Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Resolution

Episode Date: September 7, 2015

Your host attempts to write a description for the Podcast. He seeks assistance from an old book, and the plot whisperer.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Resolution. Once I understood plot after working, you know, for so many years, I knew I could convey that to other writers. Martha Alderson is the plot whisperer. On her website, blockbusterplots.com, she promises that she can help any writer unlock the secrets of plot resolution. I called her up to find out how. I have these two sort of major templates I use. One is to show plot at the overall story level, which is, I call it the plot planner.

And the other is plot at the scene level, and I call that the scene tracker. Let's back up, though. I'd like to try it this way. Say I'm coming to you i'm a writer and i'm having trouble yes and i need the plot whisperer so here i am knocking on your door hello martha i need your help okay so i get contacted exactly like that with people really desperate i mean either they i'm Yes. Let's just use me. I'm worried that if I can't come up with a plot for my podcast, then I'm not going to be able to compete with the 8 million new podcasts that are out there now.

And this is really frustrating because I find plot totally boring. Well, to me now, plot is so much more than just a series of events. Plot is about a character being transformed over time by the dramatic action and what that means. You know, the deeper meaning of that transformation. without a character being changed or transformed. It's just the story doesn't have that richness and doesn't have the depth that's needed nowadays in order to really engage a reader long enough for them to sit through a whole movie or to read an entire novel. Yeah, I think the reason I'm getting so frustrated

is that everything seems to be getting judged now on plots terms. And the things I find interesting about stories like color and texture and form, they're like getting turned into little plot appendages. But the dramatic action is critical in a story because the only way we can see a character is how they react to what's happening around them. Yeah, but what about the character who reacts to what's going on around him by not changing because he's so disgusted and finds everything so awful that he's not going to change. Well, so over time, if the character at the end is as stuck in the end as that character was at the beginning, the story is not going to be very satisfying to the reader. So as the plot whisperer, then this is something you're going to insist on.

Exactly. You know, I believe that there is sort of this energetic flow that is happening around us all the time. And, you know, you see it in nature with birth and death. And, you know, it's just sort of this cycle that happens. That sort of energetic flow is moving us. And we're evolving over time because of, you know, the things that are happening around us in nature and, you know,

beyond just us as humans, but the whole, you know, planet and the universe itself. So if I was coming to you for help, this is what you would tell me, that I need to realize that I'm part of the universal story. Well, it depends. I'm kind of sensitive about that because a lot of writers that I work with are very left-brained. They're very linear. They're very logical. And it is hard to talk about the universal story because people really do sort of roll their eyes.

And it sounds so, you know, new age. Well, it's not exactly what I was hoping to hear, Martha. But what do you say to writers who are resistant to the universal story thing? As long as the writer is open, as long as they're willing to listen and willing to try something new, then they can get to where they want to go.

But, you know, for most of us, it's no outside force that's stopping us from getting our dreams. It's ourselves. It's our own sort of sense of self. And so my job then, if I'm not helping the writer get unstuck with their story, I'm sort of helping them a little bit get unstuck with themselves. You know, there's all of this sort of internal play that comes, you know, which is part of the writer's journey itself is that you too, just like you're taking your protagonist through, you know, these set of

challenges, a writer is going to go through very similar challenges. And if you're aware of those, you can see what the antagonists in your own life, what they represent. And in doing so, you can then work your way through them without getting so victimized by it and so stuck by it and you know give up and turn away from that which you really really long for the most it's like being able to see the deeper purpose of you know of of story, but really life too. It's like beyond the material it's, are we really only here to accumulate wealth and, you know, um, a mass material objects and be externally beautiful and youthful forever.

I mean, there is a deeper purpose, I believe, here, and that's beyond the veil. That's this sort of evolutionary impulse of wanting to grow and change and, you know, sort of learn more about our true essence. And if we can convey that in a story or for the reader to learn it through a story, it allows the reader then on a deep and profound level to be moved and transform themselves and sort of empowered for them too, to sort of see the way clear that they can find meaning beyond the material.

So in the end, it's not the priest or the rabbi or the imam or the shaman who has the power to unlock the door to the other side. It's the plot whisperer. Yeah. Kind of funny, isn't it? That's so awesome. The first time you pick up Plato, it almost looks like a thesaurus, or it's like trying to make sense of a phone directory or something.

It seems to have no apparent rhyme or reason at first. Writer Paul Collins penned the introduction to the new edition of Plato, a 1928 reference book for writers in need of a plot. Basically, Plato is a plot generator. It's this collection of plot elements that can be mixed and matched, and there's thousands of them. So the idea being that by putting them in all these various combinations, you have, practically speaking, some unspeakable number of possible plot variations or combinations. Plato was the brainchild of William Wallace Cook, but it wasn't something born out of necessity.

Far from it. William Wallace Cook was himself a plot machine. He was actually known as the man who deforested Canada. That was his nickname, just because of the insane output of books that this guy had. Basically starting in the 1890s and right up through the 1920s and 1930s, he would crank out these short stories, novellas, and pulp novels. At one point, he wrote 54 pulp novels in a single year. That's more than one a week. Yeah. He had this just sort of amazing system of, there's no other way to call it, of manufacturing books, basically,

and of manufacturing plots. And towards the end of his life, he started thinking about how can I sell the system itself, actually making a book out of that. And the way he goes about doing that is he has what he calls the master plot formula. There's an A clause, which is the protagonist, basically, a B clause, which originates the action, and the C clause, which resolves it. And basically the entire book is set up with a combination of those A, B, and C setups. So the whole formula, everything gets boiled down to this formula,

this three-part formula. It is absolutely, literally formulaic writing. I mean, not just as sort of a descriptive way of describing someone's writing. He's literally trying to come up with a formula for writing and for plotting. So the way the entries are set up is that if you look at any particular plot twist within the book, it's preceded by a whole series of numbers, and it's also followed by a whole series of numbers. And those numbers are potential situations that could lead up to that plot twist, and then the ones that follow are the ones that may follow that plot twist. So that basically allows you to determine what are the different combinations that can be

kind of joined to that twist. This is entry number 1333B and the A and B mentioned in this are the basically two of the protagonists. A, with a hobby for collecting curios, presents B with an old hand-painted miniature. The miniature is of a beautiful woman framed in gold containing a mechanism by which a needle, steeped in poison, is thrown out of the painted face. The miniature is to be worn next to the heart. This is kind of, wow, this is kind of advanced.

He has kind of strange stuff in there. But basically, if you read that entry, it's preceded by a series of numbers, 1410, 1384, B, and A. And then it's succeeded by a whole bunch of numbers, 1461B, 1433C. There are all these plot elements that could be put before or after this particular one. So, you know, in theory, and a lot of these can be kind of almost endlessly daisy-chained into increasingly lengthy plots. Well, let's go forward and see what happens. Sure. So, well, yeah, pick a number. We've got 1461B, 1433C, 1438B.

What do you think? 1433C. 1438B, 1433 C, 1438 B. What do you think? 1433 C. 1438 B, sorry. 1438 B. All right, let's see. A, unknown to himself, has in his possession an object, X, which at any moment may bring death or disaster to him. A, unaware of his danger, is associating with people

or is ignorantly dealing with deadly circumstances which may bring upon him a catastrophe at any time. I see. So we have the object, the needle. Now he's wearing it, and he doesn't know he's wearing it, and he may be endangering other people around him. Right. Or the other way, I guess you could read that as, he's given this object to this other person. B, he also possesses an object. So he's also walking around. A is also walking around with some incredibly dangerous object

that they don't realize. Oh, my God. This is fascinating. So now let's go. Maybe we go back to 153. Let's see. 153. Ah.

A, in love with B, has a valuable gift sent to B by a jeweler. Through error or by evil intent, packages are transposed, and the gift received by B, as from A, very nearly proves disastrous to A's love affair. So if we're going to go with the needle here, the needle jumps out and kills his neighbor or a cop. Some other random

customer of the jewelry store. Wow, alright. We're kind of moving along with an actual story here. Yeah. I mean, it does actually work in terms of generating plots. So, this book comes in the mail. You've been having some trouble. You open it up and you go back to your study. And how can this help you?

I don't think it can. I don't think it can help a writer. Let me put it this way. I think it might help a writer just in terms of the idea of playing with plot, playing with kind of crazy and random ideas. But one of the strange things about plot and plot generation devices is – and to be fair, Cook himself kind of points this out in the book too. He describes it as something meant to inspire a writer, but it's not really designed to be a replacement for writing because it can't be. It's only a plot. Lots of people can come up with a plot, but not many people can execute it very well. So what does this actually teach us about the nature of plot itself? I think it says a couple of interesting things

about plot. You know, one is that you do have the possibility for these sort of endless recombinations of elements of plot. And that's something that I think writers realize pretty early on when they start working on plot and thinking about plot. But the other is actually the limitations of a book like this, which is that whenever you pick a particular passage, there are only three, four, you know, half a dozen plot elements that you can then choose from there, that they have to be believable. They actually have to make sense to some degree. And that strangely restrictive nature of it, I think,

actually is a useful thing to think about in terms of plot. That once you've laid down a certain element in a story, it is determinative of what can follow next. To some degree, that's even true of nonfiction, in that if something truly unexpected happens, readers demand an explanation. And if the facts don't fit into a narrative, it'll often really throw them off.

Just because something's true doesn't make it a story. And that's actually a real problem, I think, for a lot of nonfiction writers. You find something that is interesting, and it's interesting to you, but you can't figure out how to make it into a story. People bring fictive expectations to non-fiction. You know, they want believability, they want resolution, and when real life doesn't offer those things, they'll actually get frustrated with the writer or with the story. One of the weird things to me about nonfiction is that things that actually can't work in fiction because they're not believable do sometimes happen in nonfiction.

Because that's just what happened. Maybe the better way to put that is that nonfiction stories that get published tend to follow certain paths. You can't have a story that's nonsensical. You can't have a story that is essentially plotless or seemingly aimless or doesn't resolve itself in some way. And in some cases, the person writing it almost has to force a resolution onto the story. In other cases, because they can't really figure out what the focus of the story is or how it resolves, it means that as a writer,

you actually put that story on the back burner because it just doesn't make sense as storytelling. I've always hated the word podcast, but I will admit that over the past decade, I did appreciate that most of the people I met had no idea what a podcast even was. This enabled me to answer their what-do-you-do question with a long-winded definition of podcasting itself. And the more I droned on and on about RSS feeds and iTunes directories, the better my chances became, I discovered, at escaping the dreaded follow-up question, what is your podcast about? But now, now that everyone knows what a podcast is, this question has become impossible to escape. What is your podcast about?

And it's killing me. Of course, I've got no one to blame but myself. I know this, dear listener. It's not like people are trying to put me on the spot. They're genuinely curious. They're interested. people are trying to put me on the spot. They're genuinely curious. They're interested. I should be excited when I hear this question. What's your podcast about? And I should have an answer. I should be able to answer this with my eyes closed and with my hands tied behind my back. You know, in my defense, when I started my podcast 10 years ago,

it's not like they made me fill out a form or anything. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I had been required to write out a coherent description of the show before I was allowed to touch the microphones, well, I never would have made a single episode. When we launched Radiotopia, I made a pretty serious attempt to deal with this once and for all. I asked one of my friends who does semiotic branding for assistance. He's the one who came up with the current tagline, Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything,

personally connecting the dots, all of them. Well, actually, I added the word personally because I thought it needed something a little warmer. Plus, I wanted to make at least a one-word contribution to my own podcast description. What's your podcast about? Yeah, I know. It doesn't exactly solve the problem.

I made a resolution that this summer I would answer the question. I made a resolution that this summer I would write out the definitive description for Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything podcast. I spent most of the summer in the countryside, in Burgundy in France. There was no internet, I had peace and quiet, and a lot of time on my hands. But I didn't get anywhere with the resolution. Now I'm in Paris. I fly home to New York tomorrow. It's come down to the wire.

So this morning, I decided I would take one final stroll around Paris and throw myself at the mercy of the universe. But then I remembered that I have my friend Luc San's new book, The Other Paris, on my phone. So I thought I should read it as I walked around. It's so good. But I lost the whole day to walking and reading. But I think I may have found something.

Listen to this. This is Luke's definition of the flaneur, the infamous city walker who inhabited 19th century Paris. The flaneur is not a reporter. Reporters are in the business of asking specific questions, to which they require specific answers. The flaneur may entertain questions in the course of things, but overall he or she is in the business of negative capability. The flaneur must be alive to the entire prospect, to the ephemeral and perishable, as well as the immemorial, to things that ordinarily lie beneath notice, to minute changes and

gradual shifts of fashion, to things that just disappear one day without anyone paying attention, to happenstance, and accident, and incongruity, to texture and flavor, and the unnameable, to prevailing winds and countercurrents, to everything that is too subjective for professionals to credit. The flaneur must possess a sixth sense. Possibly even a seventh and an eighth. Must have an intuitive sus for things about to occur without warning and things that are subtly absent and things that are silently waving goodbye.

What is your podcast about? My podcast is alive to the entire prospect. I focus on the ephemeral and the perishable and the immemorial. I'm in the show business of negative capability. I cover things that are about to occur without warning, as well as things that are subtly absent, and things that are silently waving goodbye. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Resolution. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Martha Alderson and Paul Collins. Special thanks to Tin House Books, Matilde Biot, and Bill Bowen.

The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, the world's greatest podcast network. Check out all the other shows in our tribe. Everything you need to know is at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.