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The Well-Tempered Plot Device
Aug. 11th, 2005 10:53 pmRead this hilarious blog entry by Nick Lowe from a 1986 issue of Ansible. I call it a "blog entry from 1986", because Ansible is a fanzine. This is an ancient form of communication between fans from before there was blogging, using dead trees and shoe rubber that transmit blogs to you at .0000000000000001 megabytes per minute. Twenty years later this essay has been put on a webpage and got hundreds of thousands of readers by getting on the most popular bookmarks list on del.icio.us.
Read it right now. I nearly fell over laughing. Some choice excerpts:
"While this Thing rested in the possession of the Divine Dynasty" (ie. the good guys) "the favour of the Gods shone upon Atlantis. No Emperor could hold the throne unless he also held the Black Star...." which means that the wicked Trotskyite rebels that have temporarily overrun the kingdom will be overcome so long as the goodies retain the Black Star. Notice that the only causal connection between possession of the Black Star and victory is that enforced by "the Gods", for whom of course read "the author", and you perhaps begin to see why I like to term this kind of thing Collect-the-Coupons plotting. It would be much too complicated to have three goodies overcome the whole usurping army... So what you do instead is write into the scenario one or more Plot Coupons which happen to be "supernaturally" linked to the outcome of the larger action; ... the hapless goodies have to run down no fewer than nine different plot tokens before they can send off to the author for the ending.
I've changed just one word throughout; see if you can spot what it is.
( Read more... )
Read it right now. I nearly fell over laughing. Some choice excerpts:
"While this Thing rested in the possession of the Divine Dynasty" (ie. the good guys) "the favour of the Gods shone upon Atlantis. No Emperor could hold the throne unless he also held the Black Star...." which means that the wicked Trotskyite rebels that have temporarily overrun the kingdom will be overcome so long as the goodies retain the Black Star. Notice that the only causal connection between possession of the Black Star and victory is that enforced by "the Gods", for whom of course read "the author", and you perhaps begin to see why I like to term this kind of thing Collect-the-Coupons plotting. It would be much too complicated to have three goodies overcome the whole usurping army... So what you do instead is write into the scenario one or more Plot Coupons which happen to be "supernaturally" linked to the outcome of the larger action; ... the hapless goodies have to run down no fewer than nine different plot tokens before they can send off to the author for the ending.
I've changed just one word throughout; see if you can spot what it is.
Covenant saw. The Staff of Plot. Destroyed. For the Staff of Plot had been formed by Berek Halfhand as a tool to serve and uphold the Plot. He had fashioned the Staff from a limb of the One Tree as a way to wield Earthpower in defence of the health of the Land, in support of the natural order of life. And because Earthpower was the strength of mystery and spirit, the Staff became the thing it served. It was the Plot; the Plot was incarnate in the Staff. The tool and its purpose were one. And the Staff had been destroyed. That loss had weakened the very fibre of the Plot. A crucial support was withdrawn, and the Plot faltered.Of course, the word "Plot" in all this replaces Donaldson's "Law" (with one of those significant initial capitals), and of course all Covenant has to do now, in a Lensmanesque escalation of the same basic routine he went through in previous volumes, is go chugging off to cut himself a new Staff of Plot from the jolly old One Tree.
( Read more... )
