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Picture this scenario: You’re watching your absolutely favorite show. Things are getting dicy for the heroes. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion! Your heroes’ lives are in danger! What’s going to happen to them? Are they okay? Will they survive? Then, the screen goes black. And then you see: TO BE CONTINUED. “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” you scream. “I have to know what happens next!”

And what does happen next? Well, you tune in when the next episode airs or the new season starts. Why? Because you’re HOOKED. Because you need to know the sequel: what happens next.

Though I wouldn’t recommend reading it straight through, just like with Stein’s books, I recommend everyone should at least check Scene and Structure out from your local library and read the sections on Sequels. It’s not about subsequent books, but the pattern of how scenes follow-up the disaster that happened in the previous scene.

The way you structure the flow of your scenes is one of the primary ways, after dropping disasters on your characters, to keep the reader hooked. Remember, the purpose of each scene is to move the character further from quick fixes and shortcuts. Once you’ve written to the hook, the disaster, you can keep the reader frustrated and wanting to find out what happens next by breaking away from one character’s disaster to a subplot or other POV character’s scene. But change POV only when it creates more tension and suspense, not just to be in the other character’s head.

Bickham gives a few ways to amp up the conflict for each character within the scene that then ties that scene to either the next one or what happens later in the book (setting up sequels to keep the reader turning pages):

• Drop hints that the antagonist knows something which the hero/POV character doesn’t—something that is advantageous to the antagonist and/or disastrous for the hero. This is Malfoy taunting Harry Potter with stuff he knows that Harry obviously doesn’t. This is the serial killer taunting the detective. This is someone (either an antagonist or someone well-meaning but ill-informed) telling the heroine that the hero is cheating on her.
• The antagonist could actually reveal something the hero didn’t know yet—a bit of bad news that alters the hero’s assumptions or decisions or even make him deviate from his scene goal (or at least make the reader believe he will).
• Show that the hero has faulty information—and that he doesn’t realize it—to lead the reader to believe he’ll make the wrong decision.
• Have the antagonist (or an outside source) set a ticking clock on the duration of the scene (Can Jack Bauer stop the terrorists in twenty-four hours? Can Rose get Jack unshackled before the room fills with water as Titanic sinks?)

Once you’ve upped the tension in a scene, then ended it with a disaster, there are six ways to keep the conflict going in the sequel that will give the reader some closure on the previous conflict and yet still keep the tension level rising:

• As already mentioned, set a timer on your character’s actions, a time-limit in which to make a decision. You end a scene with the hero receiving a ransom note from the kidnapper who has his child: You have three hours to deliver $5 million or I kill the kid. What happens in the sequel scenes is shaped by that disaster, by that time-limit.
• Have the POV character come to understand—on his own or with help—an entirely different aspect of the previous disaster he hadn’t thought of before. How can that disaster actually be used to his advantage?
• On the flip-side, instead of realizing how the disaster can be advantageous, the character is now overwhelmed by the disaster (and the emotions resulting from it) and plunges back into the conflict with insufficient understanding of what’s going on, leading to more disasters.
• Introduce roadblocks (have you ever seen Amazing Race?) that create a “sidebar” conflict the character must get through to get to the next scene—conflicts which the character (and thus the reader) sees as relating directly to his stated goal for that scene, but which, in reality, only serve to throw him further off course.
• Have the character hint that he has more of an agenda than he’s revealed to the reader. Something along the lines of, “He knew what he had to do.” [End of scene].
• Stage an interruption—an outside stimulus—which forces the character to stop “sequelizing” and meet the new threat/conflict. This is very similar to the roadblock idea. Something interrupts the very straight-forward direction of the plot and either waylays the character for a little while or throws him completely onto a different trajectory for the remainder of the story.

Now that you’ve read the “how to,” let’s look at some examples of how published authors have put these techniques to work. I probably should have put these on the “disasters” page, but I think from these, you’ll also be able to see how the disaster sets up the sequels to come:

Janet Evanovich, Eleven on Top, end of Chapter 5:

“How could you be the big bounty hunter without knowing how to pick a lock? How’d you ever get in anywhere?” Lula stood back and looked at the store. “Ordinarily I’d just break a window, but they got one big window here. It’s just about the whole front of the place. It might look suspicious if I broke the window.”

She ran across the street to the Firebird and came back with a tire iron. “Maybe we can pry the door open.” She put the tire iron to the doorjamb and another car drove by. The car slowed as it passed us, and then took off.

“Maybe we would try the back door,” Lula said.

Sandra Brown, Play Dirty, end of Chapter 13:

She must have parked around back, where he’d parked the first time, because the red Honda was the only car in the driveway. In the time it took him to reach it, he was already considering going back inside to apologize. He was still mad as hell, but he couldn’t afford his anger. The price tag of it was half a million now, and millions more to come. Not worth it. Not by a long shot.

He turned on his heel and had started back toward the house when he spotted something that drew him up short.

Susan May Warren, Happily Ever After, End of Chapter 21:

He needed Mona. But he was the last thing she needed. She had her hands full building her life, and the Joe Michaels deluxe package, complete with handicapped brother and covert identity, did not fit into that reality. She needed a man who could hang up his backpack and invest in her dreams.

Instead he’d spent the past month knitting together a façade of white lies. Lies meant to keep him and Gabe safe. Lies that could unravel at any moment.

No, he couldn’t stay.

He closed his eyes and fought the urge to weep.

Linda Windsor, Maire, end of Chapter 25:

Unable to speak, Maire strained against the hold of the guards, leaning into the sword and toward the fire as though she too were ready to walk into its deadly mouth, even if it meant perishing with him . . .

Rowan stepped to the fire’s edge where the heat slapped him and reached into his lungs with invisible hands, clutching his breath. The perspiration on his forehead evaporated. Lord, use my example to Your glory. He lifted his foot, ready to take the final plunge from which there would be no return, when a voice of protest cut through the bonds of tension holding all in check, save the beasts of flame.

“Hold, in the name of God Almighty!”

For Discussion:
Are there some scenes/chapters in your WIP in which you can apply one (or more) of these techniques to tie the scene to what comes after it (sequel)? What are some ways in which you’ve planted information or dropped hints that the hero doesn’t know everything he needs to know before facing the next conflict? Do you tend to immediately follow your disaster with a scene that resolves it, or do you leave your character hanging off the cliff and cut to another character/subplot?

On Tuesday, we discussed the five elements of keeping the reader hooked into our stories: characters, POV, suspense, balance, and bomb-dropping. Today, we’re going to look at what goes into the development of an individual scene, and for help, we’re turning to my new favorite writing-craft book, Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham.

According to Bickham, the structure of a scene is threefold:

• Statement of the character’s goal
• Introduction and development of conflict
• Failure of the character to reach the goal; a disaster

The scene should start with the POV character who has a definite, clear-cut, attainable goal: Anne is going to show George potential sites for (what she thinks is) his engagement party. George is going to reveal the identity of his employer to Anne before the man shows up at the site for the party. Meredith is going to the pet store to buy food for the puppy she found. Major is attending his employers’ New Year’s Day open house because they’ve asked him to come to talk to him about something. And so on. Each scene should start out with a goal that is an important step in the character’s game plan—a small goal that gets them one step closer to attaining the main goal of the story (or what the character thinks is their main goal for the story—that’s where the conflict/disaster part comes into play). But the goal cannot be easily attained—it’s your job as the author to make sure your characters suffer.

Once you know what your character’s goal for the scene is, you must determine what Bickham calls the “disaster” that will happen at the end of the scene to keep them from reaching that goal. Now, when I first read this, I thought, but that doesn’t work in every genre. But I think I’ve figured out what he means. From the examples above:

• Anne is going to show George potential sites for (what she thinks is) his engagement party. However, by the end of the scene, she’s actually ended up sharing with him the details of her past: that she survived a plane crash that killed her parents—pushing her ever closer to the edge of what she believes is falling in love with a client (because George, after all, is the Stand-In Groom). For Anne, at this point in the story, her real goal at the beginning of the scene was not getting him to choose a party site, but trying to keep herself from falling ever closer to the precipice of falling in love with him.
• I’m not going to reveal the disaster that George faces—you’ll have to read the book!
• Meredith is going to the pet store to buy food for the puppy she found. She’s dressed in her skuzzy clothes because she’s been at her house, which she’s refurbishing, stripping paint. In trying to get the puppy out from under the back porch, she fell in the grass and got soaked (because it’s pouring rain). Though she’s dried off and cleaned up, she’s definitely not looking like she does when she’s planning black-tie events for her parents’ Fortune-500 company. So, naturally, she runs into the recently elected mayor’s wife—a woman who was not only in Meredith’s mother’s sorority, but the woman whom Meredith must work with to plan an upcoming black-tie fundraiser event. Not a great first impression, and Meredith dreads news of the encounter reaching her always very proper and appearance-minded mother.
• Major meets with his employers at their open house and receives an offer for a business opportunity he can’t pass up. Not a disaster, right? Well, he then meets someone who has the potential to make-or-break his career—and his personal life.

See how it works? It’s not a disaster in the truest sense of the word: a car accident, a stock-market crash wiping out the hero’s livelihood, a death, or whatever. It’s a disaster in that it puts our character further into the hole of narrative debt—a setback, a redirection. And, as in Major’s case, it doesn’t even have to be an immediate setback, as he won’t know for several more chapters that this woman he’s met has the potential to affect his life so greatly.

In other words, you’re starting the scene out with a question: can the character do/attain this? To keep a reader hooked into the story, the answer at the end of the scene should be no. Or at least yes, BUT . . . or yes, IF . . . —if it’s a yes answer, it cannot be unconditional. The end of the scene has two primary jobs: to answer the scene question (preferably “NO!”) and to make the reader want to read the next scene to find out when the character will attain that goal.

Sometimes, you may have to work a scene backwards. If you know the disaster that needs to happen—because of what comes after it, because it sets up what happens next (a.k.a., “sequel,” which we’ll get into later in the series), examine the disaster and determine what it is that the disaster is stopping the character from doing/attaining. But don’t forget that all of your “disasters” must also fit logically into the main “disaster” (climax) of the story.

“Well-planned scenes end with disasters that tighten the noose around the lead character’s neck; they make things worse, not better; they eliminate hoped-for avenues of progress; they increase the lead character’s worry, sense of failure, and desperation—so that in all these ways, the main character in a novel of 400 pages will be in far worse shape by page 200 than he seemed to be at the outset.”
~Jack Bickham, Scene & Structure, pg 44.

A good scene will end with the characters making “backwards” progress; it eliminates options for an easy answer or solution; it makes the walls start closing in (think about the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars); and it has an impact on later events (consequences/sequel).

But one caveat: don’t contrive a disaster just to create a cliffhanger—hooks should be unexpected, but they should also be realistic and logical for your plot, the world of your story, and the development of your characters. Make the lead-up to the disaster subtle enough that the reader is suspicious something’s going to go wrong, but not so that they can see it coming from a mile away.

For Discussion:
Pull a scene from your WIP and examine the structure of it. What’s the scene question/the character’s goal at the beginning? What conflicts build during the scene? And, finally, what’s the “disaster” that happens at the end of the scene that keeps your character from attaining his/her goal? Did you find, as I did with Anne’s scene above, that the character’s goal at the beginning of the scene was actually more subtle than you originally thought?

A sign of a novice writer is that
he begins scenes too early
and ends them too late.

I don’t know if it’s a quote, a maxim, a proverb, or just something that was said at a writing conference a decade ago that everyone took to heart. (It’s probably from Don Maass or Sol Stein, but I couldn’t find it quickly.) I’m sure that most of the people reading this blog have had the experience of reading someone else’s work in which the scene starts with the character waking up in the morning, going through the morning routine, thinking about what they have to do that day, having breakfast, kissing the family goodbye, getting in the car and setting off for work. Then, once they arrive at the office, they’re fired. Or their boss turns into a big green monster and tries to eat them.

This is a prime example of starting the scene too early. There is no hard and fast rule that says, in both cases, the scene should have started in the boss’s office—with the character receiving the pink slip, or with the boss turning into the big green monster. In the second case, especially, there is a need for the establishment of “normal” before something like that happens if it is at the beginning of the book. Hopefully, if this isn’t the opening scene of your book, you’ve already established that in the “normal” world of your characters, bosses don’t usually turn into big green monsters, so opening the scene with your already-established character walking into the already-established boss’s office will seem normal until the extraordinary happens—as soon as the scene opens.

Starting scenes in media res, or in the middle of the action, hooks the reader. Just as we don’t want to open the book with the boring scene of someone going through the morning routine (unless he wakes up to discover he’s metamorphosed into a giant cockroach overnight), you don’t want to start any scene in your book that way. Readers don’t want the mundane, day-to-day stuff. As I quoted from Stein last week, readers are looking for something that they don’t usually experience—they want to be put smack into the middle of this fictional fantasy you’ve promised them.

“Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.” (Stein, How to Grow a Novel) A reader is hooked when she can’t put the book down—she just has to turn the page to find out what happens next. “Immerse the reader so deeply in the story that he’ll let go of the book only when the real world intrudes” (Stein).

Once you’ve created characters the readers will invest in, then you have to start writing each scene, each chapter, to a hook. The structure of a chapter is similar to that of the novel itself—except the chapter ends before the resolution of the conflict.

Reality TV as well as scripted shows like LOST, Heroes, Jericho, and soap operas have perfected this in the visual storytelling medium. It’s the long pause by the reality show host before announcing who’s getting kicked off the island. It’s the commercial break right before Heidi Klum announces who’s in and who’s out. It’s the cliffhanger at the end of the show—followed by the snippet of a preview for the next week—that leaves us worried about whether Jake and Stanley and Robert will all survive and keep the bad guys from using the last nuclear weapon to take out the new government.

There are five key elements to making sure you’re continually hooking the reader in each scene you write:

1. Credible Characters. As has already been mentioned many times, the reader must identify with and become invested in the characters.

2. Strong POV. Go deep. Show, don’t tell. Eliminate structures that keep the reader at arms’ length. Don’t write, “He saw something happen.” Get so deep in the character’s head that you’re writing, “Something happened.”

3. Suspense. Your hero is hanging off the cliff by his fingertips. The reader wants you to rescue him. Your job as the author is to avoid rescuing him as long as is possible (and believable). The reader gets more and more hooked by a story when she wants something to happen and it hasn’t happened yet.

4. Balance. You must have a good balance between narrative and dialogue, introspection and action. Every scene needs to serve the novel—to move the plot ever closer to the climax—while revealing who the characters are and why they’re here.

5. BOMB DROPPING. Imagine all the action in your scene is happening in a small room. You, the author, are standing at the door, directing everything that’s happening. You’re getting to the end of the scene/chapter. You casually pull out a grenade and yank the pin. Toss it in, and slam the door closed. This is the end of your scene. Think about those TV shows or movies that do this—they throw the characters into mortal peril then either cut away to a commercial, flash to be continued on the screen, or cut away to another scene. You’re on the edge of your seat. What’s going to happen? Will the “grenade” explode? Will anyone be hurt? Will someone be heroic and sacrifice himself to save others? We have to make the reader want to wrench the door open (read the next chapter) to find out.

Remember, though, what we talked about with plots—your action/drama/suspense cannot be unrelenting. There do need to be quieter moments as well. Not every single scene can end with a dropped bomb—at least, not all on the same magnitude. But you do need to have built up enough questions in the reader’s mind that a “happy” scene ending doesn’t lead them to putting down the book feeling like all their questions have been answered, all the conflicts resolved. [For more on this, see (Narrative) Debt and Simple vs. Compound Interest.]

For Discussion:
From something you’ve read or from a TV show/movie, what is the best cliffhanger scene ending you’ve ever read/seen? How did the writer/filmmakers build up to it—how did they hook you into caring about what happened to the character(s)? Then, from your own writing, have you ever written a scene ending like that? One that just made you clap your hands and laugh maniacally, knowing you’d just dropped a big bomb on your readers? What kind of feedback did you get from people who’ve read it? Did it make you want to write more scene endings like that?

Don’t forget, every comment gives you another entry into the drawing for the $15 Amazon Gift Certificate at the end of this series!

Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog knows (at least) two things about me: I’m a rabid LSU football fan, and I quote from Stein on Writing whenever I can. Well, guess what—no Stein on Writing today!

In How to Grow a Novel, Sol Stein (aha!) compares the act of reading with the phenomenon of sports fanaticism. In the first chapter of the book, Stein writes about how the one person most writers don’t think about when writing is the reader:

“What is amazing is the fact that so many writers with a novel in the planning stage give little or no conscious thought to the reader’s experience. They need look no further than sports to understand the spectator seeks the excitement that does not usually occur in daily life. The joy of winning, even through surrogates, is real” (Stein, 8).

This past year was one of the best—and worst—in college football history. No one, it seemed, could hold onto the top spot. The number one position came with a target, and lots of other teams hit the bull’s eye. This was the season of Appalachian State, the University of South Florida, and Rutgers—under-rated teams from small schools who toppled giants, only to be toppled themselves. But this was also the year of controversy—the year that proved the BCS championship system doesn’t work. Because of all this CONFLICT, it was the most-watched, best-attended, most-talked-about football season ever.

“But let us remember that when a team—even the team we are rooting for—is winning too easily, our enjoyment of the game decreases” (Stein, 8).

I truly believe that the reason it took until the spring for the doctor to get my high blood pressure down is due, in large part, to the 2007 LSU football season. Games that came down to the wire—won by touchdowns with only a couple of seconds left on the board. Two losses in triple overtime. Nail-biters that had me screaming at the top of my lungs. Games so close they kept my complete focus for four—or more—hours. But then there were a few others in which my boys jumped out to a commanding lead and never looked back. The other team may have made a foray or two into the red-zone, but they posed no serious threat to LSU’s winning the game. I could do laundry, write, even read, and not worry about the ultimate outcome.

When we write, we want to give our readers the same kind of experience LSU fans had when Les Miles had our boys go for it on fourth-down not once, not twice, but five times in a neck-and-neck game against defending national champs, Florida. We want to surprise them with faking a field goal and scoring with a no-look, over-the-shoulder touchdown pass to the kicker . . .

Okay, yes, I’m ready for football season five months early—but I hope you’re getting my point. Readers want that kind of enthralling experience—the kind that doesn’t happen in our normal lives—to lose ourselves in. That is the promise we’re making when we put words on paper and call it a story. That’s what we’re going to be discussing over the next few weeks.

At the end of the series, I’ll give one lucky blogee a $15 Amazon gift certificate—so come by daily; every time you post a (topic-related) comment, your name will go into the hat!

To get the discussion started: What kind of experience do you hope for when you pick up a book to read?

Hopefully every writer is familiar with the literary device known as Checkov’s Gun. Author/Playwright Anton Checkov wrote: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” This is a technique also known as foreshadowing. Sometimes it’s as obvious as the gun hanging on the wall, sometimes the reader isn’t aware the hints are there until they get to the twist at the end.

Every writer needs to watch the movie The Sixth Sense. If you’ve never seen it, get it on DVD and watch it straight through. If you’ve seen it and have never watched the “Rules and Clues” featurette, this is a must-see for anyone who wants to write stories that have some kind of twist at the end.

In The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan did the near-impossible: he created a story that has such a surprise twist ending that he had to make the behind-the-scenes featurette to show exactly how he did it. The clues are all there, meticulously thought out and planted—from the clothes Malcolm is wearing to the temperature to the color red. Because he was dealing with the supernatural, he created rules and stuck to those boundaries. It was so subtly and masterfully done that when the twist was revealed, the audience didn’t feel cheated, didn’t feel like Shyamalan pulled that little trick out of thin air. Subconsciously, we were seeing the clues and understanding the rules, even though we didn’t realize it.

J.K. Rowling was great at dropping important pieces of information into her stories in such a way that they didn’t seem important—until the twist came or the object was needed at the end of the book, or even later in the series. For example, the invisibility cloak Harry receives in Book 1 that becomes an integral part of the plot of Book 7, or the “throw-away” mention of a locket being tossed aside when they’re cleaning up headquarters at the beginning of Book 5, which also becomes important in Book 7.

If you’re planning a surprise twist in your plot, you don’t want your markers to be as obvious as Checkov’s Gun. You want to hint, to suggest, to make things seem unimportant at the time by having lots of other things going on (as well as planting red-herrings). But you also don’t want to bury your markers so deeply or make them so obscure that the reader cannot find them even after they’ve read the ending.

Shyamalan used the color red as a marker that something supernatural was about to happen. Once you know this clue, it’s really easy to see on a second viewing—the big red-brick schoolhouse, Cole’s red sweater, a red balloon, Malcolm’s red doorknob.

Think about some of your favorite books or movies that have twist or surprise endings. How did the writer/filmmaker plant clues throughout so that they’re there when you know what you’re looking for, but didn’t give away the twist the first time? Old-fashioned mystery movies/shows/books are great for this—because in the climax scene, when the murderer is revealed, they sit there and go through all of the clues for you, because they were subtle enough you probably missed them. The Marple series that Masterpiece Theater/Mystery! did, based on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books, are wonderful for studying this kind of subliminal clue-dropping.

You want your readers to go back and say, “I can’t believe I missed that!” You don’t want them to say, “Yep, I knew it from the first page when I saw the gun hanging on the wall.”

Last Thursday, we discussed raising the stakes to keep our plots alive and moving forward. But a couple of you raised the question of how much conflict can we throw at our characters before it becomes melodramatic. To summarize the answers I gave there (check them out in the comments), You have to throw enough conflict at your character to make the reader fear the character will not reach his or her ultimate goal, but not so much that it’s realistically or logically insurmountable.

If, in the climax of the story, you have to give your character a new ability (whether natural or supernatural–example: the tone-deaf heroine must sing for the king or face losing her head; when she stands up before him and opens her mouth, she suddenly has a miraculously beautiful singing voice when she has never had anything supernatural happen to her before then), have a new charater (the cavalry, literally or figuratively) swoop in out of the blue to save the character, have the villain suddenly and inexplicably relent, or solve a crisis off stage because even you have no idea how the character will get out of it, you’ve either thrown too much or the wrong kind of conflict at your character.

As I explained in the post Conflict: Thematic vs. Actual, you need to know what the thematic conflict of your story is. Thematic conflicts include:
Man vs. Man (or Man vs. Woman in a romance)
Man vs. Himself
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
Man vs. God
(see this Wikipedia article for definitions)

All of these are vague, lofty ideas, on par with defining what genre you’re writing. They don’t actually define the plot of your novel.

Depending on what article you read or what book you buy, there are anywhere from six to fifty master fiction plots. In addition to knowing your thematic conflict, you should know what your master plot is. Many popular fiction genres lend themselves toward certain master plots, but you will find that some of the best genre fiction writers use master plots not usually seen in their genre to take their stories to the next level. (Don Maass would call these people “breakout” novelists.) Here are eight master plots I came up with:

1. The PHYSICAL JOURNEY plot. The character must get from point A to point Z. Prime example: Lord of the Rings. Frodo must get from The Shire to Mount Doom to destroy the ring. Everything that happens to him along the way, all of the conflicts he encounters, happens because he must complete this journey.

2. The FIGURATIVE JOURNEY plot. If graphed, this plotline would look much like the physical journey plot. But this is a journey that takes place internally. “Coming of Age” novels are the best example of this type of plot. It’s less about what is happening on the outside and more about the change that is taking place internally for the character. Literary fiction many times will fall into this category.

3. The PROBLEM-to-SOLUTION plot. The character is presented with a problem at the beginng that must be solved. This can be a writer who has writer’s block (think of the movie Stranger than Fiction), an artist who has broken both hands and can’t paint, a visitor is stranded in a strange land (planet) and must figure out how to communicate with the locals to survive.

4. The MYSTERY-to-ANSWER (or QUESTION-to-ANSWER) plot. This is one of the plots that is very closely tied to a genre. When someone says they’re writing a mystery novel, they don’t really need to define the plot of it, do they? But this plot has a broader scope than just Murder, She Wrote or Law & Order. This is the baby left on the doorstep story—the characters must find out who left the baby there. This is the amnesiac trying to figure out who he or she is.

5. The DOWNWARD SPIRAL/DESTRUCTIVE plot. This is the plot we find in many short stories, including “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This is where the character goes from a place of sanity/normalcy through a cycle of depression or self-destructiveness. Like the Figurative Journey, this deals more with what’s going on inside, but it moves in the opposite direction.

6. The LOVE STORY plot. Yes, this is the plotline most closely related to the romance genre. It goes deeper than just two characters falling in love. There is an expectation of what will happen in a love story: boy and girl meet, fall in love, are ripped apart, something climactic happens to bring the back together, boy and girl live happily ever after. However, not every love story plot necessarily follows this expectation. A prime example is the movie Roman Holiday, in which the hero and heroine don’t get together at the end. (Sorry if I’ve just ruined that for anyone.)

7. The BATTLE-to-VICTORY plot. Seen in historicals, action, SciFi, and many other genres. These are stories that center around war, or that use physical conflict as the main focus of the story. This is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, Star Wars, Glory, or Behind Enemy Lines. The climax of the plot comes in the heat of battle, the resolution comes with the victory and the peace enjoyed afterward (no matter how short-lived).

8. The THWART THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD plot. This could actually be considered a Battle-to-Victory plot, but it takes it to a grander scale. This is the ultimate Good Guy vs. Bad Guy matchup. This is James Bond versus Dr. No. Harry Potter versus Voldemort. Jean Luc Picard versus the Borg. Homeland Security Agent versus the Terrorists. The country/world/planet is about to be destroyed and the hero must stop it from happening.

What are some other basic plots you can think of? Does your story fit into one of these? Have you incorporated more than one of these into your story? (HeeHee . . . topic for tomorrow . . .)

So your characters are in place. You’ve made connections between character development and plot. You know where your story is going.

Great. Now raise the stakes.

Huh? What does that mean?

“Raising the stakes” for our characters is something we writers see and hear over and over and over in writing books, in online classes, and at conferences. But what does it actually mean when it comes to writing?

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks or months or years)? One of those days where it feels like everything has gone wrong and there’s no way your day could possibly get worse? The car didn’t start this morning. It took the tow truck two hours to come. Your boss yelled at you when you got to work for being late (even though you called). The daycare center called—your kid just threw up on their new carpet and you have to go get them right now. But the rental car company hasn’t come to pick you up yet. Your husband calls from his business trip on the other side of the country to say his boss has asked him to stay two more days because the deal isn’t going as planned. Older kid’s school calls—kid got into a fight and is being suspended. Mom calls from two hundred miles away: she’s taking your dad to the hospital because they think he might be having a heart attack. The auto shop calls to give you an estimate to fix your car and it’s over $2,000—which is more than you have in your checking account at the moment. And it’s not even lunch time yet!

Each one of these CONFLICTS increases the stakes for the character. (And no, you would not want to throw this level of conflict at your character all in one day. This is what people read fiction to get away from.) The reason they increase the stakes is not inherent in and of the conflicts themselves, but because each conflict builds upon the one that came before it—getting the call from your mother that your dad may be having a heart attack and they’re two hundred miles away is bad. But with no car, dealing with issues with both kids, a husband who’s out of town, and facing a bill you’re not going to be able to pay, the situation with the parents is twenty times worse than it would be if that were the only thing going wrong.

Remember Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

Donald Maass, in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook explains “the essence” of raising the stakes as “making things worse, showing us that there is more to lose, promising even bigger disasters that will happen if the hero doesn’t make matters come out okay.” This can be on a global scale (think of all of the villains bent on world destruction that James Bond defeated) or it can be on an individual scale (will Maria stay at the abbey or will she return and declare her love for Captain von Trapp?).

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein writes that “the essence of plotting [is] putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. . . . One way to plan is to think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist.”

What is the main conflict for each of your main characters? How can you make the problem worse? For a great example of this, follow Frodo’s journey from the Shire to Mount Doom. Every time something happens to him, we think that nothing else worse could happen, but it always does.

Is there another character (whether good or bad) in your story that has the ability to keep your main character from achieving his or her goal? If the character must be somewhere at a certain time to stave off worldwide disaster, how many things can you think of to stop the character from getting there on time?

A great example of a movie (miniseries, really) that raises the stakes and develops conflicts like nothing else I’ve ever seen is The 10th Kingdom. The simple premise is that two modern New Yorkers (played by John Larroquette and Kimberly Williams-Paisley) find themselves transported into the land of the Nine Kingdoms—fairy-tale land! They must find the magic mirror that transported them to this fantasy world to get back to New York. When the story finally ends seven hours later, you feel like you’ve run a marathon—because these poor characters have been put through the ringer.

Do you back off of conflicts in your story? Do you pull punches? Do you try to make things easier for your characters? Do you resolve arguments off stage?

STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!

What’s the worst thing that happens to your character in your current work in progress? Your assignment is to think of a way to make it even more horrible. Raise those stakes!

Have you ever considered any situation in which your character might not reach his or her goal? Put them in that situation and see what happens. Raise those stakes!

And just think about this. When you’re watching a movie, and one of the characters says something along the lines of, “Things can’t get any worse.” What is our immediate reaction? “Yeah, right. Oh, look, things just got worse.” The stakes were just raised.

So go out there and raise the stakes—make things worse—for your characters and see if that doesn’t add a totally new spin to your plot.

One of the most important lessons to learn about plot is that it is different from narrating a sequence of events—it is connecting the events together with emotion and meaning. E. M. Forster explained it best. “The king died, and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.” Why is the second plot? Because there is now a cause-and-effect that gives meaning to the queen’s death. Plotting a story is more than just cataloguing the events that happen. It is connecting all of the events with the characters’ internal conflicts and with the other events in the story.

This is one of the main reasons why the experts I quoted in the first Plot or Plod post all point to character as a main focus of plotting. The characters are where the connections come from.

Even for SOTP writers, when we begin to develop a story idea, we typically know the general direction our stories are going. I recently had the opportunity to talk plotting with award-winning CBA author Tamera Alexander. She admitted to being mostly a Pantster (a seat-of-the-pants writer) but did say that, even though she doesn’t plot the whole story out, she always knows what her ending scene will be. The story is what happens between the opening and closing scene. Plotting is how we make all of those story events tie together and, ultimately, make sense.

Just as with character development, when developing your plot, you want to constantly be asking “why?” Why would she make that decision? Why would she go there? Why would she think she would be able to get away from the bad guy by running UPstairs? Why is the bad guy a bad guy? Why is the hero going to the place where he is going to have a humorous run-in with the heroine?

I recently posted a question on my Facebook page about why shows like LOST and Heroes are so addictive. Someone said it’s because of the soap-opera-like serial storytelling—each show builds upon the last. Someone else mentioned it’s the ensemble cast of characters. I think it’s actually both. Without a cast of characters that we fall in love with, the continuing story wouldn’t be of interest. One of the most fun things about LOST is the flashbacks where they reveal that most of our survivors have crossed paths in the three to five years leading up to boarding flight 815—or at least bumped into each other in Sydney or at the airport before they got on the plane. Instead of connecting them in their backstories, Heroes has made connections by slowly bringing all of the heroes together. Their paths cross now and again throughout the first season until they all come together in the finale, where Peter can absorb their powers and defeat Sylar (or so it seems). The plot hinges on the characters, on the decisions they make, on their emotional/visceral reactions to the conflicts they face, on the reason why they do the things they do.

Star Trek liked to play with the chain-reaction concept. In the Star Trek universe, they used the premise that each decision the characters made actually created an alternative universe where they’d made the opposite decision. Occasionally a character would cross over into an alternate universe where one person making one decision differently created a totally different reality—usually where all of the good guys are now bad guys. In an episode of the Original Series, they visited a planet that was basically a doppleganger of Earth . . . except it was an Earth where the Roman Empire never fell, which made it completely different than the Earth we know.

Plotting is about chain reactions. If your character makes a decision, there have to be consequences—for good or bad. Things can’t just happen in your story. Unlike in life, the events that your characters experience must have meaning, must connect with something else going on in the story. Otherwise, you’re leading your reader down a bunch of rabbit trails, but actually going nowhere.

This is one of the problems I’ve experienced in reading the Lord of the Rings books. Tolkien was so immersed in his world that he wanted to include all of the history, all of the lore, of the peoples who had been long-gone from Middle Earth in the narrative. There are long passages telling stories of characters like Beren and Luthien which, while they would be good stories in their own right, in reality have nothing to do with the forward progress of the plot of this story: trying to destroy the One Ring.

I’ve been busily working on the second draft of Ransome’s Honor (I’ve completed revisions through chapter 23—or about 65,000 words), and one of the things I keep asking myself is: Does this dialogue / introspection / action / description / scene have an important impact on the plot? I’m combing through the narrative to make sure that everything my characters do connect somehow with the forward progress of the story. By doing this, I’ve managed to cut about a chapter and a half—and I know that once my crit partners get a hold of it, I’ll be able to cut even more, especially once I get all of the new conflicts/events of the last third squared away.

Again, going back to the experts and their comments on characters. It’s all well and good to be constantly throwing conflict at your characters—in fact, it’s great. Don’t pull punches. Just make sure that the conflicts connect the characters to the plot, that there is a reason, a purpose, for the conflict to exist. And don’t forget to ask why.

For the last week, we’ve been focusing on characters. Hopefully, you’ve picked up a few tips and have spent some time getting to know your character(s) better and learning more about the story they’re trying to tell you.

Before deciding on first- or third-person (or even second), limited or omniscient, present or past tense, the most important thing to figure out is WHOSE STORY IS THIS?

In a typical romance, there are two POV characters: the hero and the heroine. In chick lit, there is only one: the chick telling her own story. In a mystery, you may have only one: the detective/sleuth; or you may have several: the detective, a red-herring character (make the reader think he’s the villain), the actual villain, a victim (alive or dead, if you’re including supernatural elements). In general, historical, sci-fi, and fantasy fiction, there are most likely going to be multiple POV characters.

So, how do we decide who gets to have a say? Whose head we’re going to invade?

If the genre doesn’t dictate the POV (i.e., standard romance or chick lit), the first thing you must do is determine who the stakeholders in the story are. In other words, who has the most to lose and the most to gain in your story? Who has a stake in the conflict/plot? Which character(s) has the most important information to reveal to the reader? Do you want the reader to know it by being inside that character’s thoughts, or do you want the reader to find out when “all is revealed” to another character whose stake in the plot is greater?

Next, who has the most to learn/the most potential for growth? If the theme of your story is forgiveness, a POV character who has already learned how to forgive isn’t going to make for interesting reading. POV characters should be those who not only have a stake in the plot, but who also have a character arc—in other words, they’re different at the end of the story than when we first meet them at the beginning. Not all characters who change/grow are going to end up being POV characters. Some of them will remain secondary. But they have the best potential.

Finally, which characters are most compelling? Who will the reader want to know and become intimate with? Who do you as the author want to get to know and become intimate with? The characters that resonate with our readers are going to be the characters that we, as the author, fall in love with. They are going to be the ones with the deepest flaws (Scarlett O’Hara), the ones who can never seem to get ahead (Charlie Brown), or the ones who must time and again face their greatest foes/fears (Harry Potter).

When I first started writing Ransome’s Honor, I had two POV characters: William and Julia. Then Julia’s mother wanted to have her say. About seven or eight chapters in, Sir Drake burst onto the scene and barged in, telling things how he wanted them to be. These four POVs seemed to work pretty well . . . until I got to chapter sixteen and William’s younger sister arrived in Portsmouth. I suddenly realized she’s a major stakeholder in not just the first book but in the entire trilogy—I allowed her to have a POV, and immediately, the plots for the second and third books materialized in sharp detail, not just the vague idea I’d had up until then. I am now working on the second draft. Julia’s mother has switched teams and is now Sir Drake’s mother (Julia’s aunt) and because of this can become the secondary character she needs to be. Sir Drake’s POV is introduced at the end of the first chapter (the scene not only introduces him, but raises the stakes for Julia’s conflict), and Charlotte’s importance has been increased by her first POV scene (new) appearing at the end of the second chapter (introduces the idea she’s keeping a major secret from her mother and William—raising the stakes for both her and for William—and Julia in Book 2).

Have you chosen your POV characters or have they chosen you? How do you determine which characters you’re going to allow to have “stage time”? Have you ever cut a POV character completely in a revision—or added one? Have you ever written a POV character you didn’t really like?

No matter how wonderfully complex and well-developed a character is, a reader isn’t going to care about them unless they can identify with what the character wants. There are many names for this: goals, motivations, objectives, desires. In Getting into Character, Brandilyn Collins wrote:

“What is your innermost Desire that will propel you through this story? . . . All of your main characters and important secondary characters should have a Desire. Conflicts between characters come into play when they are pursuing Desires that oppose one another.” (37)

In another series of posts, I have discussed conflict at length, and this is where Character and Conflict come into union with each other:
It’s Good to Be Conflicted
Conflict: Thematic vs. Actual
Conflict: Desires and Goals
Conflict: Move That Bus!

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein describes plotting at its most basic as “putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict . . . think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want, then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist” (83).

Before you can develop that conflict, you have to delve into what each character’s desire is. We have a tendency to define characters as “good guys” and “bad guys,” but when we start developing real, multi-dimensional characters, we have to move beyond these epithets into the knowledge that no one is “all good” or “all bad” (unless, of course, you’re writing fantasy or allegory with “evil” characters such as Sarumon and Orcs).

In The End of Harry Potter?, Hugo Award–winning author David Langford points out the problem with the idea of “bad guys who are just naturally bad because of their ancestry — or because they’ve been Sorted into Slytherin House” (11–12). Yes, it is easy to have characters who are just naturally bad with no redeeming qualities . . . and, frankly, sometimes that’s all the story calls for. But in the Harry Potter reference above, if everyone who is sorted into Slytherin house is naturally bad/evil, why would the house continue to exist? Why wouldn’t people sorted to that house be immediately expelled from the school because it’s a sign they’re going to turn out to be dark wizards? Later in the series, Rowling started to introduce characters who came out of Slytherin who did not turn out to be all bad (such as Horace Slughorn), but the example should serve as a warning that we must be careful about drawing characters in terms of absolutes. Perfect characters aren’t interesting. Evil characters with no redeeming qualities aren’t believable. We don’t want either of these in our writing.

Anyway, back to desires . . .

A character’s desire should be specific, but should also be universal. When we define our character’s desire/goal, it shouldn’t just be, “I need to get from point A to point B,” but the deeper, “I must get home and protect my family from those who seek to tear it apart” kind of goal that transcends time periods. (Keep asking “why?” until you get to the deepest level.) Give your character the kind of goal he is not going to give up on—the kind he will fight to the death to achieve. Reaching that goal becomes the motivating force behind everything the character thinks, says, and does. And knowing what this goal is specifically gives us the ability to set up obstacles—in the physical environment, in the character’s own inner psyche, in the antagonist—to thwart our character’s achieving that goal.

If the character meets no resistance on the path toward gaining what they most desire, there is no motivation, no story. Think about The Wizard of Oz. If Dorothy & Crew hadn’t constantly met with conflict—with the Wicked Witch trying to stop them, with the Wizard turning out not to be a wizard after all—it wouldn’t have been a very interesting story. The way I keep my characters movtivated is to make sure the character has a goal, then to set other characters and situations in opposition to that goal. If the character keeps coming up against a brick wall, or if someone or something keeps thwarting them from being able to reach their goal, the motivation to reach it grows stronger. Naturally, they cannot always fail in moving toward the desire—they must have some successes to show that this goal is ultimately achievable, if they will just persevere, hold on, keep going.

So we must ask the character:

• What is her main goal/desire?
• What will she do to attain it? (go deep here)
• What will she do when she meets resistance?
• How far will she go to achieve her goal/desire? (keep going deeper)
• What internal hindrances does she have that could keep her from achieving her goal? (Dig deeper than just fear—what is the root cause of the fear? What happened in the past to give her this fear?)
• What external hindrances could keep her from achieving her goal? (This can be the antagonist . . . or even the hero or other main character, family members, cultural restraints, geographic constraints, finances, etc.)
• Is there anything that could happen that would make her relinquish her goal? (If so, then you need to start over at the beginning, because this goal isn’t the right one.)
• Is this goal something she would sacrifice everything—her health, her wealth, her family, even her own life—to achieve? (Make her prove it by putting her in one or more of those situations.)