Seeking story, finding plot

Snatches. Wisps. Word straws, briefly afloat, then gone forever.

“Mum’s never going to forgive me when she hears...”

Hears what? I’ll never know.

The talkers: two young women, striding purposefully along the beach, backs slightly bent as they push against the stiff breeze.

A laugh — a nervous titter — accompanies the statement before it, too, is devoured by the greedy wind.

What’s the full story, I wonder, my thoughts dragged away from the pages of my book — The Kindly Ones — a gigantic tome that despite its weight, all of nine hundred pages, is, I find, quite unputdownable. Yet, here am I, out for a spot of relaxation and a session of serious reading, suitably distracted by the fragmentary utterances of a passerby.

I have come here to get away from the present. I’d strategised I could do so by losing myself in the past, hence the book. Determinedly, I search page 184 for the paragraph I’d deserted. Ah, there... “...and his eyes, I saw this, his blue eyes faded into the blue of the sky. The sky erased his eyes.”

The wind, teasing as is its wont, brings more voices. I glance up.

Another couple is approaching, an older man hands in his pockets and by his side a silver-haired woman in a frock handling a tiny dog on a leash — a hairy white Pekingese, a breed that’s not among my favourites ever since, years ago, one of their ilk, unprovoked, snapped at me and would have rendered my heel a similar fate as that befell the great Achilles had I not been wearing a sturdy pair of trainers. Legend has it that the Pekingese is the product of a bizarre love union between a lion that fell hopelessly in love with a tiny marmoset. Because of the disparity in size the wise Supreme Judge in the animal kingdom, who was called upon to make a ruling, decreed that the marriage may go ahead if the lion was willing to forego his strength and stature and be reduced to the size of the marmoset, which it did unhesitatingly. This particular Pekingese is, if one observes closely, actually taking the couple for a walk — a healthy jog, if truth be told. So when the trio trot past all I hear is, “Well you told Barry not to lean over the balcony. Did he listen? Did he?”

The man’s response is censored by the wind and even if it hadn’t it would have been superimposed by a volley of barks from the lion-descended Pekingese which appears to have encountered a crab or a similarly pincered crustacean, for it is no longer running but in minor retreat.

I try getting back to my reading. Jonathan Littell is, after all, an absorbing story teller. This book is they say a new War and Peace. But I find myself wondering. What became of Barry on the balcony? Was he a friend? A son? The woman who uttered the words — did she sound distressed? Matter of fact? What was it that the man said in reply?

It’s easy, I discover, to get drawn into in the lives of others. Easy as well to think up a plausible scenario from a small overheard fragment of conversation.

Is it a good thing — to worry after their welfare? Is it inquisitive, intrusive — even if one is dwelling on matters from a distance? Is it just — human nature?

Where is the past and the quiet I came seeking? Is the forceful, superimposing present trying to tell me something? Live in the moment?

My head is full of the just overheard story lines. Soon it will be devising plots. That unfortunately is the beaten path a writer must always tread.

Which provides me an opportunity to segue neatly to E.M Forster who in distinguishing between story and plot gave the following example: The king died and then the queen died is a story... The king died and the queen died of grief is a plot.

— Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.