Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 805
What we are saying then is that a plot as reduced to a statement is just a frame. The work is still to do. For any writers who are looking for plots, here are some good ones, so good that they were used thousands or hundreds of years ago:
1. A man goes down to hell to get his wife. He plays the lyre so well that the devil lets her go. Later he’s sorry. Hundreds of poets worked on this.
2. A man goes down to hell as a visitor, meets a lot of old acquaintances and comes up again. Dante made a great hit with this.
3. A man sells his soul to the devil, has a good time, and finds there’s nothing in it. Goethe thrilled all the world with this.
These are famous plots, which belong to the history of the world’s literature. Yet in and of themselves they don’t seem hard to think of. Any married man might dream the first; any sociable old fellow the second; and the third is what many students have tried at college.
Nor do the plots of world-famous books of the present epoch seem much harder to invent than the classical ones.
Here is one of to-day:
An old man has taught in a school for forty years. And then dies over tea and toast.
Here is one of yesterday:
A girl who is not married has a baby and kills it and is hanged.
Indeed any student of literature can easily realize the difference between being told a plot in outline and reading its actual conversion into a story. Even anyone who is not a student of literature can realize it the next time any of his friends, thrilled with a new thriller, undertake to tell him what it is about.
To show, in a didactic way, this relation as between the plot of a story and the telling of a story, let us take a practical illustration. Here we have a world-famous story, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, which at first sight seems to typify the preeminence of plot. Yet if we start from the mere outline and try to tell the story, we soon find in what class we belong.
Dr. Henry Jekyll is a London physician of wealth and reputation, a handsome genial man, as wholesome to the eye as is his apparent personality to the mind. But there is concealed in him a desire for dissipation, for a double life. He would like to be ‘tough’ if he had the opportunity. Chance gives it to him. The accidental discovery of a medicinal powder enables him to transform his appearance. His body seems to shrink, his face to distort, his limbs to shrivel. At will he can convert himself to a ‘double,’ and an infamous, creature. Edward Hyde, revelling in sin, takes the temporary place of Henry Jekyll. The inevitable follows. Evil multiplies. Hyde is led to crime — to murder. Henry Jekyll, stricken with shivering horror and repentance, finds the operation of the drug has gone beyond his power. Locked in his surgery, as Hyde, unable to re-escape into himself, his agonies of mind end in suicide.
As the story draws towards its end its underlying meaning, never explicitly set forth, seems to grow luminous beneath the printed page. It reveals that strange quality of good and evil that is in us all.
Very good. Now try to write that out in 20,000 words. You can’t? You don’t know how to begin. Start with Henry Jekyll as a boy at school? You’ll get prosy and wander all over the place. The reader will never get beyond matriculation. Start with the news of the murder done by Edmund Hyde, as cried in the streets and posted in headlines? Quite so, you’ll get excitement for five minutes and just settle down into the old stuff of Inspector Higginbottom making notes and picking up clues, and Hector Trumper suppressing a yawn, and the arrival of the great detective with a saxophone and a bulldog. Start with an account of mediaeval sorcery and queer potations? Exactly, and give away the story before it begins.
I had a dear old friend, a professor, who got a brilliant idea (so he told me) for a mystery story, to be laid in London. He began it by describing two friends approaching London up the river on a steamer. They never got there; they talked too much.
So suppose you turn and see how Robert Louis Stevenson went at it.... Wonderful, isn’t it? From the first word, and not a wasted sentence in the whole; all done by the superb art of narration that only a combination of initial talent and arduous exercise can achieve.
Here is the outline of another plot-story which has gone round the world as the Prisoner of Zenda.
The story opens with a careless but capable Englishman of good family, lazily cracking eggs at his lazy breakfast. Now, though he doesn’t know it, the careless gentleman has an extraordinary resemblance to a careless but worthless European reigning prince of still better family. In fact, they are absolute doubles. This is not really so strange, because, generations ago, their families were one family. But they know nothing of this. Mr. Rassendyll has never been in Ruritania and Ruritania never heard of Mr. Rassendyll.
Then two things happen. The careless, over-careless, even dissolute prince is to be betrothed to a beautiful and related princess, an affair of state, not of love. A rival court faction, dead set against the marriage, make a plot to prevent the ceremony of betrothal by kidnapping the prince. That’s one thing. The other is that Mr. Rassendyll happens to take a careless trip to Ruritania; knowing nothing of the Prince or of the Princess Flavia or the approaching betrothal, or anything. The prince gets kidnapped and shut up in a castle (as the ‘Prisoner of Zenda’). But his adherents discover Mr. Rassendyll, the double of the prince. He is substituted, or as they say in the movies, ‘stands in,’ for the prince and is duly betrothed; the princess indifferent to the real prince falls in love with the substitute. After which one may easily conceive the alarms and excursions, the terrific hit made by Mr. Rassendyll as a reigning prince, the advance thrill as the time draws near that will change betrothal to marriage, rescue of the real prince, and the renunciation and farewell of Rassendyll, ex-prince... ending the story with Rassendyll back in England, lazily cracking breakfast eggs again and reading newspaper items about the royal marriage in Ruritania.
But observe that if you, unless you are one in thousands, were given as a present the copyright of such a plot you could do nothing with it. You still have to make the characters. It’s no use saying that Rassendyll is careless; you’ve got to make him careless. That’s why Mr. Anthony Hope had him crack eggs in Chapter One. You wouldn’t have thought of that. You would have given him orange juice and spoilt him. It’s no use saying that the princess is charming; you’ve got to prove it, which is harder than cracking eggs. After which you must make black Michael black and reckless Rupert reckless and a lot of other things; get in colour without getting tiresome; make a big crowd in a few strokes and a grim castle in a couple of sentences.
Nor is that all that is to be said about plot and the positive difficulty of turning it into reality. There is on the other side the relative difficulty of keeping things out of it. A good story can be spoiled by the introduction of unnecessary elements, of secondary characters not needed and incidents only put in to fill up. In the egotism of creation a writer is apt to think too well of his characters; he gives us too much of them, they get tiresome.
A great many of the stories of yesterday and even of to-day were badly damaged by the tradition of the need for ‘comic relief.’ The idea of having comic people to take off the strain of the tragic people, the idea of contrast to heighten colour, came from the stage to the book. It is as old as Shakespeare. No doubt the Greeks had it. Perhaps it can be traced clear back to the snake in the first book of Genesis. The stage clung to it till yesterday. Many of us remember the good old-fashioned play in which the heroine has no sooner left the stage in a flood of heartbreaking tears than in comes the comic butler, upsets a tray, stubs his toe, and puts the house in a roar.
All through the nineteenth century this idea of variation and relief dominated story-telling. Even now, no doubt, it affects the minds of many people who are planning how to begin to write fiction. But it is wiser to break away from it. Take your characters as they come and take a chance on them. Some may be more comic than you think.
Another myth of plot-making is that if we take a particular environment and tell all about it it must be interesting. It won’t be, unless you can make it so. Thus a writer lays his story on the east side of Chicago, or the west side of San Francisco, or among the haymakers of Indiana, or the cigar-makers of Omaha, the head-hunters of Borneo or the pot-hunters of Washington, the Manxmen of the Isle of Man, or the brakesmen of the Nickel Plate Railway. This, indeed, is what one may call the besetting sin of the fiction of the present hour, or was proving itself so till war bombed it to fragments. If it is gone, I for one am glad. Life in odd places may be peculiar; but I can do without it. I’ve read enough. If there are any other kind of farmers, share-croppers, hill billies, mine workers and such, I’ll do without them. I don’t care how hard they swear. I’ve heard enough. If that is an exaggerated point of view let me restate it thus: A set of people, a way of living, is not interesting in a literary sense unless it is made so by art. Without the art of narration each crowd is drearier than the last.
Another still heavier incubus that lies on fiction writing is the plan of following a man’s life all through, every bit of it; how he had first lived in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and then moved to Walnut Street, first met Adelina Thompson and then threw her out and took in Adelina Jackson. A great many contemporary stories, some of the most successful, have been of this cradle-to-the-grave type. But in and of itself a cradle-to-the-grave story is not interesting. It still depends on how it is told. Living is one thing. Narrating life is another.
The test of the degree to which a writer possesses the art of narration can be made by imagining one page of his book missing and being asked to fill it in, having just the general idea of what it was about. With ninety per cent of our current stories there would be no great difficulty about this.
Thus let us say that the page before the missing one ended like this.
‘As Sir Everard entered the drawing-room and advanced to meet his hostess, he saw before him...’
No trouble here in going on. Give the woman’s height, her breadth, thickness, estimate of her age, whether well- preserved or shot to pieces, complexion, teeth, and whether lame in one leg, and which. It is as simple as filling out a census form. But try to replace the description of Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, whose portrait covers the opening page of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and you would find that a very different matter; and this, too, even if you had Mr. Utterson exactly in your mind; you still must find the words, the way, to put him over.
The reason why substitution is so easy in one case and so hard in the other is that a poorly told story, or even a story told moderately well, has so little depth to it, that large stretches of it have no more character to them than motor signs on a highway. They just show where the story is going next.
One may well ask then — what must I do to be saved? How can one acquire, or cultivate this art of narration? The answer is that the first thing to do is to see how other people have succeeded. Open again, with a new eye to see, some of the pages that have seemed to you and to other people marvellously good writing. Take a new look at Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving and from then onwards to the outstanding writers of the present hour; or select again your favourites from the roll of honour of British writers that runs from Walter Scott and Charles Dickens down past Robert Louis Stevenson and Conan Doyle and to the writers of to-day.
Here are some of the things you will note.
Good writers have a way of using the right word, the word that exactly suits the sense, often so exactly that its very exactness is pleasing to contemplate. Very often, especially in the English language, there are half a dozen words that will suit the sense in an approximate way, but none of which will convey exactly what is meant. Lying aside in the corner of memory is the right word waiting to be rediscovered. One recalls J. M. Barrie’s story of the little Scottish schoolboy who stuck dead in the middle of his composition while competing for a prize. He had been expected to win easily, but there he sat, his head in his hands, tears gathering in his eyes, and not writing. Afterwards they asked him why; he said he wanted a word to describe how many people there were in church and he couldn’t think of the right one. When they suggested this word or that he said no, that meant too many or too few. Then at last in a triumph that came too late, he exclaimed, ‘a “hantle,” a “hantle” of folk, that’s what I meant.’
It’s a beautiful story, and one for a writer to ponder on. Barrie gives it as fiction; if it is not true, it ought to be.
But even harder than the choice of the right word which is, after all, lying there ready to hand, is the construction of a combination of words that shall be striking, expressive, vivid; to make some happy phrase that fits an unusual adjective to a noun and thus gets one-and-one to make more than two. Consider the combination just used— ‘a happy phrase’ — how happy it is, or once was, itself. To refer to a phrase thus, to personify it as if it sang with joy, is an act of constructive imagination. In such ‘happy’ uses of words lay the genius of such a man as Chaucer fashioning half-known words to the sudden expression of thought.
But the difficulty with striking phrases is that so many have struck so often that they are as it were ‘struck out.’ No spark comes; just a click. These combinations, one happy and expressive, have grown feeble with long service. These dead phrases are referred to in French as clichés, a word sometimes taken over into English. Those who wish to avoid the affectation of a foreign vocabulary sometimes call them ‘chestnuts,’ a word of sudden and great vogue about fifty years ago but now itself a chestnut. Many writers on the use of English gather together for us lists of such worn-out phrases. A movement has been started in the columns of John O’ London, that most admirable literary magazine, for the ejection of all such phrases out of use. Writers are invited to take an oath never to repeat them.
Many of the technical manuals on composition contain lists of these over-worked combinations. An excellent one is given by Mr. George B. Woods in his Writers’ Handbook of 1922. Taking the cliché phrases out of these and similar lists we find that we could easily, if we wished, rewrite our familiar literature with little other material.
Here, for example, is The Boy stood on the Burning Deck:
The heroic youth stood on the deck already consigned to the flames. The devouring element gained apace. There was no friend in need; indeed help was conspicuous by its absence. There came a dull rumble, a terrific crash, followed by a sickening thud, after which the boy’s whereabouts became a matter of speculation.
Passing from the use of single words and verbal combinations, we find a field more difficult still in the use of comparison, as a means of forcible description of explaining a new thing from an old one, of making vivid the impression to be conveyed. Everyone, who hasn’t forgotten it, remembers the difference between a simile, or open comparison in direct terms, saying that one thing is like another, and an indirect comparison by a metaphor which says that one is another. Thus the sentence, ‘He rushed like a lion on the foe,’ is a simile. The sentence, ‘He rushed, a very lion, on the foe,’ is a metaphor. Observe that literally a simile is the truth, and a metaphor is a he. He wasn’t really a lion; he was just so mad that he seemed like one. But the lie somehow wins out.
But whether he or not, the use of metaphor is the very root of the growth of language. Biologists tell us how a piece of protoplasm in primitive life divides itself and then, as with the little nigger-boys, walking in the zoo, then there are two. Perhaps it was the other way with the little niggers — there may have been three in the zoo — but anyway protoplasm makes two things out of one, then later specializes each portion to distinctive uses. Thus grows and multiplies organic nature. So it has been with language. Ever so many words, perhaps most of them, are just buried metaphor. Mountains are called ‘sierras’ because they look like saws. A saw has teeth. A hammer has a ‘head’ and a ladder has a head, and a ladder has a foot, and so on endlessly. Such comparisons while still in the making are called slang. Once accepted, they are diction and get into the dictionary. Thus a hat is not yet officially a ‘lid,’ nor a woman a ‘skirt’ nor a man a guy. But fifty years hence they may become so. We may read, for instance, that the President of the United States, in receiving the British Ambassador, saw that the guy had a skirt with him and courteously lifted his lid.... A hundred years later still a skirt will be an old- fashioned courteous term for a lady of distinction, and a guy will mean a man like the President of Harvard or a judge of the Supreme Court.
A writer of to-day, John Brophy, in an interesting presentation of ‘English prose,’ tells us that ‘the English language is strewn with the mummified corpses of once lively metaphors.’ Some, he tells us, have been so long dead that we have ceased to realize that they once were figurative. He quotes as an example the combination, loud dress, an epithet of sound applied to an object of sight, once full of life but now dead. Yet even this epithet might be resurrected. I remember once saying to a tailor (A.D. 1890) that I thought a certain material too loud. He replied that it was not so, as he had made out of this same material a pair of trousers for himself and was surprised how quiet they were on the street. Here is new life galvanized into the mummy.
But the point under discussion is that people learning to write must make their metaphors vivid but not exaggerated, striking but not preposterous. Above all, they must learn to recognize and avoid the muddle of the mixed metaphor, a comparison which jumbles up the different senses, confounds sight with sound and both of them with touch. Extreme and even silly examples make clear the fallacy of the mixed metaphor.
A mixed metaphor arises in the following way. A comparison is good. A sustained comparison is better still.
As an illustration.
But let us clear the shale and debris of argument with which the surface of the subject is encumbered and come down to the bedrock of fact, upon which truth must rest.
