Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure Read online

  As an example of the crucial importance of adhesive, consider the Neil Simon play The Odd Couple. Oscar Madison is a happy slob. He lives in a bachelor pad where he and his friends can be as sloppy as they want. They can smoke cigars, play cards, and make a mess.

  Felix Unger, Oscar’s friend, is a neat freak. When he moves into Oscar’s apartment, sparks fly. The two do not get along. This is the engine of the conflict.

  The obvious question, however, is why doesn’t Oscar just kick Felix out? It’s Oscar’s apartment, after all. If he can’t stand Felix, why not show him the door?

  Simon, recognizing the need for adhesive, cleverly sets it up from the start. Felix’s wife has left him, and he is suicidal. Oscar and the others are worried about Felix being left alone. Thus, Oscar, Felix’s friend, undertakes an understandable moral task — watching out for Felix.

  Of course, the humor of the play occurs as Oscar reaches the point where he feels like killing Felix himself.

  In literary fiction, the adhesive will sometimes be self-generating. A Lead must change on the inside or suffer psychological loss. Or she must get away from an influence (the opposition) that threatens to squelch her growth. In White Oleander, for example, Astrid struggles throughout the book to find her own identity, apart from a domineering mother.

  Some other examples:

  In Jaws, Brody has a professional duty to protect the residents of his town.

  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is dying inside in the world he inhabits and must find another reason to live.

  In Dean Koontz’s Intensity, Chyna spends much of the book trapped in the back of a killer’s van (a physical location). Later, she tries to save a tortured hostage (a moral duty).

  In the movie The Fugitive, the adhesive is the law. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is innocent of his wife’s murder. It’s not only self-interest that keeps him on the run; he also has a moral duty to find the man who killed his wife. On the other side, Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) is a U.S. Marshal, and thus has a professional duty to catch the fugitive. We well understand why neither character can just walk away.

  ARM YOURSELF FOR CONFRONTATION

  ARM stands for Action, Reaction, More action. It is the fundamental rhythm of the novel.

  Think about it. Unless your Lead character is doing something, you have no plot. Plot results from the action of the character to solve the problems in front of him, all with the aim of gaining his desire.

  Action requires that the character has decided upon an objective and that he has started toward it. This action must be opposed by something or the scene will be dull. So pick an obstacle, an immediate problem to overcome.

  What About a Passive Lead Character?

  Someone who doesn’t really do much? My advice again: Don’t try this at home until you’re practiced and skilled like Anne Tyler, who manages to pull it off (for some readers) in A Patchwork Planet. The Lead, Barnaby, is a thirty-year-old man who seems to float through the novel as things happen around him and to him. Tyler uses details and her perceptions of character to keep interest aroused.

  Most often the right choice is another character who, for whatever reason, is standing in the way of the character. Conflict results.

  Let us take a few examples.

  Suppose we’re writing a legal thriller, and a young lawyer has just been assigned to help on a case. The case involves one of the firm’s big clients and the SEC. The young lawyer’s first task is to gather information, and he sits down with the client’s chief accountant.

  If the scene becomes merely a question-and-answer session, with the lawyer asking and receiving what he wants, we have a lifeless scene. Not much interest. This can happen when you have characters on the same side, with similar interests.

  How do you spice up such a scene?

  You find ways to add conflict or tension.

  One way to do it is through the surroundings. Perhaps the session is constantly interrupted by other business around the office. Before any of the crucial information can come out, the session is ended when the accountant is called to another task.

  But tension from the characters themselves is often the surest way to generate interest.

  The accountant trusts the lawyer, but he is afraid. Instead of answering the questions directly, he keeps asking about what might happen to him. The lawyer has to keep trying to calm him down.

  What the lawyer doesn’t get is the information he needs. That’s conflict, a frustration of his goal in the scene.

  Or the lawyer goes over to the accountant’s house. As he begins to ask questions, the accountant pulls a gun on him. Is that conflict? You bet.

  But why does he pull the gun? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

  And that’s what novelists do. They write actions and justify them.

  At the end of an action scene, the character might have overcome the various obstacles in his way and attained his scene goal. But keeping in mind that worrying the reader is the primary goal of the middle of the book, it is actually much better if the character does not attain his goal. In fact, if the situation can be made worse, then so much the better for us, your readers.

  So now we have our young lawyer looking down the barrel of a gun. The accountant says that if he comes around again, he’s going to be shot. “Now get out.”

  We have reached the end of our action unit with a nice kick in the pants to our character. Now what does he do?

  He reacts.

  That’s how the human being operates, isn’t it? When a nasty situation hits us, we react to it.

  First we react emotionally. This depends upon our psychological makeup. It’s the same for your character.

  Our young lawyer might be angry, confused, scared, or some other variation on these themes.

  Then what happens? Well, the character might give up and go home. He might decide to leave the firm and look for a new job.

  But then your story is at an end. If the action involves the main plot, your character cannot give up. Therefore, he is going to take more action after he’s thought about what to do. It may be a few seconds of time, or it may require longer rumination. But at some point, he will decide to take further action, and the pattern repeats itself.

  Action, reaction, more action.

  It keeps your story moving forward. Chapter seven covers scene writing and will expand on how you do this, beat by beat.

  KEEP THEM READING

  Writers sometimes refer to the infamous “Act II Problem,” which boils down to this: How do you keep the readers interested through that long portion of the novel? Yes, we write action, reaction, and more action. But what sort of action?

  It will help enormously if you think about two principles all the time:(1) stretching the tension and (2) raising the stakes.

  Learn to do these two things, and you’ll save yourself a lot of plot headaches. And you’ll have those readers anxiously flipping the pages.

  Stretching the Tension

  One of my great movie-going experiences was watching Psycho in high school in an auditorium during a storm. The place was packed. The mood was right. And from the shower scene on, people were screaming their heads off.

  I’m glad my first exposure to the movie was not on television. I got to see it uncut (which is more than we can say for Janet Leigh after the shower scene). But more importantly, I got the full effect of the suspense without commercial interruption.

  When Vera Miles started walking toward the house, the audience shrieked. Most people were shouting Don’t go in there! Stop! NOOO! My skin erupted in a million pin pricks.

  Of course, Vera didn’t listen. And it seemed like it took forever for her to get inside the place, and then down to the basement to see, ahem, Mrs. Bates.

  The screaming did not stop during the entire sequence. The anticipation was unbearable. The surprise-twist climax actually changed my body chemistry. I didn’t sleep right for a week.

  Which demonstrates why Alfred Hitchcock w
as called the master of suspense. What he did better than any other director was stretch the tension. He never let a thrilling moment escape with a mere whimper. He played it for all it was worth.

  And so should fiction writers. Learning how to stretch tension is one of the best ways to keep your readers flipping pages, losing sleep, and buying your books.

  Set up the Tension

  Before you can stretch anything, of course, you need the raw material. You don’t fashion a clay pot without clay. The clay for a novelist is trouble. The question you have to keep asking is this: What problem has the potential to lay some serious hurt on my character?

  If your Lead has misplaced his pajamas, you could write several pages about it, throwing obstacle after obstacle in his path (a roller skate, a phone call, the postman ringing twice). But the hunt is unlikely to engage your readers. There just isn’t enough at stake at the end of the line (unless, of course, your hero has hidden the mafia’s money in the pajama bottoms and has five minutes to find it).

  So the first rule is simple. Always make sure scenes of tension have something to be tense about.

  When you’ve got a handle on the trouble for your character in a given scene, you’re ready to stretch it. You can do that with two aspects of your fiction — the physical and the emotional. Each presents an opportunity to transform your story from the mundane to the thrilling.

  Stretching the Physical

  Physical peril or uncertainty is perfect material for the big stretch. The way to do it is simple — slow down. Go through the scene beat by beat in your imagination, as if you’re watching a movie scene in slow motion.

  Then, as you write the scene, alternate between action, thoughts, dialogue, and description. Take your time with each one. Milk them.

  Let’s say you have a woman being stalked by a man with assault on his mind. It could start this way:

  [Action] Mary took a step back.

  [Dialogue] “Don’t be afraid,” the man said.

  [Thought] How did he get in here? The doors are all locked.

  [Action] He swayed where he stood, and [Description] she could smell the beer on his breath.

  [Dialogue] “Get out,” she said.

  [Action] He laughed and slid toward her.

  Want to stretch even more? Good. Do it. Each item — action, thoughts, dialogue, description — can be extended:

  [Action] Mary took a step back, bumping the end table. [Description] A vase crashed to the floor.

  [Dialogue] “Don’t be afraid,” the man said. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mary. I want to be your friend.”

  [Thoughts] How did he get in here? The doors are all locked. And then she remembered she’d left the garage door open for Johnny. Stupid, stupid. You deserve this, you always deserve what you get.

  Extending beats can even stretch tension when a character is alone. The secret, once again, is in the setup material.

  In One Door Away From Heaven, Dean Koontz has a scene early in the book where Leilani, a nine-year-old girl, walks through a trailer home to find her drugged-out mother. Doesn’t seem like much of a problem, except Koontz sets the scene up with this description: “Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.”

  From there, for seven pages, Leilani continues step by step. The suspense builds until the revelation at the end of the scene. This section, which many writers would have dealt with in a paragraph, adds enormously to the overall tension.

  Your ability to orchestrate beats so they conform to the tone and feel of the story you’re trying to tell is one of the most important skills you can develop. Here are three key questions to ask before you write a tense scene involving physical action:

  What is the worst thing from the outside that can happen to my character? This may be in the form of another person, a physical object, or a circumstance outside the character’s control.

  What is the worst trouble my character can get into in this scene? You may come up with an instant answer. Pause a moment and ratchet it up a notch. This may suggest further possibilities.

  Have I sufficiently set up the danger for readers before the scene? Remember, they need to know what’s at stake before they start worrying.

  Stretching the Emotional

  Of course, a scene does not have to involve physical peril to have tension worth stretching. Trouble can be emotional as well.

  When a character is in the throes of emotional turmoil, don’t make things easy on her. We humans are a circus of doubts and anxieties. Play them up! Give us the whole show.

  In chapter one of The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Beth’s youngest son, Ben, disappears in a crowded hotel. The next forty pages cover hours, not days. Emotional beat after emotional beat is rendered as Beth goes through the various manifestations of shock, fear, grief, and guilt.

  For example, when the detective, Candy Bliss, suggests Beth lie down, Mitchard gives us this paragraph:

  Beth supposed she should lie down; her throat kept filling with nastiness and her stomach roiled. But if she lay down, she wanted to explain to Candy Bliss, who was holding out her hand, it would be deserting Ben. Did Detective Bliss think Ben was lying down? If Beth ate, would he eat? She should not do anything Ben couldn’t do or was being prevented from doing. Was he crying? Or wedged in a dangerous and airless place? If she lay down, if she rested, wouldn’t Ben feel her relaxing, think she had decided to suspend her scramble toward him, the concentrated thrust of everything in her that she held out to him like a life preserver? Would he relax then, turn in sorrow toward a bad face, because his mama had let him down?

  Notice how Mitchard uses physical descriptions that show rather than tell: throat kept filling with nastiness; stomach roiled.

  She places us in Beth’s mind as her thoughts come one after another, accusing her. Then Mitchard goes back to the action of the scene. And so the beats continue.

  In Brett Lott’s story “Brothers,” the beats come mainly through dialogue. During a drive through the desert after picking up a chair for someone, the narrator tries to understand his younger brother: “Tim had been chewing on something since we’d picked up the rocker recliner.”What Tim is chewing on is the subject of the story, related through Tim’s emotional account of a neighbor’s death.

  We keep reading to find out what impact this has on the narrator. Does he really know his brother? What will the revelations do to him? Lott keeps up the tension by delaying answers until the end.

  To stretch inner tension, ask these questions to get your raw material:

  What is the worst thing from the inside that can happen to my character? This encompasses a whole universe of mental stakes. Hint: Look to the character’s fears.

  What is the worst information my character can receive? Some secret from the past or fact that rocks her world can be stalking her through the scene.

  Have I sufficiently set up the depth of emotion for readers before the scene? We need to care about your Lead characters before we care about their problems.

  Stretching the Big and the Small

  Think of tension stretching as an elongation of bad times. This can be on a large scale, as in Jeffery Deaver’s A Maiden’s Grave, a novel about a one-day hostage crisis. Each chapter is marked by a clock reading, for example, 11:02 a.m. The chapters then give the full range of dramatic beats.

  The tension can also be stretched on a micro level. Usually this happens when you’re revising. You come across beats that pass a little too quickly for the rhythm you’re trying to create.

  In A Certain Truth, featuring my early 1900s Los Angeles lawyer, Kit Shannon, I have Kit sharing a meal with the temperance champion Carry Nation. The first draft of the scene had this:

  Their laughter was interrupted by the figure of the Chief of Police, Horace Allen. He stood at their table with one of his uniformed officers. Kit knew immediately this was not a soc
ial call.

  “Kathleen Shannon.” The Chief’s voice was thunderous.

  “Good evening, Chief.”

  I felt the moment, for dramatic purposes, needed a little more time. I rewrote it, adding more beats:

  Their laughter was interrupted by the figure of the Chief of Police, Horace Allen. He stood at their table with one of his uniformed officers. Kit knew immediately this was not a social call.

  “Kathleen Shannon.” The chief’s voice was thunderous, causing all conversation to cease within the place.

  Kit felt the silence, sensed the social opprobrium flowing her way from the gentile patrons. A pleasant evening was being rudely interrupted, and that was not why people came to the Imperial. “Good evening, Chief.”

  The best way to get the right amount of tension into your novel is to stretch it as much as possible in your first draft and then look at what you’ve got.

  Go for it, and don’t worry about overdoing it or wearing out the reader. You have that wonderful thing called revision to save you. If you write hot, packing your scenes with physical and emotional tension, you can always revise cool, and scale back on rewrite. That’s much easier to do than trying to heat things up the second time around.

  Of course not every scene should be a big, suspenseful set piece. A novel can sustain only a few of those, and you want them to stand out. But any scene can be stretched beyond its natural comfort zone. Get in the habit of finding the cracks and crevices where troubles lie and burrowing in to see what’s there. You may strike gold. And your readers will be thankful for the effort.

  Raising the Stakes

  In the classic Warner Bros. cartoon The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Daffy Duck is earnestly pitching his new script to the unseen Jack Warner. As Daffy tells the story, we see it unfold, performed by the great stock company of Daffy, Porky Pig, Sylvester, and Elmer Fudd.