things have to happen

on literary fiction and why it's afraid of plot

Over the last few weeks, for various reasons (teenage visitors, post-Christmas lull, being tired), I’ve had cause to watch a good few 80s/90s/early 2000s movies, namely: Back to the Future, Sister Act, Mrs Doubtfire, Legally Blonde. They’re all bangers (despite the sometimes ‘of its time’ content, to put it mildly). They’re all crowd pleasers. The teenagers loved them.

You don’t get these sort of mid-budget, star-vehicle movies anymore; they were a product of their time that’s been sacrificed to the Marvelisation of Hollywood. It’s a shame, because they were brilliant, and fun, and were often written around or for a specific star, so played to their strengths—and because they were made for mass-audience consumption, they prioritised storytelling. In that way, they’re masterclasses in good narrative writing.

The first scenes in all of these films give us a sense of the main characters—and immediately set up their lack, an absence or problem that the rest of the film will revolve around or attempt to resolve. In Legally Blonde, it’s Elle Woods, an apparently airheaded girl who is only expected, by everyone in her life, to marry well. On the night she thinks her boyfriend will propose, he instead breaks up with her for not being serious enough. In Mrs Doubtfire, we watch underappreciated voice actor Daniel lose his job, his marriage, and his access to his kids, all within about ten minutes. In Sister Act, we immediately meet Whoopi Goldberg’s character Deloris Van Cartier in the lacklustre and largely ignored lounge act she performs in. She goes to quit, to tell her married mafia boyfriend that she’s done, and accidentally witnesses the murder of a mob snitch who was caught snitching (the inciting incident). BAM. The problems: she’s talented but unappreciated, she’s in a relationship where she always is the side piece but she can’t get out, and now her life is in danger as well. Add in the actor’s natural charisma and you’re hooked. We have only made it about five minutes into the film.

From then on, it’s a classic fish-out-of-water narrative. She’s placed in the last location anyone would ever look for her—a convent—and the pious and austere nature of it stands against everything she likes, against the good life she’s been striving towards. She brushes up against the authority and the boredom until she finds an outlet where she can be herself—and, crucially, where she might solve the convent’s problem too. Eventually she discovers a different way to be, while bringing up all the people around her too. All entertaining, all very satisfying, all narratively sensical. You could watch it dozens of times over (I have).

As a writer, what you notice about Sister Act is that every single scene advances either the story or the development of the characters; actually, in every scene, it does both. The same is true of all the movies above. Mass-market film can very often be a blunt object, with producers demanding that any nuance has to be stripped out to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but these films were always meant to appeal to the mass market; that was the point of them. They went the other way; they started from broad appeal to have surprisingly nuanced moments (sometimes), but the foundations they were built on were solid. The writers and producers knew the driving force of any piece of broad successful fiction: you have to take well written characters and put them in situations through which their personalities and hopes and dreams can be shown and changed. In other words: things have to happen.

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Over the last few years, for various reasons (mentoring early career writers, being in a workshop group, chairing events, running a magazine, being asked to blurb books), I’ve had cause to read a lot of literary (and other) fiction—some of it by new writers, some of it by established writers. Some of it by me. In the twice-yearly open calls for Extra Teeth, we receive upwards of 500 submissions each time, and while we have a small submissions team, there is one of us that always has to read through everything (at speed) at least once. That person is me. Suffice it say, I’ve read a lot of stories.

When you get to the point of mentoring and editing emerging writers, you see a clear pattern of issues shared by most people’s early work. If you look back, you’ll see that you made the same mistakes too. Mistakes like overwriting (solution: use simple language well), being so desperate to make pretty sentences that you don’t actually describe what’s going on (solution: use simple language well), failing to give basic information clearly (solution: use simple language well). We are often so keen to be good at something, to be artistic, that we forget the basics. We forget that writing is a method of communication, and unless you’re being unclear for a very specific reason that will eventually reveal itself, in communication, clarity is key.

When it comes to first attempts at literary fiction, though, there’s often a different issue. That issue is that nothing fucking happens in it.

When I started writing short stories I had excellent free mentoring from much-lauded Glasgow writer Kirsty Logan (now a good pal). The most irritating but insightful thing she would say to me, when I presented her with my stories, was this: what is this story about? And more often than not, I didn’t know.

The problem was that I had all these ideas, but the ideas were situations; they were not stories. A situation is: a priest and an atheist find themselves lost at sea. (When asked what is this about? you can only really say it’s about two men in a boat). A story is: a priest and an atheist spend three days lost on the open sea, and by the time they are rescued, only one is left alive. (When asked what is this about? you can say that it’s about the madness-inducing panic of isolation/about how belief systems can sometimes make us wild/about how far even good people can go when they believe they are about to die, etc etc). To have a story, characters have to be placed into situations where they have to make choices, and those choices have to have consequences for both the character and the story. In other words: things have to happen.

There’s a strange gulf between literary fiction and genre fiction, based, I think, on a particular type of snobbery. Literary fiction, which aspires to be lofty and grand, wants to differentiate itself from genre fiction, which is often packed full of plot, sometimes in a formulaic manner and sometimes not. To set itself apart from genre fiction, lit fic goes the other way: it prioritises character and emotion rather than happenings—which is all well and good, if your characters do actually go on an emotional journey in some way, and if your characters do reveal themselves. But too often, they actually don’t.

When starting to write literary fiction, we often prioritise line work—that is, nice sentences and impactful syntax. Because we’re avoiding action, we instead just have lots of conversations, and because we have grown up in the internet age, all our characters speak in a very detached, ironic style where you can’t actually figure out what anyone feels about anything. Because there are no obvious emotions, you can’t really figure out an emotional change. Because there’s no action, and instead we have characters just saying what they think (but not what they feel), there’s little progression or tension, and you don’t see characters forced to make decisions. There’s no propulsion from one scene to the next, and you might get to the end of a story – or sometimes, an entire novel – without anything having actually occurred. You’ve had lots of discussions in different bars (to show your character is tortured, right?) but no plot is to be found anywhere. There were a lot of words, but there has been no journey.

I find myself at these times wanting to throw a proverbial bomb into the narrative. When you’re coming up with characters, there are all these little exercises you’re encouraged to engage with so you can understand who your character is. What is the worst possible thing that can happen to this character? If this character found a magic lamp, what would they wish for? What if this character was wrongly accused of murder—what would they do? What I realise now is that these are story moments; these questions that build a narrative. What would happen if you took your fast-living character and put her in a convent? What if an out-of-work mimic and actor (whose brother was a prosthetics expert) lost access to his kids? What if an underestimated woman’s prospective husband ditched her and went to law school, and she wasn’t ready to let him go? These questions need to be asked early on in your stories. These questions are the stories. You have to show how your characters react to these decisions: what choices they make, and how these choices play out. They can go in any way you like, but along the way, things have to happen.

This isn’t to say that a story (or a book, or a film) has to be as simple as this. They, of course, don’t have to be simple at all. The best books and films subvert structure, and defy genre tropes and expectations, and invent new ways to confound and surprise and impress the reader or viewer. But under every effective, formally-inventive story is a writer who understands narrative structure, who has a strong grasp on the basics of storytelling. You can’t break the rules until you understand what they are. And you can’t understand the rules without writing a lot of things that stick to them first.

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A couple of weekends ago I saw Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gloriously unhinged adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. None of Gray’s work can be said to be restrained, but Lanthimos truly does not hold back in any regard; the performances are borderline hammy (not a criticism), the cinematography wide-ranging, the colouring meandering from monochrome to hallucinogenic technicolour. The accents are all over the place. The dialogue was manic. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

The sheer delight of this film is already being massacred by discourse (is it feminist? why isn’t it set in Glasgow? is it actually about something that no one at any stage suggests it is? ad infinitum) but there are two things you can’t deny. One is that its protagonist, Bella Baxter, goes on a journey. The second is this: things happen. This film is 2 hours and 20 minutes long and the word I kept using to describe it was ‘rollicking’. You’ve got brain transplants and moral conundrums and loads of sex and travel and dance and brothels and death. Christ it was fun.

But more than fun: it put Bella, and the characters around her, in all manner of situations. She had to make choices. The plot shaped and changed her character, and challenged her, and confounded her, and by the end she was an active participant in the world, a completely different woman to who she was when the film started. She had, like Deloris Van Cartier, found a way to be.

I love literary fiction. I love camp and horror and melodrama as well, but I love more nuanced, quieter work; stories that are about character and politics and power and relationships. But the best literary fiction writers know that plot has to be part of these stories; look at Toni Morrison, look at Gabriel Garcia Marquez, look at Hilary Mantel. If the latter can write the line ‘you’re reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt’ in a Booker-winning novel*, you can have a little bit of a plot, just a smidgen, in your lit fic short story. Go on. Just a bit, as a treat.

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*yes, I’m reading Wolf Hall again.