Seeing the Multiple Purposes to a Novel’s Action

All writers should read a lot, and they should cultivate the habit of reading both for pleasure and for seeing what works and what doesn’t.

For example, Gone With the Wind was a wonderful read. I read it for the first time when I was 12, and my sixth-grade teacher, once she realized that THAT was why I wasn’t paying attention in math class, left me alone for nearly a week to plow through the book.

But for the writer who’s paying attention, it can also teach something about structuring a plot. For example, Scarlett can’t ultimately decide to leave Tara and go to Atlanta to try to seduce Rhett (and ultimately marry Frank Kennedy when Rhett turns out to be in jail) unless Margaret Mitchell (the author) effectively removes several moral and practical obstacles. The moral obstacles are Scarlett’s parents, who are never going to let her compromise herself to save the plantation — so her mother dies and her father’s mind becomes weak. Now, for the reader, these are both tremendously emotional events: Scarlett is devastated by them and I can’t imagine anyone putting the book down while reading about them. But for Mitchell, they made it possible for her main character to believably do what she later did — her own character saw no problem with them, and the outside societal influences that had previously halted some of her actions had been eliminated.

Note that Mitchell set this up previously when Scarlett first moves to Atlanta — she’s outside the direct influence of her parents, so she can commit some minor offenses and she’s careful to come up with buyable excuses for when reports of her conduct make it back home. But she doesn’t do anything that her parents would absolutely condemn — and by the time the need to do so arises, those obstacles have been removed by the author. (Plus, here the strong-willed, somewhat ruthless aspects of her character which we saw in the first half of the book now really start to come into their own — again, partly as a result of the newfound lack of a tempering influence.)

The practical obstacles are that no one else on the plantation will keep it going if she leaves, because they either don’t care or aren’t strong enough. The solution is Will Benteen, whom they take in and nurse and who stays on to work the plantation, thus freeing Scarlett from that role and allowing Mitchell to concentrate on how Scarlett’s efforts to keep herself and her family going change her character and influence her actions.
Not difficult to see, but for me, a budding writer then, a revelation — that things that happen in a story have a greater function than just being part of the emotional narrative, or events for characters to shape and react to. And, like well-written dialogue, the actions in a novel probably should have more than one purpose — either making something possible that will happen later, or making it inevitable, or making it more believable when it does, etc.

At any rate, evaluate writing for “needless” action — stuff we see that has no purpose other than to take up page space. Action, if it doesn’t move the story as outlined above, should at least illuminate characters and their relationship to each other. If a guy is going to pick his nose, someone else’s opinion of him should probably change because of it!

~ by seriouswriter on June 24, 2007.