posted
A simple plot is merely the straightforward movement from a start's setup to a destination outcome related to the setup's complication-conflict. Unfortunately, that "plot" type entails telegraphed action and outcome. And the Grail appears, and some stuff happens, and the Grail disappears, and to no meaningful end -- an "And Plot."
"Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular."
An anecdote from script culture illustrates. A play production director asks a script writer what is wrong with a problematic final act. The script writer says the first act. Little, if any setup, no earned payoff outcome.
Apt setup entails ample complication-conflict development and suited pre-positioned motifs, foreshadows, Chekhov's guns, and likewise repetition, substitution, and amplification throughout.
EmmaSohan posted: "The problem of decisiveness doesn't need to be completely solved, she just needs to learn and improve, right?"
Valid enough, though "solved" is for puzzle stories. Satisfied is a more apt term, and relevant to a first act setup's complication-conflict. A mystic Grail's appearance is the vehicle for the subsequent visitations. The complication given is problems of nonproactive reactions and indecisiveness about the Grail and visits and external compulsions to become active and decisive, not internal ones.
A possible vehicle for the Grail's disappearance at the end is she does exhibit personal and moral growth, and that be earned by the whole action. Other loose ends tied up might not matter and might represent others' lacks of likewise personal growth.
Maybe she wants to be more active and decisive, maybe she doesn't. Maybe she's patient to wait and see what happens and willing to give benefit of doubt to all and sundry, herself foremost.
Conflict -- what are her stakes at risk? Seems a common acceptance and rejection conflict forces scenario, want to be accepted, socially, at least; problem, risk of social rejection. Life and death doesn't seem at risk, nor riches and rags or success and failure overall.
Maybe salvation and damnation are at risk. The Grail's true portent from inception has been full acceptance into the Christian God's graces earned, a knight's difficult object-quest errand, and a basis for the Arthurian legend's predicate king preordained by divine assent. Plus, though not part of the Canterbury tales where the Grail holds such significance, though part of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Britain, the Pendragon line descends from a Greek hero king of the Trojan war (Odysseus), therefore, Pendragons are preordained royalty. Kings and emperors and pharaohs, all royalty, have always justified their utter right to rule though such confirmation and survivorship bias nonsense.
Uther Pendragon committed unspeakable crimes with Igraine and other hubris acts, and was damned. Arthur betrayed God's grace similarly and otherwise, and the hero's lineage, and Camelot crumbled. He and Camelot were damned for their pride and hubris.
This is why a pre-positioned proactive want-problem setup is substantive: a focal persona's destination is established up front, irrespective of if straightforward to or a consequence of revelations and reversals that arrive at a different nonetheless complication-conflict satisfaction destination (Aristotle's complex plot).
Revelation, also known as anagnorisis: "the point in the plot especially of a tragedy at which the protagonist recognizes his or her or some other character's true identity or discovers the true nature of his or her own situation"; reversal, also known as peripeteia: "a sudden or unexpected reversal of circumstances or situation especially in a literary work" (Webster's).
Revelation and reversal attend each other, and are the most fundamental facets of a dramatic unit. Reversal then revelation or revelation then reversal, or contemporaneous or simultaneous revelation-reversal, completes a dramatic unit: scene, section, chapter, and whole.
quote:Originally posted by Grumpy old guy: it's also episodic. Phil.
Is that a type? It fits my book really well. Like, a scene begins with the cup being stolen and ends with getting it back.
The big challenge for an episodic book would be making every scene enjoyable/interesting.
An episodic book can do more than, say, a TV show. I have personality growth, exploration of problems, and a few problems spanning the entire book. I have repeating conversations with variation.
The movie Ground Hog day would be episodic, right? That movie is the epitome of repetition with variation, but I do that too. If that movie explores the different goals one could have in life, my explores the different ways that people can be healed. I have her giving advice she received many chapters back. Etc.
I hadn't thought of my book that way. Fascinating idea.
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Arguably, many narratives are episodic though not exclusively picaresque. The label "episodic" ranges from a polemic term to neutral to a positive emotional charge. The polemic term is for "And" plots, or clueless literary review critics. Robert Heinlein's novels and overall body of works' timeline trend toward episodic.
The challenges of an episodic structure are concision, completeness, and unity of a dramatic action and whatever congruent counteractions transpire, or, actually, the several axes, layers, or threads of a whole action.
The worst sort of episodic narrative is those which the episodes are contrived to make readers the butt of a coy and clever lark. Nextmost is episodic and melodramatic narratives which lack apt conciseness, cohesiveness, and completeness. Nextmost is episodic narratives that lack an apt degree of complexity that obscures formulaic structure. Nextmost is narratives that waste readers' engagement due to they amount to little, if any, apt degree of profound and sublime payoff outcome.
Forest Gump is episodic though not picaresque. The narrative is a romance, not a portrait of a rogue. Likewise, Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher, is episodic though not picaresque, except if a portrait of a protagonist's suicidal ideation and suicide is a rogue's behavior, and is also philosophic's moral law assertion, problematic for me. Ground Hog Day is classic picaresque -- a rogue agonist's episodes operant in vice- and folly-fraught social situations, and uncommonly results in an individual's personal maturation transformation though not the usual lame outcome resorts of personal injury or financial loss, death, marriage, or laudatory celebrations of successful outcomes (cliché), like the several Danny Ocean caper movies' outcomes (Ocean's Eleven, etc).
Also uncommon though crucial to apt episodic and robust dramatic action is -- again, a tangible, material, concrete want-problem developed early and persists throughout and results in a profound and sublime inevitable surprise outcome payoff, for completeness and unity's sakes. Plus, a likewise intangible, immaterial, abstract persistent want-problem motivation is crucial. Maybe a third dramatic action axis is crucial, too, a congruent want-problem counteraction synthesis tandem to the tangible and intangible want-problem, a liminal social-moral subtext, as it were.
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