Book Report

So, I finished ‘Twenty Master Plots: and How to Build Them’, the how-to guide by Ronald B. Tobias that I mentioned a while ago. I bought a second-hand copy on Amazon for the princely sum of… a little under three pounds.

While I have a voracious appetite for fiction, I have to admit that my track record with technical manuals and textbooks is somewhat poorer: I buy more than I finish. Tobias must have written a fine and particularly accessible book, therefore, because I devoured the whole book, from start to finish.

Tobias has created a book that pulls off a clever balancing act, establishing that the author is a very clever chappie without alienating the reader. He introduces key principles by example, drawing upon well known tales. In one moment it’s The Wizard of Oz; in another it’s Othello, or Casablanca. (Tobias makes no great distinction between screenplays and literature.)

A few of the twenty forms are a little bit stunted: they just don’t get the same degree of attention as the others. ‘Underdog’, for example, has only three points to its checklist, one of which is the blindingly obvious insight that “The underdog usually (but not always) overcomes his opposition.” The other two are merely points of distinction made with regard to the rivalry plot that preceded it.

Later, the 19th and 20th master plots (ascension and decension) are dealt with together, which seems like undue haste to get to the end of the book – whereupon we find that Tobias has little else to say, except to make a few remarks that might be seen as undermining what has gone before. That there are other plots; that we shouldn’t be afraid to break the rules; that there are combos – although he isn’t much help on how they can be made to work in combination.

Now, maybe I have too great an opinion of myself but I didn’t actually learn a whole lot. I found it a very ‘comfortable’ and reassuring read, and occasionally I made a note in the margin that I’ll be wise to heed in future writing efforts… but I can’t say that I’ll be depending upon the Tobias scheme and fitting my thinking around it. (One doesn’t simply pick a twelve, a seventeen, a nine, and fried rice and prawn crackers…)

Perhaps I’m just not clever enough to decipher literature, but – until it’s explained to me by Tobias – I can’t look at a famous story and say where it fits within the scheme. Neither can I consider one of my own completed stories and say what master plot it conforms to. (And who knows my own writing better than I?) Does that mean my plots are woolly? Garbled? Overly intricate?

I’m not sure.

I don’t trust the idea that a person who wants to write but is short on plot can read Ronald B. Tobias and acquire something suitable. I find the idea a bit scary: if an author doesn’t have enough creativity to come up with the basic skeleton of a story, what are the chances that her dialogue, characters or grammar are going to be up to snuff? Yikes.

Perhaps my disappointment stems from the fact that my reading of ‘Twenty Master Plots’ hasn’t yielded an answer to the question that is currently vexing me: how do I connect the start of my latest effort (working title: Faustian Economics) with the end? What is the motivation of the disruptive element that I introduce in the second act? I don’t know… and while I am now able to identify the plot as a form of ‘underdog’… that leaves me feeling like the police when thieves stole all the toilets from Scotland Yard: I don’t have anything to go on.

But it was an easy read, and a second hand copy cost me less than three quid. I learned something interesting about Casablanca, too.

Meh.