The Happiness Plot

 

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. For additional content related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

Now, The Happiness Plot…

An Out-of-Body Experience

1.

Think of the novel you’re currently reading. Or the last movie you saw. Imagine not the story, but yourself reading or watching the story. Now, treat yourself to an out-of-body experience. Let yourself hover above yourself there on the couch watching the movie, or above your bed as you read before going to sleep. Linger there for a moment, watching yourself watching or reading. Think about what it is you’re doing. Isn’t it strange? We human beings love to absorb ourselves in images of other human beings. Whether images made of words or of pictures or of both words and pictures, we simply cannot get enough of gazing at ourselves. Sometimes, even after an emotionally draining movie, I’ll head right upstairs and pick up a novel, short story, or play. One would think the rich feast of the movie would be enough for me, at least for awhile. But it isn’t. I need more narrative. I need more story. I need to keep gazing at images of my kind.

Why is this?

To answer this question, reflect now on the content of the stories you enjoy. If you had to describe what it is you’re enjoying when you read a novel or watch a movie, what would you say? Don’t focus on any particular plot. Simply consider what you’re gazing at as soon as the novel or movie begins.

Most generally speaking, what you’re gazing at are images of people on the move. Of people wanting things. All stories are essentially quest stories: an agent’s pursuit of some goal. And we love to gaze at, to contemplate, the quest because, whether we realize it or not, our own lives take the form of a quest.

A Story Is An Image of Someone’s Wanting

2.

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, The Children Act, begins with Fiona Maye, a London High Court judge, trying to calm down after a fight with her 60 year-old husband, Jack. Jack has just proposed to Fiona an “open” marriage, as he wants “one big passionate affair” before he drops dead. Fiona, of course, is beside herself. When the novel opens, Jack is in another part of the apartment and Fiona is sitting on a couch, helplessly trying to finish some work. She wants to calm down; she wants to win the argument; she wants to get her husband back.

A story is an image of someone’s wanting. Human action, in fact, is defined by the deliberate willing of some “end.” If I encounter you walking down the street, I will naturally want to know where you’re heading. If I get up from my computer, it’s because I want to get a second cup of tea, or because I need to run an errand, or because it’s time to eat. Movement by a human being needn’t always imply a deliberately willed end (I may only be half-consciously jiggling my foot). But the movement which interests us enough to want to tell a story about it is always an action that has been deliberately willed.

What makes the opening of The Children Act so compelling is that, as soon as we turn the page to Chapter One, significant motion is already well underway. Before the curtain rises Jack has already expressed his want: he’d like an open marriage. Fiona in turn already has expressed her desire for Jack to come back to reality. But our first glimpse of Fiona, in the first sentences of the novel, is of her alone, “supine on a chaise longue.” The room in which she is supine is described in a longish paragraph, but the paragraph ends with this ominous sentence: “And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.” The story train, as it were, has already left the station, and we, the readers, have to race to catch up with it. This is what the ancients called starting in medias res, “in the middle of things.” A human being starting off in pursuit of an end is interesting. A human being already in pursuit of an end that at present is mysterious to us, the readers or viewers—that’s what gets us hooked.

What Is It That We Want?

3.

The enjoyment of story is the enjoyment of wanting to know what happens next, an enjoyment driven by the question: “Will the hero or heroine of this story get what he or she wants?”

For many years while I was teaching philosophy at the university level, I used on certain occasions to open the door of my classroom and invite a random student passing by in the hallway or on the quad into my classroom. College students being great hams, they were not usually shy about being invited in to be displayed in front of a classroom of their fellow students. I did not know any of the students I picked; I did not prepare them in any way. I simply put them in front of my sniggering class and told them that I was about to ask them a question and that their job was to answer it simply and sincerely. What was the question? It was this: What, more than anything else, do you want out of your life?

Before I tell you what these students nearly unswervingly replied, I want you to ask this same question of yourself.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The End of All Our Desiring

4.

What was your answer? I’ll tell you what those students answered. They answered with the single word, happiness. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that was your answer, too.

Happiness is the supreme end of all our desiring. It is the end that structures all our other wants. Later in The Children Act, after Jack packs a bag and leaves, Fiona has the locks changed on their apartment. That’s an action, but it’s only an interim step, and a defensive one at that, toward Fiona’s goal of putting her life back as it was. It does not, all by itself, bring her the happiness she wants. Throughout our day we complete any number of actions, from taking a shower to checking email, from washing the dishes to writing a blog post. Some of these actions are more important than others. Some, such as spending time with a spouse or perhaps writing fiction, are more integral to our fulfillment. These are the actions that we feel make up our happiness.

Happiness is not something we pursue for the sake of something else. However we may define it, happiness is the summit of our desire. It makes no sense to ask someone, “But why do you want to be happy?”

Stories are about characters either succeeding or failing to achieve happiness. Not necessarily the happiness that lasts a lifetime, much less for eternity, but the happiness they feel will, at least in the circumstances of the story, put a cap on their desire. At the end of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy marks the achievement of the happiness (the “felicity”) each was looking for throughout the novel, though perhaps an even better happiness awaits them in their future married life at Pemberley. Myriad fan-fiction authors have endeavored to find out.