The Plot полностью

A plot like mine, Evan Parker had called it. But in fact, was there even such a thing as “a plot like mine”? Greater minds than Jake’s (and even, he was willing to bet, than Evan Parker’s) had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself: The Quest, The Voyage and Return, Coming of Age, Overcoming the Monster, et al. The mother and the daughter in the old clapboard house—well, specifically the daughter in the old clapboard house—looked pretty likely to be a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but compelling as these stories could be, they hardly acted as stunning, surprising, twisting and hurtling stories, so compelling in themselves that they could be immune to bad writing.

Over the years of his teaching career, Jake had sat down with plenty of students who’d possessed an imperfect grasp of their own talent, though the disconnect tended to center on basic writing ability. Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader. Others believed a single detail was enough to render a character memorable, but the detail they chose was always so pedestrian: female characters merely described as “blond,” while for a man “six-pack abs”—He had them! Or he didn’t have them!—were all any reader apparently needed to know. Sometimes a writer set out sentence after sentence as an unvarying chain—noun, verb, prepositional phrase, noun, verb, prepositional phrase—without understanding the teeth-grinding irritation of all that monotony. Sometimes a student got bogged down in their own specific interest or hobby and upchucked his or her personal passion all over the page, either with an overload of less than scintillating detail or some kind of shorthand he or she thought must be sufficient to carry the story: man walks into a NASCAR meet, or woman attends reunion of college sorority friends on exotic isle (which, indeed, was how one particular honeymelon-endowed corpse had ended up on a beach). Sometimes they got lost in their pronouns, and you had to go back, over and over, to figure out who was doing what to whom. Sometimes, amid pages of perfectly serviceable or even better-than-all-right writing … absolutely nothing happened.

But they were student writers; that’s why, presumably, they were here at Ripley and why they were in Jake’s office in Richard Peng Hall. They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently engaged in their lives, or that there wasn’t enough information about NASCAR or the college sorority reunion for him to understand the significance of what was being described (or not described), or that the prose felt heavy or the dialogue meandered or the story itself just made him think so what? … they tended to nod, take notes, perhaps wipe away a tear or two, and then get down to work. The next time he saw them they’d be clutching fresh pages and thanking him for making their work in progress better.

Somehow he didn’t think that was going to be the case here.

Evan Parker could be heard making his leisurely way down the corridor, despite the fact that he was nearly ten minutes late for their appointment. The door was ajar and he entered without knocking, setting his Ripley water bottle down on Jake’s desk before taking the extra chair and angling it, as if the two of them were gathered around a coffee table for a comradely discussion rather than facing each other across a desk with any degree of formality or disparity in (nominal) authority. Jake watched him take from his canvas bag a legal pad, its topmost pages torn raggedly away. This he put on his own lap, and then—just as he had in the conference room—he crossed his arms tightly against his chest and gave his teacher an expression of not entirely benevolent amusement. “Well,” he said, “I’m here.”

Jake nodded. “I’ve been looking again at the excerpt you sent in. You’re quite a good writer.”

He had made up his mind to open with this. The use of the words “quite” and “good” had been thoroughly interrogated, but in the end this he had felt to be the best way forward, and indeed his student seemed ever so slightly disarmed.

“Well, glad to hear that. Especially since, as I said, I’m not at all sure writing can be taught.”

“And yet here you are.” Jake shrugged. “So how can I help?”

Evan Parker laughed. “Well, I could use an agent.”

Jake no longer had an agent, but he did not share this fact.