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PLOT
What is happening?

What is Plot?

• Plot is the series of events in a story or play
• Plot is sometimes called the storyline
• A plot has four main parts
o Exposition
o Complications
o Climax
o Denouement ( pronunciation: [thanx to JPec] Day-New-Mon, the "mon" having a french sort of fade so it sounds more like "moh" than "mon")

THE PARTS OF A PLOT

EXPOSITION

The Exposition introduces a story’s main characters, setting, and conflict.

COMPLICATIONS

Complications are the events making up the rising action of a story, and leading to its climax. Rising actions build as the characters try to deal with their conflict.

CLIMAX

The climax is the point of the plot with the greatest intensity, suspense, or interest. The climax may reveal how the conflict will turn out.

DENOUEMENT

The denouement is the conclusion of the story. In it the conflict is resolved (happily or unhappily) and any remaining questions are answered.
• Sometimes modern fiction ends without a denouement.

PLOT ORGANIZATION

As the story plot is usually organized in chronological order- starting at the beginning of the story and telling of each event in the order of which it happened.
• Writers sometimes interrupt the chronological order with flashbacks.
o A flashback shows a scene from the past that is relevant to what is currently happening in the story.
• Writers may use foreshadowing to hint at events that may happen later in the plot.
o Foreshadowing gives the reader clues as to arouse their curiosity and increase suspense.



Plot - Time & Sequence
Hooking Your Curiosity _When we talk about stories, plot is the element to start with, for plot is story itself. Plot is a series of related events, like links in a chain. Each event hooks our curiosity and pulls us forward to the next event.
Conflict: The Fuel of Narrative _In most stories, we care about what happens next because we’re hooked by a conflict, or struggle. In an external conflict the struggle takes place between two characters, between a character and a group, or between a character and something nonhuman—a typhoon or a computer virus, for example. An internal conflict takes place within a character’s mind or heart: A desire to win someone’s friendship might conflict with a fear of rejection.
Conflict is the fuel of narrative. The greater the conflict, the more we care about the outcome.
The Bare Bones of a Plot _Stories, like houses and human beings, need a structure, or framework, to hold them together. Plots are usually built on four major parts, which we might think of as their bare bones.
1. The first part of a plot is called the basic situation, or exposition. This is the opening of the story, when the characters and their conflict are introduced.
Young William didn’t mind his hard work as the king’s stableboy because he loved horses. The king, however, was miserable because his kingdom had been invaded by a large fire-breathing dragon who smelled to high heaven.
2. The second part of a plot is the complication. Now the main character takes some action to resolve the conflict but meets with more problems or complications: danger, hostility, fear, or even a new threatening situation.
William set out to kill the dragon in order to help the king. While he was riding into the woods, several robbers tried to hijack his horse. Poor William felt himself losing courage.
3. The third part of a story is the climax. This is the key scene in the story—that tense or exciting or terrifying moment when our emotional involvement is greatest. Now we learn what the outcome of the conflict is going to be.
When he had just about decided to give up the chase and return home, William found himself staring down the dragon’s throat. Closing his eyes, he hurled his sword into the dragon’s windpipe. The monster gagged and began to die.
4. The final part of the story is the resolution. Sometimes this is called the denouement. The resolution occurs at the end of the story. Now all the struggles are over, and we know what is going to happen to the characters.
When he returned to the palace with the dragon’s head, William became a hero, although he had to spend the next two weeks soaking himself to get rid of the smell of a very dead dragon.
It’s All in the Timing _Events in real life can go on and on, but stories cannot. That’s why the plot of a story is framed by time. A story may cover fifty happy years in a marriage or five nerve-racking moments in a submarine, but every work of fiction is defined by a time span, a period of time that suits the writer’s purpose.
Most stories are told in chronological order, the order in which events unfold in real time. The writer starts at the beginning and tells about each event in the order in which it happens. Yet writers frequently use other techniques to manipulate time and control our emotions, especially our feelings of suspense. For example, they might slow down time to emphasize a moment of danger, or they might speed up time to skip over events that don’t move the story along.
Playing with Time _You have also read stories in which writers interrupt the flow of events to present an episode from the past. Such a scene is called a flashback. For example, a story might begin with a description of a woman hiding in an abandoned house. The writer might then use a flashback to show why the woman is hiding. A flashback could also be used to strengthen our understanding of the character by revealing a powerful memory.
Writers can play with time in another way as well. Instead of going back to the past, they can jump ahead days or years into the future by using a literary device called a flash-forward.
Finally, writers can bring the future into the present by using foreshadowing, hints or clues that suggest what is to come in the story. Foreshadowing can make a story more exciting by increasing suspense. For instance, a man is barely aware of wolves howling in the distance, but the reader wonders about them. Days later the man is pursued by those wolves. The reader realizes the howling foreshadowed the man’s now-desperate situation.
So, whether writers make us look back or think ahead, they hook us into a story by playing with time.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED…

Complications – the events making the rising action of the story and leading to its climax.

Foreshadowing – Hints as to what will happen later on in the story. Increasing suspense and curiosity.

Denouement – Conclusion of a plot, which resolves the story’s conflict.

SETTING
Where it all happens.

What is Setting?

Setting is the time and location in which everything takes place. A story’s setting may include
• Its geographical location (a small southern town)
• Its physical location (inside the school gym)
• A specific time of day
• The season or time of year
• A historical time period including events and social conditions
• The weather

How Do Writers Reveal Setting?
To communicate the story’s settings a writer may

• Directly state the story’s time and place
• Hint at time or place through the stories details

The Importance of Setting

Setting can have several functions in fiction. It can help create or enhance
• Conflict
• Atmosphere or mood
• Character

Setting and Conflict

In some stories the setting is the main point of the conflict while in others it adds to or aggravates the conflict.

Setting and mood

The details to a story’s setting may add to its atmosphere or mood from carefree to happy from frightening to suspenseful.

Setting and character


A story’s setting may add to or shape its character.
• The setting may reflect the character’s personality if the character shapes his or her environment.
• In some stories the environment help shapes the character



Setting: Putting Us There
A storyteller, like a travel agent, can help gather us up from wherever we are and put us down in another setting on earth or, for that matter, on another planet or on the moon (as Arthur C. Clarke does in “Dog Star”). That other setting may be a spot we’ve always wanted to visit, such as a beach in Hawaii, or a place where we don’t want to be, such as the deck of a sinking ship.
Setting tells us where and when a story takes place. Setting can include the locale of a story, the weather, the time of day, and the time period (past, present, or future). Setting can even include people’s customs—how they live, dress, eat, and behave. One purpose of setting is to provide background—a place where the characters can live and act. Think, for example, of Ship-Trap Island in “The Most Dangerous Game,” which provides a background filled with peril for Rainsford’s contest with Zaroff. A good setting helps to make a story vivid and memorable.
Setting and Character _Places where people live can reveal a great deal about their characters. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” for example, Connell tells us that General Zaroff lives in a “palatial château.” The dining room has “a medieval magnificence about it,” with its “oaken panels,” “high ceiling,” and table set with the “finest” silver and china. The interior of Zaroff’s castle gives the impression that the general is a civilized and cultured gentleman of refined taste. Other details of the setting hint at another, very different side of Zaroff, however. The towers of the castle plunge “upward into the gloom,” and the cliffs below the castle dive “down to where the sea licked greedy lips in the shadows.” A “tall spiked iron gate” guards the entrance to the castle. Although Zaroff is a man of culture and elegance on the outside, these eerie details hint at the evil lurking inside him. The setting helps us understand one of Connell’s points in the story: Evil is sometimes masked by polished manners, hidden from view by deceptive appearances. As Connell does, writers can use setting to help reveal meaning in their stories.
Setting, Mood, and Tone _Setting can also provide mood, or atmosphere—it can affect the way we feel. Some settings make us fearful or uneasy (midnight, a lonely house, the scraping of a branch against the window). Other settings make us feel happy (morning, a garden, the song of a bird). The emotional effect created by a story’s atmosphere draws us into the plot and makes us care about the characters.
Writers can also use setting to help express a tone, or attitude toward a subject or character. Imagine, for example, that a writer places a character in a home decorated with fake antiques and huge, poorly painted portraits of family members. We can tell from the setting that the writer is mocking the character’s pretentious manners. By contributing to the tone, setting helps shape our reactions to a story.
How Is Setting Created? _One of the wonders of language is that it can summon up a place for us immediately. It can take us to Ship-Trap Island in “The Most Dangerous Game” and into Zaroff’s château. Language can reach us through our five senses and put us right in the middle of the action, along with the characters themselves. To create a believable setting or one that can make us feel pleasure, mystery, or fear, the writer must select the right details or images. Images are words or phrases that call forth a response from our senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. Suppose a writer wants us to imagine a setting as ordinary as the drugstore where Tamara is telling J. D. she never wants to see him again. We would get tired of reading a long list of all the objects on the drugstore shelves. Similarly, we would get tired of reading a list of all the trees, rocks, and puddles in the mountain pass where Casey is waiting to ambush the noon stagecoach. However, our own imagination will supply many details if the writer prompts us with the right images. In the drugstore scene the right image might be a row of bottles, each bearing the label “Poison.” In the mountain pass the right image might be a circling vulture or the muddy water that seeps into the outlaw’s cracked boots. When a writer supplies a few right images, we will provide the rest of the scenery. We might draw from our own experience, or we might go beyond our memory into our imagination. There we will find all kinds of images—desert islands, palaces, and planets where we have never been. This exercise of our imagination is what makes reading fiction a more personal and mind-enhancing experience than, for all its lazy pleasures, watching the ready-made images of movies and television.
What I have learned…

A setting may include historical events.
Writers don’t always state the setting of a story.
The setting may be the source of the conflict.
The setting can help create or set mood or atmosphere.
Characters that exist in the story can help shape or change the setting.

Character
The People Behind the Plot

What is a Character?

A character is an individual in a story or play.
• A character always has human traits even if it is an animal or an object.

Methods of characterization

A writer can reveal what kind of person a character is in one of two ways. He or she can
• Tell readers what the character is like, (Direct Characterization)
• Show the character to readers to let them figure out what the character is like (Indirect characterization)

Direct Characterization

Direct characterization provides readers with the narrator’s opinion of the character, directly stating the characters traits.


Indirect Characterization

Indirect characterization provides a variety of details to paint a portrait of the character’s traits without directly stating them. These details include
1. The characters appearance
2. The characters words
3. The characters inner thoughts and feelings
4. The characters actions
5. The characters effect on others


TYPES OF CHARACTERS

You know from your own reading some characters are more complex than others.
• Flat Characters have only a few obvious traits. Flat characters include stock characters – people who are recognizable and may fit a stereotype (a dashing hero, a doting grand mother, a lazy teenager)
• Round Characters have many traits, including some that might contradict each other. These characters are more complex than stock characters.

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Character: Revealing Human Nature
Creating characters—telling what human beings are like—is the whole point of writing stories. A story is interesting to us as readers largely because of what it tells us about people and how we behave.
A magazine editor once told me that all you need to tell a story is a character, an adjective, and a series of choices that the character must make. Of course, people are much more complex than a single adjective can suggest, and that is the joy, and the difficulty, of storytelling. How does a writer build a character out of words—someone who will seem to become flesh and blood and rise off the page?
Interpreting Characters’ Words_The most obvious method of characterization is the character’s speech. Think of how you can recognize your friends from what they say and how they say it. Think of how Joe can be counted on to talk about what things cost, whereas Sally talks about their beauty. Think of how Alice reveals her nature by using long, fancy words and Sam reveals his by using short, slangy ones. Here are four ways writers use speech to reveal character:
1. When characters tell their own stories through first-person narration, they speak directly to the reader. They present facts—describing events in the story and perhaps even their backgrounds—but they also tell us what they think and feel. As they talk, they reveal their personal traits.
2. Reading the character’s dialogue in a story is like listening in on a conversation. We can learn about the characters not only by what they say about themselves, but by how they respond to each other.
3. In a dramatic monologue, a type of poem, a speaker addresses one or more silent listeners, often discussing a specific problem or situation. As the words come tumbling out, however, the speaker tells us a great deal about his or her life and values. We also learn about the speaker’s relationship with the listener(s).
4. In a play this kind of self-revealing speech is a soliloquy. It is delivered by a character alone onstage, addressing himself or herself. Shakespeare’s plays, such as Romeo and Juliet (see page 787), contain a number of soliloquies in which characters reveal their deepest thoughts to the audience in this way.
Other Clues to Character_1. Writers also use appearance to create character. We can tell so much about Scrooge, for example, from the way Charles Dickens describes his features:
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue….
Clearly Dickens wants us to think of Scrooge as a character whose cold heart is reflected in his whole appearance.
The kinds of clothes a character wears can give us hints too. As readers we will respond one way to a character wearing a pinstriped suit and another way to a character wearing faded jeans.
2. In fiction a writer can even take us into the characters’ minds to reveal their private thoughts. We might learn, for example, how one character secretly feels when he sees the bully picking on the smallest kid in the schoolyard or how another character feels as she watches her grandmother’s coffin being lowered into the ground.
3. We can learn about characters by watching how other characters in the story feel about them. We might learn, for instance, that a salesman is a good guy in the eyes of his customers and a generous tipper in the eyes of the local waiter, but he is cranky and selfish in the eyes of his family.
4. One of the most important ways that we learn about characters is from their actions, from what we see them doing. For instance, when we first meet Scrooge on Christmas Eve, he is working on his accounts—an action that instantly reveals his obsession with money.
Direct and Indirect Characterization _Some writers also use direct characterization to tell us about the people who inhabit their fictional worlds. This means that a writer tells us directly what a character is like or what a person’s motives are. In a famous listing of adjectives, Dickens tells us directly what kind of person Scrooge is:
Oh, but he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!
Most modern writers do not rely on direct statements about their characters. They usually use the other methods listed here, which are called indirect characterization. This means that a writer shows us a character but allows us to interpret for ourselves the kind of person we are meeting. In fiction as in life itself, it is much more satisfying to discover for ourselves what people are truly like.




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