Tag Archives: story line

A Lesson in Plotting from a Very Funny Guy

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I went to see J. Elvis Weinstein the other night. He headlined at the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis and drew an enthusiastic crowd, despite dire warnings from talking heads about an impending sleet and slush apocalypse. I got some good, healthful laughs and a wonderful reminder about plotting a novel. 

From a stand-up comic?

You bet.

After all, whether it’s a novel, a screen play, a lyric or a standup routine, the author is telling a story.

I realized that the show was much more than a series of jokes.  It was instead a series of elements, carefully woven into a subliminal story line that plumbed the human condition with warmth and humor. Things mentioned early, like teeth grinding, got a laugh and got fixed in our minds. They disappeared, to return later and fit with other carefully positioned elements. The conclusion carried some of the elation of pushing that last piece of a 3000-piece puzzle in place and made the final laugh so much the bigger.

In rewriting my third novel, I’m trying to balance dropping those elements that are important to the conclusion in place delicately enough so, like Weinstein’s stand-up routine, the reader will put them all together just a second after the big reveal and realize that they knew all along what was going to happen, but were not aware they knew.

A lesson well taught.

Stranger Than Fiction

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'Tis strange, but true; for truth is always strange; 
Stranger than fiction; 
                             Lord Byron - Don Juan

Byron’s line has become a throwaway:  Life is stranger than fiction.  I think most of us use it to describe the offbeat or serendipitous event without much thinking about it.  Until those of us who write  begin to wrestle with a plot line, that is.

So here we are, a critique group critique group assembled around cups of coffee and sheaves of paper on a Saturday morning.  A plot twist on page five.  Clever, but defies normal logic.  If the story occurred in real life, we would trot out the ‘stranger than fiction’ trope, shrug, and go on to the next part of the story. Not in critique group, though. Eyebrows raise. Greg voices the Kagan Rule:   Fiction has to make sense; life doesn’t. 

But … but … my plot twist is an actual event, I respond.  Sure, I changed names and places but it didhappen.

Karl voices the Jorgenson Corollary, which he attributes to the courtroom:  Truth is no excuse.

I guess I have to ditch the twist.