lost. It is only a concrete observation and will be of no value to you.
Instead, tie your observations to abstractions. For instance, you observe that someone is aggressive in a nasty way, and that he is also frightened and uncertain. You might conclude that he is putting on a show, that he is a coward who is aggressive as a defense. This is classifying a concrete under an abstraction—and this is the kind of observation that will be valuable to you as a writer.
When you master the relationship of abstractions to concretes, you will know how to translate an abstract theme into action, and how to attach an abstract meaning to an action idea. If you start with a philosophical abstraction, you will be able to translate it into a conflict, a climax, and a plot. Or if you get a plot idea which at first glance has no philosophical meaning, you will be able to discover the meaning and develop the idea into a serious story.
If you have to crank the process by hand because you have not yet mastered the abstract-concrete relationship, it will take forever and seem impossible. Only when your mind is geared to dancing back and forth—and I mean dance, with that kind of ease—between abstractions and concretes will you be able to give the philosophical meaning to an action idea or the action story to a philosophical idea.
Plot action is not mere physical action, and it is not mere spiritual or mental action. Some writers think that if a man takes a trip and comes home, this constitutes plot action (he did something!), just as the writers of bad melodramas think it is plot action if someone is chasing someone and there is five minutes of speeding cars or horses galloping. The counterpart of this error is conflicts within a man’s mind which are not illustrated in physical action.
The arty, modem stream-of-consciousness novels, on the one hand, and bad melodramas on the other, where characters run around hectically, are two versions of the same error. (The latter is action—so why is it so dull? It is dull because it is mere physical action.) Proper plot action is neither spirit alone nor body alone, but the integration of the two, with the physical action expressing the spiritual action involved.
To construct a proper plot, you have to be (at least as a dramatist) on the premise of mind-body integration. If to any extent you hold the premise of a mind-body split, it will hamper your plot ability, because it will lead you to consider dramatic the mere fact that a man experiences something in his own mind, or that he moves around in some mindless physical action.
A story is like a soul-body relationship. Whether you start with the body (the action) or the soul (the abstract theme), you must be able to integrate the two. And the proper integration of idea to action requires a mind that is not confined to thinking merely in terms of physical concretes, or merely in terms of floating abstractions.
Think in Terms of Conflict
A proper plot situation involves a conflict of values. Therefore, the next point—the real fiction writer’s point—is: Learn to think in terms of conflict.
A valuable exercise is the following. When you go to modern movies, watch television shows, or read modern novels, which with rare exceptions are plotless (or have inept plots), try to correct them mentally. If a story begins interestingly but then peters out, see what you could have done with that beginning, how you could have turned that story into a real conflict of important values. You will encounter such wasted opportunities in almost every modern story (although some are no good even for this purpose because they lack any rudiments of a plot).
I am not recommending plagiarism. I recommend this only as a mental exercise, only as training in how to give a purposeful plot structure to some shapeless presentation of undefined events and people. And the lead to doing it is: Think in terms of conflict.
At the start of my career, I had a valuable conversation with Cecil DeMille. It was my first year in Hollywood, I was twenty-two, and I had already developed a strong plot sense; but although I could recognize a good plot story, I had not consciously identified what characteristics made it good. DeMille told me something that clarified the issue for me.
He said that a good story depends on what he called “the situation,” by which he meant