Writing - part xx359 Writing a Novel, the Plot of The Maltese Falcon

26 September 2020, Writing - part xx359 Writing a Novel, the Plot of The Maltese Falcon

Announcement: Delay, my new novels can be seen on the internet, but my primary publisher has gone out of business—they couldn’t succeed in the past business and publishing environment.  I’ll keep you informed, but I need a new publisher.  More information can be found at www.ancientlight.com.  Check out my novels—I think you’ll really enjoy them.

Introduction: I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon. This was my 21^st novel and through this blog, I gave you the entire novel in installments that included commentary on the writing. In the commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes. You can look back through this blog and read the entire novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.

I’m using this novel as an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published. I’ll keep you informed along the way.

Today’s Blog: To see the steps in the publication process, visit my writing websites http://www.sisteroflight.com/.

The four plus one basic rules I employ when writing:

1. Don’t confuse your readers.

2. Entertain your readers.

3. Ground your readers in the writing.

4. Don’t show (or tell) everything.

     4a. Show what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage of the novel.

5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.

These are the steps I use to write a novel including the five discrete parts of a novel:

1.     Design the initial scene

2.     Develop a theme statement (initial setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action statement)

a.     Research as required

b.     Develop the initial setting

c.     Develop the characters

d.     Identify the telic flaw (internal and external)

3.     Write the initial scene (identify the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)

4.     Write the next scene(s) to the climax (rising action)

5.     Write the climax scene

6.     Write the falling action scene(s)

7.     Write the dénouement scene

I finished writing my 29^th novel, working title, Detective, potential title Blue Rose: Enchantment and the Detective.  The theme statement is: Lady Azure Rose Wishart, the Chancellor of the Fae, supernatural detective, and all around dangerous girl, finds love, solves cases, breaks heads, and plays golf.  

Here is the cover proposal for Blue Rose: Enchantment and the Detective. 

Cover Proposal

The most important scene in any novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the rising action. I am continuing to write on my 30^th novel, working title Red Sonja.  I finished my 29^th novel, working title Detective.  I’m planning to start on number 31, working title Shifter. 

How to begin a novel.  Number one thought, we need an entertaining idea.  I usually encapsulate such an idea with a theme statement.  Since I’m writing a new novel, we need a new theme statement.  Here is an initial cut.

For novel 30:  Red Sonja, a Soviet spy, infiltrates the X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test pilot’s administrative clerk, learns about freedom, and is redeemed.

For novel 31:  Deirdre and Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school where they discover difficult mysteries, people, and events. 

Here is the scene development outline:

1. Scene input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)

2. Write the scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)

3. Imagine the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and develop the tension and release.

4. Write the scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.

5. Write the release

6. Write the kicker

          

Today:  Why don’t we go back to the basics and just writing a novel?  I can tell you what I do, and show you how I go about putting a novel together.  We can start with developing an idea then move into the details of the writing. 

To start a novel, I picture an initial scene.  I may start from a protagonist or just launch into mental development of an initial scene.  I get the idea for an initial scene from all kinds of sources.  To help get the creative juices flowing, let’s look at the initial scene. 

1.     Meeting between the protagonist and the antagonist or the protagonist’s helper

2.     Action point in the plot

3.     Buildup to an exciting scene

4.     Indirect introduction of the protagonist

Ideas.  We need ideas.  Ideas allow us to figure out the protagonist and the telic flaw.  Ideas don’t come fully armed from the mind of Zeus.  We need to cultivate ideas. 

1.     Read novels. 

2.     Fill your mind with good stuff—basically the stuff you want to write about. 

3.     Figure out what will build ideas in your mind and what will kill ideas in your mind.

4.     Study.

5.     Teach. 

6.     Make the catharsis. 

7.     Write.

The development of ideas is based on study and research, but it is also based on creativity.  Creativity is the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form.  It is a reflection of something new created with ties to the history, science, and logic (the intellect).  Creativity requires consuming, thinking, and producing.

If we have filled our mind with all kinds of information and ideas, we are ready to become creative.  Creativity means the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in a new form.  Literally, we are seeing the world in a new way, or actually, we are seeing some part of the world in a new way. 

I’ve worked through creativity and the protagonist.  The ultimate point is that if you properly develop your protagonist, you have created your novel.  This moves us on to plots and initial scenes.  As I noted, if you have a protagonist, you have a novel.  The reason is that a protagonist comes with a telic flaw, and a telic flaw provides a plot and theme.  If you have a protagonist, that gives you a telic flaw, a plot, and a theme.  I will also argue this gives you an initial scene as well. 

So, we worked extensively on the protagonist.  I gave you many examples great, bad, and average.  Most of these were from classics, but I also used my own novels and protagonists as examples.  Here’s my plan.

1.     The protagonist comes with a telic flaw – the telic flaw isn’t necessarily a flaw in the protagonist, but rather a flaw in the world of the protagonist that only the Romantic protagonist can resolve.

2.     The telic flaw determines the plot.

3.     The telic flaw determines the theme.

4.     The telic flaw and the protagonist determines the initial scene.

5.     The protagonist and the telic flaw determines the initial setting.

6.     Plot examples from great classic plots.

7.     Plot examples from mediocre classic plots.

8.     Plot examples from my novels.

9.     Creativity and the telic flaw and plots.

10.  Writer’s block as a problem of continuing the plot.

Every great or good protagonist comes with their own telic flaw.  I showed how this worked with my own writing and novels.  Let’s go over it in terms of the plot.

This is all about the telic flaw.  Every protagonist and every novel must come with a telic flaw.  They are the same telic flaw.  That telic flaw can be external, internal or both.

We found that a self-discovery telic flaw or a personal success telic flaw can potentially take a generic plot.  We should be able to get an idea for the plot purely from the protagonist, telic flaw and setting.  All of these are interlaced and bring us our plot.

For a great plot, the resolution of the telic flaw has to be a surprise to the protagonist and to the reader.  This is both the measure and the goal.  As I noted before, for a great plot, the author needs to make the telic flaw resolution appear to be impossible, but then it happens.  There is much more to this.  Here’s the list of plots I’ve looked at already:

1.     Redemption

2.     Detective or mystery

3.     Messiah

4.     End of the World

5.     War

6.     Anti-war

7.     Revenge or vengeance

8.     Revelation

9.     Zero to hero

Here is the list of classics that everyone should read.  What I want to do is evaluate this list for the plots. 

This is the plan.  Let’s look at each novel and try to pull out the plot types, the telic flaw, and the theme of the novel. The ultimate point is we can glean plot ideas and types to add to our list.  Part of this evaluation, we can try to identify the zero and the hero of the protagonist.  All this might help us define plots and perhaps help us to develop plots for our own novels.  This is kind of like looking at art as an artist and figuring out what makes a picture successful.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury – Best modern novel in English.  

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible – Most important book to understand Western culture.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 We The Living – Ayn Rand

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Dune – Frank Herbert

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – better to see as plays

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 The Cadwal Chronicles – Jack Vance

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Green Pearl Novels – Jack Vance

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchel

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

37 The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu

38 The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne

39 The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 Dracula – Bram Stoker

43 Till We Have Faces – C.S. Lewis

44 Le Morte D'Arthur - Thomas Malory

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand

51 What Katy Did - Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under her pen name Susan Coolidge

52 A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett

53 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

56 Kim - Rudyard Kipling

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 Beowulf – Unknown

60 The Odyssey – Homer

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

64 The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Robinson Caruso – Daniel Defoe

69 The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

73 Heidi – Johanna Spyri

74 Hans Brinker - Mary Mapes Dodge

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 The Big Sky Country – Arlo Guthrie

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 The Black Arrow - Robert Louis Stevenson

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

83 The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

84 The Miser – George Elliot

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemmingway

87 Tarzan – Edger Rice Burroughs

88 The Death of Socrates – Plato

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 Huckleberry Fin – Mark Twain

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift

96 Matilda – Roald Dahl

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

101 The Once and Future King – T.H. White

102 The Deerslayer – James Fenimore Cooper

103 The Black Book of Communism – Various

104 Ben Hur – Lew Wallace

105 The Robe – Lloyd C. Douglas

106 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

107 The Histories – Herodotus

108 Lives – Plutarch

109 The Call of the Wild – Jack London

110 Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner

111 The Shockwave Rider – John Brunner

112 The Aeneid – Virgil

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is an excellent example of the coming modern novel with a Romantic protagonist and almost a Romantic plot.  With The Maltese Falcon we are definitely out of the Victorian Era, and we are definitely in the new era of the Romantic and entertainment.  That’s not to say the Victorian Era novels were not entertaining, but they are stuffy pretentious and written nearly exclusively for the upper class and aristocrats.  With novels like The Maltese Falcon, we have literature written for all with an earthiness and strength that truly projects the American ideal of the self-made man (and woman) making their way in the world.

This isn’t Steinbeck and it isn’t Hemmingway.  This is the type of novel Hemmingway whished he could write and that Steinbeck knew he couldn’t write.  Not to mention, this is the real beginning of nior literature and the nior novel.  I need to also mention that The Maltese Falcon give use wonderful historical information and is a nearly pure “show and don’t tell” novel.  This is truly a modern novel.  Let’s look at the plots.

You might gather there is an achievement plot in The Maltese Falcon, but it isn’t the achievement plot you might think.  The telic flaw of the novel isn’t the Maltese Falcon at all.  The mystery, history, and article itself isn’t the problem in the novel—the problem is the murder of Archer, Samuel Spade’s partner specifically as well as later the sea captain.  The Maltese falcon is a McGuffin as well as providing an article plot. 

Primarily, we have a mystery plot with the mystery being the murder of Archer.  The novel has an article plot with the Maltese Falcon and a revelation plot in regards to the Maltese Falcon.  As I noted, the article is simply a McGuffin that allows the novel to proceed.  There is a lot of sex, but really no Romance.  What is it with these authors that they see men and women as using each other for nefarious and other purposes? 

With O'Shaughnessy we has a betrayal plot.  I think I’ll add an illness plot for the drugging of Spade.  That’s about all the plots.  It’s not that simple a novel, but it does have a short list of plots compared to other novels we have looked at.  I think this is a good point to note—the more the plots does not mean the better the novel. In fact, too many plots tend to dilute the point of the plotline.  I’ll not say the simplest path is the best, but too many plots obscure the original point of the novel.  In the case of The Maltese Falcon, I think the author developed an excellent balanced novel with just enough excitement and adventure to build the entertainment factor.  It is sweet, relatively simple, but complex in detail and showing beyond most novels.     

Here’s the list of plots.  I’m going to amend the list as we noted. 

1.     Redemption – 8i, 4e, 7, 6ei

2.     Detective or mystery – 28, 1

3.     Messiah – 5

4.     End of the World - 1

5.     War – 12

6.     Anti-war - 1

7.     Revenge or vengeance – 22, 2ie, 1e

8.     Revelation – 29, 1e, 1

9.     Zero to hero – 11

10.  Romance – 25, 1ie

11.  Achievement – 11e, 12ei, 18, 2i, 1ie

12.  Article – 1e, 17, 1

13.  Travel – 26, 1e

14.  Coming of age – 15, 1ei

15.  Progress of technology – 3

16.  Discovery – 2ie, 22, 1

17.  Rejected love (rejection) – 14, 1ei

18.  Miscommunication – 3

19.  Love triangle – 8

20.  Betrayal – 1i, 17, 1ie, 1

21.  Totalitarian – 1e, 6

22.  Blood will out or fate – 19, 1i

23.  Psychological – 11, 1i

24.  Horror – 7

25.  Magic – 5

26.  Mistaken identity – 6

27.  Money – 2e, 12

28.  Spoiled child – 3

29.  Children – 9

30.  Historical – 7

31.  Legal – 3

32.  Adultery – 10

33.  Illness – 6, 1e

34.  School – 7

35.  Self-discovery – 2i, 6

36.  Guilt or Crime – 12, 1

37.  Anti-hero – 5

38.  Immorality – 3i, 2

39.  Proselytizing – 4

40.  Satire – 3

41.  Reason – 6, 1ie

42.  Escape – 1ie, 6

43.  Knowledge – 7

44.  Camaraderie – 7

45.  Parallel – 2

46.  Allegory – 7

47.  Curse – 3

48.  Insanity – 2

49.  Fantasy world – 3

50.  Mentor – 5

Samuel Spade is the protagonist of The Maltese Falcon.  The author makes this very clear.  Sam is a Romantic protagonist filling nearly every box as that type of character.  The telic flaw of the novel is the murder and murderer of Sam’s partner, Archer.  This is both the internal and the external telic flaw.  There is no telling in this novel, but Sam’s desire both externally and internally is to discover the murderer and bring him or her to justice.  Of course, we know it is a her—Sam’s current client and lover.

I’m not certain this is the first use of a McGuffin in a piece of literature, but the Maltese Falcon is a McGuffin.  What is a McGuffin, this is an article used in the plot to drive the plot, but with zero real effect of importance other than to drive the plot.  The Maltese Falcon doesn’t even appear in the novel, except its fake.  If anything, The Maltese Falcon shows an author how to make a wonderful and entertaining real world work from a pure fantasy concept.  As I noted, the Falcon doesn’t appear in the entire novel.

The Maltese Falcon is almost a Romantic plot.  Where it misses is that the author doesn’t make the discovery of the murderer appear impossible.  We are assured over and over that Sam will uncover the mystery, and he does.  The direction of the novel is more rough and tumble than it is mental and reasoning.  We have a Sherlock Holms who is willing to go to the mat to resolve the mystery than to use logic and reasoning.  That’s not to say Sam doesn’t, but his style of resolution is interrogation and badgering rather than logical reasoning.  This is the style that modern movie makers have cast Sherlock Holms, buy the way. 

More than this, Sam is willing to engage in physical activity and fighting in a way few Victorian Era characters ever would.  Steinbeck and Hemmingway’s characters would, but never the wimps from the Victorian Era—they had other people do their dirty work.  In any case, The Maltese Falcon, is the perfect example for new and old authors to get a clue about showing and not telling.  Check it out and learn from its example.  

In the end, we can figure out what makes a work have a great plot, and apply this to our writing.     

  

Let’s start with the idea of an internal and external telic flaw.  Then let’s provide it a wrapper.  The wrapper is the plot.       

      

The beginning of creativity is study and effort.  We can use this to extrapolate to creativity.  In addition, we need to look at recording ideas and working with ideas.    

    

More tomorrow.

For more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel websites:

http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com  

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