The Mechanics (And Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction

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The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of

Web-Work Plot Construction
BY HARRY STEPHEN KEELER
PART I—THE MECHANICS OF IT
I.
To understand how to build stories of either complex or simple plots, one must have a thorough
knowledge of the elements of which plot is composed. You may marvel at the giant locomotive
which carries a heavy train of cars over the Great Divide, but until you learn to know at least
that the two chief components of that locomotive are the piston against which the steam is
exerting actual pressure, and the connecting rod and driving wheel through which alternate
thrusts of horizontal pressure are transmuted into rotary, then linear motion, you are not going
to be able to duplicate even Stephenson's clumsy and insectivorous-looking Rocket engine of
1850.
Since the field of plot has been for many years a terra incognita, and is, in fact, today, judging
from the discussions which take place in writers' clubs over the country: since plot itself,
therefore, is a bugaboo to many thousands of writers, the first thing I shall attempt to do is to
define it—and I shall be so radical as to give my own definition. With that, I shall endeavor to
separate plot into several easily understood and grasped components; and to show that these
components enter definitely into atmospheric, thematic, or character stories, as well as mystery
yarns. And for those readers who yet may not feel absolutely clear on the subject, I shall present
a considerable number of actual geometrical diagrams picturing the 15 elemental combinations
of which the most complex plots are only collocations.
With the presentation of these elemental plot diagrams, I shall give a more complex diagram
covering two pages of this magazine—the graphic picture of a full booklength mystery novel, in
which the "art" of the novel, if such exists, will be ignored, and the "construction" instead will
be analyzed from its first situation to its last.
The analysis of this particular story. however, will bring out points that I can say, from my own
experience and observation, are true of all complicated "web-work" stories, no matter from
whose pen.
The selection of the novel for analysis will be guided by several diverse considerations. There
are, as you know, certain elements that while admitting a story to the book market keep it out of
the magazine market—or, while allowing it to pass the test of American tastes make it fail to
comply with British tastes, or vice versa. Or, while passing all these tests, it may yet fail in the
syndication field requiring peculiarly short choppy daily installments. Because of the
suggestion, therefore, of the publisher of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST that my own current
novel, "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows," published by E. P. Dutton & Company, has also had
book publication in Great Britain via Hutchinson & Company, has had magazine publication
once in Great Britain and twice on this side, and has been contracted for by the Bell Syndicate
for newspaper serialization later, thus passing the tests of three publishing fields and satisfying
two sets of national tastes, I shall take this novel as a subject for dissection and graphic
picturization. Having a certain modicum of modesty I would prefer to analyze some other
writer's novel, but I am actually limited in my choice by two factors quite other than that
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THE MECHANICS AND KINEMATICS OF WEB WORK ... http://www.spinelessbooks.com/keeler/mechanics/index.html
advanced by the publisher of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST: one, that I might violate the
copyright laws by giving the full story and construction of another man's literary property; and
two, that I am, fortunately, supplied with my original notes and diagrams which show how this
story was actually built up—literally out of nothing.
This series is primarily for those who aspire to the novelette and the serial. Note: I do not limit
its application to the mystery novelette or serial, as the principles given here apply to all stories,
long and short, of which the mystery serial is only a variation. As to short-stories, I wish to say
that I have myself devised and sold many short-stories that consisted of small quadrangular
web-work plots, and have, in my capacity of short-story editor, accepted and bought many such.
And so—but in the speaking of "quadrangular web-work plots" it appears that we are already
getting into a terminology without having even yet defined our subject; so back we'll go to our
statement that we will define plot.
Just what is it?
II.
I MENTIONED in the foregoing that I intended to give my own definition—which is one more
added to a considerable number. Plot has been defined elsewhere as "a problem and its
solution"—"a series of incidents comprising a story"—"that which makes suspense"-"the story
so moulded as to gain for the author the emotional response he desires"—etc. The second
definition was offered by no less a person than Noah Webster, but with all due regard to this
gentleman, whose one novel contained all the words in the English language, I am going to say
that he never attempted to sell a story to Street & Smith, or to serialize his dictionary in the
newspapers, else he would not have found himself content with this sketchy definition.
I, on the other hand, do not know anything about the difficulties of the lexicographer or the
science of etymology, but unlike Mr. Webster I have had to cope for fourteen years with the
problem of making plots that would sell, and the last twelve years of this have been devoted
exclusively to the production of the serial story of from 40,000 to 160,000 words. Not alone
this, but I have also faced the question from the other side of the editorial door. That is to say, as
the editor himself I read for many months the manuscripts of plot-novels as submitted to a
magazine which had unlimited capital and whose rate, openly advertised, was one calculated to
give it early access to the production of writers, small and big; and, queerly enough, I was, all
during this time and for many years additional, again as editor, reading submitted serials on a
publication whose low rate essentially dictated: that the stories thus secured would be in one or
more ways defective stories. As editor, I grew acutely conscious of certain defects, particularly
when I saw them repeated again and again from different pens, but the publisher's theory in this
case was that his particular coterie of readers was not of a sufficiently technical mind in a
literary sense to perceive them. Thus, with a personal production of a good many million words,
and a reading of a good many million more, good, bad, and indifferent, I take the liberty for the
first time of setting forth that which I have found plot clearly and indubitably to be:
Plot, I offer, is the chronological and spatial relationship between a number of incidents which
are themselves reactions (sociological, medical, legal, economic, etc.) between characters or
characters and inanimate objects, that shall permit, by its intersection with a particular character
or set of characters, a story, through the minor and major crises, complications, denouement,
climax, etc., thereby produced.
This is a little comprehensive to keep in mind; so let us simplify it into something which we can
clearly visualize.
By allowing "chronological and spatial relationship" to ride as "relationship"; letting "incidents"

presuppose themselves as happening between people, or between people and things; assuming
also that incidents necessarily are reactions in the thousands of fields in which humankind
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contacts; and allowing the minor and major crises, complications, denouement, etc., in a
character's life to be considered simply as "drama," we may reduce our foregoing definition to:
Plot is the relationship between a number of incidents that shall permit, by its
intersection with a particular character, a dramatic story.
You will now note that we have led off with a distinct differentiation between a "plot" and a
"story." Later on, by means of diagrams, we shall visualize this difference in such a way that,
ever after, mere words only in treating such a subject as plot will seem as a sort of philandering
with one's thesis!
III.
If, reverting to the analogy touched upon in the opening paragraph of this series, we are to
compare plot to a steam engine, it must be possible to take it apart and analyze it into some
simpler components, so that we may say that, just as an engine is composed of bolts, nuts,
gears, cylinders, cams, wheels, etc., so too is all plot made up of a certain number of basic
relationships simply joined together in unlimited combinations.
But before doing that, we must follow our analogy of the steam engine and survey plot as to its
two main aspects: force and direction. For there must be force involved, since plot, if
concurring with the definition rendered under Chapter II, evidently has two abilities, to create a
story and make it move, and to direct the course of that story. We f eel this, we sense it, even
those of us who may be unable to define technically what a "story" is. And this division of plot
into two aspects—the Chinese would term these "aspects" feng-shui—is duly authorized for us
by the fact that a steam engine's operation, too, can be considered scientifically and logically
under two basic heads-force and movement (direction). Indeed, the title of this article was
dictated by the fact that the entire field of mechanics, steel and concrete construction, and
electro-dynamics, etc., has been divided for years into the study of each of these fields
separately, i.e., Mechanics, the study of forces; and Kinematics, the study of spatial movements
only. Explicating further, Mechanics is the study of steam pressures, tensile strengths, voltages,
etc.; while Kinematics is the study of the application of these forces in various directions or
various frequencies, with no reference whatsoever as to how much actual force is under
consideration.
So, just as when you give a playful push to a child's kiddy-car, sending it rolling this way or
that, if plot too is to make something roll, i. e., to create a moving story, we may put down as an
axiom that it must function:
(a) Forcibly
(b) Directionally
That is, we are interested in an incident both (a) as to the degree with which a character was
urged to help create the incident or to become an unwilling participant in it, or to do something
as a result of having been in it, and (b) why he was urged (or hopelessly impelled) to take part
in this incident instead of some other; and why, as a result of it, he is urged to take part in a still
further incident.
And now to consider only the "force" element of plot, or that which. as we have specified,
causes an incident to be.
IV.
THE force element of plot is derived wholly from our old friend motivation, to which must be
added all our natural laws and physical phenomena. In a moment I am going to discuss that last
term, just sufficiently to indicate how it, too, for the academically minded, may be considered as
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"motivation." And as a very hasty and passing example of what I mean by tying up natural laws
with motivation, I will offer the following: So that a young man and a young woman desiring to
go picnicking on a cloudy day may emanate from said picnicking very bedraggled, there must
be added to their picnicking desires, for the production of this eventuality, the known proclivity
of clouds to precipitate moisture.
But now to consider motivation solely.
Motivation, as you know, has really two quite distinct angles, i. e., motiving and motivating. In
constructing stories we do not always definitely stand and ponder, differentiating between these
two things; for the mind works rapidly and unconsciously, from one to the other. But in
complicated plots, the two processes come in very widely, and the plot-constructor often
becomes blocked long enough at a particular point in a piece of plot-construction so that he
becomes keenly conscious that these two factors exist as separate and discrete things from one
another. For the younger element of writers now reading this journal, who do not appreciate the
difference between these two dynamic actions, I will say that:
MOTIVING consists of the providing of the proper character to react in a given

incident, with given conditions, in a given way.
MOTIVATING consists of providing the proper conditions and causes in a given

incident for a given character to act in a given way.
Now a bulging drawerful of notes on the technique of plot construction, collected over ten
years, warns me that a full tome—a two-volume work—could be constructed dealing with the
various points that are to be taken up in the course of this series in THE AUTHOR &
JOURNALIST—and I could easily devote a full chapter to each and every point and then not
say, perhaps, all that could be said. It must be, therefore, that in this series I can in most
instances render you only a single, but clear, example of each technical point touched upon. At
times my examples may be melodramatic, farcical, or even fantastic; but they will be invented
solely for the purpose of conveying one point and no other.
The laws of motiving and motivating, into which we'll delve presently to get a clear picture, are
constant throughout time, whether the story is laid in Rome in 100 A. D. or in New York in
1928, only where they involve solely
(a) the basic human emotions, such as the desire of women to be beautiful (sex?),
men in love to be jealous (sex?), man to hoard against want (self -preservation?).
(b) natural laws of physics, light, matter, etc.
Motiving and motivating are changing phenomena when they involve
(c) the shifting economic and social conditions, and the chattels of so-called
civilization.
As an example of (a) : An old Roman satirist, Martial, who lived in the first century A. D.
wrote, perhaps of one of his girl friends:
"You go to bed with most of you in ointment boxes hid:

"You sleep—your face is not with you, but 'neath your rouge jar's lid."
Evidently, any motiving or motivating hinging upon woman desiring to beautify herself is
equally acceptable in a Roman story told in Latin, or a flapper story appearing today in College
Humor.
As an example of (b) : If you have disappeared from your farm, and I, your friend, find your
footsteps on the edge of your well, it is natural that I look downward, not up at the clouds for
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you, for objects fell downward before even Newton "discovered" gravity. And if furthermore
somebody creeps up on me and knocks me on the head while I am peering down in that dark
aperture, my own mischance is conditioned because I was. motivated (and motived) to look
down by your disappearance in a terrestrial sphere where objects fall downward.
Now a moment ago I promised those who wished to be ultra-consistent—the academically

minded, I term them—that I would endeavor to provide some basis on which they consider
natural laws also as "moti ings" and "motivatings." I therefore refer such to one, Reverend
Williams, who recently sent me for review his book "Evolution Disproved." Says he: "God is
the author of all mathematical principles. The Square described on the hypotenuse of a right-
angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares described on the other two sides, because He
made it so. The circumference of a circle Is approximately 3.1416 times the diameter because
He made it so." It would appear then, if Reverend Williams is correct, that all natural laws are
God's motivations entering into our quite human plot!
And in further connection with (b) it should be obvious that the writer of a fantastic story,
laid—say—on Jupiter, is not subject to the same laws of motivation as the writer laying his
story in Chicago. Gravity pulls harder on Jupiter; therefore people are made lighter yet bulkier.
Different standards of love and attraction would probably prevail. William Wallace Cook years
ago wrote a fantastic story of an Edgar Rice Burroughsian land where the people talked solely
by clattering away on typewriter-like word-boxes. You could there, obviously, prevent an
important political speech by stealing your opponent's wordbox. Here you steal, at best, only his
thunder! In an artificial sphere created by you, as story writer, your people may not have the
denary system as we do; they may have the number 14 as their mathematical base instead of 10.
In such a system, as you may not know, our old familiar 17 becomes "13 !" People on Earth do
not get worried around the time of sunset; but in H. G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon"
they actually commenced to sprint desperately for cover—for they were frozen to death if they
missed getting inside of something before that red globe sank beneath the horizon.
Referring to (c) above: Suppose that in the year 1900 an explorer was going with a party into
equatorial Africa; he would very likely encumber the party with a huge mechanical music box
replete with heavy metallic circular records, causing six porters to sweat and groan and curse in
Bantu; today he carries a light radio set, because he has learned how to transmute ripples in the
ether into audible tones. And any motivating or motiving based on heavy metallic circular
records becomes inacceptable due to the shift in our civilized accoutrements.
The above points may seem elemental to the practiced writer, but in forging into our own
particular Tropical Africa here, the dark land of plot, it is best that we lay out our luggage and
see what we have before we go. With that preliminary examination of our luggage, and a
knowledge of where we are heading for, we may discuss motiving and motivating, and show as
well some of the disturbances that one may produce on the other. In the meantime our assistant
can be whittling a pencil for us, preparatory to our making some diagrams after we reach the
kinematical phase of plot.
V.
MOTIVING, as we have said, is the providing of the proper character to react in a given
situation, with given conditions, in a given way: Let us briefly consider an acceptable example
of motiving and an inacceptable one, with the same given conditions:
GIVEN: Henry Rogers, a young man, has stolen $10,000 from his employer (we
dare not even, in the given conditions, denote this employer by a particular name,
because the name given to the acceptable character for motiving will not fit the one
given in our example of the inacceptable motiving). It is REQUIRED that Henry be
arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to a stiff term in Prison, so that the author may
develop a Prison novel.
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INACCEPTABLE MOTIVING
will confront us if we make the employer a very rich man, a clubman and man-about-town,
Participant in many "affairs"; manufacturer of cocktail shakers, and stage-door Johnny. If we
call him Wellington van Dever, we add to our woes. For such a man, in addition to standing his
loss and "calling it a day" would likely be too afraid that his own unsavory private affairs would
be dragged forth by the defense in a court prosecution; furthermore, much association on his
part with the varied characters of night life, the stage, etc., would lead us to expect from him a
rather tolerant point of view tending to excuse human fallibility, and thus overlook his
employee's weakness as being the inevitable theft following temptation. He would perceive, if
his mind were only half logical, that his occupation—manufacturer of cocktail shakers—was
one tending to increase moral weakness (I protect myself here with my "wet" readers by adding
"among the already weak") ; and his name, whether we believe in ordinary numerology or even
the Chinese numerology known as the Yi-King, Tao, suggests somehow a broad-gauge,
easy-going, give-and-take individual. And we could not legitimately arrive at our arrest of
Henry Rogers.
ACCEPTABLE MOTIVING
is ours if our employer has been made a deacon in some religious sect that is very narrow in its
views—you will note that I am not so rash as to endeavor to name such here, much less in any
story I might write: a deacon who has never associated with any but people of mentally
astigmatic vision; who is a manufacturer of-say—washboards; who has led an impeccable life;
who has a somewhat limited capital himself. We may call him Phineas Hardscrabble. We now
find that such a character has, as a result of his sect, a fundamentally narrow point of view; also
a man who manufactured something to make women work harder than they already do in
bearing children, etc., would have a narrow handling of a situation involving the future of a
mere man. If his life had been impeccable, he could not suffer in the court trial resulting from
such a prosecution; if his own capital were limited-i. e., if we motive him as a small
capitalist—his prosecution would be vigorous—and perhaps vicious. Even his name furthers all
this.
Because of the vast field to cover, this brief example must suffice to crystallize in the student's
mind one of the two phases of that force which causes incidents to be. For it is, you see, in the
motiving of the employer that the vital necessary incident of the hero's arrest and prosecution is
made-literally—made to happen. That is, it is made acceptable, for you as writer make existent
only that which you can make your reader accept; in other words, only that which is well
motived and motivated.
Now to do the identical thing for motivating that we have done for motiving, and then we are
finished with considering the force principle of plot, and are ready to step into the kinematics of
the thing, an angle from which may be surveyed certain salient points that will be of very
definite benefit to the embryo plot-constructor.
VI.
MOTIVATING is, as we have said, the providing of the proper conditions and causes for a
given character to act in a given way in a given incident.
For instance:
DESIRED that a Spanish girl named Dolores Sanchez (we have already motived
her by her name, sex, and race. as an individual who would act hastily and
violently through her emotions only) be led to attempt violence on her American
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sweetheart, William Galloway, whom she loves dearly. GIVEN the conditions that
the man and girl are sitting on a stone settee in her arbor. The incident is desired so
that the man may be nursed back to health by a blonde nurse girl of the North, thus
confronting him with the necessity of continually comparing the deep-feeling
brunette with fiery passions, who struck him down, with the cool, calm, but
somewhat superficial blonde who pilots him back to recovery.
INACCEPTABLE MOTIVATING:
will result, if Galloway brags to Dolores that he has had affairs with a hundred girls in his life.
This will be inacceptable regardless of whether his statement is true or false, or whether
Dolores realizes the truth or falsity of it. Depending upon whether or not his statement can be
proven, or whether it rings true or false, a girl of her character would only consider that he was
that much more desirable or undesirable; or that he was a braggart; or that he was a liar; or that
he was a little conceited. In any event, only an increasing or dimming of her ardor would result.
ACCEPTABLE MOTIVATING:
will result if, for instance, Galloway takes from his pocket a number of papers strapped together
with a simple rubber band to show her one—say—the contract he has obtained for a new
engineering job, and the top paper of which is a folded-over letter from a girl to his brother,
Homer Galloway, referring to some Mexican inamorata of the latter's, and saying: "My darling,
when you concede that that hot-tamale is unworthy of you, you give me great happiness." If he
lays this down on the stone settee while he steps over to get a drink at a nearby fountain, an
acceptable motivating has been created for the desired incident: for not a woman on earth
(except the feminine readers of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST) but would hastily read the
visible lines of such an epistle, and not a true Spanish girl but who, by the time the young man
got back, would be seeing red—so red that the young man would find himself sitting there with
a poniard in his breast and an hysterical woman saying: "Take that—you double-crossing dog!
So I, a Castilian, am a hot tamale, eh? And unworthy of you—and you are her darling, are
you?"
VII.
NOW if the distinction has been made quite clear, it should be evident that in many cases the
motiving of a desired incident with respect to that participant in it who is not fixed by the
exigencies of the required plot, can and does form part of the motivation for the fixed
participant. So much so that a change of it can change the very motivation itself and destroy the
incident. These are life's little trials for the story builder. For instance:
GIVEN: Pendleton Wesbey, a young man, son of a clergyman, and student of

religions. DESIRED: that he shoot and kill, in his intense anger, a thief whom he
has just found stealing from his study a crude but holy clay statuette of
Mohammed, worth two cents intrinsically and only authoritatively reputed to have
had Mohammed's own breath blown on it in the making.
Now to create this incident, which incident is not so simple as it looks, it appears that some very
vital motiving with respect to the thief will be required, so as to create a logical desire for such
a worthless, inartistic bit of clay. No mere girl, burglar, artist, or sneak-thief would lug off a
misshapen lump of clay, even if she or he knew that Mohammed had blown his holy breath on it
fourteen centuries back in time. So we play exceedingly safe, therefore, in making our thief one
Dunghis Ghan, an East Indian—and a Mohammedan—who, being such, would most likely
have followed the career of the holy statuette from its initial purchase in India, would have
known where it had gone, and who could appreciate the priceless worth of Mohammed's own
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breath! But the moment we make him a brown-skinned, turban-clad gentleman from the land of
the Ganges, our young man, Pendleton Wesbey, being fixed by the exigencies of the plot as the
son of a clergyman, and a student of religions, ceases to become angry as he would against a
burglar, because he, of all people, understands the intense religious devotion of a Mohammedan
for such a piece of clay.
VIII.
CONVERSELY, motiving which is fixed and required may frustrate the most desirable
motivating at hand, and again make a plot incident unrealizable. As, for instance, in the
following compound incident:
GIVEN: Pogwallow College is a small, narrow, jerkwater educational institution

out in the "sticks." REQUIRED: that the college itself, its faculty and its founder,
still living, and the weaknesses of all, be satirically portrayed in a novelette for
College Humor—from the viewpoint of an individual unaffected by the usual
American college glamor and the conventional way of seeing things. Let us even
go farther and say that the editor, appreciating a flair on the part of his writer for
humorous description, is intent on having conditions and institutions as found in all
colleges written up, by viewing the story through the eyes of a character who could
never have been part of any American college in his life; to whom even a campus
would be a new concept. Indeed, the editor, we will say, has already given so much
thought and invention to the satirical end of his proposed narrative, that he has
hedged the writer badly in on the matter of motiving. That is, in this story for
College Humor, the editor has not motived his share of the structure by definitely
decreeing that the viewpoint character shall be a Chinese scholar rather than a
Hindu or an Eskimo. Such motiving has allowed such f acts to remain as that this
visiting scholar had been passing through America, had been invited to lecture on
some subject, and had thus formed the initial contact with Pogwallow College.
But—the editor, seeing the need of drama in his novelette demands (a) that this
naive viewpoint character shall himself form a veritable storm center, so that as a
result of his presence there be strife, struggle, clash—a moving story, in other
words; and (b) that the founder himself of the college play the part of a serio-comic
villain; and (c) that the viewpoint character get upon the stage of the story on an
insecure basis, upon which efforts may again and again logically be made to oust
him, thus creating a continuously uncertain outcome to the narrative.
Now the conditions back the author, much as a horse used to be backed between the two "thills"
of a buggy, pretty definitely into the following inescapable—or at least desirable—motivating
of the induction of this celestial narrator into the story, i. e., (a) that the founder of the college
shall have established a long-respected but unwritten law that only white Americans may enter
this college; (b) that he be still living, and have incorporated in his written charter for the
college the definite ruling that any class might at any time by unanimous vote eject its professor
in any subject and elect another instructor in that same subject, provided the new candidate
were willing; and (c) that the Chinese scholar be brought into the college as a professor by a
unanimous vote of a certain class, except that, to comply with "c," the Celestial's lecture be
upon some subject quite other than the regular prescribed one.
Now we must remember that a class at Pogwallow or any other college is a class which contains
a certain number of earnest students who have come to college to learn. As a group alone, it is
certainly motived so that a powerful topic, indeed, would have to be discussed, by the
distinguished visitor, to bring a unanimous vote to retain him. Now we might accept without
much trouble that a class lectured to on any subject by a visiting humorist like Will Rogers who
kept them in a continuous uproar would unanimously vote to retain this prize for good. Chinese
are a serious and solemn race, however. Again, we might motivate the class's vital action by
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having it taught by the visitor that the white race is superior to all other races and will survive
all others. White people like to hear such things; it acts as a sop to their individual inferiority
complexes. Again, however, a Chinese could not consistently lecture on such a theme, quite
aside from the fact that present indications are strong for the survival of the yellow race.
Another subject might be "How Any Young American Can Get Rich on the Wheat Market."
Again, the Chinese character precludes such a topic. Really, it appears that there is nothing left
for our poor Chinese to do but to lecture on the making of delightful drinks out of hair-tonics;
but being free to brew rice wine, Muikwailo, etc., in China and not having any problems like
this, his character again prevents a knowledge on even this line. Thus, the one really desirable
incident, his lecture and election, is nevertheless destroyed because of the motiving that has
been fixed by Johnny Lansinger or Mr. Swanson.
Do not feel, however, that because you do not have to write a story to fit some hardhearted
editor's requirements, you can escape such predicaments. For the hardest taskmaster in the
world, even harder than the editor who sometimes can be argued out of his stand, or can be
made to rescind his position by the judicious opening of a bottle of pre-war Scotch, is that part
of your plot which is already created, fixed. inelastic, "hawg-tied" and staked-out, as it were, at
a dozen points.
The desirable incident in the previous instance, however, can be made to stand; the problem
there propounded can be solved by more complicated sub-plotwork, making the class elect the
Chinese scholar regardless of any subject on which the latter may talk, but as a resultant of
certain deals in votes made by certain members involved in odd (motivated) relationships with
each other, or by certain trickery in counting the ballots, etc., etc. The old saying that there is
always more than one way to skin a cat was never truer than in plot-work.
IX.
A BRIEF mention should be made now of some of the anomalies of motivation.
You might argue that the same motivating could not work with a fixed character so as to cause
him (or her) to act in diametrically opposite ways, and without the interposition of a new f
actor: But I point to you the wording in a published story in which it was very vital that a girl
buy a peculiar, grotesque, bizarre vanity case with all her savings, and then sell it again for the
same price all without further extraneous help. She says, in her later explanation in the story
itself.
"Oh, that terrible vanity case! I spent all my savings for it. It was one of those things which,
when we first see them, we think we would give everything we own to possess. About the
second day we begin to wonder if we weren't a little rash in buying it. The third day we begin
to feel that everybody is staring at us, and in a week we hate the thing so badly that we
would sell it for a penny to get rid of it. And that was my case. I had grown positively to recoil
from it."
Of course this anomaly rests in the motivated trait of all human character to be attracted by the
unusual but to tire of it that much quicker. Or, more briefly, a natural law of psychology is
operating with our incident. And to teach you not to accept my statements too implicitly—to
watch every step of this terrain yourself—there was, after all, a certain extraneous circumstance
which entered into the selling of this vanity case as compared with the buying of it, i. e., a
week's possession of it!
It may be mentioned here, too, of all places in this series, that frequently a character may be
compelled to act in some odd manner in a vital incident where there is no adequate basis for
such action, either in motiving or motivating: a way around this is to relate one or more similar
incidents in his past which would indicate his tendency to act in this particular way: to motive
him artificially, in other words. In a recently Published novel, the very pivot of the plot was that
a young man should desire himself to be buried only a wax figure and to have a genuine funeral
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sermon preached over his effigy. Since the whole novel swung on this incident, and there was
no way adequately to motivate such a bizarre desire, the author motived it by having a character
describe several past incidents in which this young man participated, showing him to be a
sensationalist, pure and simple. The illuminating incident which required the most words was
how, when a boy in Louisiana, he pretended to have taken a trip clear around the moon by being
thrown out of a giant slingshot, falling back into a net between four trees, and how he
corroborated his story with close-up photographs of the moon made from an orange and the
light from a candle. Thus, his later funeral hoax appeared quite in keeping with his bizarre
self—but all this required words and many extraneous characters—sub-plot, to be exact.
It is often necessary, if there is to be any story or drama, that the characters therein be made to
remain not only on the scene but impotent to act against one another; this is so that the author
may have time to develop his drama in a veritable "hot box." I have termed this expedient
"locking," and it is achieved by a series of deliberately invented motivings and motivatings
which may be suspended or modified for brief periods of time. I have in my own writing carried
a story for 100,000 words in which, had I not "locked" my characters tightly against each other
in the first 7000 words, there would have been no story, as everyone would have been killed,
informed against, betrayed, or shown up by at least one other person. One of the best examples
of this "locking" is found in the melodrama "Kongo" of which the entire first act is devoted to
establishing such a relationship between a set of varied characters at a trading post in Central
Africa that they are prevented from taking any overt action against each other and from
departing from the spot (and from the drama!). Flint, the storekeeper and "emperor," dares not
destroy Kingsland, the hasheesh fiend, because Kingsland was made a "doctor" by the authors
and they also paralyzed Flint's legs; Whippy, the store clerk, dares not leave, because he's
wanted outside of Africa for rape in Australia (the authors made it so); Kingsland, the hero,
dares not leave because he's wanted outside of Africa for murder by abortion in London;
Zoombie, the savage priest, dares not indulge in any action whatsoever beyond waving his
arms, because his power among his own tribe is due to Flint's collection of electrical "ju-jus;"
Annie has the "makrak" and is dependent both on Flint for sustenance and Kingsland for a cure.
And so on and on. A minimum corps of union sceneshifters set this one scene in the Minturn-
Central theatre in Chicago, and all these characters were unable to leave it, or, by the grace of
God, to compel anybody else to leave it. The progression of the story in one of these "locked
dramas" is done by temporarily suspending or modifying these "locks" in a series of leisurely
checker-like moves on the part of the author or dramatist. For instance, if it is no longer desired
to lock Flint against Kingsland, Kingsland can be revealed at any desired point to be a Doctor
of Philosophy instead of a Doctor of Medicine!
Motiving should be made to help motivating, particularly if the incident resulting therefrom is
one on which the entire story indubitably hinges. And vice versa where possible. The incident
then becomes absolutely inevitable instead of merely acceptable. In a certain published serial it
was necessary that a certain character give back to another character at a critical point a packet
of which he had possession and legal ownership, and which he might have retained, and thus
worried the reader for the rest of the reader's life as to what might have happened if it hadn't
been given back! The whole story pivoted on this point "coming through" right. The author
took great pains to create, all the way through, as the possessor of the packet, a kindly,
benevolent gentleman, aristocratic and courteous, with even a little daughter (unnecessary to the
actual plot) to mellow him further, and then at the critical point the author added motivation in
addition. (The italics are mine) ;
Leslie van Slyke's face was the soul of concurrence. "Rest assured," he said kindly "that I
owe too tremendous a debt to you to refuse such a thing, even were I of the mind to want to
retain the packet. And this, happily, is not the case."
X.
BECAUSE of considerations which the preceding discussion must by this time make clear, I
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take exception strenuously to the contumely so openly expressed against plot-writers as being
"carpenters," "jugglers of mere types," etc. It was Polti who claimed that a character was a
character because he had contradictory elements in his makeup. Precisely, plot characters
—especially those in a narrative who are functioning in the conditions antecedent to the actual
opening of the story, as well as the story itself, have to be often finely devised and complicated
characterizations, especially when the plot demands that they shall act somewhat oppositely in
somewhat similar situations. Types cannot function paradoxically. Only true characters can be
converted, by the delicate stimuli provided by their collision with other objects or characters, to
form dynamic plot engines capable of reversing their direction of rotation in an instant.
XI.
MELODRAMA, like plot, has had its share of definitions, including that simpler one of the
child who says it is "one of those plays where they have green lights and thrilly music." But,
thanks to our discussion of motiving and motivating, I would like to offer a new definition
devolving upon those factors.
Have you ever noticed in a true melodrama (whether played on a stage or published as a dime
novel) how the villain is a very, very bad man? He looks bad; from his teeth and mustache to
his gun, whip, or cowhide boots; he has a bad history; and he talks with a sneer. The author has
stamped, him with a notice which says: This is a villain. Now, having noticed this much, have
you also noticed how his relentless persecution of another individual throughout three long acts
(or 40,000 words) is often based upon nothing other perhaps than that that individual had
defeated him in some petty deal on the stock exchange or legitimately won the affection of
some woman the villain at one time fancied? And you have also noted, no doubt, how the
beauteous heroine acts, unlike most girls: though starved, beaten, kidnaped, tortured by being
bound in front of a buzz saw (once I saw her tied by her wrists to the steeple of Trinity Church),
her relatives shot to death before her eyes—she yet preserves that virtue of hers which
thousands of girls every year in big cities are giving up on a mere economic basis in exchange
for decent clothing and shelter? Her adherence to moral principle in the face of these super-
terrible tortures and mental strains is beyond all understanding except for the existence of her
wonderful nobility of character; she was reared right, she has always been good—she looks
virtue and she talks virtue. She has golden hair very frequently, the color of the harps in
Heaven; she dresses in white, the symbol of purity, and the stage manager even provides for her
part, if possible, a girl with a noble brow!
This condition will be found to run, with variations in intensity, through all melodramatic
literature and drama, and I therefore offer the following definition for melodrama based on
more scientific terms than green lights and thrilly music.
Melodrama is a piece of dramatic structure of any sort in which the dynamic force creating the
story is derived too much from motiving and insufficiently from motivating.
We have now concluded our discussion of the forces of plot considered purely as forces, a
subject on which indeed a book could be written. We are now ready to view pot and plot
elements and plot forces from the kinematic angle, but to do so we must draw up a figurative
blackboard, provided for us by the invention of photo-engraving combined with the air mail
between Illinois and Colorado, which reproduces my pen and ink diagrams done in Chicago in
the pages of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST in Denver. These diagrams will show us in what
respects Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone" is related to Jack Woodford's "The Loves of Trixie
Triptoe," and Wilson Collison's "Up in Mabel's Room" to "Ben Hur."
PART II—THE KINEMATICS
XII.
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KINEMATICS, we said, was the study of spatial movement. In considering why plots cause the
story to move hither and thither instead of thither and hither, it is necessary to focus our
attention on two elements, known as
(1) The plot incident, which may be
(a) motived
(b) motivated
(c) accidental
(2) The plot thread, which may be
(a) passive
(b) active
Unlike motives themselves, which cannot be shown in a diagram—that is, we cannot

graphically compare the thirst for a drink of creme-de-menthe with a belligerency towards the
colored race—we can show diagramatically how motives may conspire to direct the course of
an individual or object.
It is necessary that we build up this workable graphic conception so as to grasp what I shall
term the 15 elemental plot combinations, and these have to be grasped if we are to understand
the larger and more complicated structures found in stories which range from 25,000 to 125,000
words.
And do not believe the literary pessimist who tells you that there are only seven original plots in
the world, any more than you would believe that the instrument known as the kaleidoscope can
show you only seven patterns. It is only the number of pieces of colored glass in the
kaleidoscope that are limited; so, too, the elements in life. But there are enough elements in life,
if recombined in all their possibilities, to provide plots to the number of
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-at which point our linotype machine runs out of zeros!
XIII.
THE first vital thing in the kinematics of plot to be impressed on the mind is something that
should, presumably, have been taken up in the mechanics of the thing—but which has been left
for discussion here in order that Part I might remain as simple as possible. But as that deals with
the plot incident, and we are now going to study the possibilities of that element toward
directing a story, we have made no mistake in leaving it until now.
Suppose I should tell you that there is a bank in which you may draw one hundred per cent
interest for every deposit you make? You will not believe me. And if I add that it is (for you,
who aim to sell stories for money) a financial bank in a way, too, you will remain incredulous.
But this bank exists, and it exists as the plot incident which, under Part I, or the Mechanics of
the subject, we commenced to regard as a small bundle of explosive force. And this explosive
force that lies in a plot incident can always be doubled by any depositor.
To double it, the first vital thing the student of plot must watch is this: a plot incident once
created should never be viewed nor even verbally expressed, in its A-to-B form only. It should
also be expressed and thought of in its B-to-A form. This may seem puzzling, and I will
objectify the statement by saying that you should never view an incident as merely
—say—"Peter Zeller, a ship mate of San Francisco, becomes acquainted with Leonard Wong,
an eighth-breed Chinese boy." Immediately rephrase it with your lips and your mind to read:
"Leonard Wong, an eighth-breed Chinese boy of San Francisco, becomes acquainted with Peter
Zeller, a ship mate." As a result of clearly viewing this incident in two ways, two avenues for
the force inherent in this meeting open themselves, i. e., Zeller may some day use this boy in
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some capacity, such as to gain him entrance into an opium den or Chinese gambling house; or
the boy may use Zeller, some day, perhaps for a passage to Mexico, or Europe, or Australia.
Again, do not merely say: "Fenway, a newspaper reporter, calls on Miss Margaret van
Allingham, a society girl, and offers her one hundred dollars for information where to find a girl
friend of hers of her boarding school days whom she is hiding and whom the newspapers want."
Phrasing it in such manner will only bring to your mind the effects on Fenway's course as to her
acceptance or her refusal. If you will again rephrase your incident to: "Miss van Allingham, a
society girl, is called upon by a newspaper reporter and offered one hundred paltry dollars for
information as to the whereabouts of her friend," you at once perceive new angles to the
situation. For example, that in the lady's heart is engendered indignation at the press, or the
reporter, for the insult of even assuming she would betray a friend for that sum.
But it should not necessarily be thought that this double explosive force becomes immediately
directed into the bilateral channels open to it. As a simple example of what I mean, if I swindle
a man out of his money, I have the money as a result of the swindle, quite aside from his having
a hatred of me and a desire to get even. Long after this happening an opportunity may arrive in
which he can retaliate, and his hatred of me, resulting from that swindle, may motivate him to
direct powerful action then and not before. So also, my possession of his money may lead me
long afterwards, when I have met an heiress, to buy a Rolls-Royce with which to impress her.
Two springs of force have arisen from that earlier incident, but they have not become operative
till long after. The main thing to consider in this discussion is that by considering your incident
in two phases-in an active and passive form, so to speak (although, remember, the passive form
here is as dynamic as the active), your store of force has increased into two stores.
XIV.
NOW you have studied geometry, you know that a line is the path followed by a point. If the
point travels north and south, east and west, in a horizontal plane, its path will be a curved line,
a wiggly line. If you have not studied geometry, you have my permission to clear your table top,
dip a fly in your inkwell, and watch the path he makes on the table-top.
But if we go to represent characters and objects, these vital units in plot, as lines, thus getting
the first kinematical element of plot, the plot thread, we are confronted with the fact that
movement in time plays as important a part as movement in space. Indeed, it cannot be stopped.
For instance, Amos Hobbs, a farmer, may sit down in a chair in his kitchen at 4 o'clock in the
afternoon. At 6 o'clock he has moved two hours ahead whether he wishes to or not: whether he
has been fast asleep all the time and never even snored. Or with this progression of time alone,
he may, during the two hours, have gone out to the barn, thence to the pasture, thence to the
creek.
So to make room for time in our graphic depiction of plot, let us present characters and objects
as lines whose vertical wanderings shall indicate all spatial movement of any sort, and whose
left-to-right movement shall represent progression forward in time only. Thus will be born the
plot-thread. The simplest element, therefore, following this convention, will be the plot thread
(passive form).
XV.
A PASSIVE plot thread, since it has not been heretofore defined nor even named in the study of
plot, I shall define as the graphic depiction of the course of a unit of plot incapable of being
motived or of acting under motivation other than natural laws. Such things are, of course,
inanimate objects, social ideas, etc.
Survey the following diagram:
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Graphically, it represents a passive plot thread called "Passive thread A," as operating between
two points of time, t1 and t2 ; and it is obvious from the thickening of it at the point n that it is
desired that the movement of the point constituting that thread is to be considered by us
particularly at n. You will note that this line possesses extension only to the right and to the left,
but does not change its vertical level, and since at the left it is t, and the right t2 and ever at the
same level, it is obvious that the point composing it has been moving through time only, and not
at all through space. That is, since vertical movement up and down on our diagram is to
represent movement through space of any sort, our point has evidently been standing still.
We will therefore select one of many million possible assignments for the letters, so that we
may have a concrete bit of life represented by the line above. I propose that "A" be a copy of a
very rare book lying in the bin out in front of an old second-hand bookshop on West Madison
Street, near Halsted Street, Chicago, between the hours of 2 P. M. of March 15th, 1928, and 4 P.
M. of March 15th, same year. In order to enrich the picture a little bit, say that it is a copy of the
De Devinis Institutionibus, written by one Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius. from the
press of one Mr. Wendelin of Speier, back in 1472, with initials of red, and containing the
Nepithomon wanting in the few copies of the De Devinis. If the left and right limits of this
column in THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST are to be considered as mechanically cutting off
all diagrams, it is obvious that the rare book lay there before 2 P. M. and after 4 P. M. because
the line flows into and out of the space permitted to it.
It is evident, however, that the condition at it is to be particularly considered. and in view of the
fact that you now have all the other conditions, we can describe point n as:
A rare book (a Vindelinus) lay in an open bin on West Madison Street, near Halsted, Chicago,
at 3:18 P. M.. March 15th, 1928.
We call this a passive thread because we are allowing it to represent an object—a thing which
can only be acted upon by external circumstances; which cannot of its own volition come into a
relationship with any other character or object. In other words, the only possible force from
which an incident can evolve is the motivation provided by this thread for some other thread, or
the operation of natural laws involving its weight, color, etc. The object pictured by a passive
thread cannot mentally function or emotionally function, regardless of the thousands of things
that might happen to it.
XVI.
SUPPOSE we now take a thread which we will call an active thread; and in addition to giving it
thereby the power to be motived and motivated, we will also give it spatial movement as well as
time movement. Thus it will be presented a little differently, i.e.
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Our diagram represents a thinking, acting character called B, as he (or she) passes 1, from the
point in time t1 to t2, and spatially from the level of the left hand end of the line to the level of
the right hand end. Its obliquity, due to its movement through both space and time, gives it the
tendency to intersect with other oblique and horizontal lines.
It may be presented by the following bit of life:
Phineas T. Tanneyday, Litt. D., impoverished student of incunabula, or rare books, an old
man, is walking along West Madison Street in Chicago between the hours of 2 P. M. and 4 P.
M. of March 15th, 1928. At 2 P. M. he was crossing State Street, and at 4 P. M. he was
crossing Ashland Avenue.
It is evident that the condition at n is to be particularly considered, and it may be described thus:
Phineas T. Tanneyday, a bibliophile, is on West Madison Street near Halsted at 3:18 P. M. of

March 15th, 1928.
XVII.
THANKS to this perfect combination of a thread which can act, and a thread which can be
acted upon, our two miniature threads may be allowed to react with each other with no trouble
in a plot relationship, with the following composite diagram to show such:
which might be readable as
Phineas Tanneyday, a poor bibliophile, buys a copy of the De Devinis from an open bin on
West Madison Street, Chicago, near Halsted Street, at 3:18 P. M. of March 15th, 1928.
Such geometrical superimposition would not necessarily be enough in itself to create an

acceptable plot incident, however, and that is why I took up the force element of plot first in this
series. If it were desired that n by such superimposition should represent "Phineas buys the
Vindelinus (for five cents or so)" and Phineas already had been decreed by the exigencies of the
plot to be a specialist in spear-heads instead of books, we would have had no acceptable
motivation. For, as such, Phineas would not have been even driven over to one of the many bins
on this street to examine a dusty, mud-spattered book printed in Latin. But, as I once told you,
there are more ways in plot to skin a cat than there are cats; so, in that event, we could have
made Mr. Wendelin, the publisher of our book, a "Mr. Guiseppi Hasta," and just as Mr. Alfred
Knopf has his Borzoi hound on his publishing output, so Mr. Hasta would have conceivably
been led to imprint all the covers of his books with a large spearhead representing his
publishing output. And old Dr. Phineas Tanneyday might have believed that here was a book
containing lost information about spearheads, and might have bought it. It may be necessary
you see, in plot, to cause a king to preach Bolshevism! You can do it.
XVIII.
THE very superimposition of these plot threads, however, will give a diagram quite different
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than merely laying one of these threads over the other, i. e., it will resemble this:
for no longer in all probability will Dr. Tanneyday, discovering that he holds in his hands a
genuine Vindelinus containing the Nepithomon, proceed leisurely on to Ashland Avenue; but he
will board a Madison Street car and ride back to State Street to consult the daily quotations on
rare books in the Rare Book Brokerage House in the Masonic Temple. His path has changed
from B-B' to B-B"; and the Vindelinus no longer remains in the bin till 6 o'clock (A-A'), but is
now deviated to State Street, and follows the path of Dr. Tanneyday (A-A" or A-B", as you
like).
Here in simple space-time form is shown one of the primal functions of the plot incident—one
of the most vital considerations ever to be realized in plot: the deviation of threads by their
intersection with one another; but at the same time our plot diagram of space-time turns out to
be insufficient to show full plot deviations. And that is because a plot incident causes far more
than a space deviation. For characters and objects, though continually moving in time, are not
necessarily always moving spatially. A complete life drama can be played out in a single room,
with the characters never even leaving that room or entering it. The movement which characters
are going into and out of are really dramatic relationships with other characters or objects, while
all together are continually moving forward in time. That is, Amos Hobbs, a farmer, may sit
down in a chair in his kitchen at 4 o'clock, with two persons, his hired hand and his daughter, in
the same room. At 6 o'clock all may have moved not at all in space, but will have moved two
hours ahead in time whether they wish to or not.
If, now, during these two hours—say at 4:30—Amos Hobbs has been paid $1000 by Henry
Hickmeier, his hired hand, who owed it to him; and if at 5 o'clock Amos gives S500 of that
money to his deaf, homely daughter, Melissa Hobbs, as a marriage dowry, he has moved twice
in a vital relationship with other characters; that is, he has become richer by one thousand
dollars in cash and must alter his attitude to Henry Hickmeier; and he has expedited his own
daughter's marriage and departure from his menage by his donation of a dowry to her.
Going back to old Dr. Tanneyday, our bibliophile, his course, after buying the Vindelinus, is
deviated whether he merely goes back to State Street, or if he proceeds on to his attic near
Ashland Avenue. Before supper that night, he may have—and by telephone solely—secured a
loan on his book, or sold it for $10,000, ordered a season box at the opera, had a steak and
mushrooms sent up to his room instead of cooking noodles; he may have signed a lease on an
apartment, and last—but far from least—may have proposed marriage to the spinster lady
across the hall. As for the book, which might have continued to lie in that West Madison Street
bin, moving only inside and outside the door each morning, it has now been deviated off its
course: it causes newspaper stories to be written, it winds up in the collection of some
millionaire book collector, it inspires people to try to steal it, others to kill those attempting to
steal it, spurious copies are made of it—and all sorts of relationships occur both spatial and not
spatial.
Therefore, since our first space-and-time diagram has two disabilities, first, that objects
occupying the same space—or practically the same space—at the same time will show as the
same thread; and second, that there exist changes in people's affairs which are not merely the
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occupancy of a succession of new areas, we will adopt a new expedient of diagraming. We will
retain plot-threads, and still continue to allow their left-right extension to represent passage of
time; but we will utilize the up-and-down scope only for the purpose of showing by means of
knots or intersections where these plot threads come into vital deviational relationships with
each other.
And do not disregard that word "deviational."
For it is in that essential that a plot incident is a plot incident, and deviation is the keynote of
plot itself.
XIX.
A PLOT incident always changes the complexion of affairs for one or more participants in it.
This is one of the most salient rules of plot which should be drilled into the writer's brain.
Whether a happening in which I participate arouses in me an emotion, or whether through it
someone merely explains something concerning a past part of the web of relationships of which
I am a part, my future course is probably determined and changed as a result of that knowledge.
Your reading this very article is changing your course and mine by a measurable. degree: either
your ideas are being modified and shifted to some extent, or else you are evolving antagonism
toward my theories. Whether you accept these theories and alter your stories slightly, or
whether your antagonism becomes so great that your future stories take on an individual
anti-plot atmosphere as a gesture, your work has been affected one way or another. As your
work changes, the market changes—and the acceptance of my work changes, for if a story of
mine laid on Mars gets into an editor's hands, or to the reviewers, at a time when yours laid on
Saturn gets there, the entire delicate balance of acceptance, sales, etc., is disturbed. Every
character we meet in life, everything that happens to us, affects our future life if by no other
mechanism than that our judgment becomes more sure for analogous cases and analogous
characters. And the idea of plot. is to show in smaller area, but in less subtle manner, how we
are deviated and affected by other people and other things, all only puppets of a benign (or
wicked) but masterful fate.
Now we may, thanks to the removal of the rigid space yardstick from the vertical extent of our
diagram, picture our last diagram, which showed how Dr. Phineas Tanneyday bought a $10,000
Vindelinus for a nickel, a little more completely yet, thus
which shows the old incident n which is vitally turning off the careers of both the Vindelinus
(A) and Dr. Tanneyday (B), being itself the resultant of two incidents, n-1 in the life of the
Vindelinus and n-2 in the career of the Doctor. Let us say, in fact, that n-1 was where an
auctioneer, ordered to dispose, at the best price, of the books in the library of an old ex-brewer,
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sold the Vindelinus (with several hundred other valueless volumes) to a second-hand dealer;
had he not done so, the book might have continued to A'; i. e., to have gathered dust in his
mansion or even to have been taken to Europe by the old man's widow who decided to go back
to Germany to live.
As for incident n-2, Dr. Tanneyday may have been told that afternoon by a friend that some
Greek or Italian nickel show in the polyglot district of Halsted near Madison needed an old man
to take tickets in the afternoon, for which they would pay $7 a week, and he may have been
hurrying over there to get-the position instead of drowsing (B-B'), as was his wont in the
afternoons, in the reading room of the Public Library.
Now the path of a stone propelled from the body tends to be a straight line, but if that stone is
on a string, held tightly in the thrower's hand, the centripetal force in the string ever bends the
path of the stone inward, making it follow a circle. Thus, characters or objects in a plot may be
considered as continually under a sort of deviation due to all their encounters with other people
in the plot and people outside of it, and we may now dispense with our dotted lines and supplant
our broken straight lines by curves, thus securing a workable graphic scheme for plot. Our
curved threads, of course, represent people and objects under the force of continual deviation
due to their relationships with others. Thus, our last figure will appear:
each plot incident having contributed to the bending provided by the previous incident.
XX.
Early in this discussion I dogmatized that a story was-created by the "intersection of a plot with
the thread representing a single character." So too may an elemental plot combination intersect
with a character's thread and produce the element of a story. If I insert actual threads in the
preceding plot incidents, thus
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in which thread C may be said to be the auctioneer who sold the Vindelinus, or the widow who
ordered it sold, or the dealer who bought it; and thread D may be the friend who told Dr.
Tanneyday of the job over on Halsted near Madison, or the want-ad itself which he may have
read, I may now ask what is the plot and what is the story.
Let us darken one of our threads which we have decided to invest with the greatest human
interest and emotional values, i. e., thread B, or Dr. Tanneyday. To answer my own question, the
plot (elemental plot combination) consists of the three incidents, n, n-1, and n-2, and the story
element, the intersection of these incidents on the human-interest thread B. The story element
may be described or related as:
Dr. Phineas Tanneyday, very poor, went over in a poor district of Chicago to get a lob at $7 a
week. A friend, Casper Kent, had told him of the existence of this job. But instead he picked up
a $10,000 rare book and didn't even need the job.
Just the element of a story, you see, but caused by Dr. Tanneyday's intersection with one thread
and a two-thread relationship.
Before closing this chapter, I would like to call your attention to one of the most well-defined
analogies to plot-action existing in nature: the human eye-ball.
The eye-ball is actuated in its orbit by six muscles. These muscles are so placed (one even
working through a bone pulley) that it takes the action of several to move the eye to any
position, and very frequently to enlist & aid of one muscle to help another, a third muscle must
be called in to neutralize the undesirable component brought into existence by the first helper.
The way in which these six muscles have been placed and combined to help each other's
beneficial actions, and defeat each other in inimical actions, is amazing. I do not think you need
read Jackson, Savage, Howe, Hansell and Seber, Worth or Duane to survey them. The
Encyclopedia Britannica gives a condensed version of the twists, torts, pulls and drawings
actuating them. I am not an opthalmologist, but I have had occasion through certain personal
exigencies to make a deep study of these muscles, and their combinations of actions would do
more to convince me of a Deity than would the presence of the Atlantic Ocean, or the moon
sailing around the earth. It has, at least, aided me immeasurably to understand plot. Space will
allow but one example of the perfect way in which their action is combined, and I give it
because I have named a certain elemental plot combination after it: I refer to the operation of
the eye in looking down and in, for reading.
For the eye to look in and down, it is drawn inward toward the nose by the internus, and
downward toward the lap by the inferior rectus. Nature, however, desired to make the second
aid the first—for even savages may string fine beads and focus on skin-sewing for long hours of
time—so she threw the base of the inferior rectus back toward the root of the nose so it would
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pull on a slant and help to draw the eve in too, as it drew it down. The moment she did that, the
muscle twirled or twisted the eye—wheel-like—outward, making it unable to fuse its image
with its companion eye (which was getting the same kind of a deal at the same time). So nature
brought a third muscle, the superior oblique, to help the second muscle draw the eve down, but
to work through a pulley in such a way that it would at the same time twist the eye—wheel-
like—in, and exactly counteract the out-twist being done by the inferior rectus which it is
helping.
Thus, the eye is held where it should be held, and remains vertical, the victim of six balanced
forces. Again and again this balance happens in all its nine (with the other eye) positions,
showing that mathematics and plot existed before mathematicians or story writers. But space
forbids further discussion of the other equally astounding cases.
What I want to do now is to present the fifteen elemental plot combinations which, from a long
study and analysis of many plots, short-stories, novelettes, and novels, I find compose the most
complicated ones—and the simplest ones too! A perception of each, and how it differs from the
others, will create, by addition and subtraction in your mind, a perception of all plot.
PART III—THE 15 ELEMENTAL PLOT COMBINATIONS

IN presenting the 15 elemental plot combinations, I am going to dispense with the handy
algebraic figure "n" to show the unknown chronological order which an incident may work in a
succession of incidents, as well as "n-l" for the next previous incident, and "n+l" as the next
following incident. For expediting our grasp of the true relationship, I am going to name, in
each case, the plot incident under question "28"; and previous incidents will then be figures
under that, like 27, 26, 25; and later incidents figures over that, like 29, 30, 31.
All the examples, except the Tanneyday example (certain factors in which were taken from one
of my own novelettes), are pure inventions, and not taken from published stories.
CASE I.
The plot incident between two threads results from a previous incident on each thread, but each with a
separate thread.
This case is completely covered by our development of the Dr. Tanneyday diagram, figure 7.
CASE II.
The plot incident between two threads results from a previous incident between the
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same two threads.
Example: Nick Papadoros (A), a Chicago Greek restaurant owner, gives "Blindy" Connors (B),
a blind beggar seated outside, a meal ticket on his restaurant (27) ; "Blindy" later mortgages his
palatial court apartment building in Rogers Park, Chicago, and saves Nick from being closed
out by the sheriff (28). All sequences where a man meets and falls in love with a girl, goes forth
to seek his fortune and comes back to claim and marry her, are Case II on a large time-scale.
The shortest timescale I ever saw Case II worked out on was when I saw an Australian
performer (A) on the stage of the old Kinzie Vaudeville Theatre, Chicago, throw a boomerang
(B) (27), intending to catch it; but he turned his head and was knocked out when the boomerang
came back round (at 28).
CASE III.
Two threads engaged in a succession of 3 plot incidents in which each incident is an

outgrowth or resultant of the preceding incident. In this way, it might be said that the
third incident is the indirect resultant of the first. But in this case, Case III, it is desired
that it also be a direct resultant of the first, as well as the second.
Example: Hugh Armisted, a financier (A) who does not desire to pay for an expensive vault he
has had installed on one year's trial, baits (26) an acquaintance, Peter Kroll (B), suspected to be
an ex-cracksman, with $1000 for robbing his vault. That is, he gives Kroll a half of a thousand
dollar bill, and places the other half inside his vault, sealing it with Kroll's own ring, and shows
Kroll the hidden mechanism by which the burglar alarm can be short-circuited. Kroll laughingly
disclaims the distinction awarded to him and puts his half of the thousand dollar bill away "until
Armisted quits his joking." Since he has refused, evidently suspecting a trap, Armisted tries
new tactics in (27); he inveigles Kroll into a poker game with marked cards and cheats him out
of $900. Kroll's entire savings. (27 has been a result of 26 as far as Armisted's motivation goes;
the refusal has motivated his cheating; also the ex-cracksman has been motivated to play
perhaps by the fact that this man has apparently so much money that it would be a shame not to
take some of it away from him by legitimate means, plus perhaps the natural reasoning that
such a man must be a fool in poker if he was fool enough to believe that a cracksman would go
back into such a dangerous field.) At any rate, one motive does stand out: he plays carelessly,
thus getting cheated, because he believes no man freely offering $1000 would cheat in a card
game, 27 is not sufficient cause for Kroll cracking Armisted's safe in 28, as it is not sporting,
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not to stand your poker losses; but because of first, his impoverishment (in 27) and the $1000
offer, second, (in 26) together, he robs Armisted's safe (in 28). 28 is a result of 27; and 26; but it
required 27 to be interposed to make 26 effective.
CASE IV.
A plot incident between two threads, A and B, results from a previous incident of each
with the same thread C.
FIGURE 10
Example: Curtis Corley (C), a tricky professor of mechanics and physics, sells for $1,000,000
to Great Britain (A) in 27, an invention for gasifying a given area of war terrain so badly that no
living man, attacker or attacked, can live in it within shooting range. But Professor Corley stole
(26) this invention or secret from Wyndham York (B), a pacifist student and genius in his
classes. York, the student, as a result of this loss, becomes bitter and militaristic, and creates a
new counter-invention consisting of an automatic death-ray which will pierce for miles. He sells
this to Great Britain which, heretofore cool on the subject of death rays, grudgingly votes
another $1,000,000 and buys it (28) to prevent some other nation from getting hold of it and
nullifying her advantage in the ownership of the gas invention.
This relationship fulfills the requirements of Case III: Great Britain's (A) purchase (28) is
necessitated by her first purchase (27) from Professor Corley (C) ; and the existence of
something for her to purchase from York (B) is a result of York's loss to Professor Corley (C)
(in 26). Also Professor Corley's sale to Great Britain (27) is made possible by his theft from
York (26).
CASE V.
A plot incident between two threads develops normally out of previous incidents on each
thread with other threads, but is vitally dependent on still previous incidents on each
thread, with still other threads.
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In words, this sounds complicated; but it is clear in picture form. That is, incident 28
must develop out of 27 and 26, but must be vitally dependent on 25 and 24. Let us
objectify it, however:
Example: A noted crook, Denver Dan Crealy (A) steals a paste necklace (B) (in 28). We may
say that Dan has been hunting the original of this necklace, because of its once belonging to his
family, or any other cause, and his location of it—the genuine one—and his theft is an
outgrowth of certain newspaper publicity about the spurious necklace instituted (26) by the
Marquis of Curtindale (F) who owns the original necklace.
(Now when you institute newspaper publicity about anything, you are, under certain
circumstances only, likely to deviate strongly its course; and the Marquis has played a bold
hand, actually having a story written up in which he is accused of possessing a paste necklace
as the famous Curtindale necklace.) This institution of newspaper publicity (26) about this
spurious necklace is a daring trick used by the Marquis because he feels practically
certain—and this is the truth, too—that his friend, a banker, Roger Gorham (D), custodian of
his necklace, in incident 24 has substituted the paste necklace (B) for the Marquis' own string
and is planning to fly the town with a certain actress with whom he is infatuated (or any other
cause). The Marquis is merely suspicious of certain indications of Gorham's impending
departure, which in turn are due, on Gorham's part, to 24; hence we may say that the Marquis is
acting as an outgrowth of 24; and he has shrewdly reasoned that if he makes a demand for his
necklace, he will precipitate the flight and lose his property. But if he gives out a feature story to
the press making the press accuse him, Gorham will temporarily resubstitute the right necklace
while reporters and photographers are interviewing him, and in this brief interval the Marquis
will seize his property while the seizing is good! We may say, however, that Denver Dan acted
so quickly (28) after the story broke that the paste necklace was not yet changed back, and thus
the Marquis (in 26) produced a deviation other than what he intended! We may say also that
Denver Dan reasoned that the story was only "newspaper stuff," but that the history contained
in it of the Curtindale necklace gave him the clue and location (of what really was the paste
one) and produced incident 28.
Now continuing back along the other thread, Denver Dan Crealy (A) got access to the safe by
wounding a guard, Mike McGann (E), but the whole affair. was really possible only because (in
25) he was released from prison by a careless turnkey, Obadiah Jenks (C).
This fulfills the requirements of Case V: that 28 shall be an outgrowth of 27 and 26 with two
other threads, yet dependent utterly upon the existence of 25 and 24 (with still other threads).
That is, 28 is more dependent on the "hind" incidents than the ones just preceding. Given the
conditions of thread A and B as they actually are at the left-hand margin of the diagram, 24 and
25 are necessary for 28; 26 and 27 can be "plotted out of the plot."
Case VI.
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This is one of the most complicated elemental plot combinations there are, but vital, and
because of its importance, I am going to objectify it twice—and then we'll go back to simpler
elemental combinations again. Case VI might be described as
A plot incident (28) between two threads A and B is not dependent at all upon the next
previous incidents (27 and 26) of each thread with C and D; but is a resultant instead of
still prior incidents (25 and 24) between C and D with E and F, respectively; yet these
last named incidents, 25 and 24, do create 27 and 26.
That is, in the above picture, 28 results from 25 and 24, but not from 27 and 26;
although 27 and 26 must result from 25 and 24.
Example: A northwoods paper mill proprietor, Axel Christionson (A), falls down badly on a
huge consignment of paper and prevents Medill McAllister (B) from printing an extra paper at a
time when needed. The failure to bring out the extra, being deviative, is shown in 28. A
Bolshevik laborer, Boris Krokosk (C), has conspired with the foreman, Andy Philps (E), to
delay production, in 25, thus directly creating 28; but as a result of his successful conspiracy,
Krokosk conveys a number of confidences resulting from this conspiracy before Axel
Christionson (in 27) which deviates him to actually being made foreman himself.
Although A and C suffer a deviation by 27, number 28 is a result of 25.
Now going back along the other thread.
Medill McAllister (B) is prevented from getting out an extra (28) solely because of the need of
such. (That is, if an extra hadn't been required for some reason, we could not say he had been
prevented from bringing such out.) The need of such was created by the assassination of the
President (F) by one of McAllister's reporters, Frank Woodstock (D) in 24. To elicit powerful
aid to avoid consequences of his act, Woodstock hurries to his employer and in 26 divulges how
he has unearthed a nest of political corruption in Washington.
Although B and D suffer deviation by 26, number 28 is a resultant only of 24. This relationship
is so important to you if you absorb it, that I will invent a further example:
Example II: A wheat operator, Rutger Tinney (A), is the unwilling cause of ruining his friend,
Howard Folk (B), by heavy buying in Amalgamated Copper on the board of trade in 28. But the
ruining occurred only because a crazed broker, Crazy Harris (E), prevents, with a gun, a
telephone operator, Maizie DeWitt (C), in 25, from phoning in to her employer some vital
message—say that Folk has unexpectedly changed from buying to selling. But while Maizie is
in this restricted "compulsified" position of 25, she takes advantage of the excuse she will later
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be able to render, to get for herself a long-desired revenge against her employer and phones him
(27) the spurious news that his daughter has eloped with his negro chauffeur and was married in
Cincinnati.
If you will check this, you will find it fulfills the requirements of Case VI.
Going back now along the other thread, the ruined broker, Howard Folk (B), is also ruined (28)
because an enemy, Clara Hartley (F), in incident 24, gets his chief counsellor and market
interpreter, John McTigg (D), drunk, and removes an inhibiting influence which would have
prevented him from even dealing in Amalgamated Copper. However, McTigg (D), as a result of
being gotten drunk in 24, now goes to his employer, and while of no use as an inhibiting
influence, does divulge (26) a secret of his own—that an unknown Stock—say—Aluminum
Coffee Pots, Ltd.—can make a fortune for a man able to sell short because—say—of
forthcoming medical testimony that their use by housewives creates the poison, Aluminum
Hydroxide.
Without attempting to worry you with too many considerations, as my only desire is to give you
the "plot feel," I will say that wherever plot elements take the form here shown, with
intermediate threads, plot takes on a semblance strongly suggestive of the "locked dramas"
about which I spoke in Part I, Mechanics, because incidents have to inhibit as well as compel.
Case VII.
Now one more complicated one!
A plot incident 28 between threads A and B results from incident 25 between B and C;
and incident 26 between D and E, which produces, through D, an incident 27 between D
and A.
Much simpler in picture form, as shown above.
REQUIRED: That incident 28 results from 25 and 26 of this diagram, but not from 27;
yet that 27 also result from 26.
Example: A wholesale milliner, Hattie Evans (A), on Fifth Avenue, New York, intrigues the
ladies of the public (B) with a vast flood of red hats (in 28) because the fair public (B) has
gotten sick and tired of the earlier output of another enterprising style-former, Monsieur Du
Farge (C), who satiated them with blue hats (in 25). (This pendulum motivation depends on the
natural laws of psychology.)
Now back along the other thread:
Hatie Evans (A) was enabled to make a cheap purchase of an enormous quantity of red feathers,
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beads, straws and ribbons because Whipple (E), a wholesaler in hat trimmings, was bankrupted
(in 26) on the board of trade by Grover Halloway (D), a trader, who now having much money
and being a Don Juan, and having his attention called to the facts of the hat business from
having bankrupted a big hat trimmings magnate, learns that there are more pretty girls in
hat-making establishments and millinery shops than in any other line of business, and so buys a
substantial but minority share of Miss Evans' business (27) to have an excuse to hang around
there. (When he does this, he deviates his course to feminine adventuring, and Miss Evans'
course to enlarging her business.)
As will be seen, studying along this branch, Miss Evans' purchase of red trimmings results from
26, and would have taken place whether 27 ever occurred or not; just the same, 27 is also a
resultant (one of several possible ones) of 26.
Case VIII.
(When new threads are born.)
A plot incident on thread A is due to intersection with a new plot thread B which
has evolved—or been born—from an incident between C and D.
Thus, pictorially:
Example: Sam Drewer, a rum-running captain (A), receives (28) a decoy code telegram (B)
directing him to leave the harbor at once, in spite of fog and everything. (Imagine how this
would deviate a rumrunner, continually on the alert for Volstead agents.) But the code telegram
(B) has sprung into existence (27) from the fact that Haines (C), a rival rumrunner, has been
helped in its construction by Professor Waltham (D), a liquor-hungry professor of codes and
ciphers (27). (Note: The telegram evolves from the rival rumrunner's desire to do harm to
Drewer, plus the professor's knowledge of ciphers. Neither is sufficient in itself.) (26 may be
where the professor, a professor of mathematics, first became interested in codes and ciphers;
and 25 may be where Haines first evolved his hatred of Drewer.)
Case IX.
(Triplicity incident)
A plot incident occurs between three threads, and is the result of an incident of each
thread with another thread. Thus:
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Example: A crazed negro, Sammy Cuzzly (A), in the Black Belt, holds up and kills (28) a
druggist, Grover Lenson (B), with a revolver (C).
Cuzzly (A) has been crazed by the theft (27) of his morphine by Mammy Chudd (D), a negress.
Lenson (B) has been forced to work over-time that night by his clerk, Walter Fenway (E),
quitting in 26.
The revolver (C) has been left temporarily (25) on Lenson's open shelf by a gambler customer,
Charles Jordan (F), afraid of being picked up for gun-totting.
Many incidents involving three threads can be dissociated into several two-thread incidents
separated by tenths or hundredths of a second, but such dissociation is frequently too academic
to be considered.
Case X.
A single incident between three threads causes three new incidents of each thread with
another.
Thus, diagrammatically:
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Example: An exhausting poker game (28), lasting four days and nights, between three men,
who are Ebenezer Wick (A), who loses $1000; Clarence Henden (B), who wins $1000; and
Wiltshire Clark (C), who breaks even, so motivates the three men through weariness and
changes in their bank accounts that Ebenezer, the loser (A), joins the church, being easily
converted (29) by his pastor, the Reverend Shakewell; Clarence, the winner (B), proposes
marriage to and is accepted by (30) Lily Lassiter (E) ; while Wiltshire, the man who neither
won nor lost, convinced that poker playing is a tremendous loss of time, energy and health buys
(31) a near-defunct magazine (F) entitled, "The Organ for the Abolishment of Inefficient
Pastimes and Pursuits."
Case XI.
(The "eye muscle" elemental combination, working analagously to the manner in which
the superior oblique eye muscle, although helping the inferior rectus muscle to pull the
eye down for reading, also supplies an "intort" to neutralize the unwanted "outtort" of
the inferior rectus.)
REQUIRED: That an incident 28 between two plot threads A and B be helped or created by
both 27 and 26 with C and D; but of such nature that certain elements of 27 will also neutralize
certain elements of 26 that otherwise would have prevented 28.
Example: This will be just a bit strained or fantastic, but it is desired to show clearly the specific
action of this double-hinged elemental combination. Required, therefore, that Minna Furlong
(A), a former sharpshooter in the circus, shall fulfill a gypsy's prediction that she shall die "by
the knife" and "by her own hand" (28) the thread B being the dagger she actually uses.
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Her fit of discouragement is due to two things: First that a psychological thief who can find
hiding places, Shifty Morris (C), steals from her (27) her special circus revolver, an
odd-calibred weapon which uses a cartridge not now manufactured, of which her husband has
locked up the only box obtainable, and the revolver is concealed in a spot known apparently
only to her and her son, from which she deduces erroneously that this son, the apple of her eye,
is a certain holdup man who has been appearing in the locality.
Her fit of "nerves" is also occasioned by her despair at the sloppy and happy-go-lucky attitude
of her husband, John Furlong (D), a former circus juggler or knife thrower, who (in 26) was
engaged in cutting off, with a juggler's dagger, for fishing sinkers, the tips of a few of these rare,
special and unobtainable cartridges of which he possesses her only box, and who was
interrupted therein, leaving the outfit strewn over the grand piano!
You will note that she commits suicide as a result of 27 and 26; but 27 gets rid of the gun that
would have assuredly been used with the cartridges of 26, and would have thus prevented the
proper 28.
Case XII.
(The quadrangular polygon, frequently appearing in short-stories.)
Four threads shall form, by their deviations and intersections, a quadrangular

relationship.
I take the liberty of giving only a very slightly altered version of a short-story I sold about 13
years ago.
Example: Ronald Baer (A), president of the Cherry Valley Interurban Traction Company and
Robert Holly (B), a young man who loves Baer's daughter, have a stormy argument about the
latter's suit and break up in a rage (28). Baer goes to his daughter, Natalie (C), who works in the
office of the company, and ordering her limousine taken away from her, commands her (29) to
walk home each day from work, which will carry her along the traction line and through the
Red Rock Tunnel. Holly goes out and agitates for a strike, bringing it under way at 30. (A
strike, being a terminable, creatable, deviatable and deviating thing, can function as a plot
thread. The girl (C) walking home, and going through the short dark tunnel, gets her foot caught
in a frog inside of the tunnel just as a heavy interurban car is bearing down on her; and is saved
from death (31) by the strike (sudden cessation of electricity from powerhouse).
Case XIII.
[(a.) The tale, news story, atmospheric short-story, or "Pilgrim’s Progress" plot.]
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Incidents develop along a thread, but have no causal relationship, one with another, so
that any one could be left out.
Most tales, also news stories, as well as atmospheric short-stories, which merely narrate the
various incidents occurring between two vital incidents, are of this structure; so, also, may be
said to be "Pilgrim's Progress," in which Christian (A), the central character, solves one problem
after another, but none has any particular relation toward any other except chronological. One
or several could be omitted without detracting from the coherence of the whole. For instance,
Christian's encounter (28) with the Giant Despair (B) does not in the least bear upon his
struggle (29) with the Slough of Despond. Or, also, the order of each could even be reversed.
Case XIII
[(b.) Adventure stories, etc.]
is a peculiar variation of the preceding form in which B, C, D, E, F, etc., are all one
thread, thus:
Case XIII-b is found in many treasure island serials and treasure-hunting stories, and adventure
stories of all sorts. The various encounters (28, 29, 30, 31, 32) between the two parties (A and
B) hunting the treasure throw the balance acutely first to one, and then to the other, keeping the
reader "set up." I particularly remember that "The Pirate Woman," by Captain A. E. Dingle,
which appeared first in The Argosy, and of which I bought "second rights" for a magazine I
edited, was thus constructed in the main: many of the encounters on a certain island could have
been left out, or an editor wishing to condense the story could have dropped out several
segments of the one thread and corresponding convulutions of the other thread (see diagram)
and, joining together the broken parts, could have had a novelette instead of a novel.
(The Row-of-Bricks plot, frequently found in short-stories.)
Incidents develop along a thread, and depend one upon the other, although the threads
have no further use in the story or relationship with each other.
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The second previous figure, Figure 19, will show this pattern, but the example must be
different, for instance:
Example: A tramp electrical lineman, David Lauriston (A), meets a girl, Myrene Cary (B), in a
small steel town called Tippingdale, and is actuated to apply for a job in the steel mills, under a
foreman Ferguson (C), who dispatches him out on a dangerous high-tension job involving
22,000 volts, with a villain helper, Red McAfee. (D), necessitating his first instructing a power
operator, old Sam Webb (E), to keep a certain high-tension circuit open. Because of not being
sure of Webb's reliability, he goes to a life insurance agent, Hooker (F), who, scanning his
application for life insurance, is enabled to drop Lauriston a tip that sends the latter to his
long-lost father, Chase Lauriston (G) (not shown in diagram).
You will note that the incidents are like a row of up-ended bricks, where one brick, in toppling
forward, topples the next one forward, and thus through to the end. Many, many short-
stories—even 0. Henry's—are of this structure; although 0. Henry also used the quadrangular
polygon as well.
Case XV.
(The Scheherezade plot, or pseudo-web.)
A chief character merely narrates a number of incidents for a purpose, in the narrating
of which only are new characters brought into the structure—but these characters are in
turn brought into a relationship with still other characters, which relationship consists
chiefly of hearing their stories of how they met still further characters; the whole thing
when diagrammed presents the appearance only of a fungus growth on the thread
constituting the narrator, or main character. (The reason this impractical form of plot is
here designated is that, in small elements, it is used to give sub-plots, unconnected
with a main plot, that will motive a character in some odd or bizarre happenings difficult
otherwise to motive.) (See Chapter IX, Mechanics.)
The chief example of Case XV is "The Arabian Nights" where Scheherezade (A) spins, night
after night, a new conglomeration of relationships which, however much they seem to resemble
a web, are merely a sort of tree-like formation, with trunks, branches, and twigs.
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It is so done as to provide hundreds of simple stories—really tales—although the real story all
the time is that of Scheherezade (A) herself.
NOW we are done with these elemental plot combinations. No doubt, as in the field of biology,
there are sports and mutations of these, as well as new elemental combinations themselves
which have never yet been born. What I want to do now, however, is to show you a huge
number of these elemental combinations blended together into a single web-work plot, the
telling of whose story and the full presentation of whose relationships demanded 104,000
words. And what will be of most interest, perhaps, is how this web was started and how other
webs, likewise, both small and large, may be started in a similar manner.
In the next installment of this series, Mr. Keeler reaches the heart of his subject. One of his
popular mystery novels, published both in America and abroad, "The Voice of the Seven
Sparrows," will be diagrammed and analyzed. The method by which it was built up will be
shown step by step.
XXII
A TRUE web-work plot consists of a plot structure in which many or all of the 15, Elemental
Plot Combinations described in part III appear combined and recombined one with the other
and all, of course, in the same narrative.
On pages 18 and 19 of this issue of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST appears a complete
diagram or graph of the mystery novel "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows" (by Harry Stephen
Keeler) which appeared serially on both sides of the Atlantic and likewise as a book on both
sides, being issued by Hutchinson and Company of London and E. P. Dutton and Co., of New
York.
Our diagram, as seen in the black numbered spots (the unnumbered crossings of threads do not
count; they are merely due to our having to use a sheet of paper to represent characters moving
three-dimensionally) emphasizes that the novel contains 80 markedly deviative incidents which
change the destiny or course of one or all of the participants therein, either immediately or
subsequently.
We also find that the novel contains 34 plot threads—some active, some passive—of which 18
figure in the plot both antecendent to the opening of the actual narrative, as published, and the
course of the narrative itself 7 appear only in the antecendent conditions; and 9 appear only in
that portion of the plot which develops after the story has opened.
It will be seen (by the typewritten scale at the top of the graph) that the plot structure lying back
(to the left) of the opening of the story (39) covers 500 years from the incident (1) which serves
as an opening gun for the creation of the plot. It will likewise be noted that once the story opens
(39) it requires from then to the close (80) exactly 4 days 15 1/2 hours.
It might be of interest also to note that one plot thread consisting of two steel garden spades
(entering 17 from 14, and thence into 18) is carried from 18 to 35 as an idea only, which at 35 is
transmogrified by one of the villains into a symbol or deuce of spades; indeed, into a great
number of such!
It may be noted from the graph alone that several incidents—notably No. 17, a wreck on the
Pacific—deviates 5 vital characters into 5 channels, different from those they were already in.
presenting thus a quintuple variation of Elemental Plot Combination No. X.
Just as one plot thread was, for part of its course, an idea, so does another plot thread consist of
a purely abstract conception, namely the Chinese game of Yeng-San, which, changing the
destiny of humans and itself being changed and affected by outside factors (i. e. being banned
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by the Chinese government) constitutes a thoroughly conventional plot thread.
It will also be noted that the heavy black line represents not only the "viewpoint character,"
Absalom Smith, the hero, but the story itself. The events are viewed through his eyes, and the
reader as a rule has no cognizance of what has taken place elsewhere until Absalom Smith, in
some certain incident, learns of it.
In the key to the graph (in small type below) the opening incident of the narrative, number 39,
is given the bold-face letter A to indicate that it is the first to be brought under the reader's
scrutiny. The incidents thereafter, as they actually take place before the eyes of the reader, are in
turn lettered B, C, D, etc. The unlettered incidents lie outside of the viewpoint character's
progress, and are brought to his (and the reader's) attention only indirectly, through the mouths
of others, or by direct abortive lapses from viewpoint.
The chart does not show at what exact point in the story a character becomes aware of an old
incident in the plot; that is, while I can show how in actual time Beatrice Mannerby's creation of
the spurious Ng Yat newspaper story (30) occurs two months prior to the opening of the
narrative, I cannot show how Absalom Smith, the hero, learns of her little bit of feminine
ingenuity only almost at the end of the narrative, i. e. in incident 75, where Beatrice, now
technically under arrest, tells what she did. But I will endeavor later to give a principle or two
covering this ever-present problem of story presentation.
XXIII
BEFORE going briefly into the specific matter of how all web-works are started, including this
one, it might be well to preface such a question with a few remarks as to the philosophy and
general methods of such composition.
In the first place, why a web-work anyway?
Is not the following explanation of it wholly acceptable? Aside from normal interest in dramatic
happenings, is it not true that in every human being is a longing—an instinctive hunger—to
believe that life, in its great complexity and utter meaningless involvements, does move in a
regulated manner; that it is not all incoherent, all mixed up and utterly without pattern, but that
the whole thing is mathematically accurate in its causes and effects? We see it proved frequently
in small limited relationships and we often call such proof "poetic justice."
But on the large stage represented by years, oceans, continents, and infinite numbers of
reactions between people, the thing is not so susceptible of proof.
Life, on the larger scale, though full of effects which are the direct results of causes, is
apparently plotless. It is too complex. There has never yet appeared in life a causal relationship
involving even 80 incidents and 34 strands that can be as unified as one artificially created. And
it is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of fife twisted into a
pattern mathematically and geometrically true, that fills the gaps in one's spirit which rebels at
the looseness of life as it apparently is.
" Should one aim for plot or for story?" I give you this answer: The author should imagine
himself as possessing, so to speak, a near-sighted eye and a far-sighted eye. The near-sighted
eye should watch the developments being built into the story and concentrate on its job, for this
is the story which the reader is going to follow before the curtain begins to lift and show him
the web-work plot back of it all. But all the time the far-sighted eye must be watching two
things: First, will the developments in the story help to weave a more structurally satisfying
plot? Second, will the plot as thus far built help to provide interesting developments (in the
story) for the nearsighted eye to concentrate upon?
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Naturally a change in story may necessitate a change in plot, or vice versa; with every change,
some distortion of the whole structure may take place. The web-work at times literally seems to
quiver like a sea of jelly. Every tap of the hammer makes a dozen changes necessary. But
gradually as both the story and plot develop together, it becomes more and more stable, till
finally it is as near perfect as it can be made.
The story intrigues the editor, but the plot sells it to him.
XXIV
THERE is, sticking forth in every webwork plot, the crumbling relic of a preliminary structure
that to the technician marks the initial simple structure—or move—from which the entire plot
was created. And sometimes, too, this structure is so admirably preserved that the terrible
seesawings and agonies of the plot-maker have not destroyed its pristine beauty and classic
lines !
This brings us to a statement of a mental process which eleven years ago was first enunciated by
this writer and was named by the publisher of THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST "The Keeler
Law." It was then stated in a form calculated by this writer to give it mathematical definiteness
(and a headache to the non-mathematical) and because I am still hoping for some royalties from
Mr. Emerson, owner of Bromo-Selzer, I will re-state it as it was stated in 1916. It ran, as I
phrased it:
In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with

threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an
opening incident of numerical order "n" (with respect to the incidents in the conditions
precedent) there must be invented a following incident "n + 1" involving threads A and
C; an incident "n + 2" involving threads A and D; an incident "n + 3" involving threads
A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least "n + 4” or "n + 5"; and furthermore "n" must
cause "n +1"; "n + 1" must cause "n + 2"; "n + 2” must cause "n + 3" etc.
Because already I am beginning to feel shaky about the possibility of receiving those Bromo-
Selzer royalties, or even a free bottle, I will re-state this "law" today, after eleven years, as the
following simple rule:
When you create a (web-work) plot you will have to begin the creation with a short
row-of-bricks plot (as described under Elemental Plot Combination No. XIV) which may
remain intact or which may proceed to derive itself from the subsequently invented
structure by any of the other 14 elemental plot combinations.
In 1922 Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, in his "Fundamentals of Fiction Writing," attacked the above
stated law as "the last word in formula." It is more than possible, of course, that Mr. Hoffman
misconstrued the statement of the law as supposedly declaring that a plot must definitely be
built in that way, rather than that the mind must follow that formula only in initiating the plot. If
he did not thus misconstrue it, my chief defense to his allegation that "this is the last word in
formula" is that it has brought many thousands of dollars into my till; many books and
magazine serials out under my name; and many hundreds of newspaper reviews in papers in
America, the British Isles, New, Zealand, Australia, British India and South Africa. As editor
for many years of a magazine devoted to adventure stories—and Adventure was one of the most
successful and profitable magazines ever issued, as well as one showing that a popular
magazine may attain a real dignity—Mr. Hoffman has been confronted with plots that are
prolongations of Elemental Cases II, III, XIIIa and XIIIb, and XIV, varied by entanglements
here and there with one or another combination. Whereas the law I have stated refers to
web-works. And if he will tell me how one may create a set of complicated yet correllated
dramatic relationships without deriving them from an initial set already created, I will be glad to
learn of it. If he can make of me furthermore sufficiently a gambler in a literary sense that I will
work out a number of initial incidents in the optimistic hope that the rest of my plot will provide
the entire compulsion for these incidents, he can invest me with a great deal of courage which I
do not have: for when it comes to time and energy, I want—and so do you, I believe—in case
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invention fails and balks, as it so frequently does, to have the structure on which all else hangs
sound in itself, able to stand on its own feet, depending on nothing and nobody for its
compulsion.
But let us get down to examples. You may, as time goes on, watch all stories. For the present,
the closest story at hand is the one that has been graphed and to which there is a printed key on
page 18.
XXV.
IF you will note carefully, Absalom Smith. the hero, is brought successively and quite early in
the narration, into an encounter with six or seven other characters of some importance in the
structure. Each of the first incidents brings him into relation with a new (to the reader)
character. In No. 39 he receives a $1000 offer, subject to certain provisions, from Snell, City
Editor of the Argus; in No. 40, he visits Monte van Tine, a young clubman; in No. 41 he has an
encounter with "Sam Barker," his enemy, on the steps of the Argus, in which he foolishly drops
a hint that he has an inside tip to things. In No. 42, he calls on Ambrose Smith, his brother, to try
to get a loan to reach New Orleans and follow his tip; in No. 43, his father gives him everything
he has in the world to reach New Orleans; in 44 he calls on Albert Wick, an acquaintance, to
make certain arrangements about his mail. In No. 45 he receives a (supposed) photograph of
Beatrice Mannerby whom he is trying to locate. Thus, one after another, his path has been made
(by the author) to cross the paths of a number of very actively functioning factors in the plot,
and also a few which proved (for the author) to be nearly "duds." Yet had the author not made
these crossings, he would not have had even the nucleus of this web. And the philosophy of
these early crossings is—or should be—obvious. It is necessary (in initiating the plot) that the
viewpoint character make a number of rapid crossings with other characters or threads, so that
they may be gotten into the network—so that the author may begin to weave! Just so sure as the
strands are kept down by not sufficient crossings in the beginning, there is nothing to weave
with—or else the web-work will be no more complex than the pigtail down a little Dutch girl's
back. In this story (the serial form) the narration opens in the first paragraph establishing
Absalom Smith's point of view. In the next six hours, seven incidents involving him take place,
each introducing a different character or object. Thus and thus only is thrown into existence a
set of strands by which the weaving of that which is to lie ahead of the story is to take place,
and also that which is to follow. I was many years discovering this fact, but only a few days in
discovering the philosophy of it. I have found that unless one deliberately projects a number of
characters in quick succession into a story, one will flounder helplessly in trying to build up a
web-work.
It should be emphasized here, however, and before we proceed a step further, that in the final
manuscript, as completed by the author, the narrative may not necessarily open at the point
where this preliminary invention or row-of-bricks "trial plot" was begun, even if this original
row-of-bricks structure has remained unchanged, as so frequently happens. The opening curtain
may ultimately be placed back of all this, or it may be placed midway in it, in which case some
of the incidents in this row-of-bricks plot will lie in the "conditions precedent."
But we will later clarify all these points of a highly important principle, by actual
demonstration.
XXVI.
Why, someone asks, must each incident in this preliminary half dozen be a direct resultant of
the previous incident? That is because at this point there is no fully developed set of incidents
back of the "weaving board" (the opening of the story) from which any of these early incidents
may be derived by the process of invention; nor is there any later plot either. It is, in fact, from
this early "invention" that all else is woven, to the left, to the right. Therefore it must stand on
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its own feet, since it supports the webwork, not the webwork it; and since it may prove
impossible to derive any of its incidents from the portion of the plot that covers "conditions
precedent."
In "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows," tracing up this causation and comparing it with certain
crude notes and diagrams on pieces of manilla paper still in the author's possession, it appears
that only two incidents were re-derived: that is, the original plot notes show that the young
newspaperman gets the offer (39) ; to try and make a loan, he goes to his friend, the young
clubman who gives him the tip and the story of how he was doublecrossed in lieu of a loan (40)
; therefore he goes to the villain to have it out (41) ; having in his anger dropped a tip to the
villain he goes reluctantly to his successful and sarcastic brother to make the loan (42) ; being
refused, he goes with equal reluctance to his partly paralyzed father to make the loan (43);
having got it, he goes to a friend and arranges for having his mail forwarded to New Orleans
(44) ; he then digs up a picture of the missing person (45).
This "beautiful" structure got altered by the plot which was woven to create it, but not so badly
altered but that it still looms up indisputably as the preliminary organization of incidents from
which the 80-incident affair must have been evolved. It is because through the lightning-like
sifting and cementing and eroding process of invention this structure often partly vanishes,
leaving only its ruins, that Mr. Hoffman descries the "law" as the last word in formula.
As an example of this "vanishing," the author in this story saw, after his preliminary row-of-
bricks invention, that there were too many "goings to get a loan" with the consequent danger of
monotony from using the same motive. In fact, there were three such. So he reduced these to
two (42 and 43), by having the hero sent for (40) by the young clubman as a result of the latter's
having been a private secretary (26) and knowing all about a certain "doublecrossing." As a
result of another change of derivation, he had the hero receive (45) the picture of the missing
girl, through a certain sub-plot, instead of digging it up, and moreover was thus enabled to foist
a spurious photo on the reader and cover up the identity of the heroine. Still further, to
demonstrate how that part of the plot which evolves from the initial "row-of-bricks" (to the
right) can change an incident therein, the refusal of the loan by the sarcastic brother (42) is
made to drag, in certain additional matters concerning a Japanese oil well and playing cards,
etc., which prove very advantageous to the later plot. For an incident, like a human being, can
be "fat" or "skinny."
But because this preliminary structure as originally invented by the author was a perfect row-of-
bricks in itself, following the law stated, had none of these things come up, had none of these
changes been made, it could still, in a sense, have thumbed its fingers to its nose as far as the
world was concerned, and could have supported the entire 80 incidents.
XXVIII.
Yet could this law, you ask yourself a little skepticallv, be after all the beautiful theory of a
theorist? As I write this part of the series on web-work plot, I step into the adjoining room off
my studio and tear from the morning Chicago Tribune the synopsis of Louis Tracy's story "The
Woman in the Case," running in the Tribune. I have not read the story, and probably never shall,
but let us see what we shall see:
SYNOPSIS:
John Arden, returning to his rooms at the Palace Hotel. London, in the early hours of the
morning, breaks his key in the lock and is given a room in a luxurious suite by the night
watchman, who assures him that the rooms are untenanted. He is about to retire when
two women enter the apartment. One is addressed as Esmee and the other as Mrs.
Sinclair. Arden, hiding, hears them speak of the sudden death of Lord Farndale. Without
being observed he lets himself out of the apartment. The next morning he reads of the
mysterious death of a peer. A little later he sees Esmee on the street and is not far from
her when she is knocked down by a motorcycle. Her dress is torn and he offers her his
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raincoat. She accepts it and he offers to get her a taxi, telling her that they live in the
same hotel. She tells him that she and her aunt have left the Palace, but says she will
drop him at the hotel.
Now following this only for the first half of the above paragraph, you will note that John Arden,
or thread A, crossed in succession a series of threads: B, a night watchman; later, at the same
moment, C and D, Esmee and Mrs. Sinclair; and, through overhearing their conversation about
a certain Lord Farndale, a thread E; and you will also note that A crossed B because A lost his
key: and A crossed C and D because of B giving him certain rooms, and he crossed E through
overhearing the conversation between C and D. You will notice you have not seen an old
plotmaster like Louis Tracy having two women discuss philosophy, cake-baking, or kissproof
lipstick at a time when he is working at high pressure to get threads into his story, namely Lord
Farndale, who if he is really dead will obviously function no further in the following part of the
plot, but who (from parts of the synopsis I have later seen) has evidently been very actively
used in the conditions precedent.
But one of my readers who has been kind enough to read the proof thus far on this series and
has accepted the statement about the necessity of creating the preliminary psychological
structure, asks how this preliminary structure existing in "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows"
itself came to be invented. instead of some other structure following the A, B — n, n + 1 law,
etc. And although such explanations involve to some extent dramatic considerations, on which
subject a book also could be written, I am glad to follow the thing out exactly as found on those
manilla notes filed away in a desk drawer.
XXIX.
THERE were no particular ideas in the beginning for what came to be "The Voice of the Seven
Sparrows" beyond that of developing a human drama by the intersection of a character with a
web of relationships. It was the intention, therefore, to create that web. As a starter, however,
one must have the thread which should intersect the web and provide the drama, and so the
author created a likable, fairly typical young fellow, capable of acting the part of a hero and
interpreting affairs clearly enough to be a good viewpoint character for an average reader. Since
the average reader must be made to enter into close accord with a hero—must "feel" events
from his viewpoint as well as "see" them—it seems essential that the hero selected should have
no repellent traits of character and should not be too extreme in any particular—just a pleasant.
earnest, chivalrous, ambitious. healthy-minded young fellow, whose personality the reader
could be led to assume without repugnance. The necessity of later inventions will motive this
hero more definitely; so one must start with a character who shall be highly elastic. yet
acceptable even to the most cynical. Thus Absalom Smith came into existence, but at that early
stage any name would do for him, and the author's notes show, in fact, that he bore a number of
names, beginning with "Kenton Jeffries," since it was not until the plot was fairly developed
that the need was discovered for the most common name in the world, Smith—yet preceded by
a pre-name that should be uncommon.
As the hero stood here, the author was led to try him out as a newspaperman. It was at that
critical point that one story of many millions commenced to be spun, woven, cemented or built.
At the beginning incident of the whole invention, a million stories are trembling to be
crystallized on the black ribbon of the typewriter, like those fairy babies of Maeterlinck who
were all waiting to be born. Had the author here made his hero an engineer, a society man, a
steel mill employee. a negro slave in Timbuctoo, or any other of thousands of individuals, the
whole course of the story would have been different.
But, deciding on the hero as being a newspaperman, before the author could begin to weave
there must be more threads. So Smith—to call him by the name finally used—was decreed to be
out of a job, which allowed him to be brought into forcible relationship with another character,
city editor of the Argus, who might have a job lying around loose. Had Smith gotten the job,
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that might have been the end of the story, but possessing the scars of many encounters with
vicious and intractable plots, the author did not end his story on the first incident following the
opening. He made the city editor give the young man an offer of $1000 to locate some missing
person.
One character thus crystallized a second character, and sufficient motive power was introduced
to propel the first character directly at several more. Moreover, a handy note of mystery was
created by the nature of the assignment given to the reporter, and one of those very, very
fortunate things was created: a "free" thread; the "him," "her," or "it" who had disappeared!
XXX.
THESE "free" threads, capable of being held in reserve for a long time and of being objectified
into many things, are the handiest weapons the plot-maker-can have. It is a dollar in the bank
against a hungry day—a bone in Father Plotmaker's cupboard. It wasn't until quite a bit of plot
had been actually woven that this free thread was made one Beatrice Mannerby, daughter of a
rival publisher. It could have been an old college professor. Mayor Big Bill Thompson of
Chicago (perhaps kidnapped by the English), the city editor's own son, a rival publisher, some
musical comedy actress, or a Chinese xzylophonist. Sufficient it was that an editor said "X has
disappeared. Locate X for us, and you can have our thousand bucks reward."
The author was not uncognizant all this time that a story must have romance. and that a thread
constituting a lovely girl introduced into the initial structure will result in the lovely girl's
assuredly being in the completed structure! But temporarily, and at the risk of creating only a
stag party, the author plowed on mentally with masculine threads only. Smith, impelled by a
S1000 offer, is sent to a man (any man) who is in a position to give him a lead on the missing
person; this man will be allowed to give the desired lead, but also additional information
tending to show Smith that he has an enemy: this will naturally send Smith around to his enemy
for a verbal set-to, in which he may be allowed to drop too many hints of the big news story that
is trembling in his "mitt," but having thus "spilled the beans," he will naturally start out to
search for a loan to follow up the tip given him: let him go therefore to one man who will refuse
him, then one man who will give it to him; with which (for certain reasons mentioned later) he
may then go to somebody, a man friend, to arrange for having his mail forwarded; this done, he
may then dig up a photograph of the missing person.
What is of chief importance here is that a webwork plot has been started. The author has
created six or more incidents, each derived roughly from the other, each involving a new thread,
and all with great potentialities. None of these strands were, in the author's mind, even woven
into a pattern. Most of them had not even been named. Figure 23 would represent the story (and
the plot!) as it thus far existed in the author's mind, the numbers referring to incidents actually
found on the graph of the completed story.
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The incidents marked T are "trial incidents" which the author may include in his preliminary
attempts at weaving; and so that any of them may be dropped independently of the others, or
interchanged.
Thread "X" is a "free" thread being tightly held on to by a desperate author!
XXXI.
HAVING reached this point, the author realizes that he must now crystallize his preliminary
threads and incidents into some objectiveness rather than hazy encounters and figureheads with
alphabetical letters for names.
He creates a definite disappearance, at last making it that of a girl called Beatrice. He sends the
hero first to a milliner, Mrs. Curtray, for whom she once worked; then to her boarding house
landlord, Mike McTegg; then to a young clubman, Monte van Tine, whom she once interviewed
on some subject; then, since Smith is in the newspaper business and engaged on a newspaper
venture, he makes the latter's enemy also a newspaperman and calls him Sam Barker; then, to
get a loan; he sends the hero unsuccessfully to the hero's own brother, whom the author puts in
the shoe business (later, the author has to change this to the oil business, but what of it?) ; then
to an old washwoman, Mrs. Murphy, who once worked for his mother; then to the hero's own
father; then to a friend, Albert Wicks, in the printing business; and then to a newspaper morgue
where the hero obtains a picture of Beatrice.
The author's diagram from which he must weave now looks like this:
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Now, having concrete strands, he commences to weave, gradually, as the story, is carried
forward. He weaves not only for possible incidents in the past, but incidents in the future.
Studying his figure 24, he evolves from it a small partial web-structure as found in figure 25, by
ratiocination much along the following line. He says: "If Barker is to be Smith's enemy and is
moreover a newspaperman, I will just make it that Smith is out on the streets, ragged and
hungry because Barker himself "double-crossed" Smith out of a good job in a certain incident
(25?), the details of which I will work out later." He then extends these two threads back to an
intersection (25?) shown. He ruminates again and says: "I believe I'll drop out the trial threads,
the milliner, the landlord, and the washwoman; I can put 'em back later if I have to." (They have
been dropped in the diagram.) Says the author: "If my hero is ultimately to succeed, like all
heroes, in his quest, his thread will cross that of the girl Beatrice." So he extends Smith's and
Beatrice's threads
both to a putative incident (108?), of which he does not bother at this point to insert the details.
"Somebody is sure to buck Smith mighty hard for reasons of his own before Smith reaches his
goal. I'll call this person Zeller, and Smith, in at least one incident (90?) (and maybe more) may
have an encounter with him." A hitherto nonexisting thread, Zeller, is now laid down and
extended to intersect with Smith's thread somewhere ahead of (108?), but the details of this
intersection are not yet invented.
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"That hazy relationship between Beatrice and Monte van Tine," the author ruminates.
"Why—I'll make her a society girl, and I'll extend their threads to some old relationship (15?) of
a social nature." He does this and continues: "Why—in fact—that—s where I'll get the desired
photograph of her (by thread birth), from his photographing her on some country club steps.
The author, therefore, extends the photo thread
back to that incident (15?) from which its existence is now supposed to be due. Says the author:
"How did this Monte get not only information about Beatrice, a society girl, but about Smith, a
newspaperman being doublecrossed? Why not because Monte was private secretary to the
owner of the paper where the doublecrossing took place? In fact, I can, if I wish, make this
owner Beatrice's father, or I can dispense with that if I will, but at any rate I'll extend Monte's
thread back to an incident (20?) where he became a private secretary to a man named
Mannerby, and that will throw a new thread, Joseph Mannerby, newspaper owner, across the
weaving board." Which is no sooner said than done.
We have now commenced to weave very definitely. I cannot carry you further than this, because
I have no more notes, and because the processes of invention are at times too swift, at other
times covering days. But it is obvious that, the existence of threads gives you that with which to
weave; and that the existence of these threads is dependent on the first creation of a hazy row-of
-bricks plot and its subsequent crystallization into colorful details of some sort.
XXXII.
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AN author creating a complicated plot does not merely weave forward. For everything that
happens to the hero and others with whom he is engaged has to be accounted for by devising
deviating actions—plot incidents—that have taken place at some time in the past. In like
manner some of his weaving, even when done after the opening "gong" of the story, is between
threads other than the viewpoint character (or characters!). Such incidents have to be brought to
the reader's knowledge in some way; but retrospective narration is not ordinarily as gripping as
direct narration. Readers do not care so much to know what has happened as what is going to
happen next. If you see a richly clad man waving his arms wildly in the window of a deserted
warehouse which is on fire, your first thought is not: "How did that man happen to be in that
warehouse?" but "How can the fireman rescue him?" Only after he is safely out will we begin to
inquire about the details of his presence there.
This example conveys an approximate idea of the relative effectiveness of retrospective and
direct narration. But in nearly all long fiction, particularly mystery stories, retrospect is a
necessity.
At what points, then, in the story should this retrospective narration be given? The point usually
determines itself. If given where it relieves curiosity tension, and withheld where it will destroy
suspense, it is being handled as properly as by any rule I could give.
I would ask you to note, as applicable of a principle, that in the plot graph published in the
October AUTHOR & JOURNALIST, one certain incident in Wong's thread—No. 25—his
getting a job on the Leader and becoming "Sam Barker"—was held back clear until the end of
the story. The reader never sees the plot as you see it in that graph until the missing incident is
supplied at the end. And that point is a very important point to the writer. For when the second
comes that the reader sees the graph (or the relationships on the graph are completely and fully
given to him), the story is over.
Another point, equally important.
What of the final intersections shown between any two threads on the graph—or any two
threads in a satisfying story? What, if anything, particularly characterizes these last
intersections?
When characters have told all they can, or have functioned in the last incident which is to have
a desired effect on the plot, they usually are dropped. But please note a very important point.
Where they are dropped, a point of stability has been reached with respect to their dramatic
affairs.
Let us examine a few points in the graph of "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows." In No. 36 Sing
Moy turns over an important bit of information to the T’ong. He is now stabilized so far as his
own affairs go. Incident No. 56. The Mystery Smith or "X. Y." Smith dies from shock due to the
receipt of a two-of-spades. He burns the card in addition. If there is anything more stable than a
dead man or a pile of oxidized carbohydrates, the reader is asked to dig it up for himself. And
so on up to No. 80 in which Beatrice and Absolom plight their troth. This is at least
conventional stability, though the cynics may tell us that only now is real instability created.
Just so much as these various terminal intersections of threads bring about stability for each or
one, just so much will the reader f eel, at the end of the narrative, that the drama has been
played out.
XXXIII.
A NUMBER of questions have doubtless arisen in a number of minds. I know, because they
arose in my own mind throughout the years, and because they have been asked me personally
42 of 43 22/03/11 23:05
and at writers' gatherings. I have agreed to answer pertinent questions through THE AUTHOR
& JOURNALIST, and shall be glad to do so. One query may be anticipated. It is:
Do you diagram all your own stories in the way "The Voice of the Seven Sparrows” was
diagrammed, before you commence to write?
My answer is no. The full diagramming as was done here is helpful in an analytic study of plot.
I have diagrammed other stories, to be sure, particularly those of Bertram Lebhar, who was an
instinctive and natural web-work plottist of splendid ability; but such diagramming has been
done distinctly for the study of plot. Doing this and deriving principles from it has been a
perfect exemplification of the inductive process of logic. I do, however, often diagram fractional
parts of my own story, in the initial plotting, in order to see what strands I have available, and to
see just what a certain tentative conception gives. For the most part I go by an acquired sense of
feel.
In conclusion, my main idea has been to teach you neither a method nor a rule for building
narrative, but to give you—as much as was in my power—this "feel" of plot. Much of my own
work, and perhaps the majority of the work of professional writers, has been done only through
the "plot feel,” without any acute consciousness of the principles that might be its cause.
It is only through a purely inductive process, and a personal love of inductive reasoning, that I
have worked backward, as it were, and endeavored to find what similar factors existed in all of
that which was known as plot."
To those interested in plot, if I have given you any new principles, I am glad. If you have only
the plot feel, you have something more than half a dozen principles. And if you have any
unasked questions that were not answered in this series, the author would like to say that he
maintains open house on Friday evenings at his mystery workshop, at 1321 Addison Boulevard,
Chicago, and you are invited—if you are in Chicago by any chance—to come and propound
then, without the necessity of calling by phone or by introduction, other than that you met him
in THE AUTHOR & JOURNALIST.
And as Trader Horn would say, "I bid you a fond adieu! Aye!"
THE END
The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web-Work Plot Construction

at Spineless Books
43 of 43 22/03/11 23:05

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THE MECHANICS AND KINEMATICS OF WEB WORK ... http://www.spinelessbooks.com/keeler/mechanics/index.

The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of

Just what is it?

By allowing "chronological and spatial relationship" to ride as "relationship"; letting "incidents"

But now to consider motivation solely.

MOTIVING consists of the providing of the proper character to react in a given

MOTIVATING consists of providing the proper conditions and causes in a given

(b) natural laws of physics, light, matter, etc.

Motiving and motivating are changing phenomena when they involve

"You go to bed with most of you in ointment boxes hid:

Now a moment ago I promised those who wished to be ultra-consistent—the academically

GIVEN: Pendleton Wesbey, a young man, son of a clergyman, and student of

GIVEN: Pogwallow College is a small, narrow, jerkwater educational institution

A BRIEF mention should be made now of some of the anomalies of motivation.

PART II—THE KINEMATICS

(1) The plot incident, which may be

(2) The plot thread, which may be

Unlike motives themselves, which cannot be shown in a diagram—that is, we cannot

Survey the following diagram:

It may be presented by the following bit of life:

Phineas T. Tanneyday, a bibliophile, is on West Madison Street near Halsted at 3:18 P. M. of

which might be readable as

Such geometrical superimposition would not necessarily be enough in itself to create an

And do not disregard that word "deviational."

PART III—THE 15 ELEMENTAL PLOT COMBINATIONS

same two threads.

Two threads engaged in a succession of 3 plot incidents in which each incident is an

Although A and C suffer a deviation by 27, number 28 is a result of 25.

Now going back along the other thread.

Now one more complicated one!

Much simpler in picture form, as shown above.

Now back along the other thread:

(When new threads are born.)

(The quadrangular polygon, frequently appearing in short-stories.)

Four threads shall form, by their deviations and intersections, a quadrangular

[(b.) Adventure stories, etc.]

(The Row-of-Bricks plot, frequently found in short-stories.)

(The Scheherezade plot, or pseudo-web.)

by the Chinese government) constitutes a thoroughly conventional plot thread.

In the first place, why a web-work anyway?

In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with

Thread "X" is a "free" thread being tightly held on to by a desperate author!

Another point, equally important.

The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web-Work Plot Construction

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