Free 20 Master Plots by Ronald B Tobias Page A

Goldberg and indirectly (through Whoopi) to her dead boyfriend;
    • Swayze relates directly to Goldberg and indirectly (again through Whoopi) to his living girlfriend;
    • And Goldberg (as the medium) relates directly to both Swayze and Moore.
    The character triangle looks like this:
    It's a tight package with a twist that works well.
    Or take another ghost story, the Gothic romance Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (later made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock).
    The setup is simple: Dark, brooding and mysterious Maxim de Winter brings back a naive, head-over-heels-in-love bride to his estate, where the memory of his dead wife Rebecca still looms very large, especially through the character of the housekeeper, a sinister woman who was (and still is) entirely dedicated to the dead woman. De Winter is haunted by his beautiful, dead wife and cannot return the love his new wife lavishes on him.
    In Rebecca, the ghost of the dead wife doesn't literally stalk the halls of the mansion, but she does figuratively. Reminders of her are everywhere. The new wife (who curiously never has a name in the film) cannot overcome the presence of the old wife. To make matters worse, the housekeeper plots the new wife's destruction.

All three points of the triangle are developed:
    • Maxim de Winter's relationships to the housekeeper and his new wife (both of which are affected by Rebecca);
    • The housekeeper's relationships to de Winter and his new wife (again both affected by Rebecca); and
    • The new wife's relationships with her husband and the housekeeper (you guessed it, all affected by Rebecca).
    Rebecca, whom we never see in flashback or ghostly vision, affects everyone and everything in this story. So the triangle looks different because all three major characters are affected by a fourth character who never appears. The triangle then, would look like this:
    In terms of sophistication of plot, Rebecca is the better story. Ghost is simple and straightforward and clever, but it lacks depth of character. We enjoy it mainly because of its cleverness, which is manifested through humor. Rebecca, on the other hand, even with its Gothic coloring (cliffs and storms and huge, hollow castles) deals more with people.
    So when you develop your opposing forces in your deep structure, decide which level of character dynamic you want in your book. Ask yourself how many major characters best suits your story: two? three? four? And understand the consequences of having two, three or four major characters.
    THE DYNAMIC DUO
    Plot and character. They work together and are inseparable. As you develop your story, remember that the reader wants to understand why your major characters do what they do. That is their motivation. To understand why a character makes one particular choice as opposed to another, there must be a logical connection (action/reaction). And yet you shouldn't have the character behave predictably, because then your story will be predictable (a nice way of saying boring).
    At times the character's behavior should surprise us ("Why did she do that?"), but then, upon examining the action, we should understand why it happened. Just because there's a logical connection between cause and effect doesn't mean it has to be obvious.
    Aristotle felt that characters became happy or miserable as a result of their actions. The process of becoming happy or miserable is plot itself. The events that happen to the protagonist change her. That change will probably leave her happier or sadder (and perhaps wiser). Aristotle put plot before character. Today we don't agree that must be the case. But it is true that we understand who a person is by what he does. Action equals character. What a character says about himself isn't that important. Paddy Chayefsky, the author of such films as Network and Hospital, said that the writer is first obligated to create a set of incidents. Once you've established those incidents (plot beats), you should create
    characters