20 Master Plots (16 page)

4. The focus of your story should be on the hero's pursuit of the villain.

5. Your hero should go out into the world to pursue the villain, and usually must contend with the villain on the villain's turf.

6. Your hero should be defined by her relationship to the villain.

7. Use your antagonist as a device whose purpose is to deprive the hero of what he believes is rightfully his.

8. Make sure the antagonist constantly interferes with the hero's progress.

9. The victim is generally the weakest of the three characters and serves mainly as a mechanism to force the hero to confront the antagonist.

10. Develop the three dramatic phases of separation, pursuit, and confrontation and reunion.

T
he previous two plots (pursuit and rescue) have much in common with the escape plot. The escape plot is physical, and as such, concentrates its energy on the mechanics of capture and escape. That would eliminate stories about characters who try to escape a personal demon (such as addictions, phobias and dependencies). Those are character plots (plots of the mind). Escape in this plot is literal: The protagonist is confined against her will and wants to escape.

Literature is ripe with examples such as
The Prisoner of Zenda
by Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins,
Typee
by Herman Melville, "The Ransom of Red Chief' by O. Henry,
Midnight Express
by William Hayes and William Hofer (made into a film by Alan Parker), "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce, and films such as
Papillon, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Great Escape
and
Stalag 17.
It is also a familiar theme of fairy tales: the child who is being held prisoner by a witch or an ogre.

The thrust of this plot is in many ways the flip side of the rescue plot. In the rescue plot the reader follows the rescuer, and the victim waits patiently to be saved. In the escape plot, however, the victim frees herself.

The moral argument of this plot tends to be black and white: The hero is unjustly imprisoned. But not always. Sometimes the essence of the escape plot is nothing more than a test of wills between two strong personalities: the jailor and the jailed. They

devote themselves to the task at hand: the warden to keeping his charge imprisoned, and the ward to escaping imprisonment. John Carpenter's
Escape From New York
has no meaningful moral structure, not even the basic reaffirmation of right over wrong, but in terms of an escape adventure, it's fun to watch.

By comparison, read Hayes and Hofer's
Midnight Express,
whose title is prison jargon for "escape." It deals realistically with the horror of imprisonment in Turkey and the character's need to escape in order to survive. In it, Billy Hayes is caught trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. He tries to make his first escape when he shows the authorities where he bought the hashish, but he's unsuccessful and is sent to prison, which is a Hell on earth. His sentence is four years and two months, which, according to his lawyer, is a light sentence. Hayes is determined to serve his time and get out, even though he must witness homosexual crimes, knifings, even the torturing of children. At first he hopes his lawyer will get an appeal, but nothing happens. Finally, two months before his release date, Hayes gets a summons. Hoping for an early release, he finds out to his horror the court intends to make an example of him and is going to retry him as a smuggler. He's given a thirty-year sentence—a virtual death sentence—and sent back to prison.

Hayes now knows there's no way out except escape.

The rest of the story details Hayes' attempts at escape. He makes plans to escape through an underground tunnel system beneath the prison but is thwarted when the tunnel dead-ends. Through a series of incidents that take him to the depths of Hell, he finally gets his chance to escape and takes it.

ESCAPE PLOT-PHASE ONE

The story typifies the three dramatic phases of the escape plot. In the first phase, the protagonist is imprisoned. The crime may be real or imagined (the protagonist accordingly guilty or innocent). In the case of
Midnight Express,
the punishment doesn't fit the crime, so as readers we are offended by the excess and side with Billy Hayes, who's a decent human being among animals.

In "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Peyton Farquhar stands on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama looking down at the swift waters below. His hands are tied behind his back, and there's a noose around his neck. He's about to be hung by Union soldiers. This situation, compared to the five-year ordeal of Billy Hayes, takes place in a few minutes. Either Farquhar will be hung or he'll escape through some miracle. The conflict is clear and the tension immediate.

In Melville's
Typee,
Toby and Tom jump ship at one of the Marquesas Islands, only to end up the "guests" of a tribe of cannibals, who are fascinated with the Englishmen. The cannibals defer having their guests for dinner, but they will not let them leave, either.

In O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief," Sam and Bill kidnap the only child of a wealthy man and take him to a cave. The situation seems straightforward: If the father wants his boy back, he must pay a ransom.

ESCAPE PLOT-PHASE TWO

The second phase of the escape plot deals with imprisonment and plans for escape. There may be an attempted escape during the first dramatic phase, but it always fails. Either the escape is foiled or, if it succeeds, the protagonist is recaptured and returned to prison.

The plot question is a simple one: Will the protagonist escape? The third dramatic phase contains the answer, but in most cases the reader will be able to guess correctly well in advance what the outcome will be. This is a result of the simple moral structure. If the forces are clearly drawn between good and evil, we don't expect evil to prevail. It's dissatisfying for the reader to be rooting for the protagonist only to see him fail at the end. Readers prefer an upbeat ending, a triumph rather than a defeat. We expect Billy Hayes to escape; we expect Farquhar will somehow escape hanging; we expect Toby and Tom to escape the cookpot; and we expect that Johnny's father will pay the ransom for the return of his son (although with O. Henry, we also expect the unexpected; we would be disappointed if the end didn't have some twist to it).

In "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the sergeant in charge of the execution steps off the board that is keeping Farquhar up. Farquhar falls, the noose tight around his neck. On his way down, the author relates his crime: As a staunch supporter of the South he had tried to burn down the Owl Creek Bridge before the Union troops arrived. But he was captured and sentenced to death. Farquhar dreams of throwing off the noose, diving into the water and returning to his wife and family, who await him at home.

Toby and Tom attempt their own escapes, but the Typee cannibals obviously have other plans for them. Tom comes down with a disease that swells his leg; Toby convinces the Typees to let him get help for his friend, but on his way out hostile warriors from another tribe attack him, forcing him back to the Typees.

"The Ransom of Red Chief," on the other hand, begins working in a strange direction by the second phase. After Sam and Bill kidnap Johnny, Sam leaves to return a horse and buggy while Bill watches the boy. When Sam comes back, however, he finds Bill and Johnny have been playing a game of trappers and Indians. Johnny, who announces himself as "Red Chief," now has his poor battered captor tied up! Red Chief then declares that in the morning he will scalp Bill and burn Sam at the stake.

The ironic twist is already evident. Johnny is the captor and Bill and Sam are the captives. He terrorizes the two men by keeping them from sleeping and threatening them with their morning executions. He attacks them with a hot potato and then with a rock. The two men have no chance against him.

ESCAPE PLOT—PHASE THREE

The third phase consists of the escape itself. Usually the well-laid plans of the second dramatic phase fall apart. (If they didn't, the action would be too predictable.) Wild cards come into play. Enter the unexpected. All hell breaks loose. To this point the situation has been tightly controlled by the antagonist, but suddenly the situation becomes fluid, out of control either by gratuitous circumstance or by design of the hero. The hero, who has been at a distinct disadvantage, finally gets the upper hand, and if there's a moral score to settle, the time has come for settling it.

The third dramatic phase is usually the most active of phases. Since the second phase consists of escape plans, the third phase is the realization of the escape itself, even though most often it's under circumstances different from those planned in the second phase.

Peyton Farquhar drops from the bridge, and then, "... all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears,

and all was cold and dark____He knew that the rope had broken

and he had fallen into the stream." He struggles to escape to free his hands as he rises to the surface. But the Union soldiers open fire on him, forcing him back under the water.

The swift current takes Farquhar downstream and out of range. Exhausted, he starts the walk home with only the thought of his wife on his mind. He reaches his house, barely able to stand, and there is his wife, waiting for him. He reaches out to embrace her.

Then comes the final line of the story: "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge."

The escape, it turns out, was no escape at all. Or perhaps it was, since in Farquhar's mind he had escaped. Bierce can get away with this kind of ending because the short story was written for the effect of the last line. We don't get to know Peyton Farquhar, so we don't care that much about him. His life, or death, is immaterial to the plot, which is successful only because of its radical turn at the end.

O. Henry uses a similar strategy in "The Ransom of Red Chief." We can see where the story is going as we see Red Chief take over his captors. The difference between the stories is that "The Ransom of Red Chief' is played for comic rather than dramatic effect. The journey of Peyton Farquhar is prosaic. We go along for the ride to see where it's going. In the case of O. Henry's story, we go along for the ride because we enjoy the ride. The notion of a ten-year-old boy turning the table on two kidnappers and terrorizing them as they meant to do to him is amusing.

To add insult to injury, Johnny has such a good time torturing his captors that he doesn't want to go home.

Sam finally mails the ransom note. The father's reply: He will take back his son—provided the kidnappers pay
him
$250!

Meanwhile, the kidnappers have been trying in vain to free themselves of Johnny. Finally, out of exasperation, they pay the

ransom of $250 just to get rid of the kid. The plot reversal works as comedy.

Your responsibility as writer is to keep the reader off-balance by constantly shifting the terms of the escape. Nothing goes as planned; something always goes wrong. And that's the joy of it.

CHECKLIST

As you write, keep these points in mind:

1. Escape is always literal. Your hero should be confined against his will (often unjustly) and wants to escape.

2. The moral argument of your plot should be black and white.

3. Your hero should be the victim (as opposed to the rescue plot, in which the hero saves the victim).

4. Your first dramatic phase deals with the hero's imprisonment and any initial attempts at escape, which fail.

5. Your second dramatic phase deals with the hero's plans for escape. These plans are almost always thwarted.

6. Your third dramatic phase deals with the actual escape.

7. The antagonist has control of the hero during the first two dramatic phases; the hero gains control in the last dramatic phase.