The New Poetics 201 Overview

This is how the relationships on the square would ordinarily look from the perspective of the hero, although there are numerous variants that can crop up, particularly when you use villains as perspective characters, or get into the stories of left-hand protagonists. For example, in Roman Holiday, because the hero is left-handed, not right handed, the female lead, although she is in the “Hapless Lover” position, is something much more like an “Unattainable Beloved.” In a villain perspective piece, on the other hand, you might find that the “Hapless Lover” looks more like a “Servile Dupe.” Ultimately these are variations on the same theme, but the question of whether the persective character is left or right, male or female, good or evil can alter the appearance and flavour of the relationships.

The simple square is, however, enough to begin with, and it is enough for most straightforward plots. In general, the corners of the squares are more fixed: a villain perspective character might despise his lover, but she will still, in almost every case, be either his lover or his partner. A left-handed heroine might fall in love with her nemesis, but the inevitable destructive qualities of the nemesis relationship will still define the archetypal action of the plot.

Secure in these certainties, it is possible to proceed with the business of forming of a plot. The most important decision, and the first one that must be made, concerns the perspective character. This is the person who is going to function as the hero of the story, and whose concerns, desires, needs, and sufferings will define the shape of the story. Once a perspective character has been selected, the primary relationship within the story must be defined, and then the secondary relationships, and so forth until a complete cast of characters has been assembled, and each assigned their role. As a general principle, the characters who are most important to the plot are the characters who get the most screen time – but that is not always the case. In a murder mystery, for example, the primary relationship is always that between the detective and the murderer; if the detective is Columbo, then these two characters will grab up most of the audience's attention. If, however, the author desires to keep the identity of the murderer a secret from her audience, it is often to her advantage to hide him in the background as much as possible and to present, instead, a parade of red herrings to amuse and distract her reader.

The choice of relationships within a plot governs the sort of plot that will emerge, the kind of tensions that will be central to the story, and the role that different characters will play. If, for example, the primary relationship is between Hero and Lover, then the Villain is likely to become a rival, and the Nemesis a Tempter or Temptress who tries to lure the Hero away from his own true love. On the other hand, if the story is primarily about the fierce competition between the Hero and the Villain for the buried treasure, then the Lover, if she exists at all, is likely to become a side-plot love interest, or a sort of female sidekick with romantic overtones.

Once the most important relationships have been established, it becomes possible to work out the balance of power within a square – to determine, in short, whether the plot will resolve happily or unhappily for the Hero. In simple plots, of the “Frog and Toad are Friends” variety, this is very simple: sweet childhood tales of brotherly love generally lack villains, and therefore they always work out happily in the end. In more complicated plots, however, there are protagonists and antagonists. This can work according to the simple “good guy/bad guy” formula, but if your perspective character is a Macbeth, or a Faust, the protagonists may not actually be good. In either case, one side is going to “win” and the other is going to “lose.” (Stalemate plots are possible, but usually unsatisfying.) There are relatively simple formulae for working this out, and it is often necessary for a writer to introduce a couple of extra, minor characters to tip the balance in whichever direction they prefer.

All of these decisions, added together, form the basis for the plot of a story, and allow it to work itself out and resolve in a satisfying, archetypally sound manner.

The Perspective Character

The single most essential choice that any writer makes, in beginning to write, is the choice of primary perspective character. Frequently, editors complain about stories in which the protagonist does not do anything, but you would be surprised how frequently stories turn up in slushpiles which actually have no perspective character, just a mish-mash of names that are difficult to relate to, and, consequently, action which is a headache to follow.

Before anyone objects that stories frequently follow more than one character, and that some particularly complicated stories seem to be from more than one heroic perspective (is War and Peace, for example, the story of Prince Andrei, or of Pierre?) I should make it clear that just as an advanced musical composition may be able to support more than one melody line, a complex novel may include two, or three, or more perspective characters. Each of these characters must, however, have his or her own plot. The plots may interweave and meet up from time to time, but if you have multiple primary perspective characters fighting over the meager stakes of a single archetypal story, you will end up with mess and confusion.

In general, I think it is a mistake for beginning writers to try to write complicated, multiple perspective stories first; usually the result is a sort of saggy-baggy caravan full of parts that don't fit, with a resolution that doesn't quite come together. (There are few published examples of this kind of writing – editors generally have a good eye for it – but if you ask around the local high-school you should be able to find some admirable examples.) Mastery of the simple, single perspective story teaches the art of plotting, and hones the skills necessary for handling a larger plot and character volume. Write the Hobbit first, then Lord of the Rings. Or Crime and Punishment, then The Brother's Karamozov, if you prefer.

The perspective character is the character that shapes and defines a story, and it is the reader's point of access to the narrative. They determine how all of the other characters will look and behave throughout the course of the story. Take, for example, any of the simple fairy-tales that post-modernists (usuaully bad post-modernists...) take such delight in rewriting. Looked at from the perspective of the Wolf, the Wood-cutter is a terrifying threat the stalks the forest, pulling wolf-cubs from their lairs and making hats from their pelts. The Grandmother is a ghastly mouthful, an indigestible old woman who grumbles and gurgles from within the stomach, but she must be swallowed if the real treat is to be ingested. Little Red Riding Hood, of course, is the prize.

The perspective character does not have to be a good person (though heroic perspective is generally easier to write well than villain perspective) and the audience doesn't even necessarily have to want them to win. No one is plumping for Iago in Othello, although Shakespeare makes the villain, and not the namesake of the play, the perspective character in this work. On the other hand, the main character may be both evil and sympathetic: Raskolnikov is a murderer, and he's proud as hell, but we love him. The tensions between the audience's desire to see him get away with his crime, our sense of moral horror at the murder of the pawn-broker's innocent sister, and our hope for his ultimate redemption from the interior demons plaguing him throughout the story provides a powerful psychological and archetypal brew.

There is a caveat here. The writer must be careful, if choosing a villainous perspective character, not to allow a moral vacuum into the middle of the story. Yes, some people do like movies where two different groups of gangsters go up against another, and all of the characters are really gritty and evil, and either the grittier, more evil group wins by out-sliming the other, or the slightly more benign group wins, because while they do steal, deal dope, and murder their enemies, at least they don't rape or skin small children alive. This, however, is bad form, and as soon as it goes out of style, everything in the genre will be forgotten. It is the equal and opposite counterpart to the sappy Christian angel stories where everyone turns out to be really good inside, and the only thing that's needed to overcome the problem of evil is love and self-esteem. Both are equally appalling, and for the same reason: they take place in a moral order that is devoid of the archetypal categories of good and evil, and there is, consequently, no meaningful human struggle at the centre of the story.

It is only through such a struggle that the reader comes to care about and sympathize with the perspective character, and that the work takes on the character of art – that it becomes universal and timeless, instead of trendy and niche-marketed. Without a struggle, there is simply no story. Sit down one day, if you really have nothing to do, with a copy of Margeret Atwood's Cat's Eye. Unless you are a pretentious, post-modern, feminist lit-geek (and yes, that is just as much a niche-market as the chain-saw-psychopath-gore genre), you will find this to be a fitting example of the story with no point. The protagonist is not engaged in an archetypal struggle. She meanders around, suffers excessively from nothing much, and finally accomplishes nothing of any import. Unless you are an ennui-drenched, spleen-ridden, victim-identified, aimless woman, it's almost impossible to relate.

On the other hand, if the character is engaged in a genuine archetypal struggle, the story will work. Even if the audience doesn't like Macbeth, and disapproves of his ambition for the throne, and looks forward to the moment when his head is severed from his body and lofted about Scotland, the play works. Why? Because the audience can sympathize with Macbeth's struggle, with his attempts to hold onto his morality, with his weakness before the iron will of his wife, with his reluctance to murder, with his guilt once he has done the deed. He is recongizably human, and he is obviously in control of the action of the story: he is not merely a hapless fool to which things happen, he is a protagonist, whose choices shape the plot. He is, in short, everything that a perspective character ought to be.

Two-Handers

Stories that actually contain only a single character are extremely rare. Even a monologue character play will usually contain at least one other virtual character, however slimly developed, in order to provide some sort of archetypal conflict. In rare cases, this character may not be a human being, but an anthropomorphised landscape, or disease, or some other inanimate object that takes on a bevy of archetypal characteristics that allow it to fulfill the functions ordinarily ascribed to human agents. This, however, is rare. Most stories involve at least two people (or two anthropomorphic frogs, or a Rat and a Mole who wear trousers and row boats.)

The simplest stories are those that involve only two characters. Often these stories occur outside of the literary genres – a dance duet, for example, might express the arhetypal relationship of the Hero and the Lover. This does not mean that the love duet in a ballet is doomed always to look more or less the same with minor variations: the dance of the Prince and the Princess will look very different from the dance of the Coward and the Whore.

Essentially, there are seven possible two-handed plots. The Romance: Hero and Lover; the Heroic Conflict: Hero and Villain; the Tragedy: Hero and Nemesis; the Friendship Story: Hero and Sidekick; the Tale of Unrequited Love: Hero and Hapless Lover; the Tale of Rivalry: Hero and Villain's Lieutenant; and the Story of Mis-matched Love. Obviously, the most common of these are the first three, and they are what we might call the High genres. In general, a story of Romance, Heroic Triumph, or Tragedy is more likely to be serious, and more likely to include epic tensions, than a story about two friends or a man who married the wrong woman.

A two-handed plot is going to be relatively straight-forward. It is rare to see these stories form the whole of a large-scale work – a folk tale, a ballad, a poem, or a child's story is much more suited to the scope of action afforded by only two characters. Porphyria goes out through the rain to see her lover, who strangles her in order to keep her forever as his own; The Lady of Shallot looks from her window, sees bold Sir Lancelot, and is thus condemned to die; Frog goes to Toad's house and tricks him into waking up in the spring; the Gypsy Rover goes whistling through the woods and wins the heart of a lady; Lean Liesl browbeats Lanky Lenz for wanting a drink of milk from a cow that they do not yet own.

Two-handed romances are extremely straightforward: boy meets girl, or visa versa, they fall in love, and they live, more or less, happily ever after. If both of the characters are right-handed, there will be very little conflict in the tale; there is nothing in the make-up of either lover that causes difficulties, and there is no external villain to complicate matters. A story where the Prince walks onto the scene, sings to the beauty of the sleeping Princess, bends over her supine form and bestows a chaste and knightly kiss, upon which she wakes, falls into his arms, and together they intone a duet on the glories of everlasting love would be an example of a right-handed romance. Needless to say, stories of two left-handed characters are generally more interesting: the tensions in the romance can arise from the interior lives of the characters, so you can have real conflict without a third party. The Shrew is proud and thinks she ought to be romanced by a Prince (or, as the case may be, not romanced at all), and the Rogue is a ragamuffin who is rough-around-the-edges and loathe to admit that romantic feelings could enter his roguish heart; romantic comedy ensues. The Adulteress believes that her past as a prostitute renders her unlovable, and they Avenger has become so used to being despised and outcast that he is scarcely able to trust or express his love; through their love they find forgiveness and relief from their loneliness.

Epic conflict is equally simple. These are the stories where the hero ventures forth to confront the villain in his lair, they face off, and the hero, after a grand confrontation, wins. Or, if you want to put a spin on it, the villainess stalks the heroine into her home, intending to destroy her there, but the heroine ultimately defends herself and wins. The classic knight vs. dragon (Warrior vs. Beast) tale is an example of the genre.

A basic Tragedy always concerns a relationships between a man and a woman who are in a nemesis relationship to one another. In a two-handed plot, this will look something like Nick Cave's “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” in which the Simpleton Eliza Jane is killed by the Cripple narrator, who remains obsessed with her even when she is dead. Or it will look like the simplest form of the classic Virgin Martyr tale, where the chaste virgin, sworn to chastity in Christ, is brought before the cruel Sun-King, who demands that she relinquish to him both her chastity and her faith. Naturally, she refuses, and her refusal condemns her to death, but it is a death which is her victory, and his undoing.

A Friendship story is the tale most likely to be featured in a book of cute stories for children, and makes its occasional appearance in the Chicken-Sap-for-the-Soul genre. The Prince goes on a nice adventure with his Knight at Arms, the Magus teaches a lesson to his Disciple, the Orphan finds a Mother – that sort of thing.

The Tale of Unrequited Love makes excellent fodder for the love-song genre; this is the story of a man, or girl, who has fallen in love, but who is condemned to pine away forever, unloved by their lover, or else to let their beloved go because they are too unworthy. Harry Chapin's “WOLD” spells out the sentiment exactly: “Okay honey I see, he's much better than me/ Okay gal I understand, you don't have to worry, he's such a lucky man.” Done seriously, it can be touching and heart-breaking; done comically, it bring out the fact, which everyone knows, that there is nothing in the world more ridiculous than a man hopelessly in love.

The Rival's Tale treats the conflict between a Hero and the character that would ordinarily be the Villain's Lieutentant. This is the most difficult of the various two-handed stories to accurately describe with a single word title, because it involves two fundamentally different kinds of stories, depending on how the power balance tips. In the case of a right-handed hero vs. a left-handed villain, it's simply a massacre: these are those stories where there is never really any doubt about who is going to win, and which really only serve to showcase how cool the hero is. The most common use of this is in children's shows for boys, where the hero goes out, every week, to confront the bad-guy, and the hero wins, and the bad-guy has no real chance. The best, and most fully archetypal, forms of the story are tales of redemption: the Priest redeems the Coward, the Magus cudgels the Disgrace into shape, the Judge leads the Cripple to confess his murders, the Martyr brings peace to the breast of the Beast, the Intercessor leads the Whore out of a life of sin. On the other hand, a left-handed hero against a right-handed villain will, unless other characters are involved, lead to a slaughter in the other direction; the valiant Warrior is crushed in the ruthless machinery of the Sun-King, the Orphan's life is destroyed by the cruel Medea, the Disciple falls prey to the wiles of the Wise-Man. These stories end in downfall – whether in the physical death of the hero, or in their moral destruction.

Finally, there is the Story of Mis-matched Love. This provides ample room for comedy, though it need not actually be farcical. A story about a Judge who is wed to a Mule will likely provide many laughs – he will be able to accurately name all of her faults, and bring them into the light, and she will constantly hen-peck him. In the end, truth will prove him right – and she will remain just as stubborn and stuck in her ways as ever. He will sigh over his small cigar, and the story will start again the next day. On the other hand, the matter can be much more serious, because the ultimate goal of the Ball & Chain, whether conscious or unconscious, is to bring the hero down to his or her own level. The Whore just might end up seducing the Priest, and thus deprive him of his courage and integrity; the Nymph may lure the Prince away from his one true love, and reduce him to lying and trickery to disguise his affair; the Sun-King might torture the Valkyrie until she becomes a hair-pulling Victim, and so on.

These are the simplest manifestations of character tension in plot; from them all of the more complicated variations are built up.

\	The Simple Plot

A two-character plot is certainly not the norm, but it is possible to create a lot of simple, straight-forward stories using only the characters on a single square, and without resorting to any of the more complicated devices that are generally employed in literary masterpeices or Shakespearean plays.

A simple plot is generated by initially taking a single character, who will be the perspective character or the hero, and then adding a second character to form the foundational relationship on which the rest of the plot will be built. With the addition of a third, and often a fourth character, the narrative assumes its shape.

In a simple plot, all of these characters will be involved in the same basic conflict or action. This means that there are no sub-plots; if the story is a tale of Epic Conflict, then the Lover, if he or she appears in the story, must serve the conflict. Perhaps the fair maid will be captured by the evil usurper, and her beloved will sally forth to do battle and rescue her. Or maybe the Warrior and his beloved Warrioress will go forth together to slay the dragon. In either case, there is no room for an extra line that concerns the falling in love of the Lovers; either they will be Lovers before the plot begins, or they will simply become Lovers without any further ado at some point during the story. Likewise, if the story is a Romance, there is no place for battles between the the Hero and the Villain over anything other than the Beloved. If the evil Stepmother wants to appear in the love story of Cinderella and Prince Charming, she had better be trying to marry her daughters off to the Prince. If she suddenly started competing with Cinderella for the affections of the Heroine's father, it would cease to be a simple plot; a sub-plot would have been introduced.

This is especially important for anyone who wants to begin trying to analyze works of fiction to see and understand the archetypes and the rolls that they play within a plot. Do not start with I Claudius or Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Start with the Brothers Grimm, or classic Hollywood, or Greek Myths. Stories that contain a handful of characters and a single objective show the archetypes and the relationships the most clearly, because every scene is a part of the same plot-line, and is written from the same perspective.

For a simple plot the most important thing to know is what kind of a plot it is: what is the primary defining relationship? After that, you need to know who the third character is. We will call this character the “complicating character,” because he or she decides in what direction the story will be complicated beyond a simple Romance, Tragedy, Conflict, etc. If, for example, the story is a Conflict tale, and the Sidekick is the complicating character, then it will become a story about how the Hero needs the Sidekick's help to overcome the Villain (Batman and Robin). If the story is a Tragedy, and the complicating character is the Lover, then it will be the story of how the Nemesis dragged the Hero into misery and thwarted his chance of true love (Sunset Boulevard). If the story is a Tale of Hapless Love complicated by the Villain's Lieutenant, then it will become a story about how the Hero overcomes the trifling obstacles between himself and the girl – and loses her anyways (Roman Holiday).

Once the first three relationships have been established, there will be enough material for a simple, yet interesting plot – enough material to sustain a short story, a fairy tale or a one act play. In most cases, however, a fourth character will still be called for to flesh out the story. This is the last character that will be a part of the core plot. Other characters after the first four are basically fifth business: they may perform a single, important function within the plot, but they will not be instrumental in determining the kind of plot that it will be.

To get an idea of what I mean, let's look at a common fairy tale: Cinderella. This is a story of Romance between Cinderella, and Orphan, and the Prince, who is archetypally a Disciple. They are in a Lover relationship to one another. The complicating character is the evil Stepmother: the Villain's Lieutenant – not the Villain. This tells us that the story is going to be about outside forces trying to prevent the Romance from taking shape, not about a direct rivalry in which Prince Charming's own affections are torn in two directions. The story is fully fleshed out by the addition of the Fairy Godmother (Mother), who is Cinderella's Sidekick and helper. Her presence allows Cinderella to thwart the stepmother. Finally, filling in as fifth business are the evil stepsisters (Parasites), who are necessary in order to provide the stepmother with a realistic motive for opposing Cinderella, and who provide the necessary tension at the end of the story. Note that if they were removed the story would not quite work, but the shape of it would not be essentially changed.

Villain Perspective

A villain perspective plot is a story that is built with an evil character in the role of Hero. This can be done well, is frequently done badly, and involves several modifications to the ordinary course of archetypal relationships if it is going to work.

The greatest mistake made by authors of villain perspective stories is the loss of a moral groundwork for the tale. The audience's sympathy for a villainous Hero should never lead them to suspect that evil is good, or that good is evil, nor should it result in a tale where there simply is not any moral compass at all to give the work shape. Narratives require the tension between good and evil to thrive; moral mushes in which the lesser of two evils is arbitrarily labeled “good” will ultimately fail (HBO's Carnivale is a particularly disappointing case in point.) Stories about how bad people do bad things and the world is bad are...well, bad.

This said, the first decision that an author needs to make when deciding to use an evil perspective character is whether or not to make the Hero sympathetic. There are several great works of literature in which the perspective character is decidedly unsympathetic to most readers (John Fowles' The Collector, Dostoyevski's “Notes from Underground”). On the other hand, sympathetic villainous perspective characters can also be very successful – Raskolnikov is the emblematic ideal of the type, but he is joined by a bevy of delightful sympathetic villain Heroes: Heathcliff, Barry Lindon, Macbeth, Tuco, Medea, and so forth.

The second choice that must be made is how immersive the villain perspective will be. In Fowle's Collector, Clegg's Cripple perspective is relieved, for a long period, by the perspective of Miranda. This means that the audience is able to see the captive woman as a full character, that her dimensions are not dictated by Clegg's obsessive love/hatred. On the other hand, Crime and Punishment is so deeply immersive that, on first reading, it is difficult not to think of Porfiry Petrovich as an evil, scheming policeman who is unjustly persecuting poor Rodya.

When writing from a villain's perspective, the ordinary archetypal relationships become perverted or fallen. The Villain, in relationship to a villainous hero, will be a heroic character who may well have more of the audience's sympathy than the perspective character. The initial season of Columbo, which was based on the idea of making a mystery series from the perspective of the murderer, is a fine case in point: obviously it is the Foolish-Judge, with his rumpled coat and his chain-smoked cigars, that has the affections of the viewer. Now, regardless of where the audience's sympathy actually lies, we do ultimately want to see the Hero fail, and the Villain succeed, if the Hero is evil. When Macduff marches the head of Macbeth about Scotland, the audience is relieved that order has been restored; when Jimmy in Mystic River gets away with murdering an innocent man, we feel a sense of continuing unease.

The Lover in a villain perspective piece, is generally in a mutually destructive relationship to the villain-Hero. She may be a classic Jezebel type, luring her husband or lover into ever greater depths of evil, or she may be someone who destroys, and is likewise destroyed by, her beloved, as Catherine is by Heathcliff. If the Hero is a villainess, her lover might be someone who encourages her delusions, as Max encourages Norma Desmond, or he might be a star-crossed lover who leads her to her downfall, as Romeo leads Juliet. In any case, the relationship will look more like Tom Waits' “Poor Edward” than like the Righteous Brother's “Unchained Melody.”

The Nemesis is the relationship least changed by villain perspective; she, or he, remains a character of the opposite gender and alignment who is the ultimate destruction of the hero. The difference is that in a narrative with a good hero, the Nemesis will either move towards mutual destruction, or bring the hero down to her level. In a villain perspective story, the Nemesis is still the antithesis of everything that the villain is and holds most valuable, but she just might succeed in bringing him up to her level – as Sonia does in Crime and Punishment. This means that a Nemesis story in a villain perspective piece may, instead of being the story of a Tragic Fall, be the story of a Joyous Redemption. It is, however, a relationship that appears very rarely, and is little explored.

The secondary characters suffer the same kind of transformation. The Sidekick may be a rival who doesn't actually get along with the hero at all, or he may be a kind of henchman, a junior partner in evil – though usually the villain will ultimately find him disappointing, and as much a liability, as Brandon finds Phillip in Hitchcock's Rope. The Villain's Lieutenant may simply be a character who assists the heroic Villain in opposing the villainous Hero, or, in an interesting twist, they may be a good friend of the Hero who appears to be a threat simply because he doesn't have the Hero's villainous interests at heart – a Banquo, for example, or a Ruzumikhin. The Hapless Lover is likely to be a poor girl, or poor man, of limited moral character, who has had the misfortune of falling for the Hero. Often an object of scorn, she or he may be used by the villain-Hero to get what they want, the way that Redmond Barry uses Lady Lindon. Finally, the Ball & Chain, rather than being an evil character who is trying to drag the Hero down, is a good character who is trying, and usually failing, to bring him back to the light. This is often used to great effect in order to heighten the poigniancy of the narrative: when a Cowardly Hero in a Film Noir leaves his saintly and faithful girlfriend in order to chase after the no-good woman who will ultimately destroy him, the regular reappearance of the charming Intercessor serves to heighten the audience's sense of the tragic stupidity of his actions.

Sub-Plots

So far we've dealt with variations on the basic, single plot. A sub-plot is a second plot, running alongside the main plot, but subservient to it. There are a number of reasons why a narrative might need a sub-plot: they can add depth and colour to a relatively straight-forward primary narrative, they can allow a writer to develop characters who would otherwise get very little screen-time, they can be used to heighten tension in a main plot line either by breaking up the narrative or by revealing information that the perspective characters in the main line don't have access to, and they can allow a writer to keep characters “alive” within a work after they have finished their dealings with the primary plot.

The rules for developing a sub-plot are much the same as the rules for developing a primary plot: you still need a perspective character who will function as the Hero, and you still need a primary relationship that will define the type of sub-plot. One thing to keep an eye on here is that relationships in a sub-plot will shift from relationships in the main plot; if the sub-plot is from the perspective of the main-line Hero's Lover, then the Villain of the main plot will, if he appears in the sub-plot, be her Nemesis, the Villain's Lieutenant will be the Ball and Chain, the Sidekick the Hapless Lover, and so forth.

This doesn't mean that you have to exploit all of these possible relationships. Neither Legolas nor Gimli ever serves as the Hapless Lover in the Arwen Romance sub-plot – Aragorn's sidekicks are not required to fall hopelessly, and unrequitedly, in love with his Lover, because they simply aren't involved in that sub-plot at all. It is necessary, however, to keep the shift in perspective in mind: writers must be aware that if they are writing a sub-plot scene, there will likely be a change in the way that imported main-line characters behave towards one another; those trying to analyze works will find that they are less easily confused if they first untangle the various plot lines, and then try to sort out the archetypes.

So far we have been speaking about sub-plots that take place on the same square as the main plot, and which include the same characters. This is not, however, the only possible kind of sub-plot. Many longer works contain more than one plot, on more than one square. In such cases there may be plots that have practically no bearing on one another: the sub-plot about Count Vasili's machinations to get ahold of the Buzukhov money has less than nothing to do with Prince Andrew's romance with Natasha; the jealous love triangle between Eponine, Marius and Cosette has only a glancing effect on Javert's enduring obsession with the capture of Jean-Valjean. On the other hand, two parallel plots on two adjacent squares might have several important intersections: the Red Square Han Solo/Princess Leia love story interacts frequently with the Yellow Square conflict between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Still, there is something superficial about these interactions; although the characters are in the same place, at the same time, dealing with the same obstacles, their plot-lines and the meaning of those obstacles within their archetypal struggle, remain largely distinct.

One of the risks with any sub-plot is underdevelopment. A well-established sub-plot, with its own interesting conflicts, tensions, and development -- its own beginning, middle, and conclusion -- will enrich any narrative. A sub-plot that doesn't seem to go anywhere, that comes out of nowhere, or that doesn't resolve (or, worse yet, is resolved by a needless deus ex machina) is an irrelevant and unnecessary complication.

The second risk is to introduce a sub-plot that does not in some way contribute to the main plot or plots. A sub-plot is, by definition, subordinate. However its action resolves, the resolution should feed back into the main plot-line in the same way that a tributary river feeds into the main stream. Merry and Pippin's adventures with Treebeard must be made relevant by the battle at Isengard; Schmendrik's quest to become a real magician must contribute to the Last Unicorn's ability to confront the Red Bull. If this is not accomplished, the sub-plot will seem unnecessary, and there is even a risk that readers will skip it in order to get back to the real action of the story.

Love Triangles

       
Love triangles are popular device that basically involves a Romance plot (or, in some cases, a Hapless Love plot) which is complicated by a third character who seeks to misdirect the affections of one of the parties. Generally, this person is a rival who also seeks the hand of the fair maid, or the affections of the young man.

There are three basic rivalry love triangles: the Epic Romance, which is complicated by the presence of the Villain (Beren and Luthien, for example); the Romantic Comedy, which relies on the Villain's Lieutenant; or the Romance of Errors, in which the rival is the Hero's Sidekick.

In the first case, the hero will face tough odds, and may be at serious risk of losing the Lover, either to death, or into the arms of the Villain (or both; slight reworkings of the Persephone tale in which Persephone is provided with a Princely lover to wrest her from the seductive arms of Pluto, are not uncommon.) Certainly, a rescue will be necessary: Wesley stumbling in at the last moment to rescue Princess Buttercup from Prince Humperdink, or the maid in “East O' the Moon, West O' the Sun” riding the North Wind to the ends of the earth to defeat the Troll Princess.

If, on the other hand, the Villain's Lieutenant is involved, rescue will probably not be called for. The hero need merely show up, reveal him or herself, romance the Lover, and trust that they will make the right choice. Jane Austen's comic use of competing suitors is an example of this formula, as is the mad wife in Jane Eyre.

Finally, there is the Romance of Errors: two friends are both in love with the same girl, they both romance her (or possibly they conspire together to romance her), and at the decisive moment one of them gallantly withdraws from the contest. This can be comic (perhaps they were both helping one another to win the girl of their dreams, and only at the last moment do they realize that it is the same girl...perhaps fairies have been dropping the juice of love-stricken flowers into the eyes of sleeping maids and youths...), but it can also be touchingly tragic (Sidney Carton at the gallows, or Cyrano de Bergerac penning lover letters for his rival).

Of course, there are other possibilities; instead of providing a rival for the Hero to defeat, we could provide a rival for the Hero's own affections. The most sinister possibility is to include the Nemesis. This is the woman who poses the most serious risk to the Romance because she is often able to actually turn the heart of the Hero away from his True Love, and towards his own destruction. These are the Sirens singing from the rocks to prevent Ulysses from getting home to Penelope, women so powerfully seductive that he cannot overcome their lures by his own strength. If a light-weight, but more sympathetic villainess is desired, the Ball & Chain can be used instead; because the Hero is bound to her in some way, he will generally not be able to escape her unaided, but her hold on the Hero will tend to be one of obligation more than of desire -- Calypso, keeping Ulysses on her island while he looks to sea and dreams of his wife. Finally, there is the possibility of a truly sympathetic, tragic rival: the Hapless Lover. This is a woman who has no chance of wrenching the Hero away from the Lover, but whose love and devotion for him is touching none the less: Eowyn pining for Aragorn, or Eponine giving her life to save Marius (in the musical – in the book, Eponine is a sinister Nemesis character who jealously lures Marius to his near-death on the barricades.)

Out of these basic love-triangle forms it is possible to create very sophisticated love-polygons. Gotterdamerung, for example, is the story of two intertwining, mirror-image triangles masterminded by the evil Hagen: Siegfried, the Hero, is in love with Brunhilde, the Lover, but their love is complicated by his Nemesis, Gutrune, who is able to bewitch Siegfried into falling in love with her and forgetting his true love. Crossed with this is the story from Brunhilde's perspective; she, the Heroine, is in love with Siegfried, the Lover, but she has been carried off, raped, and forced to marry Gunther, her Nemesis, instead. The perfect symmetry of these Tragic archetypal love-triangles leads to total destruction; “The Twilight of the Gods.”

On a lighter note, A Midsummer Night's Dream is basically a romp through an ever shifting kaleidoscope of triangles. With the help of Puck's magical interference, Shakespeare seems to be playing around with all the possible variations that he can think of; the moment the audience has an idea of what the triangles are, he breaks the relationships, shifts the lines, and the plot goes off on another farcical tangent.

For most stories, however, the simpler, three-pointed love triangle will do. Whether it is used as the foundation for the plot of a Romance, or merely as the form of a romantic Sub-plot, it is a valuable tool to have in one's narrative tool-kit.

Adding More Characters

The keen observer will have noticed that there seems to be a problem: there are only eight archetypal characters on any given square, which ought to mean that only eight characters can ever be involved in a single story, and that only if exactly four of them are male and four are female, four good, and four evil. So what about Robin Hood? Depending on the version of the story, he might have eight or nine good, male merry men? What about Lawrence of Arabia? It has no female characters at all, but that doesn't limit it to four well developed men. In fact, most stories longer than a fairy tale have more than eight characters, so where do the rest come from?

There are three basic ways to involve further characters. The first thing that you can do is fill out the archetypal relationships on square until you reach the full capacity of eight. It is very rare that all eight are actually used (the majority of really good, complicated stories have a nearly-full square, but are missing one of the archetypes), but the fifth, sixth and seventh on-square characters added to a standard four-point plot definitely do help to give it colour and dimension.

The second, very common, method is to split archetypes. This means that you take one of the archetypal roles and you spread it around between more than one character. Joe Money has two Sidekicks, both of them Avengers (at least to begin with), James Bond can encounter upwards of five villainous Beasts in the same story (generally including at least one aquatic monster with sharp teeth), C. S. Lewis' Narnia stories are crawling with legions of Princes (Peter, Aslan, Caspian, etc.), and the fairy-tale tellers positive delight in multiplying faithful servants, princesses, older brothers, and suitors.

Whe you split an archetype, it becomes, in a sense, weakened. When this is done in a very simple, straight-forward manner, the result is a sort of group character, or a series of characters who are practically identical. One sword-weilding temple servant looks very like another in an Indiana Jones movie; the Twelve Dancing Princesses are not really distinguishable one from the other; the Seven Chinese Brothers are all exactly the same, just with different fantastic super-powers. If, however, you wish to have multiple characters who are actually full, well-drawn characters it is necessary to rely on more sophisticated techniques.

The first of these is the use of on-square borrowing. Lets say that you are writing Hansel and Gretel, and you want your sweet little Orphan and her brother, who is a Disciple, to encounter the evil Medea character in two different guises: first, as a wicked stepmother who drives them from their home, and second, as a witch who plans to gobble them up for dinner. You begin by splitting up the archetypal information for the character; the stepmother will get the hatred for the children, and the desire to drive them out of the house and sacrifice them to her own needs, while the witch will get to enjoy the privilege of trying to literally devour them. But that's not quite enough, so you grant the stepmother a touch of the Parasite's jealousy, making her vie with the children for the love of their father, and you let the witch borrow the Wise Man's wolf-in-sheep's-clothing act, pretending to be a kindly old lady. Now you have two solid characters, easily distinguishable one from the other, but both fulfilling the same archetypal role within the plot.

The other option is to use resonant squares. To understand this, it's necessary to be aware that the order in which the squares are presented is important: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, White. Ideally, these should be arranged in a circle, so that both a pentagon and a five-sided star can easily be derived from the diagram. The lines forming the outside of the pentagon show you the adjacent squares, while the interior lines show you the resonant squares. Now, let's say that you have a character who is a Prince (Red Square) and you want him to have two Rogues as Sidekicks. You might decide to make the first one Avenger resonant (perhaps he has been studying sword-fighting all his life in order to slay the man who killed his father) and the second one Warrior resonant (a strong, good, but not particularly bright, giant, maybe...) Once again, you end up with two complete characters, quite distinct, but each fulfilling the role of Sidekick within the main line.

Finally, you can add characters from adjacent squares by forming sub-plots (Jean Valjean's quest for redemption paired with Cosettes romance; Frodo's quest to destroy the Ring paired with Merry and Pippin's foolish meanderings, etc.) In so far as these plots interact little, and involve their own distinct sets of characters, they are relatively simple to execute: just build two separate plots and occasionally allow the characters to meet up. In so far as two plots on two adjacent squares both involve the same character to a significant degree, they are quite complicated and will be dealt with in Advanced Square Mechanics.

These three techniques, plus the addition of sub-plots, are more than ample to fully people a tale with as many characters as the heart could possibly desire, and as the reader could possibly hope to keep track of.

The Tipping Point

The outcome of a story can generally be calculated fairly easily simply by looking at the archetypes involved, and calculating the odds. Crudely, the more good characters there are in comparison to the evil characters, the more likely that the good guys will come out on top – a principle that holds true regardless of whether or not the Hero is archetypally good or archetypally evil.

An important principle to keep in mind when adding up the odds for or against the Hero, is that the number of physical bodies in the tale is absolutely irrelevant: the only thing that matters, ultimately, is how many distinct archetypes are involved. You can up the apparent ante almost infinitely by multiplying the number of enemies encompassed under a single archetype (how many storm troupers did you say there are on that Death Star?), but on some level the audience will know that it is a trick. No one actually believes that ten-thousand orcs will be able to win the Battle of Helm's Deep, and no one imagines that Rambo can't dispense with an entire Soviet platoon.

In general, there are three ways that the outcome of a story can work: it can be a foregone conclusion that good will triumph, or it can be a total slaughter in favour of evil, or it can be a neck-in-neck race where the audience is actually unsure of who is going to edge ahead in the end. All three of these alternatives can work, provided the tension is handled properly, and provided the archetypal balance is tipped in the right direction.

Stories in which good is guaranteed to win out are exceedingly popular for on-going television shows, or series of books in which the audience knows, from the beginning, that the heroes have to survive long enough to complete the actors' contracts. No one who sits down to watch an episode of Star Trek really worries that the Klingons will triumph over the Federation, or that the Enterprise will be entirely consumed by the alien slime, or that the entire away team will be wiped out by the hostile natives. The question is not whether, but how the heroes will triumph.

When you look at the archetypes in these stories, you generally find that there is a complete complement of heroic types filling out the top of the square, and usually only one or, at the very most, two real villains to counter them. Take, for example, the original cast of Dr. Who: you have the Doctor playing Magus, Ian as Disciple, Barbara as Mother and Susan as Orphan. Even assuming that they don't meet a single sympathetic character in the world that they are exploring – and they nearly always do – they already encompass all of the heroic archetypes on their square. It doesn't matter how many indistinguishable Daleks you deploy against them; archetypally, it's still four against one.

Stories where it is clear the evil is going to triumph have to be handled carefully, or else they end up with the bad-bad-gloomy-bad problem discussed in earlier lectures. Titus Andronicus, once described as having been written during Shakespeare's “Quentin Tarantino phase,” illustrates the problem with grisly accuracy. There is, by the end, only one good character, Marcus, who is so utterly powerless against the prevailing horrors that he can't hope to do much but soliloquize about them in the end. (No, Andronicus' daughter is not heroic; before she is raped she's unsufferably self-satisfied, and afterwards, her victimization serves to impel Titus to even greater acts of depraved brutality.) The evil characters are numerous, colourful, well-drawn, and ubiquitous. Obviously, all is going to end badly, and it does, with the traditional Shakespearean “everybody dies” tragic ending. The story is made to work by providing sympathetic moments for the villains; against the backdrop of a mutual holocaust, there are moments of genuine pathos, hints of possible repentances that never fully emerge, but that establish that there is still some sort of moral order lurking in the background of the horror-shop action. Still, it is a fine line, and it is not difficult to imagine productions of the play that would be totally unendurable. (Julie Taymor's post-modern version is definitely worth a look. She overcomes the problem of horror piled on horror by using two of the most minor characters in the script, Titus' grandson and Aaron's newborn baby, as an emotional hinge: as children, their innocence is a given, and their ability to survive beyond the confines of the play gives her treatment a powerful soupçon of redemptive content.)

Finally, there is the neck-and-neck conflict, the story in which it is not clear who is going to triumph. Generally, this is the most powerful option in terms of building tension: page-turners and movies that keep the audience “on the edge of their seats” will often include a carefully balanced complement of heroes and villains. It is important to note, here, that in neck-and-neck stories, it is often impossible to calculate the outcome merely on the basis of the number of good-guys vs. the number of bad-guys. Take Bizet's Carmen, for example: there are four characters of significance involved in the main plot: the Hero (Jose), his Nemesis (Carmen), the Hapless Lover (Micaela) and the Villain (Escamillo). Added up archetypally, it's two-on-two – so who wins? In this case, tragedy triumphs; the reason is that a character who is of the same handedness as the Hero – the corner characters when you build the square – will always be of greater weight and power than the characters along the sides. Poor Micaela, for all her prayers, is powerless against Carmen; she is only the Hapless Lover. (For a precise contrast, see “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers”; it's the same set of archetypes with a single important difference: instead of the Hapless Lover, the Hero is provided with his actual Lover. This is enough to tip the scales, so that the heroes leave in triumph and the villains succumb to mutual destruction.)

Aside from ordinary archetypal stacking, the outcome can be made uncertain, and the audience's tension level kept up, by artfully concealing, or drawing into question, the archetypal alignment of some characters. Having an apparently good character turn out, at a critical moment, to be evil may jeapardize the entire archetypal balance of a plot (this is one of the main devices used in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and is probably the reason why it has become a cult classic.) On the other hand, having an apparently evil character turn out to be actually good can create a sense of elation and excitement as the audience's archetypal dread is relieved. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as having an evil character become good or a good character become evil; Scrooge's repentance, Darth Vader's change of heart, or (I need an example of a good character who falls down, and my head is not working) are a different phenomenon – if a character's nature is simply being concealed from the audience, then the truth may be revealed at any time, whereas a change of alignment demands sufficient archetypal motivation to justify the fall or redemption of the character in question.

Concordance of Genres

Generally, what we think of as genres are relatively square-bound – by which I mean that if you watch two dozen Westerns, you will probably find that you have watched two dozen Green square stories, and if you watch two dozen horror movies, you'll find the same Blue square tropes played out again and again. A lot of fun can be had, however, and you can create stories that appear startlingly “original” simply by transposing the aesthetics of a genre onto another square.

To do this, it is necessary to know what square most genres take place on, and why – otherwise you can easily end up with a mess, or with something that slips and slides between squares, which, unless it is done deliberately and very well, is just sloppy.

Here is the break-down for some of the largest, and best-known, genres:

Romantic Comedy: This is your straight-forward Romance story, and it almost always takes place on the Red Square. The Shrew and the Rogue are usually the heroic couple in the best works of the genre, but it is also possible to do a comic treatment of the Princess and the Prince. A notable exception to the Red-square rule is Life is Beautiful.

Science Fiction: Almost always takes place on the Yellow Square (hence the Mother ships, and perenially popular Parasitic aliens.) The search for knowledge is fundamentally a Yellow Square concern, and this is generally an underlying theme in Sci-Fi. Dune, and other works of what might be more accurately termed “futuristic fantasy,” take place on other squares.

Westerns: The classic Western is a story either of revenge, or of a leader trying to protect his people from Indians and Outlaws – which lands the Western firmly on the Green Square. The good sherrif plays the Priest, defending his flock or leading them through hostile territory to the promised land; the man-with-no-name, but with a grudge to settle, is the classic Avenger.

Epic Fantasy: Strictly speaking, this genre splits into two sub-genres: Quest Fantasy and Rightful Heir Fantasy, both of which are to be found in the seminal Lord of the Rings series. Stories where the Hero must go forth into the lair of the evil one in order to destroy the Ring of Power, rescue the baby, or free the unicorns are Blue Square. Stories where the true King must claim the throne and deliver the land from the evil Usurper, are Red.

Mystery: These stories are almost always on the White Square. Someone has been murdered, the Judge gets called in to investigate, he may or may not have a Foolish sidekick, and eventually he discovers the guilty party. Exceptions are often situated on the Yellow Square, particularly mystery stories for children (Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc.)

Horror: Blue Square. Beasts, Virgins, Warriors, gore, blood, rape, torture – all Blue Square concerns. Some fine work in the field of psychological horror has been done on the White square, usually centering around the Witch and the Cripple.

Comedy: This devides up in various sub-genres, and differs from culture to culture, period to period. For example, the standard 1980's American sit-com was situated on the Yellow Square, and centred on the concerns of a family peopled with various often Disgraceful children. The typical Brit-com, on the other hand, is White Square; the Mule's desire to keep up appearances, the Fool's total social ineptitude, and the comic Cripple's pathetic Napoleonic ambitions are the standard fair.

Fairy-Tales: Western European Fairy Tales are generally Red Square, concerning Princes, Princesses, and jealous Queens (Sirens). German Fairy Tales often stray onto the Yellow Square, with stories of Orphans overcoming the cruel malice of Stepmothers. White Square tales of the Fool who goes out to seek his fortune are also popular. Blue Square Fairy Tales also exist, but they are usually excised from modern collections – Bluebeard, The Maid with No Hands, and The Robber Bride are generally considered too frightening for children.

Action: Typically, Blue Square; the Warrior goes out and defeats numerous Beasts, either to save the Virgin or with the help of the Valkyrie. Spy thrillers, on the other hand, are Red Square Rogue stories (James Bond can be either – it varies from story to story). Kung-Fu movies are a Yellow Square variant, though it is not uncommon for them to fall into a sloppy Yellow-Blue mish-mash. Interestingly enough, the most famous movie in the genre, Rambo, is a Green Square Avenger tale– which perhaps explains why it stands out from the crowd.

Children's Literature: Is almost always Yellow Square. In the case of kid-lit for girls, it is generally the story of an Orphan (Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Little Women) finding her place in the world, while for boys it is usually the story of Disciple (Arthur and Merlin, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows).

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