Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (13 page)

We can set up a situation where a loss in this duty can mean the end, or at least a massive dilution, of our professional life.

Think of the lawyer, down on his luck, who gets a case that could redeem him. Or the cop who has a chance to stop a killer.

What keeps the reader reading is worrying about what the Lead is going to lose.

How do you know what obstacles to throw? The first step is to conceive an opposition character. I use this term rather than “villain” because the opposition does not have to be evil. The opposition merely has to have a compelling reason to stop the Lead.

Three keys will help you come up with good opposition:

• Make the opposition a person. (A master like Stephen King can make the opposition nonpersonal, as in
  Tom Gordon
  , where it's Trisha against the woods. But don't try this at home until you've had lots of practice.)
  
• If it is a group, like the law firm in
  The Rainmaker
  , select one person in that group to take the lead role for the opposition.
  
• Make the opposition stronger than the Lead. If the opposition can be easily matched, why should the reader worry?
  

Then ask yourself, “Why do I l
ove
my opposition character?” Climbing into the opposition's skin will give you an empathetic view, and a better character as a result.

Your confrontation still needs one more crucial ingredient:
adhesive
. Because if your Lead can simply walk away from the opponent and still be able to realize her objective, the reader will be asking, “Well, why doesn't she?”

An adhesive is any strong relationship or circumstance that holds people together.

If the Lead can solve his problem simply by resigning from the action, the reader will wonder why he doesn't do so. Or if there is not a strong enough reason for the Lead to continue, the reader won't be all that worried about him.

There needs to be a strong reason for the Lead to
stick around
, to keep the characters together throughout that long muddle.

If you have carefully selected an objective that is essential to the well-being of the Lead and an opposition with an equally valid reason to stop the Lead, your adhesive will usually be self-evident.

You must figure out a reason why the Lead and opposition can't withdraw from the action.

Writing your novel will then be a matter of recording various scenes of confrontation, most ending with some sort of setback for your Lead, forcing her to analyze her situation anew and take some other action toward her objective.

Think of the long middle of your book as a series of increasingly intense battles. Sometimes your Lead will be out of action to regroup, but most of the time she'll be fighting toward her ultimate goal.

Back and forth, parry and thrust.

That's the heart of your novel.

Here are a few tips to make that adhesive strong:

• Life and death. If the opposition has a strong enough reason to kill the Lead, that's an automatic adhesive. Staying alive is essential to one's well-being.
  
• If there is a professional duty involved, that's adhesive. The readers understand why a lawyer who takes a case cannot just walk away. Same for a cop assigned a case.
  
• Moral duty is also a strong adhesive. If a mother's child is kidnapped, for example, we understand why she doesn't walk away from the action. She will do whatever it takes to get the child back.
  
• Obsession is another strong adhesive. In
  Rose Madder
  , the psycho husband is simply not going to stop hunting down his wife. He's obsessed with seeing her dead.
  
• Sometimes the physical location can operate to keep the opponents bonded.
  The Shining
  , by Stephen King, is an example. A husband, wife, and child live and work at a mountain hotel that gets snowed in every winter. They physically can't walk away. (
  Casablanca
  is another such story. No one can get out of Casablanca without permission or “Letters of Transit.”)
  

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 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.

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.

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.

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 was 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.

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.

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.