But can you?
In theory, yes. You write whatever words you want, in whatever order you want. Your characters will be whoever you say they will be, and you can do whatever you like with them.
In practice, other powerful influences are already at work. They are to do with our collective idea about what a story is and what pattern it should follow. There are an enormous number of possible designs of chair, but they all have to support a person in a seated position and there is only a limited number of ways you can do that. Similarly, if a story is to be satisfying, there are a limited number of lines it can possibly follow.
(How many? Christopher Booker counted seven basic plots. Others have suggested three, twenty, thirty-six etc. It depends what you mean by a ‘plot.’ And that’s a delightful argument but let’s not have it here. )
Detective? Or Heist?
The choice of basic plot is made very early, often before you are aware of having made it. And it profoundly affects how you are going to tell your story. Taking our olive-pitter example, we seem to have a choice between
- a detective story with a crime, suspects, clues, false leads, maybe further murders, climax and denouement, or
- a heist-type story, with target and motive, preparations, maybe selection of a team, danger of discovery, the actual dramatic event and then escape.
Sure, you can graft on other plots. You could have a love triangle in there, for example, or a tragic hero whose fatal flaw leads him to ruin as the story proceeds. But if you stray too far from these recognisable story-lines you run the risk of losing the plot, literally.
This is because we tell stories for a reason. They allow us to rehearse, in our imagination, the critical life experiences that we will have or that we hope to have – growing in power, finding a mate, facing difficulty, or disaster, or death. We have done it over and over again, through the centuries.
It’s also why so many new stories are in fact old ones told in new ways. The Curse of the Ferryman, which I’ve just put up on this site, has a number of classic elements. It has a prophecy (the curse). It’s a misty-moonlight ghostly spine-chiller. But beneath all that it’s the good old redemption story we’ve heard so many times and love so well. It’s St Christopher, and everything like that.
Or Arthur?
Taking another example: my first novel, The Cup of the World, was set in a medieval fantasy kingdom with lots of knights galloping about. By the end of it the heroine had a baby son and had endured many things to keep him safe. I was thinking of a sequel, and Robin McKinley, who had a lot to do with getting my career going, asked me if I was going to do King Arthur.
“Arthur?” I said, with a young writer’s arrogance. “Certainly not. I’m going to write my own story.”
Arthur is massive. There are so many classic retellings: Welsh, English, French, German; prose, poetry, film and musical. It’s about love and death, honour, jealousy and fate – all those things. Its characters turn up in cameos all over the place. (Merlin is alive and well and living in Hogwarts. At least, up to the end of about Book 6 he was). Arthur is everywhere. I had as much chance of escaping Arthur as a mote of dust has of escaping the gravity of Jupiter. There were only so many ways the story could go. By the end of the third novel, The Fatal Child, our babe had risen to be king, had fallen into a doomed love and had gone to meet his fate in a tear-tinged sunset on the field of battle. Am I sorry for that? No. But did I steal Arthur? Again no. Dammit, Arthur stole me.
So this story you are working on… Yes, it’s your story. You’re the driver and the map-reader. But there’s ten thousand years of story-telling in the back seat, telling you where to go.