Structure

OK, for a few times I have taken the Myers Briggs test, and usually the result is INTP. I’m a little borderline on the I/E, and on the P/J, so there is a bit of the ENTP or the INTJ in me but basically I am an INTP.

So like most INTPs I am concerned with structure. I may come across as a bit of a joker but my chosen subject of study is the most serious subject around: Mathematics. The one subject with which it is impossible to fuck around. If you get it you get it. If you don’t or maybe you are not so clear you get caught out.

But I’m not here to talk about Mathematics. I’m here to talk about structure. It’s a good thing to understand structure, because once you get it, you get the gist of most things. I feel that if you really want to demonstrate that you understand music, you got to be a composer, but I’m biased. If you want to understand visual arts, you got to understand composition. And if you want to know how to write a play you got to understand plot.

So when I made a claim to a friend that I am a playwright, he asked me what I knew about theatre. (Actually not much. I would rather be writing short stories. But writing plays gets you noticed more than writing short stories. So I wrote plays.) He asked me if I understood dramatics, if I got the lighting and mood. If I heard about all those games that actors play when they get warmed up. I said no. But for me (again I’m biased) there is the one element which is important above everything else: plot. Plot is king.

Now I know that there are 3 main players involved: the writer(s), the cast and the crew (and the king of the crew is the director). OK, I may actually be saying that the plot is the most important thing to the writer.

Whatever it is, the plot is the first thing that a writer must get right. It is the skeleton of the whole thing. If a play is a model with clothes on, the plot is the naked model. Every thing else is the clothes. If the model does not have a nice body the clothes won’t look good either. So have a nice body. Even when we study literature, the first thing we talk about is the plot. When there is a trial, the first thing they talk about is the fact finding. Then they talk about character (probably not very much – in fact they don’t want to let the judges’ perception of the actors to colour the judgement about the case. In fact only one thing is relevant – who’s telling the truth.) and themes (how to frame the case so that we know which laws apply). Whatever it is, regardless of whether you think the plot is the most important, it definitely comes first.

You should design the plot first. Always start with the story. Never start with character, unless that character has something to do with the plot. The Little Red Riding Hood: a girl goes into the forest to visit the grandmother. A wolf eats up the grandmother, and then disguises himself in order to eat Little Red Riding Hood up. She runs away in a nick of time, and is rescued by the woodcutter. What happens to the wolf differs upon the telling of the story.

Later on, now that you have the story, then comes the other parts. What does the plot tell you about the character? The wolf? What are the themes?
The thing you should not do is to start with the themes. You can’t say, let’s make a play about suicide. And then later on you try to fit that into a storyline. One of the first plays I was involved in, my seniors decided to make a story about homosexuality. It was a legendary play, and it won the competition (in conjunction with 1 other play) but I didn’t like it because the story felt that it was tacked on. It’s the most clichéd thing you could think of. Somebody in school outs himself to his best friend. Suddenly his best friend is not his best friend anymore. Duh. Yes, this was 1991, and during that era anything that had anything at all to do with homosexuality was very daring. Well there were 2 prizes given out that year: one to us and the other probably to the one that the judges thought should have won.

Anyway it is true that sometimes even before you have a plot, you have a premise, and part of that premise is one of the characters. The one person in the Little Red Riding Hood that really has a character is the wolf. All other characters are not fully formed. It is the character of the wolf that determines everything. The other part of the premise is the forest, a setting for a dangerous place, the scene for everything that takes place, including providing a hero to rescue the Red Riding Hood in that situation. The premise, the set up of the story is to place a young innocent girl in a dangerous and treacherous place, and later have her rescued. Set up an interesting situation: put the innocent heroine in harm’s way and see how she wriggles out of it. Cross the luscious pre-pubescent with the lecherous wolf, and suddenly the story writes itself.

Why is it that bad people usually have more character in stories? It is because the good person in a good vs evil story has to be liked. The viewer has to be able to identify with the good person. Because one of the easiest ways to identify with a person is to provide that person with no personality at all, so that the viewer can project whatever he wants upon that person, the Little Red Riding Hood.

There are other reasons, of course. The only people in that story who are doing things are the guys. This was probably the sexist days when women were there to be, like children, seen and not heard. The ladies in the story are only there to get eaten up or raped.

There are a lot of meanings in that story. But they come from the plot. In a way, after the plot is formed, you might notice a few patterns, and you can expound upon them to enhance the storyline. But you should do that only after the basic plot is done.

One of the ways to deepen the impression about the plot is to have a few aspects of the plot that reinforce a certain idea again and again. What is the main theme of the Little Red Riding Hood? Betrayal and treachery. For treachery, there is the danger lurking in what seems to be a safe place. Your grandmother’s house is a safe place, but it is situated in a forest. You thought that the person on the bed was your grandmother, but instead it is the wolf, in the grandmother’s clothing. You play an innocent little game with the funny looking grandma (“My what big eyes you have…”). Then the forest is supposed to be the home of the wolf, but in it hides the woodcutter with the axe. Things are not what they seem to be, and it is a treacherous game.

Of course, now that we are grown up, we understand the one aspect of the Little Red Riding Hood. It is also about sex. Sex is about children growing up to become adults, the way that the Little Red Riding Hood making the first trip into the forest is a rite of passage into adulthood. The forest is the metaphor for adulthood, because things are not so clear cut and straightforward after all. The little teasing game that they play (“my what a big and hairy dick you have…”) is now recognized as foreplay. The grandma, a symbol of the childhood (since most grandmothers during those days did not live to see the grandchildren grow up) is taken over by the wolf. (Yes it is possible to interpret the wolf’s eating up of the grandmother as a rape but first who would want to rape her and secondly I don’t want to give myself a headache thinking about it.) Then the wolf is taken over by the woodcutter when he cuts the wolf's stomach open. In reality, they might even be the same person. Notice that the woodcutter is holding in his hand an instrument of castration. OK, maybe this is overkill but maybe it is really a huge dick. In any case, the conquest of the woodcutter over the wolf represents how the good husband unselfishly puts aside his raging lust to fulfil his duties as a good man. (But he probably needs to go somewhere private to grind his axe I’ll bet).

In a way, the other 3 main characters are the guardians of the Little Red Riding Hood. First your parents take care of you, then your horny boyfriend (the wolf) and finally the responsible husband (the woodcutter).

Also, note that the Little Red Riding Hood is both little and red. Also she is hooded. Little, because she is innocent at first and contrasted with the big bad wolf. Big dick and little pussy: a great combination. OK seriously. Little Red Riding Hood is childhood. Big Bad Wolf is adulthood. Getting fucked for the first time is a rite of passage. Is it rape? Possibly. But I would say that the little “my how big your … is” game that they play beforehand hints that it just might be consensual. Point is, both scenarios are controversial. Anybody who is outraged that a wolf would fuck a poor innocent kid should be reminded that the poor innocent kid fucking a wolf of her own volition is equally outrageous.

But importantly, she starts out as a child, or at least you know that she is a virgin, at least before she goes into the forest. (Recall that Napoleon used to nickname Josephine’s pussy “the forest”) OK, maybe the implications of child rape are a little disturbing here. But she’s wearing red. This is a giveaway. It’s not because this is Chinese New Year and there is no year of the wolf. Yes, this is about sex. Yes, this is about the unpleasant surprises that await the child during adulthood. Everybody knows about the relationship between food and sex. Also both involve the lust for human flesh.

OK, we’ve taken care of little and red. Hooded? She’s hooded because she’s sheltered. She’s wearing clothes. She’s chaste (in the beginning). The point of her being hooded in the beginning: if you want to have sex with her you got to take off her clothes. The disrobing parallels the sexual awakening. She’s sheltered, sort of. The grandma, the wolf and the woodcutter are all her guardians. And last of all, you can’t see her. She’s the only person whose face you can’t see. (OK, the wolf is disguised but can you seriously believe that a person smart enough not to get lost in a forest can’t tell a wolf from her grandma?) Point is, you are the only person whose face you can’t see. She is you.

So, this is a great story. It has survived from generation to generation because, even if not all tellers are aware of it, every detail in it is loaded with meaning. All the parts fit nicely, there is no flaw in the storyline, because every piece of the plot leads nicely into the next. The architecture of the plot, even the architecture of the ideas is good: adolescence, loss of innocence, sexuality, treachery. These things go together, and are found in the same place. The naked body under the clothes is a supple and muscular one. Great job, guys!

The other thing to note is that there is a good relationship between the plot and the themes, the characters. The characters drive the plot: the wolf in his insatiable desires, the woodcutter in his anal retentive self righteousness. But at the same time there is the influence that the plot has on the characters. There is a new, powerful psychological theory that a personality is influenced by the setting, the context, the environment. In other words, the plot drives the characters too. This goes back to the deeper philosophical principle that who you are is determined by what you do. Your actions determine what you are. Therefore a wolf is a wolf because he’s always looking for something to eat. A wood cutter is a wood cutter because he’s always the hero you can call upon for help. And Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood because she’s always getting into trouble.

So the question is, why does the plot have to come first? Let’s go back to the naked body metaphor again. When you see the naked body, what comes to mind? That’s right boys, ACTION. A naturalistic storyline is one where things happen. If you want a storyline, just borrow something from somewhere, and transplant it into a different setting. Or just remember something that happened to you, because the human memory usually remembers the exciting things. The sensational things. Mortimer Adler, in his great books series, said that there are only very few stories and plots in this world. All you have to do is to choose one.

And what is it about the Little Red Riding Hood that makes it a good narrative? Let’s go through the various actions of the tale, livejournal style. In the morning, she packs a picnic, some food, and heads into the jungle. Mood: nervous, excited. Wolf chases away the grandmother. Mood: tension for the audience because they have a foreboding about what happens next. She gets to her grandmother’s house. Mood: happy. Expects to have a jolly good time. Sees the wolf and his big whatever. Mood: nervous? Frightened? Horny? The child version would have her being scared. The adult version is much more complicated. It is also funny. Real life people do not have such conversations. Then, when all seems lost, when Little Red Riding Hood looks set to be digested, in comes Mr father figure, axeman himself.

OK, a little too much rambling towards the end, but the moral of the story is: when you are writing a story, come up with the story first, then come up with the moral of the story. Never do it the other way around because it would seem too artificial.