During my undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan, a visit to the Arts Theatre to watch staged plays was a part of my schedule. In the few minutes before the beginning of the play, the student thespians held an open-air fanfare to boost ticket sales and warm up. One of their most popular ditties was one aimed at the Department of Philosophy, which occupied the same building as theirs. From its original West African Pidgin, it can be translated thus: ‘I am happy today/That I did not study Philosophy/Philosophers suffer too much/Theatre set me free.’
The ditty was a reference to their observation of a gloomily sober mood of most of their schoolmates in the Philosophy Department, a sobriety they believed was produced by their preoccupation in abstractions. Most students considered the two disciplines to be diametric opposites of each other, one preoccupied with abstractions and the other with concrete performances.
One of my majors was literature, and I often wondered where we belonged in the dichotomy. But when I gave it a deeper thought, I realized that there really was no dichotomy; the ditty was simply a joke meant to lighten the atmosphere and sell tickets. Like philosophers, theatre artists also studied abstract theories and histories of drama; nevertheless, for theatre artists the abstract ideas took one further step, they became flesh and blood, props and scenery, that are visible. We in literature did not enjoy this concretization. Our task ended with writing. Did that move us closer to philosophers in abstraction? Only if one considers staging as the only way to concretize ideas. Fiction writers are preoccupied by the same things that engross philosophers, abstract ideas like ambition, betrayal, death, life, love, hate, and many more. In this piece, I will be suggesting a few ways fiction writers can convert abstract ideas into unforgettable stories.
A preliminary task that fiction writers achieve before writing the first word is to search the world of tangibles for entities that best represent the idea they want. The most important of these entities are person, place and situation, which, in technical terms, are called character, setting, and plot. Let us imagine your motivating idea to be betrayal. You need to ask yourself:
- What kind of person/character would best embody this idea?
- Where (place/setting) would betrayal culminate in the most devastating consequences?
- What situation/plot would most likely trigger or complicate betrayal?
You can start from any of them.
What kind of person/character is most likely to or would best embody this idea?
A commonly used one is a straying, abusive or abused spouse. When combined with an uncommon situation or plot, this common character can still generate a riveting story. Not so common examples abound. It might be a disgruntled gang member, or the child of an abused parent, who had witnessed and suffered part of the abuse.
Where (place/setting) would betrayal culminate in the most devastating consequences?
This is mostly determined by the person or character chosen. That is why these three steps are often taken simultaneously rather than separately. While the setting of a betraying spouse would naturally be a family, the setting of time offers opportunities for more creativity, such as the time of a crucial election when one spouse is sucked into the flurry of electioneering or the time of war when one spouse is deployed to a foreign land. It could also be set in the historical past, in the castles and towers of the chivalric times, within the fatal dynastic discords and territorial ambitions of the age of kings and queens.
What situation/plot would most likely trigger or complicate betrayal?
Again, this is determined by the two other questions. For the disgruntled gang member, the plot might be woven around a robbery operation at the end of which a gang member is dissatisfied with their share of the loot and is attracted by the enormity of the bounty placed on the leader of the gang. I pulled this from real life. There was a construction company where staff members regularly stole and sold company property, distributing the money among themselves, berating the lone staff member who always refused to receive his share of the proceeds. The day they were exposed, they intuitively became convinced that it was the uncooperative member of staff who did them in. Later, however, they discovered that it was one of the most senior employees, who was both dissatisfied with his share of the money and had long resented the fact that he had always been bypassed during promotion to the post of headman. He had figured out that if he brought the current headmen down by exposing the fraud they regularly presided over while protecting his own head, he would naturally emerge as the new and sole headman.
In another example, it could be that the abusing spouse is standing for election and the abused spouse finds themselves in a situation where they are depended on to cover up details that could bring down the politician spouse. Or it could be that the abusing spouse has been deployed to war and the abused one is faced with the choice of leaving or waiting for the return of the abuser, who would need their emotional support to reintegrate into society and who might become more abusive. It could also be the son or daughter of the abused, who had suffered part of the abuse, and now must make an end-of-life decision on behalf of the abusing parent.
Betrayal, revenge, infidelity, sometimes they all bleed together, and it becomes difficult to tell which is the central idea. It could be the first that came to the writer's mind, the one they set out with. Which of the three questions to tackle first also depends on individual writers. As indicated above, most times they are tackled at the same time, for they are indispensable to the process. It is like someone learning a new language. In the example of the English language, learners must learn the sounds that come together to form the syllables, then the syllables that form the words, then the stress, intonation, phrases, clauses, and so on. In actual speech production, these components are all produced at the same time, never individually. These are the three questions again:
- What kind of person/character would best embody this idea?
- Where (place/setting) would betrayal culminate in the most devastating consequences?
- What situation/plot would most likely trigger or complicate betrayal?
By the time they have been tackled, you will have at least a rough outline or draft, or the beginning of a story, something you can continue working on.
Written by: Igbekele S., Writing Consultant