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For there is amongst us a set of critics,
who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who
have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as
well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold
flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from his preface
to "Kubla Khan"
Well, obviously
he's wrong. For you see, there are really only three basic plot types: the fall
from grace, the survival story, and the messianic story. Eden, the Flood, and
Christ. And of course you can have combinations of them, such as the Exodus
from Egypt.
So really, all
plots since Genesis are simply re-combinations of older plots populated with
re-combinations of older characters. After all, only God can create ex nihilo.
We mortals can only work with what we've been given. And yet we've been given
so much that the possible combinations are truly endless.
And so Coleridge is
wrong.
The ironic thing is
that university English departments -- the high priests of the cult of personal
creativity/originality -- love to agree. But the reason they say there are no original plots is not because it's true. They
say it because they're too lazy to perform the difficult -- but very rewarding
-- task of recombining elements of what's come before to create something that
most people simply call "new." It takes a great deal of planning and
ingenuity to create a new recombination of elements that becomes more than the
sum of its parts. Ninety percent perspiration, as they say.
But it's not just a
matter of laziness. It's a matter of arrogance. It's well known within my
circles that "literary" types generally hate genre stories, genre
meaning sci-fi/fantasy, mystery, romance, adventure, and any combination
thereof. Only the "real" matters. Only the gritty details of so-called
"everyday life" are worth writing about.
And so it seems to
me that if the "genres" are off limits, there is only one thing left
to write about: endings. It seems to me that most literary stories (of which
I've had to read a great many) are always about the ends of things, whether of
people or of eras. Characters either die (whether physically or mentally), or
they cause the death of someone else (physically or mentally) via some form of
disloyalty or unfaithfulness. How many literary stories are about the death of,
or one's rebellion against, one's father or father-figure? How many are about
illicit love? How many are about letting someone down, or being let down by
others and having a relationship permanently changed for the worse?
All of them.
The problem is that
stories of redemption, stories about overcoming the odds, stories about things
turning out better than they started, usually require some element of the
improbable, if not the out-right fantastic. Something must come into the
protagonist's life from the outside, something that isn't part of the normal,
gritty, slice-o-life grind. Something larger than life. Evil. Big, fat,
cigar-chomping, black-hat Evil. Or the impossible suddenly made probable. The
rip in space/time. The Thing become flesh. Or at the very least, the
insurmountable wall with a hairline crack. The Dark Tower. The Big Thing that
normal people can't make or do on just any given Thursday.
Literary writers
hate such things. They hate Bigness. They can only wrap their minds around the
Small. And yet, a story must have conflict, or else it is only a poem, or less,
a painting. And so, having cast aside the "genres" -- where Big
Things stomp around and make noise -- all that's left to write about is Death.
Old man! 'tis not so difficult
to die.
-- Lord Byron, Manfred (Act III, Scene IV)
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