The “Five Card” Exercise
So imagine that you’ve signed up for my class.
First thing you discover is that a crazed-looking, long-haired, bearded hobo
has taken over the class. Where’s the teacher? Who’s going to teach you about
short story writing?
Oh, wait – you mean he’s the teacher? Can you
still get a refund?
Well, okay. It’s a cold night. You’ve driven
this far. May as well sit here in this warm (maybe too warm) classroom for a
while. It would be rude to walk out on him – not that you’re worried about
being rude to a hobo but, you know, on general principles…
The hobo yaps for a while, going on about
“story-shaped ideas,” and conflict and motivation – blah-blah-blah. What does
that have to do with writing? Aren’t you just supposed to put down stuff on
paper about your uncle Toby and how he used to tell fart jokes at the table
when your folks invited him over for Thanksgiving? What’s all this stuff about
revolution? Oh – RES-olution. Maybe you should have just taken that volleyball
class after all…
Just then, the hobo takes out all these cards –
or little slips of paper. Five little stacks of cards. What’s this all about?
Are you going to play Monopoly?
On one set of cards, on one side a word is
printed:
Character
Another set of cards have on them:
Motivation
The third set of cards say:
Setting
One the fourth set:
Nemesis/opposition/
conflict/“trouble”
And the last:
Resolution
From each set he asks you to pick one card. On
the other side of the first set, on each card is a name. Here are some for
example:
Arthur Stringmeier
Dana Lockwood
Chaney Hitchcock
Claudia Rollins
Budd Buford
Kate Ballinger
Why names? Why not descriptions, or resumes, or
articles of clothing?
The hobo says that names are specific. You’re not dealing with
generalities. A story is about someone.
Not only that, but names are evocative. You hear a name and you imagine a
person who has that name. Every student will have a picture of who that
character is, but every student’s picture will be different. If you give the
same name to five different students you will end up with five different
stories.
Let’s say you picked the card for Kate Ballinger.
Who is she? What does she look like? Where does she live? What does she do? If
you can’t think of anything right away, don’t worry. Pick a card from the
“Motivation” stack. You may choose from such things as:
Justice
Survival
Revenge
Redemption
Resistance
Rescue
A lot of “R” words in that bunch. But why do you
need them?
The hobo explains that characters have to need
something, or want something. Static, inert characters rarely make for
interesting stories.
Okay. So you pick one and it turns out to be “Survival.”
What’s next? Setting:
All-night diner
School library
Rest stop on the
Interstate
Concourse in city
commuter station
Basement workshop
Rehabbed warehouse
Well, the all-night diner sounds promising, but
the card you pulled is for the commuter concourse.
What’s left? “Conflict,” isn’t it? You pull one
of these:
Well-intentioned idiot
Epidemic
Ancient curse
Angry mob
Jilted lover
Former friend, now rival
“Angry mob” is an easy one to figure out, but
the card you pull is “Ancient Curse.”
So, let’s see. So far, you have Kate Ballinger;
her motivation is Survival; the setting is the big concourse in a commuter
train station (or something like that); and the “nemesis” is an Ancient Curse.
Now all we have left is to see how it all works
out in the end. The last card:
Character succeeds by first
overcoming personal demons.
Character succeeds
through clever deception.
Character succeeds by
restoring chaos to an orderly situation.
Character succeeds by trusting
an “untrustworthy” friend.
Character succeeds by restoring
order to a chaotic situation.
The card you get seems to dictate that Kate
Ballinger will have to trust an “untrustworthy” friend.
You and the other students are now asked to
either write down or verbally hash out a story based on these five cards.
Is it hard? Sometimes.
Impossible? Never.
Now, like most creators of exercises, I, the
hobo, am usually the worst at actually doing the assigned task. If I received
this set of cards, I’d probably come up with a story about Kate Ballinger, an
attorney of about fifty who has an unfortunate habit of abandoning jobs as soon
as she starts to feel too comfortable and secure. She considers this an
“ancient curse,” inherited from her father, whose employment record was at best
irregular and kept the family living from paycheck to questionable paycheck.
She is in Chicago’s Union Station with her assistant, Miss Maggs, a
demoniacally efficient person but with questionable loyalties. Kate and Maggs
are ostensibly headed for the suburb of Highland Park to meet with a potential
new client.
Kate has surreptitiously bought an Amtrak ticket
for Milwaukee, from where she plans to phone in a resignation to her current
employer. The weather is terrible. All the trains are delayed. Even so, Kate is
determined to go through with her plan, but first she has to distract Miss
Maggs long enough to get to the Amtrak departure gates. Now, Miss Maggs
wouldn’t mind having Kate’s job for herself, but her mania for efficiency may
prevent her from actually doing something to clear the way for Kate’s escape,
fortuitous as it may be to herself. This leaves us with two questions as we
approach the story’s climax: 1.) Will Kate finally break her self-destructive
pattern and 2.) Will Miss Maggs, intentionally or otherwise, help Kate to do
the “right thing,” whether that’s to abandon her job or to stay with the firm?
Now, that’s a scenario by me, admittedly a lousy
player of this game, done at the spur of the moment with a set of five cards I
randomly chose. Most of my students, many of whom are first embarking on the
notion of writing fiction, can come up with better ones. Try it yourself with each of the unused category items here.
The point is, you may ask, why? Why play with this stuff?
First and foremost, because students learn
better and faster when they’re doing,
rather than just listening or even discussing.
Second, the exercise helps illustrate the notion
that a story needs to have certain things to work. I’ve called them “elements,”
but now I’m thinking a better term might be “dimensions.” If you have them, you
can make a story. If you don’t have them, you’ll have to find them.
Third, because it demonstrates that it’s not so
difficult to put together a story. It may be built into our natures. Our brains
may be wired to think in terms of story* – which is why we can be given these
five random cards and make a story out of them. It needn’t be a great story; it
doesn’t even have to be a good story; it just has to be a story.
Many students have done the exercise, put it
aside and never looked at it again. Others have developed, continued and
completed stories started from the cards. Many of them have been pretty damn
good.
The point is not to make story writing seem
simple, or esoteric, or to advocate a process of writing fiction. The cards
simply help people understand that stories have parts – or elements, or
dimensions, or whatever lingo you wish to use – and that we can understand our
own process – and the processes that others use – better when we can recognize
those parts.
Postscript: Plotto’s
Republic
I’ve been doing this card exercise for years.
I’ve used variations of it in my science fiction writing classes and as part of
two- and three-day workshops at conventions.
It grew from things I read about legendary “plot
wheels” that pulp writers used in the early part of the twentieth century. You
can see one online that is supposed to have been used by Earle Stanley Garner.
Another touchstone for the pulp-era necessity
(at least for some) of a “plot generator” was the fabled tome by William
Wallace Cook, Plotto. It was an
elaborate index of plots derived from numbered, lettered lists of character
types, sources of conflict and means for resolution. A writer could choose one
from each of these lists and have a plot to work from in an instant.
Many writers saw that as being the sole purpose
of the book. Fiction writers, especially writers of pulp or popular fiction,
had to be prolific. Some of the most legendary writers of the era – Frederick Faust
(aka Max Brand), Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant), Lester Dent (aka Kenneth
Robeson), Edgar Wallace (aka “Edgar Wallace”), and so on – wrote at great speed
and volume. Quantity was as important, if not more so, than quality. By
spinning the wheel, or picking “one from column A and one from column B, you
would have a plot and a couple of wooden characters to go through its motions: fiction
not quite on an assembly line but conceived to be shot out in rapid fire
succession.
A great deal of fiction is turned out in such a fashion. “Series” books have been a staple
of the publishing world for as long as the publishing world has existed.
Fiction generated for the media – radio, TV, films – has been pumped out with
alacrity (or something less so) for ages.
In the back pages of various writers’ magazines
(or their electronic equivalents) one can find ads for various kinds of
software that pick up pretty much from where Plotto left off. If there is a way to make the writing of fiction
for any media as purely mechanical a process as possible, you can bet there’s
someone out there trying either to create it or exploit it, or both.
One person, though, who stated he wasn’t looking
for the perfectly-machined story, antiseptic, clean and free of any human fingerprints
or sweat, was… William Wallace Cook.
Throughout his book, Cook insists that his
plot-making machinery is merely the first step in a process that should be
completed with one’s own experience and creative input. Give the same plot to
five different writers and you will receive in return five significantly
different stories. “Each person that lives, has ever lived or shall live is,
was or will be a collector of ideas combined into a certain thing called
experience. My experience is not your experience; and that means that neither
you nor I, when accomplishing original work, will accomplish identical work. If
it were otherwise, there would be no originality in the world.” (Tin House Books edition, page 2 of the “manual”
in the back of the book)
What’s more, at times he suggests that the study
of creating imaginative works is not merely of benefit to writers. He suggests
that writing is a kind of problem-solving, and a means of investigation or
exploration.
If we’re doing it right, writing is a learning
process – a way to collect and understand experience.
“Whether a man shall sell mousetraps or life
insurance, stories or drygoods, he will find in his imagination a power which,
furthering his originality, will bring him pleasure and profit such as he has
never known before.” (as above, page 38)
I would make no guarantee to any “pleasure and
profit,” but I wouldn’t discount the possibility, either. In that regard, I’m
glad to discover that Cook precedes me on the road that I’m traveling, and not
in any superficial way. When we learn to write we write to learn, because that’s
what really makes it worth doing.
*See
THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: How Stories Make Us Human. Jonathan Gottschall. xviii + 248 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
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