that position—then her crashing in an airplane is drama. The same applies to the last chapter of the novel, where Ragnar Danneskjöld flies through a window in order to rescue Galt. If no spiritual values had been involved beyond a rescue, this would have been melodrama. But when such a physical action is tied to serious, important values, it is drama.
In this sense, I believe with Victor Hugo that the more melodramatic the action in which one can express the drama, the better the story. (By “melodramatic” I here mean physical danger or action.) If you can unite the two—if you can give a relevant and logical physical expression to the spiritual conflict you present—then you have high-class drama.
One could conceivably write a story in which a man struggles against nothing but himself, i.e., in which the only conflict is within the man, and the other characters are passive. The actions he would take in pursuit of one of his values versus the other would create a logical plot progression. He could be torn between two women, one representing sacred love and the other profane; and he could get himself into very dramatic situations where the two women would be not his antagonists, but only his foils, against whom or for whom he takes the actions. Such a story would be marvelous to write. But I have never seen it done, and technically it would be difficult to do.
The usual pattern of drama is a conflict within the hero himself and a conflict against other men. This creates the best, most complex plot structures. For instance, when Rearden in Atlas Shrugged hesitates between quitting his job and continuing the struggle, this is a conflict against outside forces. At the same time, his love for Dagny is in conflict with what he thinks is his duty to his wife. This is an inner conflict which complicates his struggle against the outside world, ultimately causing him to almost lose that struggle.
The important thing here is integration. Suppose Rearden’s romantic conflict had nothing to do with his economic conflict; one issue was private and the other public, and the two never met in the events of the story. Then the inclusion of both conflicts in the same story would be purely coincidental, and the plot would be badly constructed.
To create a plot structure, in sum, you must begin with a conflict; but not every conflict is sufficient for constructing a novel. Many conflicts are “one-incident” conflicts; they are too simple and, therefore, too easily resolved to permit a complex development. They might be good for a short story, but nothing more.
A short story, being of limited length, should properly deal only with a single incident—some one problem set up and resolved, without too many complications. To string out a whole series of incidents in the course of a short story makes for a bad story—a mere synopsis of something that should have been longer.
By contrast, a novel necessarily deals with a series of events. It may be constructed around the events of a single day, but then, by means of flashbacks or otherwise, the events are extended into a complex structure.
A novelette is an in-between form, with length as the attribute which distinguishes it from a novel or a short story. A novelette, like a novel, can have more than a single incident, as Anthem does. Anthem presents a long series of incidents—in an abbreviated, essentialized, almost “impressionistic” form. On the other hand, a single-incident story might require so many details in the telling that it becomes a novelette.
Your central conflict must be complex enough to warrant the development of events on the scale you intend. If you want to write a novel, your plot-theme has to be a much more complicated conflict than what would suffice for a short story.
A plot-theme is a conflict in terms of action, complex enough to create a purposeful progression of events. If you recall that this last is the definition of plot, you will see that the plot-theme serves as the seed from which the tree has to grow. To test whether you have sufficient seed for a good tree, ask yourself: Is this the worst situation in which I can put my hero? If these are his values, is this the worst clash I can engineer between them?
If you have chosen the worst clash possible, and if the values are important, you have a good seed for a good plot structure.
5
The Climax
The climax is that