The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

To re-envision a scene, look away from the page and look toward what is really happening. What change takes place? When does that change occur (at what precise second in the scene)? In that moment, how is the point-of-view character changed? The point of those questions is to find the scenes' turning points (note the plural).

  Having identified the turning points, you will find focusing the scene becomes easier. Everything else on the page either contributes to, or leads readers away from, those changes. All the extra stuff—the nifty scene setting, clever character bits, artful lead-ins and lead-outs—are now expendable, or perhaps they are tools to help selectively enact the scene's main purpose.

  Practice re-envisioning scenes in this way; after a while you will find yourself not only dissatisfied with flabby middle scenes as you write them, you'll also have at hand the tools to shape them effectively from the outset—possibly even a few handy tricks and master techniques to use in orchestrating scenes of multiple impact on many characters.

  All of this revision does not mean that some scenes shouldn't be cut. Sad to say, some scenes don't deserve to live. The purpose of this chapter, though, is not to set rules for scene triage, but rather to illuminate why middle scenes rock when they do. Once you have that understanding, it's my hope that revision will get easier and, for the majority of your scenes, may prove unnecessary.

  Let's look at some of the factors that contribute to scenes that can't be cut.

  OUTER AND INNER TURNING POINTS

  A moment ago I mentioned a scene's turning points. I used the plural because every change (which, after all, is the reason to include a scene in the first place) has two dimensions: 1) The way in which things change that everyone can understand; 2) the way in which the scene's point-of-view character also changes as a result. To put it plainly, scenes work best when they have both outer and inner turning points.

  Marisha Pessl's sparkling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006), was widely noted for a clever stylistic trick. The novel's young narrator, Blue van Meer, is the daughter of a colorful but drifting college professor. During their early wanderings, Blue's father advises her with regard to her writing, "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids." The text of Pessl's novel thus formally cites hundreds of other works and includes many carefully numbered Visual Aids (illustrations).

  Pressl's bold stylistic approach, though, is not enough to carry readers through more than five hundred pages. Story is needed too; this Pressl provides in a mystery surrounding the death of a charismatic film teacher, Hannah Schneider, at the prep school where Blue spends her senior year. From the outset we know that Blue found Hannah hanged by an orange electrical extension cord from a tree. Was it suicide or was she murdered? Pressl flashes back to recount Blue's peripatetic childhood, her involvement at the St. Gallway School with a clique called the Bluebloods, and the tangled webs that, ultimately, will reveal the truth.

  There's a lot of ground to cover. Along the way, Pessl faces the chore of bringing Blue to St. Gallway and getting her involved with the Bluebloods. She also needs to imbue this group of friends with the exclusivity and special-ness that makes them alluring, as well as making Hannah Schneider seem a teacher of charisma and openness, not to mention invoking the progressive atmosphere of St. Gallway.

  In most manuscripts, tasks like these defeat their authors. Arriving somewhere, introducing people, and creating atmosphere are almost always low-tension traps. Scene after scene of slogging middle are taken up with getting the players and pieces in place so that something neato can happen later on. Pessl knows this. So she constructs these set-up scenes in ways that make them matter.

  Consider the chapter titled "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (a reference to Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel of the same name, 1782). After chickening out on several invitations from members of the Bluebloods, Blue decides finally to accept an invitation to meet them at room 208 of Barrow Hall one afternoon ... only to find herself in a meeting of a Dungeons & Dragons club. Blue is crestfallen:

  In the aftermath of being brazenly hoodwinked or swindled, it's difficult to accept, particularly if one has always prided oneself on being an intuitive and scorch-ingly observant person. Standing on the Hanover steps, waiting for Dad, I reread Jade Whitestone's letter fifteen times, convinced I'd missed something—the correct day, time or location to meet, or perhaps she'd made a mistake; perhaps she'd written the letter while watching On the Waterfront and had been distracted by the pathos of Brando picking up Eva Marie Saint's tiny white glove and slipping it onto his own meaty hand, but soon, of course, I realized her letter was teaming with sarcasm (particularly in the final sentence), which I hadn't originally picked up on.

  It had all been a hoax.

  This is the scene's turning point: the moment when the protagonist's fortunes take a turn. In this case it's a low moment. Blue is deflated. Set up for new friends, she's been let down by a trick. That realization is the demarcation point, the precise moment when things change. That would be good enough to give the scene shape, but Pessl knows that turning points have both outer and inner components. In the next paragraph she creates the scene's inner turning point:

  Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the "Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising" in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians

  and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. ("Fourteen-year-old lovers last longer," he'd noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents' cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires.

  Strickly speaking, it might not have been necessary to explore how cruddy Blue feels. But look again. Pessl draws a contrast between Blue's humiliation and the ease of the other students, whose parents, unlike Blue's father, have arrived to collect them. Blue longs to be like them but isn't. This sudden ache is the inner change, the surfacing recognition that she needs friends. What about outward consequences? Pessl adds that too: Immediately after this, Hannah Schneider comes along to chat with Blue and summon her to lunch on the following Sunday. Blue's life takes a fateful turn.

  This scene does a lot of work: It humbles precocious Blue, it makes her aware of her loneliness, and it introduces the agent of change. For a set-up scene, that's pretty dynamic. In many manuscripts this scene would be weak, a candidate for cutting. Pessl uses a nicely defined turning point and a well delineated inner turning point to make the scene necessary.

  Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner (2003), had a long run on best-seller lists; his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), has also gripped readers. It's the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and their friendship and mutual suffering through several decades. The story spans the Soviet occupation years, the Taliban era, and beyond. In addition to portraying the condition of Afghan women, Hosseini also wants to convey some of the magnificence of Afghanistan's history.

  Uh-oh. Portraying the majestic sweep of history is, for many writers, a recipe for lengthy self-indulgence and low tension. Hosseini, however, is too skilled for that. In the novel's second section he switches point of view from unhappily married Mariam to young Laila, daughter of a neighboring couple. Laila has a best friend, Tariq, for whom in adolescence she develops more powerful feelings. Hosseini needs to portray the evolution of this friendship to something deeper. He wants to simultaneously include Afghan history.

  In chapter twenty-one of A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini sends Laila, Tariq, and Laila's father, Babi, on an excursion to see Shahr-e-Zohak, the Red City, and the enormous twin Buddhas at Bamiyan (later dynamited by the Taliban) carved into a cliffside. On their way from Kabul, Hosseini signals the era by having Tariq shout taunts a
t passing Soviet tanks. Later, they see remnants of many invasions. Their driver remarks:

  "And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another," the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. "Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn't that the truth, badar?"

  "Indeed it is," said Babi.

  Many writers would let it go at that, but Hosseini knows that travelogue and story are not the same. At Bamiyan, Laila, Tariq, and Babi climb to the top of the statues. The view of the Afghan countryside provokes Babi to reveal to Laila why he married her now-sour mother and how much he misses Laila's two dead brothers. He then shocks her with an admission: "As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it." That adds an element of tension to the day and to the novel, and is the scene's turning point for Laila. Her future now could be extremely different, possibly in a different land.

  Hosseini also knows that every outer turning point has an inner counterpart. That occurs at the end of the chapter. Babi's revelation triggers a realization in Laila:

  There was something she hadn't told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one important way, she was glad they couldn't go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-faced earnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning around. But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four weeks without Tariq when he had gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How could she ever cope with his permanent absence?

  Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her.

  Hosseini thus accomplishes several things at once: He conveys Laila's inner turning point, sets a larger conflict, and connects the violent history of Afghanistan directly to the lives of his characters. Not bad for a scene that began as a sightseeing trip. The scene advances the story but does so not through the mild action ofvisiting an historic site but by using that site as a springboard for twin turning points.

  What about your scenes? Does every scene of travel, arrival, aftermath, investigation, meeting—all the business of getting your characters from beginning to end—capture a sharply defined turning point and reveal its inner meaning? Are you sure? What if you were to do a scene draft of your novel? Suppose that you broke down every discrete unit of the story, pinned down its turning point, and measured in words the change it brings to each scene's point-of-view character? Would your story get stronger?

  I suspect so. You might even find that a scene you considered cutting is now vital to the progression of the plot.

  DIALOGUE

  A common downfall of many scenes is dialogue. The characters talk, talk, talk, but scenes spin in circles and don't travel much of anywhere. Plenty of dialogue in manuscripts also is hard to follow. Choked with incidental action, broken into fragments, and strewn over the length of a page, it can take almost archaeological skill to piece together an exchange.

  Dialogue not only needs to do its own work, it also can bring clarity to middle scenes that would otherwise be muddy and inactive. Dialogue is strong (or can be). The process of stripping it down and finding the tension in it can be revealing. It can help define the purpose of a scene.

  Brunonia Barry's best-selling debut novel, The Lace Reader (2008), spins a story of the present-day denizens of Salem, Massachusetts, in particular the eccentric clan of Whitney women, who have the ability to "read" people by holding pieces of lace in front of their faces. The novel initially is narrated by Towner Whitney, another in the army of unreliable narrators who crowd the pages of contemporary fiction. Towner is called home to Salem when her mother, Eva, an often-arrested rescuer of battered and abused women, goes missing and later is found dead.

  Deeper in, The Lace Reader switches to other points of view, principally John Rafferty, another in contemporary fiction's army of wounded big city cops who've retreated to small towns. It falls to Rafferty to investigate Eva's death, and thereby dig up Salem's dirt. Salem has a bona fide witch in Ann Chase, a contemporary ofTowner's, to whom Rafferty turns for help. When a teenage runaway named Angela also goes missing, Rafferty asks Ann to do a reading on Angela using Angela's toothbrush as a focal object. Ann won't do the reading but offers to guide Rafferty in doing a reading himself.

  Now, how would you handle this middle scene? Would you portray Rafferty's first eerie experience of seeing with second sight? Would you work from Ann's knowing point of view? Barry does neither. She portrays the reading and its aftermath in dialogue:

  "When you're ready, open your eyes."

  He opened them.

  He felt embarrassed, and completely inept. He'd totally failed.

  "Describe what you saw," Ann said.

  Rafferty didn't speak.

  "Go ahead," she said. "You can't make a mistake."

  "Well, first of all, I didn't go up, I went down."

  "All right, maybe you can make a mistake."

  "It was a ranch house," he said, trying to explain. He expected her to end the exercise right there. Or tell him to stop wasting her time. Instead she took a breath and continued.

  "What did you see when you went down the stairs?"

  "I didn't see anything," he said. "Nothing at all."

  "What did this nothing at all look like?"

  "What kind of question is that?"

  "Humor me," she said.

  "It was black. No, not black, but blank. Yeah. Dark and blank," Rafferty said.

  "What did you hear?"

  "What do you mean, what did I hear?"

  "Where there any sounds? Or smells?"

  "No. ... No sounds. No smells."

  He could feel her eyes on him.

  "I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything. I kept trying to go back up the stairs. I failed Psychic 101," Raf-ferty said.

  "Maybe," Ann said. "Maybe not."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I went into the room with you," Ann said. "At least I thought I did."

  "And what did you see?

  "Nothing. It was too dark."

  "I told you," Rafferty said.

  "I heard something, though ... a word."

  "What word?"

  "Underground."

  "Underground as in hiding? Or underground as in dead?"

  Ann didn't answer. She had no idea.

  Notice that Barry keeps her dialogue short. The exchange is not rat-a-tat, but even so it's quick. There's tension between Rafferty and Ann, however rudimentary it may be. Consider, too, what this snippet of the novel has to accomplish: It has to show that Ann is a true parasensitive, while Rafferty is not, and reveal a morsel of information about the missing Angela.

  Dialogue lets Barry accomplish all that with immediacy and tension. We also do not have to believe in second sight. Barry doesn't force us to accept whether it's real or not. By remaining objective, with dialogue, she leaves the choice to us, which in a way preserves the mystery of it. More to the point, a sloggy and potentially off-putting middle scene has become taut and dramatic. Wouldn't you like all of your middle scenes to have that effect?

  We can pretty much count on thriller writer Harlan Coben for crackling dialogue. Coben never wastes words and is particularly good at speeding his middles along with tension-filled talk. In The Woods (2007), he spins another of his patented stories in which a past secret haunts his protagonist and someone who was presumed dead returns to stir things up.

  Paul "Cope" Copeland is a county prosecutor in New Jersey. His past is clouded by a summer camp tragedy in which he and a girlfriend snuck into the woods along with four others, including Paul's sister. While Paul and his girlfriend were fooling around, the four others
were slashed to death. Two bodies were found; the two others (including Paul's sister) were not. Guess what happens? Yup, the dead return. Or do they? And why is suspicion now directed at Paul?

  Meanwhile, Paul is prosecuting a college frat house rape case. Thrillers (hopefully all fiction) are built on the axiom make it worse for the protagonist. This, Coben does. One obstacle he throws in Cope's way is EJ Jenrette, the father of one of the frat boys. He's rich. His friends support a cancer charity that Cope established in memory of his dead wife. Jenrette convinces these friends to back out of their commitments. There are a number of ways in which Coben could have handled this stakes-building step in his story, but he chooses a late-night phone call from Cope's brother-in-law, Bob, who runs the charity:

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "Your rape case is costing us big-time. Edward Jen-rette's father has gotten several of his friends to back out of their commitments."

  I closed my eyes. "Classy."

  "Worse, he's making noises that we've embezzled funds. EJ Jenrette is a well-connected son of a bitch. I'm already getting calls."

  "So we open our books," I said. "They won't find anything."

  "Don't be naive, Cope. We compete with other charities for the giving dollar. If there is even a whiff of a scandal, we're finished."

  "Not much we can do about it, Bob."

  "I know. It's just that ... we're doing a lot of good here, Cope."

  "I know."

  "But funding is always tough."

  "So what are you suggesting?"

  "Nothing." Bob hesitated and I could tell he had more to say. So I waited. "But come on, Cope, you guys plea-bargain all the time, right?"

  "We do."

  "You let a lesser injustice slide so you can nail someone for a bigger one."

  "When we have to."

  "These two boys. I hear they're good kids."

  "You hear wrong."

  "Look, I'm not saying that they don't deserve to be punished, but sometimes you have to trade. The greater good. JaneCare is making big strides. It might be the greater good. That's all I'm saying."