Free 20 Master Plots by Ronald B Tobias Page B

who can make those incidents happen. "The characters take shape in order to make the story true," said Chayefsky.
    Your character will come to life by doing, not by sitting around and telling us what she feels about life or about the crisis of the moment. Do, don't just say. Then your major characters will develop in relation to the other characters in your story.
    There's a short scene in Lawrence of Arabia that gives insight into the main character. The point of the scene is to show that Lawrence is determined to achieve his goal, whatever the personal cost. He harbors an almost pathological fear that he's too weak to accomplish his goal of uniting a fractured Arabia. He's not your typical macho type out to conquer the world; in fact, Lawrence is afraid of any kind of pain. It would be easy for him to sit around with some of his buddies and say, "Gee, fellas, I'm not sure I'm really up to this task." Talk is cheap.
    The scene in the film is far more intense and doesn't have a single word of dialogue. Pure action. Alone, Lawrence lights a match and holds it between his fingers until the flame burns him. In the context of the story this isn't bravado. We know Lawrence is afraid of pain, so we understand when he tries to overcome that fear by letting the match burn his fingers. This scene becomes important later in the film, when Lawrence is captured and tortured by the Turks.
    Plot, then, is a function of character, and character is a function of plot. The two can't be divided in any meaningful way. Action is their common ground. Without action there is no character, and without action there is no plot.
    A final note: Later in this book I divide plots into action-based and character-based plots. You might ask yourself how I can make those distinctions when I've just said that character and action can't be divided. Well, obviously they can be. The division is based on your focus. If you as a writer are more interested in writing a story about events (action) and create your characters to make the action happen, you're writing an action-based plot. Your focus isn't on people but on events. If, on the other hand, you write a story in which characters are the most important element, you have a character-based plot.
    T he rest of this book is dedicated to twenty master plots and how they are constructed. That may sound odd after my telling you there are only two master plots, as if they had somehow mutated and increased their power by ten. The truth still holds about plots of the mind and plots of the body, and in these twenty are examples of both categories. Beyond the basic two plots, it doesn't matter which number you come up with, whether it's Gozzi's thirty-six plots or Kipling's sixty-nine, or whatever. As I said before, it's only a matter of packaging. I present these twenty basic plots as a way of showing the different types of patterns that emerge from forda (stories of the mind) and forza (stories of action).
    The key word is pattern : patterns of action (plot) and patterns of behavior (character), which integrate to make a whole. The master plots that follow are general categories such as revenge, temptation, maturation and love; and from these categories an infinite number of stories can flow. But my primary concern in presenting these plots is to give you a sense of the pattern, not to give you a template so you can trace the design (although you could if you wanted to). As contemporary writers, we are all under a terrific strain to be original, to make the big breakthrough, though no one has any idea what that means. These plot patterns are as old as the hills and in some cases older. But that doesn't
    mean they've lost their effectiveness; rather, time proves their worthiness, their importance to us. We use the same plots today that were used in the world's oldest literature. Plot is one of the few aspects in all of art that isn't subject to fashion. We may favor certain types of plots over others during a particular