Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that you have the setting, you must construct a plot around the basic love-story theme of boy meeting girl- which is merely the skeleton. Segal cleverly dresses up his skeleton with class conflict- he chooses a poor Cliffie as the girl his richboy hero meets- and a sad ending. The sad ending is a good device: it prevents reviewers from degrading fiction by calling it "light" or "trivial...
...WITH the plot out of the way, you must concern yourself with its handling. First-person is an excellent narrative mode: it allows you to commit incredible errors of style and pass them off as a characterization of your narrator. Segal takes full advantage of this technique (although his lapses are more the voice of a wisecracking writer than that of a Harvard preppie jock), which also permits brevity by enabling you to describe characters rather than illustrate them. The reader might not accept the words of an author who says. "Jenny was brilliant," but if Oliver Barrett IV himself...
...Sheep needs a plot to usher the audience through the vacuums between jokes. The men and women on stage are superfluous, a fog between the audience and Buchwald's byline at the breakfast table. And the words, so funny when read, just don't work when they come from comic book characters on stage. Sometimes, the playwright in Mr. Buchwald comes creeping out, but he soon crawls back in. Buchwald often hints that something is really going to occur between certain characters, that a situation is leading to a plot. There is such a moment when the ambassador's daughter...
...than a hideously bad joke. The roaring is that of personality, and a line of Sammler's applies: "Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder." Henderson roars himself out literally-impersonating a lion-when the author's mad plot sends him into the bush with a tribe of lion worshipers. He returns to the new world calmed, ready to enter medical school...
...plot of The Beaux' Stratagem is as chestnutty as they come. Two young purse-poor gallants pose as master and servant in order to wed wealthily. One sometimes feels that money is the English equivalent of Nirvana. The country inn, where much of the action takes place, is the English dramatic equivalent of the French bedroom. It offers an almost novelistic diversity of characters and encounters. Prelates and highwaymen, maids and matrons meet and mingle-strangers in the night who may, with a little bit of luck, become intimates for the night. Mine host, Boniface, has given his name...