Plumbline

I was half way through my MA thesis, or so I thought, when the teacher asked: “Margaret, what is your plumbline?” I had no idea – a) what my plumbline was, or b) what a plumbline was.

I knew I wanted to write about the torn relationship I had with my father who’d died in 1976 in a veterans’ hospital. But what was the narrative arc, apart from a chronological journey to recover our relationship?

What was my plumbline?

One weekend I attended a workshop on ‘Plot’. They explained that plot is different to story. Plot is why something happens. To paraphrase E.M. Forster: story is, “The king died. Then the queen died.” But plot is, ‘The King died. The queen died of a broken heart.” This happened because that happened.

How did plotting help my story?

I ‘d written about seeing “Jack’s Daughters”, a 1980s’ play about five children and their out-of-control ex-POW father. When I revisited this scene I found a plot, or a plot-point. I was not alone in having a serviceman father who suffered PTSD (not called that at the time). As a consequence I was spurred on to find others of my peers who’d had similar child-father relationships.

I could better see my plumbline, or my ‘throughline’ as it is also known. This gave a sense of urgency to my journey of discovery, driving it forward. Or – I’d found just a touch of what Dylan Thomas calls, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”.  I’d found one small part of the story.