Writing Mistake #7: Starting at the Beginning, Finishing at the End

Yes, yes, yes, Aristotle said that plot must have a beginning, middle, and end. He is also responsible for stating the Earth was the center of the universe, undoing many more accurate theories until the time of Nicolaus Copernicus. Even Syd Field, despite never writing anything himself, created an entire Hollywood screenwriting industry by basically ripping off Aristotle's Poetics, his beginning, middle, and end.

My day begins with me waking up and ends with me falling asleep. This is the structure of my day, but it isn't the story. While I cannot presume to fully understand what Aristotle had in his mind when he described plot, I can at least use my analytical skills to carry forth a similar analysis. What Aristotle seems to have most accurately described is a plot structure.

By this I do not mean that Aristotle describes plot, nor story. He describes a plot structure that coincidentally follows the main story arch. What I'm stating is that my life doesn't start when I wake up on any given morning. I can even argue that it didn't start the moment I was born or conceived. Who we are is part of the continuum that has come before us. Such is the way of story.

Story never simply begins. Like us, it is the continuation of the many stories that have come before. Nor does it end. It becomes the prelude for many stories to come. Yet we often force story into the Once upon a time beginnings, into the happily ever after endings.

Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. She had, by a former husband, two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things. He had likewise, by another wife, a young daughter, but of unparalleled goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world.

~beginning from Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper (France, Charles Perrault)

Reading a story should be like visiting a friend; the visit never fully encapsulates who they are.

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

~beginning from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Life is a constant state of being in medias res, and story should be no different. To clarify my own analysis, I maintain the tradition of the three part plot structure, but provide more meaningful descriptions for the function of each. While Aristotle himself did not use the English words beginning, middle, and end they have become stuck in the Western mind along with all the baggage that they carry.

Maintaining the three-part structure is culturally important. Much of what we do as writers depends on the expectation of readers, regardless if we use or abuse that expectation. Therefore I choose to use a three-part structure as my common building block as Aristotle did before me and many others have in-between. Three has also been shown to be psychologically significant to the individual. Two parts of something is most often experienced as insufficient while four parts of something is often experienced as over abundant.

I dispense with Aristotelian terms in favor of the more specific terms context, tension, resolution. These are not merely replacements for the old terms. What I'm describing is a plot structure, not a story structure. While the overall plot structure, for which the story binds, follows this, substructures within the overall plot will also follow this form.

In other words, instead of thinking of your plot as a series of plot points leading from one plot point to another, plot can be thought of as a series or relationship of plot structures, where each structure contains its own context, tension, and resolution, which in turn leads to the same overall structure. This method of understanding plot better illustrates the movement and therefore function of plot, and clearly distinguishes the function of plot from that of story.

Briefly stated, context introduces and grounds your audience to the elements of your story. Context is distinct from exposition in that context does not expose but creates a foundation to build tension. Exposition fits more with story than plot and occurs throughout a story. Context establishes the baseline or control that will contrast with the resolution. Context is not a beginning but a premise.

Tension introduces dissonance to your context. This dissonance will generally come from one of four areas: an antagonist, nature, society, or the self. The function of tension is to threaten or distort the established context. Tension is in the middle relative to context and resolution, but this distinction is not relevant from a timeline perspective.

Resolution restates context. The point of any story is to transform context by tension with the result being resolution. In terms of the audience, the purpose of story is to understand the relationship between resolution and context; it is to understand how and why one moves to point B from point A. By no means is a resolution an ending; it may very well be the beginning of something new.

With this brief introduction to plot structure, it becomes critical to point out that story never begins nor ends. To state story begins with one arbitrary point is to disavow the importance of everything that has come before; to state story ends at another arbitrary point is to state nothing else matters. In both cases the story becomes self-serving and not relevant to anything but itself.