Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (31 page)

Find a novel on your shelf or the library that didn't work for you. Reread it and make notes on exactly why it didn't work. How would you have done it better? If you're not sure, look to some writing books until you find an answer. This is how you grow as a writer.

Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

— Winston Churchill to Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt, 1941

My neighbor John loves to work on cars. For four years, I watched him tinker away weekends under the hood of a little hot rod he hoped to race. This, I was convinced, was tedious business. But John loved it. “I just like to figure out how things work and how to make them work better,” he said.

Finally, the big day came. John hitched his hot rod to a trailer and headed out to Saugus, California, for his first test run. When he came back that night, I asked him how he'd done. “The engine blew,” he said.

“Oh, that's too bad.”

“Not really. Now I get to figure out why.”

And thus began another year of tinkering. But John knew what he was doing. He had a garage full of tools, and he knew how to use each one. When it came time to take the hot rod out on the course again, it worked beautifully. He races for a sponsor now.

Through it all, John was doing what he loved.

We love writing, don't we? So I want to give you some tools and tips that you can use to strengthen your plots. Make these your own. Start your own tool chest.

And tinker away.

It was probably Og the Caveman, the great storyteller of the prehistoric era, who first uttered that golden rule of compelling fiction: Show, don't tell.

At least it seems the rule has been around that long. You'll hear it at virtually every fiction workshop and see it in almost all fiction writing books. That's because Og was right. The rule works. Yet confusion about this aspect of the craft is one of the most common failings among beginning writers. If you want your fiction to take off in the reader's mind, you must grasp the difference between showing and telling.

The distinction is simply this: Showing is like watching a scene in a movie. All you have is what is on the screen before you. What the characters
do
or
say
reveals who they are and what they're feeling.

Telling, on the other hand, merely
explains
what is going on in the scene, or inside the characters. It's like you are recounting the movie to a friend.

Remember the scene in the film
Jurassic Park
where the newcomers catch their first glimpse of a dinosaur? With mouths open and eyes wide, they stand and look at this impossible creature standing in front of them before we, the audience, actually see it.

All we need to know about their emotions is written on their faces. We are not given a voice in their heads. We know just by watching what they are feeling.

In a story, you would describe it in just that fashion: “Mark's eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He tried to take a breath, but breath did not come. …” The reader feels the emotions right along with the character.

That is so much better than telling it like this,“Mark was stunned and frightened.”

One of the best “show” novels ever written is
The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett ushered in a whole new style called “hardboiled” with this book. The mark of Hammett's style is that everything occurs just as if it were happening before us on a movie screen (which is one reason why this book translated so well into a movie).

In one scene, the hero, Sam Spade, has to comfort the widow of his partner, Miles Archer, who was recently shot to death. She comes rushing into his office and into his arms. Spade is put off by her crying because he knows it's mostly phony.

Now Hammett could have written something like, “The woman threw herself, crying, into Spade's arms. He detested her crying. He detested her. He wanted to get out of there.”

That's telling. But look at what the masterful Hammett does instead:

“Did you send for Miles's brother?” he asked.

“Yes, he came over this morning.” The words were blurred by her sobbing and his coat against her mouth.

He grimaced again and bent his head for a surreptitious look at the watch on his wrist. His left arm was around her, the hand on her left shoulder. His cuff was pulled back far enough to leave the watch uncovered. It showed ten-ten.

How much more effective this is! We
see
Spade glancing at his watch, which tells us just how unsympathetic he is to this display of emotion. It reaches us much more powerfully.

Just after this little episode, the widow asks, “Oh, Sam, did you kill him?” Instead of
telling
us how Spade feels, Hammett writes:

Spade stared at her with bulging eyes. His bony jaw fell down. He took his arms from her and stepped back out of her arms. He scowled at her and cleared his throat. … Spade laughed a harsh syllable, “Ha!” and went to the buff-curtained window. He stood there with his back to her looking through the curtain into the court until she started towards him. Then he turned quickly and went to his desk. He sat down, put his elbows on the desk, his chin between his fists, and looked at her. His yellowish eyes glittered between narrowed lids.

I'm not one to quibble with a man who sold millions of books, but sometimes I get the impression Erle Stanley Gardner was rushing a bit in some of his Perry Mason books. (Of course he was — he dictated most of them.) Here is the beginning of chapter five in
The Case of the Fiery Fingers
:

Harry Saybrook, the deputy District Attorney, seemed definitely annoyed that an ordinary petty larceny case had been turned into a jury trial, and his annoyance manifested itself in everything that he said and did.

Perry Mason, on the other hand, was urbane, fair, logical, and smilingly frank to the jury.

Do we really know, in our gut, that Mason was
urbane, fair, logical, and smilingly frank to the jury
because we are told? No way. We need more than a list. We have to see it played out on the page. And Gardner does provide this whenever Mason is engaged in his famous cross-examinations. It's just that he took the shortcut from time to time.

Back in college, I was sick for a couple of weeks, confined pretty much to the apartment I shared with three other guys. To pass the time, I started watching a soap opera. The girls in the apartment across the way were addicted to
All My Children
, and happily filled me in on all the backstory so I could dive right in.

Which I did, and promptly got hooked.

I found myself not wanting to go back to classes. I didn't want to miss any of the story lines.

But as the weeks stretched into months, I started getting this frustrated feeling in the pit of my stomach. For even though I could not tear myself away from the tube, a growing realization hit me. Nothing is ever resolved! Stories just keep going and going and going, adding twist after disaster after revelation after confrontation! It would be like this forever! Hahahahaha!

And each show masterfully juggled several story lines at once, ending one with some big cliff-hanging look or discovery, cutting over to another story that just ended the same way, then cutting away from that one with a great big cliff-hanger just before the commercial.

And millions of people can't get enough.

So what can you do with your own plotting? A couple of things:

[1]
Don't resolve anything too soon. Raising questions and delaying the answers is one way to keep readers interested in the proceedings.

[2]
If your plot allows you to, cut away from one scene that leaves the reader hanging to another scene, then leave
that
scene the same way.

This is an idea I picked up from Sue Grafton. She begins her writing day by journaling. In a free-form way, she “talks” to herself as she types.

Here is a bit of my journal for
A Greater Glory
, one in my series of books about a young lawyer, Kit Shannon, in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. The plot involved, among others, a powerful opponent named Mahoney, a medium, and a not-too-pleasant couple, the Whitneys. Kit's client was a man named Truman Harcourt.

Okay, Jim, Kit is about to confront Mahoney. What can happen?

The house is creepy. Threatening. Mahoney looks like Charles Durning. It is 1905, and he is 55, meaning he was born in 1850. Came to America, by way of NY, in 1867, aged 17, and pawed his way up. What is new about his threats? He has Irish charm to start, then turns cold as steel. He tells of his Irish background. Kit tells of her own father.

He calls in his bodyguard. Maybe it's the Bodyguard, approached and paid by Whitneys, who goes to the medium?

What if Mahoney dies and a Medium says in a séance with Mahoney's widow that it was Truman Harcourt that did this? Turns out the Medium is working for the Whitneys, who want their son to get out of marrying Truman's daughter.

I used some of the material in my writing, but not all of it. Of course the plot grew and changed, but using the journal gave me new material almost every time.

That great master of hardboiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler, had a technique to overcome the “plot blahs.” He said if his story ever bogged down, he'd send some guy with a gun into the scene. It would be a surprise, and everyone would have to react. It added the needed stimulus to get things moving again.

This is a great idea because writers usually become stuck when they are planning too much and trying too hard to control the flow of the story. By injecting a surprise, it forces new visions and connections. You may end up throwing the guy-with-a-gun out, but at least you will have thought about your story in a fresh way.

It doesn't literally have to be a guy with a gun, of course. The technique works just as well with any surprising element: A telegram arrives. An alarm goes off. A dog bites. The hero is fired.

Whatever happens that is completely unexpected will help you break the barrier you have run into.

Next time you get stuck in your story, make a quick list of things that could happen. They must be unexpected and unplanned. Let them pop into your head. Select one that suggests imaginative possibilities to you. Begin to write again, letting the plot happen as you write. Don't explain the surprise immediately. Explain it later.

During a fiction writing class I was teaching at a writers' conference, I read the opening of a manuscript one of the students had given me. The prose was fine, but what was happening, which was nothing more than interior character work about a rock star, was
boring
. Finally, after ten pages, we got to a gripping account of the rock star coming down off drugs, the torment and torture of it. It was action, and it was gripping.

I said, “The novel should start here.” And the whole class agreed. But the student had been told by her critique group that she needed all this information to come first.

Mark this: Sometimes critique groups can be wrong.

And sometimes, as we've discussed elsewhere, it's best to start your novel with chapter two.

That's right. You drop chapter one altogether and jump in with chapter two. Later, you drop in information from chapter one only if it's essential.

In
Writing the Novel
, Lawrence Block explains an epiphany he came to when writing
Death Pulls a Doublecross
. “By beginning with chapter two, I opened the book with the action in progress. There was movement. Something was happening.” Additionally, there was mystery about the full-blown characters who were there. Explanations came later.

Why does this work? Because opening chapters are usually written with too much exposition. The writer doesn't even know how the plot is going to work out, so he tends to stuff the opening with description and setup.

Chapter two, however, is usually an action chapter. It moves. It hooks the reader's interest immediately. There is not as much exposition, which lends a bit of mystery to the proceedings.

• Take a novel, any novel, and open it to chapter two. Does it get you interested?
  
• Switch your first two chapters.
  
• Make any changes you have to so the new first chapter makes sense.
  
• Consider scrapping your original chapter one altogether. Let the exposition come out later, naturally. You'll probably find you don't need it all anyway.
  

Your best writing will almost always emerge during the heat of passion. When you have kicked your inner critic out of the way, giving your imagination full range, you create new and exciting things.

But at some point, you need to step back and see what you've got.

The best time to do that, in my experience, is when you've got an Act I. In a screenplay, that is usually by page 30 or so. In a novel, it can be anywhere from two to ten chapters. When you sense you have moved into the main conflict of the story, you have completed Act I.

This is the place to step back because your story will be driven by the elements you set up here. If they are not strong enough, you may not have enough power fuel to get through the rest of the book. It pays, then, to spend some time getting this part right.