The Creation Of Plot

Writing essays, theses, dissertations, analyses, and so on and so sorth, is easy if you know the subject matter well enough to find faults in it. The challenge, in my opinion, is to write a novel that has a story that pertains to your subject matter (of expertise). The story must have the right characters with the right personalities, they must speak and do the right things, and plots must, metaphorically at the very leat, bring to life what you want to say in a manner that the reader understand what you are trying to say, which in turn brings perfect exposition and narratives. When you write, say, an essay on the shortcomings of today’s society, it is easy because what you know constitues the technical knowledge; what you know is what’s going on. However, while writing  novel you are met with a dilemma: it asks you whether you are good enough to recreate the brush strokes that paints the same picture as the society you are complaining about. Escapist tendencies within you will have you borrow from real life incidents, but imagination wrecks them all. You know what you want, but you fumble when you don’t know how to put down, conclusively mind you, the little things here and there that speak in soft whispers about the scene you are moulding. One misstep and interpretation takes a different highway altogether. Some of you might not know what I am talking about, so here’s an example. And I’m sure there are some people out there who can relate to it.

An important part of the novel I’m writing now has to do with a mentally frustrated village-school teacher who instigates his little students to plant a bomb in a nearby factory. When I ask someone for help, that person gushes forth with ideas, but the real trouble lies in packing them in to fit seamlessly. When I approached a friend for help, asking him how the mannerisms of the character should be, this is what he had to say:

•  The person in question (PIQ) must be very fidgety.
• PIQ must be untrustworthy, an if possible, a backstabber as well.
• H/She must be prone to making decisions on whims.

Easier said than one, I say! Of all the things I have left to do with the book, I now have to concoct sub-plots that bring out these aspects of the person’s character. An when you change one part of the book, its innate irreplaceability in the first place causes a chain reaction. 

From this experience, I learnt three things.

1. When you are sketching the boundaries of a plot, you must be in a position to predict what is going to happen rather than make it all up as you move along. This is because, when you begin from the outer periphery of the plot, you must work towars a centre wherein stands the climactic event that deterministically defines the plot and leaves no room for doubt about whatever is going to follow. Otherwise, you end up working towards a different centre and the message you want to convey becomes distorted by the contradictions that will arise.  
2. The second way is to work from the centre of that circle itself. The centre must be symbolic of the ideas that you are going to be propounding. If it has to do with communism, for example, take the world to be your television screen. Sit down and make note of the events that shaped the face of the Reds, and how little incidents from all over the place cascaded into consequential moments for them. Next, determine how the statesmen and the proletariat were individually impacted by these incidents. One such things are done, form your characters – give them mindsets, give them personalities that will have them reacting in the same way as those you had in mind. 
3. Never begin from the middle. When you do that, you have to work in two directions: one towards the centre that dictates all that you write about in the first place, and the reaches of your thoughts – which define your exposition and magnanimity with the extent to which the events unfold or are allowed to. When working towards the centre, you will come to define your characters. However, what your characters need to do comes to light only when you work towards the circumference, and so now, you have to shift your gaze. To introduce another sub-plot, you need to work towards the centre. At some point of time, you will agree, the whole thing collapses into a chaotic mass of disagreement. 

There does exist, however, one other way to create plots, but this idea is deserving only when you are writing something along the lines of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. The characters are belched out on the spot, and the plot is defined such that it meets the requirements of the climax as wished for by the author. This technique will seem very easy when you are going for a parody or a spoof of another established work, but in creating your own masterpiece, you need to know where you stand: at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. If you are where you don’t want to be, immediately drop whatever you’re doing and shift your focus. Don’t let things take shape. If you’re working from the outside, then decide to shift your focus to the centre because it suddenly seems more compatible, don’t let your definition of the boundary hinder you. Define newer reaches if the central perspective demands it. At the end, the story must be understood in its full form only from one end – that way, only one interpretation is possible. If two ideologies seem discernable from two angles, different readers interpret different things and the message is lost. A book is always as good as the message it has: that is the point you work from. If you do everything right at every step, nothing can go wrong.

Traveller In Transit

Vienna International Airport is interestingly small. I knew the ‘small’ part of it beforehand. The whole airport, though being divided into five terminals and displaying a confident sort of busyness, has the standard set of Duty Free stores to offer. However, the ‘interesting’ bit is something I think will remain so only for a few people. When I took off from Stockholm’s Arlanda, I did not know that my connecting flight to Dubai had been canceled, and that I had been rebooked into the 23.15 – a flaw that left me looking at a stale 10-hours of waiting and watching the clock tick slowly away. An SAS employee at a help desk informed me about all this later on – but what made the difference was that she really seemed sorry that Austrian Airlines hadn’t informed me earlier on, and of course, the free food coupons! Anyway, I landed at Vienna with nothing to do at all and, for the first time in 20 years, realised how important spending time usefully actually was. In those ten hours, I must have spent at least five walking up and down the longer span of the airport. The other five, I spent looking out a window. And that’s what made it interesting.

The window looked out into an area where the planes seemed to be docked. The runway was a little way ahead, and that particular afternoon, it was very foggy and wet. If I looked beneath, I could see the engineers bustling around with all their equipments and waiting for aircraft engines to go faulty or the wings freeze up. This window was exactly opposite a shop whose banner read ‘Travel & Care’, and they played good music. When I came across the window, Annie Lennox’s ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down‘ was going on, and my calf muscles were beginning to ache. I decided to lean against the railing set adjacent to the wall, and when I saw a couple photographing something out the window, I turned around for a abstractly beautiful view. The metal birds were dozing while the brains ran around them in their trucks and what-nots. There was a group of crows in the distance, dancing with the wind. A parking lot below was full of cars except for one empty slot, into which was revving a black car. The vipers on its windshield were on full swing, and its indicators flashed into the blockade brightly. A gentle drizzle began just then, and if you had been there and put face against the window, you could each raindrop crash and slide against the perspex. It was like watching through a prison cell: as each drop landed, it was like watching a battle just a few inches away from your eyes. So much torment and turbulence at the other end, and you stood here admiring a beauty that only you could see. It was beautiful.

The song changed to Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up‘. Just then, on the runway, an Emirates jet was building momentum for its ascent. Its end fin cut through the fog as though it wasn’t there, and the dense cold clouds formed a smooth streamlined tail at the end. After the plane took off, all that remained was a streak of water suspended limply in the air, along with billows of dew that had been whipped off the ground. September ended there, and when I looked up, there was a lonely crow flying around in circles.

“Summer has come and passed

The innocent can never last…“

It’s amazing how music can deliver new perspectives every time it’s played, and it’s more amazing how each of these perspectives is different. The battle of the rain drops to crash and break through the window to the inner warmth of the lounge had me wanting me to elbow and bleed my way to the cold torment outside. The sense of freedom, for me, never had anything to with being comfortable, but always had to do with doing what I liked to do. The satsifaction it imparted, the gratification it rewarded, was and will always be overwhelming. And as I’ve before too, nature has a way of showing us these things so subtly, while we sardonic ‘intelligent beings’ mostly mistake them for coincidence or ill-concealed naivety and ignore them. Sometimes, in our need to seem mature and sane, we look beyond the obvious and land ourselves in more chaos. But I guess that’s a necessary evil.

When the Emirates jet ascended, the only remaining signs of its presence were the water clouds hanging a few feet above the runway, and probably some log sheets in the control tower. If I had had a love song with me then and there, one that I had composed and sung to, the picture in front of me would have been the music video for it. The crows flying around the place as though not knowing what to do or what to make of the great white bird sitting beneath which didn’t respond to their bird calls, the black car revving itself into the empty parking slot nonchalantly and as, at the same time, it had nothing to with the bustle around it and its driver being the key to setting everything right in that area, the rain drops and their ceaseless pounding wanting me to belong to a seemingly worse world. Music and nature are some enigmas, and will remain so for quite some time to come.

Vienna International Airport was a ghost town that evening, and I was happy to be an ethereal part of it – if only to myself and to those unconcerned crows.