Finding the Plot
Writing is a unique art, because it takes place over time and follows an emotional arc. The visual arts are static, and work with the depth of a single moment. Music also takes place over time, but music tends to deal with feeling, which is purer than emotion. Of course, feeling and emotion inevitably touch, and some music is very emotional, but all the same, it is rare to find music that takes its audience on an emotional journey. Some symphonies, perhaps, and some albums. But in general music is too subtle to deal with the humdrum everyday business of emotion.
Stories are about emotion. Books and movies work through empathy, whereas music communicates by a kind of higher intuition. We can never really explain how a series of sounds touches us; it is much easier to explain why seeing someone cry makes us cry with them. Of course, feeling evokes emotion, and emotion is a grosser movement of feeling. Beethoven can make us depressed or hopeful; reading Hamsun can induce a musical sense of elevation and space. Some outstanding writers work almost as musicians. A few of Hamsun’s novels, like Mysteries and Pan, are more like nocturnes than they are like books: strange dream-like roamings with a very delicate significance. But even Hamsun works with emotion as his primary tool. He writes about lust, hope, anger, and despair. Even he, whom I consider the finest modern writer, deals in stories, which is to say that he hangs his work on a framework of emotion.
Often we call this framework the plot, but what we generally understand as ‘plot’ is an over-simplification of this. Most Hollywood movies and beach novellas have a strictly-defined plot, a cliched emotional shape. Dan Wells calls it the seven-point story structure: backstory - catalyst - big event - midpoint - crisis - climax - resolution. The seven-point story structure is not the only structure immediately recognisable to us. There is also the Hero’s Journey, which is more profound because it is cyclical (it goes from call to refusal to the appearance of a mentor who helps to cross the threshold into the unknown, where trials build up to an ordeal which provokes atonement, revelation, and the attainment of reward, with which the hero returns to the known world to wait for further calls). Most of Shakespeare’s plots are known to everyone, even if we have never read Shakespeare. I remember reading that no Western writer has ever produced a character that did not have an analogy in Homer. I imagine the same is true of plots.
We never truly understand a plot. We recognise some plots because we have seen them before. Others are not so familiar. They sneak through our defences of comprehension and acquaintance, and dig in under our skin. I am thinking of Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, which, seven years after reading it, I still don’t understand, though I can still feel it digging into me. I have a friend with whom I often discuss this book, because I believe we both know the book is true (the process in the story happens inside us too), but we are struggling to understand how it applies to us. A good story digs into your unconscious and churns it up, so that new things float to the surface, and you come to understand yourself better. Jean Klein said the book truly begins the moment you stop reading it.
My book School Boy X follows a cycle of joy, which aligns with the passage of seasons. The characters start in summer, full of hope and spirit. Autumn takes away their energy, but not their momentum - they overreach themselves, and collapse into winter. There they are forced to sit with themselves, and confront what is beneath their agitation: each character has a truth they are trying to avoid. Facing this truth at last, changes happen without effort. Everything falls back into alignment, and joy emerges afresh.
I did not know this would be the shape of my book when I set out to write it. The shape emerged as the book developed. Plot is my weak point as a writer - I tend to start writing knowing nothing, and simply discover as I go along. This means that much of my narrative work has to be done in editing, which is not the most efficient process. But I have never considered art a matter of efficiency. I refuse to use a second-hand plot. But I am learning from PG Wodehouse, who spent many months imagining his story, writing down the plot points as they came to him, until finally it was complete, and only then did he start writing the book, which generally just took a few weeks to finish. His method starts with a plot, but the plot was his own. He discovered the plot without having to write the story. I think this is a wonderful way of constructing a novel.
Two processes of osmosis occur as a writer writes a novel: on one hand, the writer becomes the writing. I write a story, and become its characters. When I write difficult scenes, they make me downcast. I must find all the details of my work within myself - the writer is his own Monet’s garden - so in order to describe sadness, I have to be sad. Of course, it is a sadness redeemed by artistic space, but it is sadness all the same, and it remains with me even after I have finished writing.
The second process of osmosis is the characters becoming me. This is less obvious than it sounds. For example, the book I am writing at the moment is about twenty-one-year-olds going through the changes I went through at twenty-one. But not entirely, because as I write the book I am thirty, and the changes the characters are going through are really the changes of a thirty-year-old, reflected in the changes of a twenty-year-old. Everything in life seems to happen in octaves, so that the changes that happen at thirty are at least analogous with the changes at twenty. That is why coming-of-age movies about teenagers still strike a chord is us when we ourselves are no longer teens. Furthermore, analogy is really the only way to write a book. It’s hard to explain something when you’re in the thick of it. You have to be removed from the process, either by space (it happening to another person) or time (years of reflection), in order to capture it. Otherwise, it’s like trying to paint a flower from inside the flower - you are doomed to fail, because you have no perspective. It takes a truly brilliant mind, like the mind of Mircea Eliade, to write a decent teenage novel as a teenager. Most coming-of-age stories are written by people who have already come of age, and can track, in hindsight, the important steps of the process.
Therefore, my twenty-one-year-olds are explaining to me what it means to be thirty. The themes of the book, on the surface, are the pursuit of meaning and breaking away from restrictive norms. But, deeper down, the true themes are acceptance, and finding the courage to let oneself be limited. I believe the book can be summed up in two quotes. The first, by Heidegger, is “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” The second, by Lawrence Durrell, is “Like all young men, I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.”
I feel, if these quotes are combined, they describe the way my book is developing, which is to say, they describe the way my life is moving. If I may offer a spoiler alert for a book not yet finished, and a life not yet lived, it would be this: that at some point, you have to let the dreams of perfection dissolve, commit to one course, and allow that one course to burn all your other bridges; give up on flights of desperate fancy, and walk a simple path, looking at your feet, and finding beauty not in dreams of what happens on the other side of the sky, but in the simple things you see along your path, and in the simple joy of walking it.
The Nikko Road
Kawase Hasui