Building Your Play: Theory and Practice for the Beginning Playwright

6. Plot

 6 Plot We’ve examined the basic elements that underlie every traditional well-made play, these being the four keys, and noted that they are the basic building blocks of your play’s structure. Now let’s consider how best to use them. We’ll answer such questions as: How do you put all of these components into a whole play? How do you give them shape and coherence? How do you know what comes first, how to start, where and how to indicate where the play is going, and other matters? Which, of course, brings us to the large question of plot—putting it all together. But first, a brief aside. Any discussion of plot, especially in the kinds of plays we’re talking about, always and by necessity brings us to Aristotle and his Poetics. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher whose manic curiosity led him to analyze nearly every aspect of the natural and metaphysical world in order to find out exactly what things were and how they worked. He loved to classify and define things, both physical and theoretical. At one point, he put his mind to the plays he saw being written and performed around him, by such writers as Sophocles, Aeschylus , and Euripides. Not bad for role models. His musings on drama have come down to us in his work Poetics in which he scrutinized as many tragedies as he could and distilled his findings. What he wrote was not so much a book on how to write a play as a survey on the things that all the great 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  PUTTING THEM TOGETHER plays he studied had in common. Which, if you look at it, is really “How to write a play,” coming in the back door. The first part of this chapter, therefore, is a brief summary of what he found. Defining a Play Aristotle began by defining what a play is. (Earlier in this book, I did too, and some of my definition is borrowed from his.) For him, a play is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of significant magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament , the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. (Poetics 6.1449b.24–29) Let’s take this sentence in small doses and translate them into concepts that you can use. (Some of them you’ve already met in this book.) An Imitation . . . He seems to be saying that what the playwright presents on the stage is a reflection of actual life. This does not mean it’s a picture of an event as it happened, but rather a picture of the writer’s interpretation of it. You can’t show actual life on the stage: it’s too happenstance—things often occur without any meaning; and it’s too dull. Most of us spend our days going through a regimen of existence that would be painfully boring to watch. In short, an actual picture would be too random or too confusing or too simple to have any meaning for us. No, the writer’s job is not to show life, but to reflect and comment on it. I’ll have more to say about this further on. Of an Action . . . We’ve discussed the term action before. Refer to chapter 1 and note the component parts of action. And notice how it must have a certain structural shape to it. It’s not random; it has to involve what? Yes, a change. 5XVK3W&KLQGG $0  PLOT That Is Serious, Complete, . . . The term complete here means that it has a wholeness about it, a sense that a “oneness” has occurred, whatever that “oneness” is. Later on,Aristotle will define complete as that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what is it that comes to an end? What constitutes this“wholeness,”this“oneness?”Refer to chapter 1 and our discussion of what we mean by “an event.”The term serious seems appropriate because Aristotle is talking about tragedy. But he means something more here than just “mood”; he means that there is a sense of significance about the event; something that has resonance or meaning; something, if you will...