There is a type of plot that is prevalent in YA books and starting to get into general lit that I do not like. It is a similar trope to the MacGuffin, but instead of the plot being driven by an object, it is driven by the characters being in some sort of situation with formally fixed stakes.
Just as a MacGuffin is an object with no specific properties that affect its importance to the story, the identifying characteristic of this plot is that exact nature of the situation is irrelevant or at least not very important.
A very common example is when characters are involved in some sort of game or competition—for example, the first Throne of Glass book involves the protagonist competing to become the king's assassin, but the plot of the book would need to change very little if the competition was a beauty pageant.
"Gamified" plot lines like this often also include MacGuffins (to drive the "game"), confirming the tropes' similarity in my head.
The other common example is the "magic/superhero/assassin school" plot. The "school" is often just a device that brings the characters together and keeps them on a predetermined track, but there's nothing about what the characters are learning or even the school's specific identity as an educational institution that affects the plot.
so here's what i'm talking about:
The Hunger Games is NOT an example of this. The specific nature of the "games" drives and affects the plot on every level: it threatens the immediate survival of the characters, defines the culture and politics of the world, and affects the characters' relationship with each other. How the Hunger Games came to be, how tributes are selected, how the games are filmed and broadcast, and the "rules" of the game are all relevant.
But some of the successors of THG picked up the "formal game/competition" aspect and jammed it into their stories as a kind of pre-cast mold for the plot and stakes. This sucks and it's annoyingly commonplace.
These plots are probably attractive because they let authors avoid, or at least postpone, the hard questions about character motivation and stakes by trapping the character within an institution or binding arrangement of some kind.
When you're in college, you can offload most of your motivation to do things onto their utility in helping you graduate. However, as a college student, you also regularly face the question, "Why don't I drop out and become a stripper?"
Okay, that question is a stand-in for the general "why am I doing this, and why don't I leave?" but I think it's a good test to apply to stories where a protagonist older than like 15-16 attends an Institution.
- Does your character think about "dropping out and becoming a stripper [or whatever is appropriate for their world and age group]?"
- If so, why don't they?
If the answer is "they literally Cannot leave," you Must include this in your awareness of the kind of story you are writing. Your character is trapped in a coercive situation, and it makes sense for this to affect them in some way.
What you must Not do is use the coercive nature of the situation to "bury" the question of your character's motivation.
You must also be prepared to write About Institutions and to do so consciously. If a formal structure or coercive force is needed to prevent your character from fucking off out of the story entirely, that's a conflict and friction that underlies everything else. You can write this kind of story without explicitly tapping that conflict, but if you're trying to do something like that and it's???? very? hard??? it's worth looking into this as the reason why.
There's something here about how people have learned to be unable to see the The Friction as a "conflict" in a storytelling sense. Really, all of us are part of at least one Structure that would kill us for trying to leave.
Interpreting this in literature sounds very similar to what's called a Marxist reading of a book.
I'm writing this out partially because if you grew up on YA books, it's Super Easy to reproduce tropes as a baby writer that work or don't work depending on an element you don't know exists and that isn't taught.
This one in particular led me down into a bout of writer's block that I ultimately never solved, back when I was 15 or so. I hit a wall that can be described as "my character is basically in a cult, she doesn't have any of the tools to escape it, and the plot requires her to" and I realized this, but I did not have the vocabulary to make sense of what the problem was—she had what seemed like sufficient MOTIVATION to escape the cult, but she COULDN'T, because psychologically she could not do it, and therefore I could not make her do it.
The dominant narrative of writer's block was "push through it and ignore it," and this killed the entire project for me, because my inability to "make" her do the thing she wanted deep down was completely puzzling.
And this was because I hadn't intentionally designed her situation as a cult, and it hadn't occurred to me that there was a unique psychological aspect to being in a cult, because it was so similar to the books I was reading at the time—YA books with characters being driven through very structured, authoritarian institutions like a complex system of pipes.
There is, again, hella commentary on the society that writes these stories here, and it occurs to me that the whole idea of "motivation" as the main driver of a character's actions is very in line with rugged-individualism and capitalism.
It assumes a character is an independent, rational agent that acts to pursue an external goal, focusing on the character's agency and desire to obtain "something" they do not have.
The fatal flaw of this paradigm is very simple: real people have limited agency, do not know what they want, and do not act rationally, and well-written, complex characters usually reflect this.
In Othello, the titular character loves Desdemona and wants to be loved by her, but Iago toys with and amplifies his fear and mistrust, and he ends up murdering her instead. It is not useful or really even correct to say that Othello has a goal, or that he is motivated by desire for something; if you do frame it that way, you have to explain why his actions actively sabotage the thing he wants, and this explanation is likely to shift the "agency" onto Iago, and be very awkward in exploring Othello. I use Othello as an example because for me, it was a viscerally hard-hitting story about a character whose marginalization had made his approach to relationships deeply dysfunctional, because his constant awareness of his marginalization sabotaged his ability to trust.
You can say a great variety of things about Shakespeare's portrayal being racist or not, but his understanding of the experience of being "othered" hit like a ford f-350 being driven by a drunk wannabe redneck. And that's the main quality that I think makes Shakespeare enduring? The man had a DEEP understanding of the ways people have Something Wrong With Them and specifically could portray people doing wildly irrational things and show why it made sense for them to.
This was one of the things that I, as a baby writer, knew so crisply I could taste it, but simply did not have the words for—what a character wants is rarely what they think they want or what they have the mental and emotional tools to pursue, and it often doesn't make sense for them to have enough insight into themselves to make actions oriented toward a goal that aligns with their "wants." "Motivation" in the sense of an external goal or explicit desire is used interchangeably with "motivation" in the sense of driving emotions and urges, and those are VERY, VERY DIFFERENT.
"And that's the main quality that I think makes Shakespeare enduring? The man had a DEEP understanding of the ways people have Something Wrong With Them"
!!!!!!
