What Is Plot if Not Pursuit?
Thoughts about plot, pace, and The Safekeep
They are marks. The letters and the words are mere marks. Like a hare leaving its tracks in the snow, or a snake providing proof of its own bent speed through wet grass. We invented them. We are chastened, bruised, instructed, lifted, released by them, sometimes mesmerized by them, or I am. I want to know how the mere marks work. How they make us feel.
I was reading The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden)—part psychological thriller, part literary erotica, most profound character study, a charged commentary on history, home, ownership, and need. I was trying to keep up with the sounds and shapes, the accelerations and lulls that had erupted from the marks. I was thinking about pace and plot, the first being defined, in my mind, as heartbeat and the second being defined (me, again) as pursuit. I was thinking that extraordinary writers master heartbeat and pursuit.
Here is a paragraph from Safekeep that offers both pace (a body dives, swims, aches, resurfaces; the weather changes overhead; nothing is static) and plot (it is not just the day that has shifted but, we know from words like gray and heavy and chill, the character’s relationship to a situation now unfolding):
‘Isabel dove into the water—a shock of cold sucking her in. She stayed under, swam until the air ached in her chest. When she resurfaced, the day had shifted around her: the breeze blew with more purpose. An angry waving of gray up the horizon. Above, the afternoon sun still beat down heavy and full-bodied, but a chill crept in on the breath of the wind.”
If you closed your eyes and listened as a friend read these words aloud, would they come upon you like music?
In the third workshop in my “Taking Flight” writing series, I’ll be reading aloud from The Safekeep. I’ll be thinking about pace and plot and the pace-plot instructions of music. I’ll be waiting for that half hour at the end when those who gather in that Zoom box summon marks and meaning.
(I’ll close my eyes. I’ll listen.)
"Pace and pursuit"---a great way to define goals in writing. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with all the different advice, but this will be much easier to remember!
A question: was the book in translation?
I have never thought of plot as pursuit. And I’m not sure what that means except as in pursuit of. Perhaps you’ll say more Sunday. But I agree, the quoted passage is orchestral and I hear that it’s not just the words that create the movement, the heartbeat, but the punctuation as well. Since I’m visual I see the scene rhythmically. If I study the passage as music, I see the story on a staff with clefs, key and time signatures, sharps and flats, notes scurrying, holding, shifting my heartbeat. Very interesting, Beth, thank you for this expansion, this incorporation of all the senses.