Idea Driven Plot

© Michael R. Stevens 2010 all rights reserved

“Plot-driven” and “character-driven” commonly used and commonly understood terms to describe fiction, but I can’t say that my work precisely fits into either category. I would like to propose a third: “idea-driven,” the term that I would use to describe my own work.


In an idea-driven novel, the premise and the setting are important, and the author uses these aspects of the whole, along with characters, plot, etc. to intellectually explore specific themes. There are two such themes in my new novel, FORTUNA, making it a thriller, but a little bit more. (At least, I hope so!)

The first theme in FORTUNA has to do with gangs. About fifteen years ago, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense, there was a debate going on about how the United States should respond to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. At the same time, there was a lot of publicity about gang activity in East Los Angeles. So it turned out that Cheney and a couple of known gang leaders were both quoted in the same edition of the L.A. Times. And they both used the same language! My liberal Berkeley friends might respond, well, yes, we always knew Cheney and has pals were a gang of thugs. But it’s important to realize that gang leaders don’t see themselves as thugs at all, but rather leaders of what they themselves often refer to as “nations.”.

Taking this idea a little further, there are amazing parallels between the powerful families of Renaissance Italy – the Medici, Sforza, Este and so on – and the Five Families of organized crime in the last half of the twentieth century. In Renaissance Florence there was a Christian club to which the leaders belonged whose name, translated into modern English, is “Good Fellas.” The mode of assassination was the same: an invitation to a sumptuous feast, followed by murder of the guest. To be sure, there are differences. To my knowledge, the Gatti family never commissioned sculpture, and the Medici didn’t deal in drugs. But in many, many ways, the twentieth century Mafia Godfathers were the true heirs of the fifteenth century merchant princes.

FORTUNA examines how the values of Renaissance-style families translate into modern times, with the intellectual underpinning provided by my favorite political thinker, Machiavelli. The online role-playing game that gives the book its title is set in a digital simulation of Renaissance Florence. Organized crime also plays an important role, which I won’t discuss here. You have to read the book!

A second intellectual theme in FORTUNA has to do with our sense of reality, which is arguably distorted in some situations. The film THE MATRIX takes this theme to its extreme, postulating a world in which human beings live their lives in life-support pods, dreaming their reality. THE MATRIX is science fiction, but the gaming experience described in FORTUNA is a fact of life for millions. (Worlds of Warcraft, the most popular online role-playing game, has 15 million players.) And these players aren’t primarily teenage boys. About half of all online role-players are employed, over one-third are married and 22 percent have children.

What is so attractive about these games, where ultimately, a sort of Machiavellian ruthlessness wins? And are they “just games?” Is it quite alright to murder an opponent in a game? And does this sort of mental training threaten to spill over into real life?

In the novel TOM JONES the country bumpkin protagonist gets confused watching a play and jumps onto the stage to rescue the heroine. The English professor for whose class I read this novel commented that this was not only a joke, but a reflection of how caught up we can get in fiction. What happens when we are not passive witnesses, but actors in an artificial world, as is the case in role-playing games?

These questions obviously don’t have easy answers. The point here is that, at least in my opinion, philosophical questions like these can form the foundation for works of fiction – idea-driven fiction.

About the author:
 
Michael Stevens has worked as a writer all his life, starting as the music columnist for his hometown newspaper when he was in high school. He owned a successful high tech advertising agency in Silicon Valley for many years, and now freelances from his home office, mostly for very large companies with a global presence. He is a serious amateur musician and has produced four CDs.