On Writing: How Does Real Life Turn Itself Into Plot?
A Terrifying Encounter From My Past - Fictionalised. Part One.
How Non-Fiction Can Translate Into Plot
Does story structure translate into real life?
In our heads it does. We impose beginnings, middles and ends onto our life stories.
In the beginning, I met your mother (inciting incident). At first we got on well (dream stage), then not so well (frustration stage), then we could barely talk to one another (nightmare stage). A turning point happened when I had an affair (worst point). After a final attempt at reconciliation (final battle), we separated, then divorced (resolution).
As Scarlett Thomas points out in Monkeys with Typewriters (2012), life may be random, but we don’t easily tolerate it that way.
When things go well for a long time, we expect something bad to happen.
A reversal, in other words.
We all have crises, and climaxes, and final battles – in our heads.
Life is also like story in that we often grow restless and bored when it isn’t moving forward.
When change isn’t happening, in other words.
We may wish to avoid all the pain that appears in stories, but we also want to become wise – and yet the pain is a necessary part of becoming wise.
Fictional stories act as a sort of painless substitute, a ‘flight simulator’ for life itself.
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I feel I have ‘lived’ story structure over and again – and continue to live it.
For instance, when I have ducked an important but crucial decision, I have sometimes fallen into mental chaos and depression.
In my head that is because I have failed a key stage of the hero’s journey.
My life energies ossify when I am living an inauthentic life.
All good stories with three-dimensional characters are about how to become complete and authentic.
Story structure, therefore, is my life’s structure and my mind’s structure, and my desire is the same as any fictional character’s – to be, at the end of the story, a fully realised human being.
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Let’s apply some of these ideas about fictional structure to a simple, first-person, real-life story.
Let’s do it first in a three-act drama with a two-dimensional character.
That character being me.
The incident being real.
(Although I can be by no means sure that this event, which took place when I was in my mid-thirties, happened as I remember it – because memory always contains elements of fiction.)
Being a real-life situation, it does not contain the proper plot elements, except in a very rough form.
But by (eventually) fictionalising it, I am going to ‘tidy it up’ into a proper plot, with a proper structure, by both adding and subtracting.
This is to demonstrate the point made by Nigel Watts in Write a Novel – And Get It Published: ‘Although life rarely has a coherent plot, it often has the makings of one [my italics].’
For the purposes of this exercise, I am going to stop using the words ‘plot’ and ‘story’ interchangeably, and instead use them in their technical senses.
Just to recap, a story is a series of unstructured events bounded by a time sequence with no particular meaning. Just like real life.
A plot is a designed, structured series of occurrences that contains a conscious or unconscious meaning on the part of the author.
This is the raw story as I remember it:
Scene: The late 1990s. I am walking into my house just off the then-seedy north end of the Portobello Road on a busy Saturday market day with my food shopping.
My house is empty. My wife and two children are out somewhere. Because my hands are filled with shopping bags, I briefly leave the door open behind me.
I put them down in the kitchen. When I return to close the door, I see that I have been followed into the house by a man, roughly in his thirties, who happens in this instance to be black. (This detail is relevant, as you will see.)
I challenge, automatically, angrily, the man who has followed me into my house.
Instead of retreating, he shocks me by calling me a racist and taking a threatening step towards me.
Suddenly, having been called a racist, I am on the defensive – but I am still angry.
I insist that I am not a racist, I am simply questioning his right to be in my house. I ask him, why he is there?
It registers now that he is big, and clearly much stronger than me.
I become nervous.
As I speak, the tone of my voice falters.
I’m no longer (in my mind) the brave, defiant householder facing down a cowardly intruder, who will retreat when faced with firm resolve.
I become positively frightened when the man grabs me round the neck, pinning my throat…
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