Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “Darkness of Slinger Middle School Part 2” chapter from Teardrop Road
Writing Assignment for this class: The assignment from Class 12 is due today. Send it to jesseteller (at) yahoo (dot) com. Remember to rate and review your performance at the bottom of the assignment.
Plot’s tricky for me. I can tell you how it’s done. I can tell you what you already know. So let’s get through that. Let’s burn through that real quick.
You want an inciting incident. This is an event of some kind that sparks action and drama. Then you want a kind of rising action, obstacles to get in your character’s way. Alliances and treachery are great for this. The first editor I worked with said, “And if there’s not a love story in there somewhere, shame on you.” So you move through that. And everything is moving towards one massive climactic explosion of story. Then there’s usually a chapter or a few pages of falling action, bringing some kind of emotional resolution after the grand emotional explosion of the climax. If you plan on making a sequel out of it, you give a little curl at the end like the top of a Dairy Queen ice cream cone, to build on with the next story.
It’s a fairly solid plan. There’s nothing wrong with building your story based on a plot. I’ve done it a few times. I had you read “The Darkness of Slinger Middle School Part 2” because in this, we have the inciting incident. I’m being abused by a math teacher and humiliated for his own enjoyment. He has a motive that’s built around trauma of having lost a friend in Vietnam. And I wear a fatigues jacket everywhere I go. He spends all his time, when I’m in his class period, humiliating me. That’s my first hour teacher. That’s how my day starts. In this particular short of my autobiography, the next class period is social studies and that is a class taught by my math teacher’s best friend. He as well has a vendetta against my jacket. And for at least a month now, they have been torturing me. That’s the inciting incident.
Something needs to happen about this. I, at the time, the character in the story, was suicidal, and I couldn’t continue with this sort of abuse for very much longer, considering everything else going wrong in my life. I go and talk in the hallway to a mysterious character. Her name is Island. Every time she’s mentioned to somebody besides me, they have nothing but questions, or ignore the topic of this character altogether. It wasn’t until I was writing my autobiography that I realized Island was not real. Island was an imaginary friend of sorts that saw me through my days of school. When you go back and read, you’ll notice that she’s clapping in the hallway, she’s standing next to teachers, nobody ever hears her clapping. My girlfriend in this particular story does not ever look at her. Nobody does. Island is not real. So I talk to my imaginary friend.
My girlfriend comes to get me. This section of the story creates great amount of drama, and pushes the character into a corner they can’t fight their way out of. I’ve just come from being humiliated in front of the school. I can’t bring myself to hold the hand of the prettiest girl in school. So I ignore her, move on. I argue with her friend. I cannot perform, and by perform I mean, allow myself to claim her in any way.
I go back to class late, and the abuse starts again with the next teacher. What was not mentioned in this reading was the math teacher gives his lesson, then every day walks over across the hall to the social studies teacher to hang out with him. That’s mentioned in a chapter earlier. So when I get to my second hour class late, both of them are there, and the abuse is amplified. This is all rising action.
I chose this section of my autobiography for you to read because it does actually follow the diagram of a plot. The complication here that has to be worked out is I have to defeat these two teachers somehow or it’s gonna kill me. At this particular point in my life, the only reason I hadn’t killed myself yet is because of my girlfriend. And Island knows that that relationship is falling apart. I don’t have much time. She says it herself. How’s it go? Make a plan but get it done, they’re winning, and you can’t take much more of this.
By lunch, the action has climbed again to a new level, and the suicidal boy has lost the only thing he’s been living for. He’s lost his girlfriend. It’s critical now. I remember when the note was handed to me. I remember that moment when X handed me that note, I felt like I was being pushed over a precipice. I was out of time. The only thing that got me through the rest of the day was maybe I could call her. The conversations we had on the telephone were epic. So maybe I could get to a place where I could talk to her in our place, which was the telephone, and I could talk some sense into her, and get my girlfriend back.
In your plot, you’re gonna have moments of showdown-like situations that escalate the drama. This is one of those. The character goes into a situation of great stress. They have a plan. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
So, the conflict goes bad fast. And the character loses again. He loses the greatest thing that was in his life at the time. And he goes upstairs to wallow in one of his many failures and defeats in the story, and he cries.
Then he comes up with a plan. The plan is leading to the climax. He goes downstairs, he’s gotta make two collect calls.
Now, you might not remember this, but it used to be if you were calling from a long distance away you had to pay extra money. My family was poor and they didn’t have that extra money. You could make a collect call in which you told your name to the operator, the operator got ahold of the person you were trying to call and asked if they would pay the extra money.
I called my two uncles who had been in the military, told them about my teachers, knowing they were both violent thugs and they were not gonna have it. I weighed it out in my head before I made the phone calls. The “if the worst would happen.” If the worst happens and the teachers call my bluff, and my uncles have to come up here to Wisconsin, could my uncles win that fight? And the answer to that was most definitely yes. Both being in the military was one thing. One having survived Vietnam was another. But one of them had been a street thug his whole life and the other one had been a cop in Chicago. If put up against these two teachers, they would physically dominate them completely. But I knew it wasn’t going to come to that. These two particular teachers have been spending their time publicly humiliating a broken child. There is no badass here.
So I called both uncles and I had my plan. Now right here’s a very crucial part of the story. And this is where you might get into arguments with other writers. I’ll make my opinion known. In the story it says I had formulated a plan, I just needed to make two collect calls. Then I do not go into detail about what the plan actually is. However, my character in the story is the point of view character.
You have an argument going on in the writing community about this particular thing. Some people will say, if it’s a point of view character, and the reader is privy to everything that is going on inside their brain, and a plan is hatched, the reader should be made aware of that plan.
Other writers will say that you can’t do that, that you shouldn’t have to do that, that it’s okay for the point of view character to have secrets the reader is unaware of. This is an argument that can be shown on many different levels and, to be honest, I don’t play the game at all, and neither should you.
Sometimes it’s better for the story if the readers know the plan going in. And that is only to be done if the plan is going to fail on some level, then the reader knows what should’ve happened, and then sees how the plan goes wrong. It’s become such an expected part of the plot of modern day cinema or books in general, comic books, anything, that it is accepted that if anybody tells you the plan in any given story, that plan is going to fail on some level. But if the plan is kept secret, you’ll find in most stories, that plan works.
One editor that I wrote said if you’re in the mind of a point of view character and the point of view character comes up with a plan, the audience needs to hear it, the reader needs to read it. I thought that was ridiculous. It’s especially true when dealing with certain kinds of point of view characters. This point of view character, we all know, is mentally unstable. This point of view character has DID, so it’s possible for one part of his mind to have a plan and the other part not to have any idea what’s going to happen.
So anyway, a plan is formed, and the reader is given zero information. They don’t know now the collect calls went. They don’t know who the collect calls were to. They are unaware what the plan is now that the collect calls have been made. They have zero information. Then they see the plan begin to roll out before them.
They hide on the bus, they hide with the high schoolers and stowaway in their bathroom. They’re moving around the school in stealth. The character who’s hatched the plan has enlisted an ally. We’re seeing a plot roll out before us. This is not character based. This is not my character would do this, that causes tension in a certain situation, so that happens. This particular chapter of my autobiography works like a plot. So yes, they come out of the bathroom when second hour starts. Because they want both teachers to be there. I wanted one teacher to be unaware of my presence at the school so that he would be thrown off.
We see Island and she is supportive. Her being an imaginary friend and being supportive of the idea means that the character’s extremely confident that this is all going to go his way.
We see hardship for the ally. He’s been given a two-minute warning bell and he has to make it all the way across the school in time to get to his class. We sit down on the stairs. I remember sitting down on the stairs. I remember at this particular moment, I remember shifting a lot from one alter to the next. Sometimes I would shift to somebody who had no idea why we weren’t in class. Sometimes it would be an alter who had not been out in a long time, had no idea what was happening at all. And sometimes out would come a confident one. It was a very tumultuous fifteen minutes.
The math teacher steps out and the climax begins to play out. We’ve reached the pinnacle of the plot now. Everything is on the line. If there’s a victory here, then all is won, all is taken care of. If not, the attacks will escalate, the parents will be called that school was skipped. I’ll be suspended or get detention. If it doesn’t go exactly right, I’ll be humiliated. I might even be ordered by my parents to not wear the jacket ever again, which would lead to a loss of security and identity. At this particular moment, everything is on the line. The teacher comes out of the class, they are off balance. “Oh Jesse, you are here,” the teacher said. And then out comes Shadow. And he says what worked that day and since then has become a catch phrase for situations like this. If you read all the books, you’ll hear him say this over and over again. It’s always some shade of, go in there, do something, and then come out here and deal with me. Shadow’s been saying it since the day of this story.
The teachers step up and we have the final confrontation. And we see Shadow reach maturity. The character changes here. He’s been suffering loss after loss, and has a history of them. He’s kind of been a dirtbag. Petulant. In your plot you don’t only want the action to reach a climax, you also want the character to reach a climax. Everything is on the line here. If Shadow rebels against these two adults and he loses, the rebel of my mind has been defeated and might never rise again. This is not only a desperate moment in story and action, maybe suicide, maybe not suicide, loss of the jacket, and detention, or victory against adult enemies. But it is also the coming of age for a particular alter born for this kind of confrontation, fighting his first battle. This was always gonna be the way it went because the person in the conflict was Shadow, but in your plot, the hero has to act in their own way. They have to fight with their own weapons. They can’t just start doing things completely differently and call it a win.
This happens in the movie Grease. The character Sandy, who has always been a good girl cheerleader, smiley, preppy type, in the very end in the climax completely loses her entire identity, throws away every tool and every bit of herself, to become something completely different, and then she wins.
It is a play that the main character, Danny, has been trying to do and has failed at through a good chunk of the movie. He went from gangster to jock and was no good at it. She goes from prep cheerleader to gangster, which solves all the problems. The message given to girls is, your man should not have to change for you, you should have to change for your man. And no matter how attractive Olivia Newton John is in her gangster uniform, she should never have had to give away who she is to get what she wants.
In order for this scene in my life to work out, Shadow has to be able to win this fight with the tools he has. And the main tool Shadow has is complete disrespect for authority, and foul language. So here we go. You have the final confrontation. You’re not supposed to curse in front of authority. Shadow’s doing that. You’re not supposed to interrupt when a person of authority is talking. Shadow does that. You can’t vaguely threaten the life of your teacher when you’re a sixth grader. Shadow does that. You can’t give an authority position consequences. You can’t walk away from an authority figure when you’re in the middle of a conversation with them.
In doing all of these things he’s using the tools the character is known for to accomplish the plan, which is the climax of the story.
You have the odd occurrence, the mystery in the scene, which is the fact that Island is standing right there watching the entire scene play out. She’s clapping and nobody can hear her. The two teachers do not tell her to leave the hallway because they don’t see her. And so you have this big question as to why this character is here when she’s a student and should be in class. And why nobody except Shadow is reacting to her at all. That creates a mystery that leads to the next appearance of her character, and shows the reader that the story’s not complete. The moment of utter victory comes when we hear that since he was stabbed in sixth grade, he has lost every single time he’s tried to do anything. And the character has now had this huge victory.
So then the falling action is the little whip, the little curl on the Dairy Queen cone. This is the falling action. And his Bonnie was on the way. In the book up until this point, he’s described himself as love’s criminal, breaking all the rules that have been set out by the culture of the sixth grade. But he’s never been able to do that before. He’s mentioned the characters Bonnie and Clyde, outlaws in the arena of love and relationships in the sixth grade, who will break all the rules and create their own culture. And Bonnie is coming. That leads to the sequel, which is the next chapter. So it’s all here. I lived it, but the plot is all here.
We have the inciting incident, we have the rising action, the obstacle of the break up and the great defeat, the formulation of the plan that will lead to a conclusion, the presence of an ally, and the final moment of victory. We have the falling action, the whole thing, the whole thing is laid out right here. It’s very strictly a plotted out chapter. This is how plot works.
There’s other variations. You have in some shows with a plot, or books with a plot, or even poems with a plot, you have a lack of inciting incident, just sort of a situation and the coalescing of that inciting incident.
Best example I have of this is, there was a movie that came out in the early 2000s called 28 Days Later. A guy wakes up from having gotten into an accident. He’s been in a coma for about a month, and he wakes up after an apocalypse. Everything is a disaster. Everything is a mess. And he begins using his weapon almost immediately. He starts yelling out the word hello.
It’s a strange thing to be considered a weapon. It’s an open greeting to the world, showing that the character is looking for camaraderie and comfort from another person. However, every time he uses this phrase, he ends up getting into more and more trouble, until at the very end, he uses this same weapon, creating a massive flag with the word Hello, that is used to signal to planes flying over the area that there is somebody there who is still alive. His greeting, his acceptance of other people, and his desire for fellowship, is the greatest weapon he has.
Now, in this lecture I was talking earlier about the coalescing of an inciting incident. And we don’t really have one in the beginning of this particular movie. We have a setting. It’s post-apocalyptic. There are zero people here. So we have a setting. For a long time though, we have no inciting incident. It’s not until he meets up with the first zombie-like creature that any kind of plot begins to form. In this particular instance, the inciting incident is a setting. For a good chunk of the beginning minutes of the movie, he’s not doing anything except walking around yelling hello. And really, nothing has happened to him. No one has done anything to him. It’s the setting itself that creates the inciting incident. This happens sometimes.
The Walking Dead is not a good example of this, because there is an actual car chase and firefight, conversation and character building that takes place before any zombie outbreak.
There are times when the setting becomes the climax. Reaching a certain place becomes the climax of the plot. It’s not necessary action, but you have escaped the prison and you’re walking out of it. You’ve managed to cut ties with the mob and you’re just walking down the street. In those situations, the setting can become both the climax and the falling action. The character actually performs nothing of note at all.
This kind of coalescing of an inciting incident happens a lot in what is called character driven plots, or character driven stories. What you have is an action that takes place and the character reacts to that. Other characters in the same area or around the same activity react in their own way. And the writer creates the entire story based on what this person would do in this situation and what that person would do in that situation. And it moves them forward to a climax of some kind.
Character driven stories have a tendency to not move in a climbing direction. We’re in a kind of “Pilgrim’s Progress” situation.
“Pilgrim’s Progress” was a story written a long time ago about a man moving through the world with a massive burden on his shoulders, and he’s trying to find a way to get rid of the burden. The burden is sin. This is a religious story, a Christian story. The burden is sin, and as he moves through the world, trying to find a place to put all this down, he comes against symbolic character after symbolic character who talk about sin and talk about God, and give religious parables of some kind. But there’s no real climbing action. Things aren’t getting harder for him. He’s just in motion.
This kind of thing happens in The Wizard of Oz, too. You have a person on a journey with allies, they have a destination in mind, and there is an enemy. However, you don’t have a growing intensity and a situation where things are getting more and more difficult. The plot is driven by the character of Dorothy, Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. But there’s no real rising action. They face different problems, and they do face an enemy. There’s definitely a climax and a resolution, but there’s no real climbing action. It’s a different kind of story.
But today we’re talking about plot. So with that, we’re going to focus on “Darkness of Slinger Middle School Part 2.” Because it has everything that is required for a plot.
I’m gonna play you a video now. It’s a music video. It’s called “It’s Not My Time” by a band called 3 Doors Down. It has everything we’re looking for, action, rising action, obstacles, real and symbolic. There’s a goal. It has absolutely everything you need to know when studying plot. The falling action of this particular music video, though, is unique, because the falling action happens after the video is over. That’s when the falling action comes in because you start asking yourself certain questions, questions we’ll go through after you see the video.
We see in the beginning, a flash forward of an event. A mother in an SUV with a small child pulls out into the road and gets hit by a massive truck. Some entity has pushed time back four minutes exactly. And this main character, the one who does parkour through the city, is given four minutes to get from wherever they are across town to downtown to stop this event from happening. Whatever higher power you wanna talk about gives this person four minutes.
They have all the obstacles they have to go through. Time keeps passing. The rising action is not the growing intensity of the parkour, although an argument could be made for that. Because there actually is spearlike imagery in the fence he has to jump twice, and there is a collision that he makes with another automobile. But he lets none of this slow him down. The rising action is, every now and then, the camera goes back to the mother and the child. We know the collision takes place at exactly 10:13 AM. We see the mother and daughter in their automobile moving forward and their clock is being shown to us again and again. That’s your rising action.
The climax happens when he is in a tunnel that is all windows, he stops and looks out long enough to see she is at the red light. He is almost out of time. Everything that happens after that is the climax. He gets there, he stops her, saves both lives. Probably in the process he gets yelled at by the driver.
But what I was talking about afterwards, with the resolution and the falling action, is questions I find myself asking as I watch the video. Questions like, this event has already taken place, how is it now pushed back four minutes, and this person given the ability to stop those two deaths from happening? What power could have done that? What power could be driving this person who’s running through the town doing parkour to know the exact zigzag, up, down, jump, roll they’ll need to do at a flat-out run, to save this mother and child? Then I find myself after watching it, contemplating it, and that contemplation is the falling action. The reader thinking about what they’ve read or what they’ve seen is the falling action in plot-driven scenarios that end abruptly.
First time I saw this video, couple of things stood out to me. First of all it was that time had been pushed back. Only a higher power can do that. So in my particular belief system, God had pushed the time back four minutes. If you’ve got a Judeo-Christian God, then you’ve got angels. When I watched the video a second time, I started noticing this one particular image that was coming constantly over and over, and that was the use of the arms. Every main jump that this person takes, their arms are held out in a very specific way. Whenever they do a roll, their arms are tucked in. All of these arm shots, a lot of them anyway, are slowed down. They run in slow motion on the camera. A lot of times, the legs are curled up, the knees tucked into the chest. And what this created for me was the image of an angel, and that these arms were being used as wings. To the point where when the angel gets in front of the SUV at the very end, puts his hands and arms out as if wrapping protective wings around the vehicle and its occupants.
So for me at least, with the abrupt ending, the falling action was the contemplation afterwards. The ideas I carried with me that brought me to resolution about what I had just seen. And then I had a higher power and the imagery of an angelic creature. That angelic creature moving with information it never should have had. And at speeds with abilities it should not possess. The falling action was realization and contemplation. This video though does definitely have a plot.
Now there are certain critics now that are saying that we are living in a new era of plotless stories. I don’t think the word is being used correctly. Some stories are character driven. But these critics are saying this almost as if plot is dead, and that upsets me. It shows a lack of understanding of storytelling. As a writer, we have a story in our head. And our mandate is to get that story written and get that story out. For the oral storyteller, it is to get the story told with as much drama as possible, and in the most memorable way a story can be told. Plot is a tool. But through time and literature, we’ve seen that sometimes plot is necessary to tell that story, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you make dinner and the utensil you use is a spoon, and sometimes it’s a fork. These critics say that we are living in a time without plot. And it’s a clear indication that they do not understand story.
Writing Assignment
Plot is usually used in manufactured stories, but we saw today how a story of my life, my personal life, played out like a plot. I would like for you to write a 3-page essay on a time in your life when your life played out like a plot. When there was an inciting incident, rising action with obstacles and setbacks, and a climax and falling action. I’m giving you nine class periods to get this back to me. You don’t have to write the story itself. You can, or you can give me a 3-page breakdown of why this particular event was set out like a classic plot.
Reading Assignment
Reading assignment for next class: “Smilin Jack, Part 1” and “Smilin Jack, Part 2” chapters from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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