The Plot

The Plot (And How To Hide It)

I'VE BEEN GETTING QUESTIONS ABOUT PLOTTING STORIES FOR COMICS. So maybe a few thoughts on this sticky subject might help you wannabe comic storytellers.

The plot is the basic idea of the story. Big shark threatens beach community. Suicidal prince plots against his mom and stepdad. Alien gets horny every seven years and has to go home. The basic stuff. Your story's skeleton.

The problem is that new plots are pretty hard to find. So you have to find a new twist on an old one or at least a fresh approach to the formula or genre you want to write in.

This is where most "writer's block" comes from. The plot aspect of storytelling is the most intimidating part of writing. If you LET it be intimidating. The "what happens next?" part of writing doesn't HAVE to be so scary.

Look, the painful truth is that comics don't pay enough for me to come up with three entirely new plots each month. Hell, Shakespeare only thought of maybe half a dozen. Dashiell Hammett thought of two. Most writers go their whole career and never think of one actual new plot. If I came up with a brand new plot that'd never been done I'd go to Hollywood or write a novel or a TV series.

But you can take a basic plot and twist and bend it until its unrecognizable.

Try this one on for size. Take the plot of Star Wars. Instead of being a farmboy from another planet make him a fresh recruit in Vietnam. Obi Wan is one of his sergeants. Darth is the other. He's drawn back and forth between the dark and light side of things the whole while looking for the reason why he's here. Sgt Darth kills Sgt Kenobi and Private Luke is drawn to the Dark Side by his anger. So how different is the basic plot of Platoon from Star Wars?

All genre fiction (including superhero comics) has a formula. Westerns end in shootouts. Romance stories end up with the boy and girl together or one or both of them dead. Mysteries end with the bad guy getting his in the end.

So if they're all the same why do we keep reading them? Well, we love these characters, right? But is that enough? You KNOW it's not. We want to see our favorite guys and gals in well paced, entertaining stories that bring out everything we love about their characters.

But how do we do this and make it seem fresh after (in some cases) sixty plus years of continuity?
You have to hide your plot. You have to write so that your reader is not AWARE that they're reading a story.
Howard Hawks was a film director in Hollywood's heydey. He worked in every genre from comedy (Bringing Up Baby) to adventure (Only Angels Have Wings) to science fiction (The Thing From Another World). And he mastered them all because he fully understood each of their formulas and how to bring fresh exciting ideas to bear on them. He also understood that lightning pace and sparkling dialogue could dress up even the oldest story.

Hawks took a sort of sabbatical in the 1950s and spent several years in Europe not working on any film projects at all. When he returned to the States he found that in the years he was gone TV had gone from a novelty to America's main source of entertainment. What shocked him most was that the majority of programs on TV were dramas. Hour and half-hour westerns dominated TV then. He realized that Americans were being exposed to hours and hours of STORIES each week.

So how do you get them out of their easy chairs and into theaters to watch yet another story? And it was a damn western he was planning as his next feature! Movies were getting drubbed by the boob tube. Theaters were empty. Business was drying up. But Hawks was smart enough to know what most Hollywood folks didn't. It wasn't 3-D or massive spectacle or Smell-O-Vision that audiences wanted. Audiences wanted big stars and big entertainment. But how to compete with all that STORY on TV?

Hawks decided that the best approach was to hide the plot of his new movie as much as possible, to design a story that would play out without seeming like a story. The result was Rio Bravo. On the surface it seems like standard western vehicle for John Wayne. But those familiar with it see it as so much more. The move travels along at a seemingly leisurely pace while the tension builds between the good guys and the bad guys and good guys and each other. A romantic interest is introduced and seems to just melt into the rest of the story seamlessly. Even the comedy relief and (believe it or not) musical interludes work to create atmosphere and environment. And ALL of this serves to make the movie more of an experience than it is a story.

And it makes Rio Bravo the perfect model for writing comics or any other kind of serial fiction. If you can disguise the plot so that it doesn't seem like a tired old series of One Damn Thing After Another you can go a long way toward keeping your readers surprised and entertained.

One way to help disguise plot elements is to have each scene in your story accomplish two things at once. Don't just have an action bit. Have an action bit that says something about your character's personality. If you must have a conversation then mix action with it. If you must have exposition then play with it in a humorous or confrontational way.

And avoid painful exposition whenever possible. What's painful exposition?

"You know, Susan, that the last time we faced Doom he shrunk Johnny to the size of an ant."
"Oh Reed, and Ben was so hurt when we had to send him away. But what could we do? Ben might have crushed Johnny under his big, orange, cosmic ray altered feet."

"And that's why, Susan, my darling wife and mother of our own mutant child Franklin, we are in such jeopardy. We need Ben's strength to combat the Skrulls who are even now coming through the rift to the Negative Zone created when Willy Lumpkin stumbled against the 'on' switch!"

THAT'S painful! So hide your exposition in natural dialogue or even visuals. It flows more naturally. That way you help your reader forget that this is a story.

An element of comics that is somewhat unique is the longevity of the characters. This aids in plotting as you have all that established history to fall back on. Batman, Superman, Spider-man and Tarzan are beloved characters. If you can locate the core of what makes them that way you can work out plots to bring those elements forward. Where most movie adaptations of these characters fail is in getting too far from what made them appealing in the first place.

So you basically play "What If?" with these characters and there's your story. What if Superman lost his powers? What if Spider-man got married? What if Batman went away for a while and left his sidekicks in charge? You can play this up and down.

Another suggestion (and one that makes some editors nuts) is to not worry so much about your overall plot and just sail into the story blind and work it out as you go.

I've done this stuff long enough that I can start with my opening and write cold to the end of the story. I've often written the beginning of a script and then jumped to the end and let the middle work itself out as I've joined the two. If you're working with the classic characters you can do this. And if there's something missing in the story you can always go back and add it or finesse it.

Any questions? This is a big subject and open to all kinds of confusion. So please feel free to post on it.


Chuck

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