"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature"
~Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged.
~Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged.
To
paraphrase or summarize a piece of literature is to attempt to carry the burden
of the whole of its mass into an essay. It’s
pure drudgery, trudgery, pain in the, as it were, lower back to write. It’s boring and a pain in the upper back (and
neck) for readers to read. Paraphrasing
and summarizing have been two of the forms of punishment—along with dunce caps,
raps on the knuckles, beatings with paddles and switches, and cages—with which
teachers have abused students (if only metaphorically). And if teachers are
bored reading the results, then, well, it (de)serves them right.
Early on as a teacher, I vowed to be
honest with myself and with my students. I don’t assign boring tasks that
result in boring reading. Paraphrases
and summaries are boring. If they are
improvements on the literature, then why have the literature?
But,
but, but, I hear a reader sputtering, We
have to know what it’s about. Yes, it surely helps to know that Hamlet’s
uncle poisoned Hamlet’s father, and that the play Hamlet is a journey through how Hamlet does or doesn’t cope. That’s the story of Hamlet. But we don’t have to know (and here I’m
leaving out a two-page summary of the play) every first-this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens-then…
detail to cut to Hamlet’s To be, or not
to be soliloquy. We don’t have to
eat the whole wedding cake to savor our one (or two) slices. If we do attempt to eat the whole wedding
cake, that sack on the boy’s back becomes a big sack of a belly—we end up not
being able to stomach the literature. We
get sluggish, vomitatious, sleepy. (But enough of this extended metaphor.)
Let’s distinguish story from plot—or
what I am fond of calling “plod.” The story
is the two-sentence blurb we read when surfing through Netflix for a new film
to watch. It’s what we tell a fellow
student who corners you before a class and asks you (as she hasn’t done the
assigned reading) “What’s the story about?”
The process of distilling the story enables you to choose your focus and
to read more deeply.
The plod is the breakfast-to-bed
details of first-this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens-then… It fills up the required number of pages; you
can do it while multi-devicing, eating, and (forfend!) driving; and you don’t
have to learn or change your mind in any way.
It’s substituting a false sense of thoroughness for depth and
originality of thought.
It’s no wonder that the children’s
story character, Mr. Plod, is a policeman.
Assigning plod—woops—plot paraphrase/summary—is to police students: Are
you following the teacher’s laws? Are
you thinking what the teacher’s thinking?
Summary sites were created to level the possibility of students actually
learning how the mind works, how it might work. They pander to our addictions
to games and social media—get this school assignment over-with, so I can get
back to my phone.
Other
forms of plod include writing (1) Annotations. In this exercise, students might quote a sonnet
line by line, offering a few remarks—notations—after each. (2) Breakfast-to-bed.
Usually used in not-so-creative first-draft story writing, the student
starts by detailing image after dutiful image of what it means for a character to
wake up. Unless you’re having your character wake up as a huge insect, as Kafka
does in “Metamorphosis,” a startling, and engaging premise, breakfast often
leads to another form of plod, (3) Close
links. First you wake up, then you brush your teeth, then you… (4) On and On. Attempting to cite every
instance of a theme or pattern than you discern in your subject matter. (5+)
Other variations include Monday thru
Sunday, 1 to 10, and, well, I don’t want to plod through all the plodding
possibilities here. Burdensome to write,
plod writing is burdensome to read. Whatever creates a feeling of “oh-no,” Do-I-have-to-plod-through-all-this-one-robotic-step-at-a-time?
disappointment in you, as the writer, will create it in the reader. As soon as I get a whiff of that in a student
paper, we’re back to the revision board.
Don’t be thorough—be deep.
As viewers might say about a film, “get to the chase.” For our literary purposes, it’s “get to the
story.”
Works Cited:
Because I Can Teach Resources:
A Monarch Shmoops…https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2014/03/in-other-wordsthe-prison-and-misprision.html
One Paper Clip: https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2018/05/one-paper-clip-detail-design-
depth.html
Thank you, Brianna Oddo, for alerting me to Ayn Rand's quote!
depth.html
Thank you, Brianna Oddo, for alerting me to Ayn Rand's quote!
