I love to think of myself as an author, blogger, warrior princess in my own mind and? TALENT SCOUT! I also love collecting talented people, which recently my attorneys informed me this is technically called “kidnapping” and is a “felony.” Oh well. Anyway, when I ran across Alex, I couldn’t wait to share his talent and voice with you guys. He is smart, funny, brilliant, and, since he is a W.A.N.A. he is also unusually good-looking.

It is a curse we all bear….

*heavy sigh*

So to mix things up a bit, Alex is going to be helping me through the holiday season. This is a guest post by Alex Limberg from ‘Ride the Pen.’ Please welcome him with thunderous applause! His free ebook “44 Key Questions” to test your story helps you create intriguing novels and shorts. And today, he is here to inspire us to look at plot in a new way. Take it away, Alex!

*insert thunderous applause here*

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You might think social media is a pretty new thing; and there is no denying it:

Edgar Allen Poe didn’t tweet his anxieties, Jane Austen didn’t present herself seductively on Instagram, and William Shakespeare never even wrote a single Facebook entry!

Or did he?

Let’s put it this way: While social media didn’t exist centuries ago, its underlying psychological principle is as old as mankind. And that principle is: The audience loves drama.

The tickle people nowadays find on Facebook and Pinterest, they could 400 years ago find in Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, in Shakespeare’s times, dock workers were watching his comedies laughing and slapping their thighs.

So what better to study for drama than Facebook and Shakespeare?

And as Kristen’s blog is about creative writing, out of the two we should pick Shakespeare. Let’s take one of the most famous plays ever written and see how a masterful dramatic plot comes about: Let’s take a look at Macbeth!

Plot? What’s Plot?

Macbeth tells the story of a nobleman (Macbeth), who receives a prophecy from three witches that he will become King of Scotland one day. This might have sparked his appetite for power, for he subsequently murders the king and rules the kingdom with malice. In the end his tyranny becomes so bad an alliance of nobles has to get together to defeat him and behead him at his castle.

Now let’s start out by explaining why an apple is an apple, i.e. answering the question: What is plot?

Plot is the movement of characters over the chess board of the story; it shows us what the figures do and what happens to them.

Good plot is plot that is moving the audience: It makes them feel suspense, laughter, anxiety or whatever else (Side note: If it’s a comedy and they only feel anxiety, you have it the wrong way). Plot is everything that happens, on a broader scale.

Additionally, plot will lead to POSSIBILITIES not acted out, which are very important as well, because they make the audience ask themselves QUESTIONS, e.g. the extraordinarily important question: What will happen next?

What MIGHT happen is often more thrilling than what actually DOES happen– you are aware of this if, for example, you have ever been out doing your thing while wondering whether you turned off the stove before leaving the house.

Excitement comes from what IS and from what COULD BE. What actually is reality, is a little less exciting, because, well, it is already. It’s the unknown that excites us the most, it’s the possibilities: How will your cat and your new pet canary get along? What will Grandmother say when she finds out your new boyfriend works for Burger King? Will drinking horse urine really improve your health?

Questions upon questions.

Once you get the answer, things might become very exciting for a short time, but the joy or desperation will wear off quickly. A question left hovering, however, could tickle you forever…

What REALLY excites your audience is not the answer to the following question, but the question itself: “WHAT THE $&*% IS GONNA HAPPEN NEXT!?“

So how do you make a plot really fascinating for the audience?

You do it by letting them wonder about as many QUESTIONS as possible. You see, this is the trick about creating a thrilling piece of plot: The game is about QUESTIONS! The more QUESTIONS the audience are asking themselves and the more urgently they are asking them, the more they will love your story.

Suspense is created by QUESTIONS the audience directs towards themselves (because, well, there is absolutely nobody better around to direct them at…).

Solving these questions, in turn, leads to new questions, and it is also essential to ask those new questions BEFORE the old ones are resolved! This way you are making sure you have your audience hooked constantly and without any gaps in between, which would mean a lagging plot, or, in the common man’s words, a really boring story.

While the plot constantly develops in a dynamic way, new burning questions will arise.

Your questions should also come up in your story NATURALLY. They should never feel as if they are just there because of the godlike will of the author. If a prisoner suddenly finds a file on the ground, and there is no cake around it, your audience might feel manipulated and won’t buy into the illusion of your story anymore.

You say so far this all sounds very theoretical? Now let’s take a look at how Master Shakespeare did it!

Shakespeare didn’t have to post his dinner on FB– Look how he hooked the reader instead…

First act, first scene: Enter witches. First immediate QUESTIONS: Are those bitches crazy?

Speaking weird sh!% in rhymes, running around under thunder and lightning in wide open space, probably with hunches, crooked fingers and dressed in rags. QUESTION: What the *&%$ is this?

Well, it’s an unusual and very powerful way to start a play: Notice how an original setting immediately raises a LOT of questions, before even a single word is spoken (Who are they? What are they doing out there? What’s gonna happen next?), while also providing visually exciting elements on stage for entertainment-hungry 17th century, Twitter-less eyeballs (storm, lightning, open space, eerie women). Good sh!%!

Cut to second scene. We hear war cries and see a king and a bloody warrior laying out a recap of the battle– it’s all very dynamic, but you don’t see the actual fight. So the play even spares the director the hassle of having to stage the battle, which in turn saves him a couple of stuntmen.

Immediately, questions arise: Who is fighting against whom? Who is winning? What do they want? Who was killed? What happened? What’s the king’s mission?

See how the plot starts to unfold almost unobtrusively, while questions, atmosphere and characters engage the audience’s interest and spark their excitement?

We hear about Macbeth before we even see him for the first time– this is, combined with the play’s title, a very effective way to spike curiosity! Question: Who will he be?

We can’t go through every single scene here, or else you will have to witness me chew and digest my copy of Macbeth out of sheer madness, but you get the picture:

On a micro-level, asking questions works to engage the audience in a single scene, or maybe in an act.

On a macro-level, asking questions works to engage the audience in the whole drama and to overall wow them.

In the third scene of the first act the bitches witches, predict Macbeth will become king. With their prediction perhaps the two most intriguing QUESTIONS of the whole drama come to mind:

1. Are those crooked women indeed capable of predicting the future (read as: Does fate exist)?

2. Will Macbeth indeed become king eventually?

Those two questions essentially amount to the same single one. They will be resolved in the beginning of the third act, when we see Macbeth appearing as king for the first time.

Notice how by then, there will have been some urgent NEW QUESTIONS established, to never let the audience off the hook for even one second (Will the nobles ever discover that Macbeth has murdered the king? How will Macbeth cope with his own guilt? Etc…).

Please don’t do it this way…

They say you only really value something once it’s gone. So I want to make you value Shakespeare’s plot by cold-heartedly taking it away from you. This is how Shakespeare should never, ever have done it, no way.

Had he done it like this, they would have booed him off the stage, which would have made him so depressed he would have spent the rest of his lifetime on useless crap like twittering about his digestion all day long (Btw, twittering back then probably worked with REAL birds, as in messenger pigeons).

Macbeth Done All Wrong

1^st Act

The king, Duncan, in his castle, doing his thing (Instagram or whatever). We see him interacting with his sons and with nobility. He is friendly with them. No problems given, no questions asked, no solutions needed. He has a nice convo with Macbeth about the weather. He has supper with the nobles. He farts and goes to sleep.

2^nd Act

In a short, easy-going monologue, Macbeth tells the audience he has killed the king. He is wearing the crown and is now the new king. Lady Macbeth is happy.

3^rd Act

We see Macduff coming towards Macbeth’s castle, some soldiers behind him. Suddenly a soldier appears on stage and announces he has killed Macbeth.

THE END

Granted, Shakespeare’s play has much more content, but nevertheless the main point presents itself here in all its glory.

Notice all of the interesting questions missing: Will Macbeth murder the king? Will his guilt kill him? Will the predictions come true? How will Macduff react?

Much of the basic plot still happens: The king is murdered, Macbeth bullies the country, Macbeth gets killed. But there is no alluding to future events, no uncertainty around the acts or characters, no hovering possibility of doom.

No witches. No questions. No fun.

The Good-Bye Part (Summary)

I hope that from now on you will think of great plot in terms of QUESTIONS rather than in terms of events.

Create an outstanding plotline by raising intriguing QUESTIONS. Raise new QUESTIONS before you answer the old ones– this way your audience won’t ever be let off the hook!

With this new way of thinking, your readers will just have to know what happens next. You will get them eagerly turning the pages, completely addicted to your story. And you might, yes you just might…become even more important than Facebook to them.

Alex Limberg is blogging on ‘Ride the Pen’ to help you boost your fiction writing. His blog dissects famous authors (works, not bodies). Create intriguing stories with his free ebook “44 Key Questions” to test your story or check out his creative writing exercises. Shakespeare is jealous. Alex has worked as a copywriter and lived in Vienna, Los Angeles, Madrid and Hamburg.

Thanks, Alex!

What are your thoughts? Do you go too easy on your characters thereby tanking your plot? Do you kind of wish they had Instagram back then? How cool would it have been to see an Attila the Hun Selfie? What historical figure would you have loved to follow on social media? Do you find that unanswered questions are actually WAY more interesting? Do you know the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Alex is going to be guest posting a few more times, so if there are any other topics you’d like HIM to explore, put them in the comments!

Remember that comments for guests get double love from me for my contest!

I love hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of NOVEMBER, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel.

OCTOBER’S WINNER is M DELLERT Please e-mail your 20 pages (5000 words) in a WORD document. One-inch margins, double-spaced, Times Roman font to kristen@ wana intl dot com and congratulations!

The post The Truly Dramatic Plot—Shakespeare, Instagram, & Why Macbeth is STILL Awesome appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Image via Wikimedia Commons (Source The Washington Times)

In the last post, we had a little bit of a debate about literary fiction versus commercial fiction in the comments, thus I wanted to take a moment to point out something very important. Just because fiction is commercial, doesn’t mean it’s the equivalent of Transformers Part 5. Commercial fiction runs the gambit from fluff that is just there for fun entertainment to multi-dimensional, powerful writing.

I want to point out that Shakespeare’s works were all commercial fiction. His plays were written to entertain regular, illiterate working people. BUT, why his works were so brilliant was that they were multi-layered, threaded with nuance, symbolism, and powerful themes. His work could be understood and enjoyed by “common” people, but there were references that captivated, challenged, and even upset the highly educated.

We still study Shakespeare to this day. Just because our work is “commercial” doesn’t mean it’s plebeian. Conversely, just because a work is loaded with fancy words and references that only a PhD can understand, doesn’t make it good literary writing.

Um, The Canterbury Tales were also “commercial fiction” ;).

Layers and Complexity Make the Difference

Oprah Winfrey in “The Color Purple”

Joy Luck Club, Winter’s Bone, Lonesome Dove, The Road, The Color Purple, are all good examples of literary works that were multi-layered. I watched Lonesome Dove and enjoyed it when I was 15. Maybe I didn’t catch every reference, theme and nuance my grandparents did, but I could enjoy the story at least on the surface level.

In my opinion, the best literary works are the ones with the skill to entertain all audiences in different ways. But, at least that’s my opinion.

Back to the commercial side…

One of the reasons that Monty Python’s The Holy Grail is one of my all-time favorite movies is because the writers employed the same layers of brilliance. I first saw the movie when I was 5 and laughed at the knights hopping around clacking coconuts. The Black Knight was my favorite. It was basic slapstick even a 5 year-old could find funny.

Pansy!

As I grew older and studied more history, more and more references, layers of comedy and double entendres, that, before were hidden, bubbled to the surface. To this day, I still catch new references, making The Holy Grail funnier every time I watch.

Who made you King? I didn’t vote for you. We’re an autonomous collective.

*clutches sides laughing*

Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

Thou shall count to three, and the number of the counting shall be three. FIVE? Is RIGHT OUT!

Okay, I’ll stop.

The point I am trying to make here is that literary fiction and commercial fiction are not polar extremes people might believe. Commercial fiction doesn’t automatically mean the fiction is one-dimensional, simplistic and written only for people with an eight grade education or below.

Harry Potter was brilliant in that it could captivate children and adults alike. Rowling’s characters were visceral, complex, and riveting. Winter’s Bone on the literary side, could engage a commercial audience, but those who wanted subtlety, theme and symbol walked away fulfilled.

We Must Look at What We Seek to Accomplish

Goals are goals. Your goals are yours and don’t let anyone belittle those goals. If you want to write commercial fiction that simply entertains and doesn’t take on deep, raw societal issues, that’s a noble goal. If you want to write for the super-educated and challenge the status quo, go for it.

But, I will say that if our goal is to write for a living, to make money, we have to appeal to a larger audience. That’s what will drive sales. If we seek to merely win awards and accolades, then write for the PhD audience. Write for people who read The New Yorker. We have to write what we’re called to write.

Dennis Lehane is one of my favorite authors. He had astounding commercial success with Mystic River (nominated for an Academy Award), Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island and all these stories were rich, complex and appealing to a wider audience. He made a choice to write some more literary works, and, though they won awards and accolades, they didn’t make the same kind of money.

Sean Penn in “Mystic River”

Goals are Critical

But this is why goals are important. What do you want? Books are like food. Want to make big money? Reinvent pizza. Want to make a statement? Experiment with squid and duck livers. Want to do both? Be Julia Child and invite regular people into a world that, previously was inaccessible.

Be a bridge between the extremes. Mystic River is that kind of literary bridge.

In the end, good stories are good stories. Commercial isn’t better than literary and literary isn’t better than commercial. It depends on our goals and what we are called to write. But just because a piece of fiction is loaded with million-dollar words, obscure references and self-indulgent navel-gazing doesn’t mean it’s literary.

On the other hand, just because we want to write stories that entertain millions, doesn’t mean we can’t stretch and add layers of complexity. This is why it is critical to read, explore and learn about craft. My opinion? The true geniuses (literary AND commercial) entertain a wide spectrum, each on their own level.

What are your thoughts? I am no PhD and this is my opinion, so am I off base? What are your thoughts? What are some examples of commercial fiction that was complex? Literary fiction that could be widely enjoyed?

I love hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of March, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. If you leave a comment, and link back to my blog, and mention my book We Are Not Alone in your blog…you get your name in the hat THREE times. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

And also, winners have a limited time to claim the prize, because what’s happening is there are actually quite a few people who never claim the critique, so I never know if the spam folder ate it or to look for it and then people miss out. I will also give my corporate e-mail to insure we connect and I will only have a week to return the 20 page edit.

At the end of March I will pick a winner for the monthly prize. Good luck!

The post Shakespeare Wrote Commercial Fiction–The Battle Between Literary & Commercial Fiction appeared first on Kristen Lamb.