by Donald Maass
"Good night, Bob."
"No offense, Cope. I'm just trying to help."
"I know. Good night, Bob."
Dialogue allows Coben to introduce this obstacle with brisk efficiency. In less than a page, and with plenty of tension, he raises Cope's stakes. The passage is easy to read. Bing, bam, boom, it makes its point. No slogging here.
How many of your dragging middle scenes could be tightened and torqued up with dialogue? How tight is your dialogue generally? Is it lean and mean or is it choked up with incidental action and lengthy attributives? Strip it down. Pump it up. Taut dialogue is one of the secrets of making sure that middles scenes are not candidates for cutting.
STRIDING FORWARD, FALLING BACK
Most instruction in writing scenes begins with the sound advice, send your character into the scene with a goal. Well, duh. You would be surprised, though, in how many middle scenes in how many manuscripts there seems to be no particular reason for a character to go somewhere, see someone, learn something, or avoid something. What do they want?
It can be hard to tell. Now, this is not to say that the immediate goal needs to be flatly stated. If he didn't sell his boss on his idea for marketing organic toothpaste, and right now, then he was finished! How clunky. Most authors would like their characters' needs to emerge more artfully, to infuse the action of the scene rather than squat atop it like an elephant on an egg. I'm good with that. But this restraint is too often a convenient excuse for not working out what a character wants or needs at this particular moment.
Working that out is essential to shaping a scene in which everything that happens has meaning. At the end of a scene, we want to feel that something important occurred. A change took place. The fortunes of the character and the path of the story have shifted. We won't get that feeling unless we get, in some way, a prior sense of what we're hoping for—a hope that in the scene is either fulfilled or dashed or delayed.
George R.R. Martin is the best-selling author of a massive fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire that began with A Game of Thrones (1996) and A Clash ofKings (1999). In the third volume, A Storm of Swords (2000), Martin advances the epic struggle for the Iron Throne. Summarizing the plot is impossible. There are so many points of view that each volume contains a character guide with hundreds of listings grouped by family and spheres of influence. Suffice it to say that everyone has an agenda and no one is wholly good or bad.
One of the recurring points of view in A Storm of Swords is that of Jon Snow, bastard son of the king of the North. Jon is a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, a badly depleted force charged with guarding an immense wall that protects the southern lands from a mysterious race to the north called the Others. Not all humans live south of the wall. North of the wall, deserters and outcasts called wildlings have formed their own quasi-kingdom. Captured, Jon meets the self-appointed King-Beyond-the-Wall, Mance Rayder, who will decide Jon's fate.
What is Jon's goal in this scene? Survival? Sure. But Jon is loyal to the Night's Watch. In fact, he has allowed himself to be captured so that he can spy. His plan is to make the wildlings think he's a Night's Watch deserter, and he has killed one of his own company to prove it:
"When Mance hears how you did for Halfhand, he'll take you quick enough," [Ygritte] told him.
"Take me for what?"
The girl laughed scornfully. "For one o' us. D'ya think you're the first crow ever flew down off the Wall? In your hearts you all want to fly free."
"And when I'm free," he said slowly, "will I be free to go?"
"Sure you will." She had a warm smile, despite her crooked teeth. "And we'll be free to kill you. It's dangerous being free, but most come to like the taste o' it." She put her gloved hand on his leg, just above the knee.
"You'll see."
I will, thought Jon. I will see, and hear, and learn, and when I have I will carry the word back to the Wall.
Thus, Jon's opening goal is to maintain the illusion that he is a "crow." Everything in the scene works to advance him toward that goal or away from it. His captors are at first undecided about him. Dire threats are made:
"Might be you fooled these others, crow, but don't think you'll be fooling Mance. He'll take one look a' you and know you're false. And when he does, I'll make a cloak o' your wolf there, and open your soft boy's belly and sew a weasel up inside."
Charming. Observing the wildlings' surprisingly large camp, and noting that they are not entirely warlike, Jon is then brought to the tent of the King-Beyond-the-Wall. Inside, the scene again is not entirely as Jon expected. A gray-haired man plays a lute and sings. A pregnant woman roasts a brace of hens. Jon picks out a large bearded man as the king but he's wrong. It's the lute player.
Mance Rayder recognizes Jon and calls him by name. Jon's peril deepens as Mance describes where they've previously met, at Jon's father's castle, Winterfell, when Mance snuck into a feast to take the measure of his foes. Jon knows his charade is weak:
"... So tell me truly, Jon Snow. Are you a craven who turned your cloak from fear, or is there another reason that brings you to my tent?"
Guest right or no, Jon Snow knew he walked on rotten ice here. One false step and he might plunge through, into water cold enough to stop his heart. Weigh every word before you speak it, he told himself. He took a long draught of mead to buy time for his answer. When he set the horn aside he said, "Tell me why you turned your cloak, and I'll tell you why I turned mine."
Jon is stalling. He doesn't know how to convince Mance Rayder. Mance makes Jon guess his reasons for deserting, but then reveals it was because of the Night's Watch cloak. One day an elk shredded his, and cut Mance up as well. He was tended by a wilding woman,
who not only sewed up his wounds but his cloak too, patching it with some scarlet silk that was her greatest treasure. The experience changed him:
"I left the next morning ... for a place where a kiss was not a crime, and a man could wear any cloak he chose." He closed the clasp and sat back down again. "And you, Jon Snow?"
Jon took another swallow of mead. There is only one tale that he might believe. "You say you were at Winterfell, the night my father feasted King Robert."
"I did say it, for I was."
"Then you saw us all. Prince Joffrey and Prince Tom-men, Princess Myrcella, my brothers Robb and Bran and Rickon, my sisters Arya and Sansa. You saw them walk the center aisle with every eye upon them and take their seats at the table just below the dais where the king and queen were seated."
"I remember."
"And did you see where I was seated, Mance?" He leaned forward. "Did you see where they put the bastard?"
Mance Rayder looked at Jon's face for a long moment. "I think we had best find you a new cloak," the king said, holding out his hand.
By appealing to his emotions, Jon convinces Mance that he is genuine. He achieves his goal.
George R.R. Martin is a gifted storyteller, but A Song of Ice and Fire is a vast saga composed of uncounted points of view and scenes. To hold our interest over so long a stretch—the fourth volume, A Feast for Crows (2006), leapt to the best-seller lists so it's fair to say that it has—it is necessary for each of Martin's scenes to have a strong structure. Each one needs to advance the story a step. How does Martin do that? By identifying goals and making sure that every element in every scene in some way makes the goal more likely or more remote. You could say that Martin knows his characters, but I would say that he
knows how to fix them in any given moment, understand what they want, make that clear to his readers, and then keep us in suspense about the immediate outcome.
Step-by-step scene building is the business of advancing toward goals or away from them. Striding forward or falling back or simply playing with our expectations ... it doesn't matter. What's important is that each scene keeps moving. Toward what? Answer that question and you will find a scene's purpose.
FIRST LINES, LAST LINES
Why do you suppose that at the end of auto races they wav
e checkered flags? It isn't strictly necessary. It's obvious that the cars are crossing the finish line, right? I'm sure there once was a practical reason for it, but whatever the case, the checkered flag does add drama to the final lap.
Does it matter what is the last line of your scene, or the first? Apparently, many authors do not think it does. Most last and first lines in manuscript scenes are quite forgettable. That's a shame. Like a handshake, an opening and closing line can create impressions and expectations. They can set a tone. They can signal where we're going, or what we've done, or serve any number of other useful story purposes.
Or not. So many first and last lines don't do anything at all. I suspect that many authors are afraid of being obvious, or are trying to be artful. Perhaps they imagine that the first thing readers want is some detail about the setting, or something incidental to the action. Or maybe writers just don't know where to begin, or don't know when to quit.
Whatever the case, solid first and last lines can give a scene shape. Creating them deliberately is a discipline worth developing.
Marisa de los Santos's novel Love Walked In (2005) is about Cornelia Brown, a cafe manager in Philadelphia who experiences life (or hopes to) as movie moments. When a Cary Grant lookalike, Martin Grace, walks into her cafe and engages her in banter that could have been scripted in Hollywood's golden age, she knows her life is about to change.
How and who changes it, though, is a surprise. It isn't debonair Martin but rather his eleven-year-old daughter, Clare, who shows Cornelia the meaning of love. Martin's ex, Clare's mother, is slowly going nuts. Clare knows she needs a better situation but she's not close to her father. When her mother finally vanishes altogether, Clare winds up in Cornelia's care. The scene in which this happens is a crucial turning point for everyone and for the novel.
Assume that the groundwork for this development has been laid. Choose as the point of view Clare. Her mom has just gone AWOL. She's with her father and is frightened and unhappy. Cornelia has come over to talk with Martin; she's full of compassion and completely unprepared to assume the care of an eleven-year-old. But that is what is going to happen. Now, what would be your opening line? Here is what de los Santos chose:
Clare lay on her side on the guestroom bed in her father's apartment, not sleeping, trying to imagine herself as a piece of driftwood.
Since Clare is adrift in her life, the image makes sense. Notice that the moment is inactive. The author is telling not showing. Or is she? Take another look. Clare is lying on her side, not sleeping. Her anxiety is plain. Also, the idea of an eleven-year-old imagining herself as driftwood is arresting. De los Santos needs for us to feel Clare's worry. Behind that is a need to signal Clare's goal: find safety.
With those things neatly accomplished in a tidy, if unsettling, first line, de los Santos is free to maneuver events so that Clare winds up staying over at Cornelia's apartment.
How would you close off this scene? With Clare drifting to sleep in a strange place? That's the obvious choice, almost unavoidable. De los Santos elects it but is skilled enough to know that a falling asleep moment, by itself, is too common to have any impact. Thus, she goes a step further:
Clare fell onto the bed, kept falling and falling and falling. When she woke up, it was dark and, into the dark, Clare was calling for her mother.
Do you see what de los Santos is doing here? The relationship between Cornelia and Clare is clearly not going to be easy (there wouldn't be any story if it were), so why not signal the underlying issue now, so the chapter ends with tension?
The issue? Clare doesn't need Cornelia. What she needs is for her mother to be well. That isn't going to happen. Neither is Cornelia going to be a substitute. Count on it, there will be conflict. In other words, de los Santos uses the scene's final lines to foreshadow. Why not?
Young-adult writer Meg Cabot had a major hit with her Princess Diaries series, but she is also the author of other series and stand-alones. In How to Be Popular (2006), Cabot tells the story of eleventh-grader Steph Landry, who, ever since she spilled a cherry Super Big Gulp on one of the in-crowd, has had a reputation as a klutz. Steph decides to do something about that, with help from an old book called How to Be Popular. Amazingly, it works. Soon Steph finds herself friends with the A-list girls, but at what cost?
A key step in Steph's evolution comes one day when a stalwart friend, Jason, can't drive her home from school. Steph will have to take the bus. Horrors! Rescue arrives in the form of dreamboat Mark Finley, who shames one of the A-list girls, Lauren Moffat, into giving Steph and her embarrassing B-list friend Becca a ride in her BMW. It's a big social step up for Steph. So, how would you open this scene? Cabot uses hyperbolic YA first person:
I think I died and went to heaven.
Eleventh grade is far from heaven, if you ask me, but we get the point. Notice that at the beginning of this scene, Steph has not yet copped a ride in Lauren's chariot-like BMW. Cabot is creating anticipation, a form of tension, by framing the scene. We read ahead to see why she's so elated. This flashback structure happens so quickly we hardly notice. It's not a technique that will work for every scene, but it illustrates the importance of tension in line one.
By the end of the scene there are uneasy hints of the cost of Steph's new popularity. Still, Steph is happy—maybe irrationally so. How would you cap off this scene? Here's Cabot's choice:
Jason freaking out and refusing to give me rides anymore might just be the best thing that ever happened.
The very best thing, ever? I wonder if that's true ... which is exactly what Cabot wants us to do at this moment.
First and last lines need not be fancy. Even a utilitarian line can work well if it yanks us straight into, or amplifies, a scene's main action. M.J. Rose built a sizable audience with her steamy series of thrillers about Dr. Morgan Snow, a Manhattan sex therapist. In The Venus Fix (2006), Rose relates another multilayered tale in which someone is killing webcam girls. Simultaneously, Morgan copes with her uneasy relationship with police detective Noah Jordain and her daughter Dulcie's budding Broadway acting career.
Midway through the novel, Rose needs to ratchet up the stakes in the daughter subplot. Dulcie can audition for the lead in a television adaptation of the play she's in, but the audition entails going to L.A. Morgan is opposed; Dulcie is defiant. One night Morgan goes to see her daughter's Broadway performance. After the show, Dulcie disappears. During the scene Morgan learns that Dulcie has gone to stay with her father, Morgan's ex, but didn't warn her in advance.
It's a routine middle scene, moving things along a step: daughter disappears, defies mother, turns up, but of course a mother-daughter problem is apparent. How would you start this scene? Rose selects a detail to signal that Dulcie has deviated from routine:
The black town car was not where it always was.
It's basic, that line, but it does the job. Rose hardly needs to elaborate Morgan's apprehension. Her anxiety is easy to guess. The line gets right to its essence. By the end of the scene a couple of cell phone calls have established that Dulcie is with her dad. Morgan marches to his apartment—on foot, taxis being impossible to find at curtain hour. How would you close this off? Rose has snow symbolically begin to fall as theatergoers turn their faces to the sky:
I was mystified by the storm, too: the one going on within my family.
I'm not sure why Morgan is puzzled by her daughter's acting out (let the kid get her big break, why don't you?), but Rose's last line nevertheless effectively caps the scene and gets us looking ahead.
What about your first and last lines? Suppose you did a first line/last line draft, doing nothing but honing the bookends of every scene in your manuscript. Would those little changes give your story a bigger and more effective shape?
I thought so. Is that a checkered flag I see waving?
THE TORNADO EFFECT
Novels need events. Things need to happen: little things, big things. Especially big things. Big events shake protagonists, change the
course of lives, and stay in readers' memories.
What is a big event? Is it only the kind of thing that makes the six o'clock news? Can it be an interior shift; a realization of the truth, say, that has a seismic jolt? Having read I don't know how many manuscripts and novels over the course of my career, I've realized two truths of storytelling: 1) Most novels don't have enough big events; 2) What makes an event big is not its size but the scope of its effect.
To put it another way, a big narrative event is one that affects not just one's protagonist, but everyone in a story. Making an event big, then, is not so much a matter of dreaming up a natural disaster (useful as those can be) but rather measuring an event's impact on more than a few characters.
Mystery writer Nancy Pickard's stand-alone suspense novel The Virgin of Small Plains (2006) was a finalist for the Edgar, Dily, and Macavity awards and winner of the Agatha Award. Set in the town of Small Plains, Kansas, it's a complex story revolving around the murder of an unknown teenage girl seventeen years ago. Moved by the death of this nameless runaway, the town paid for her burial. The grave of "The Virgin," as she's known, is now a shrine that is said to heal.
Of course, the truth is more tangled. Two of the main players are Abby Reynolds and Mitch Newquist, who on the winter night of the Virgin's death, were a teenage couple. On that night, Mitch suddenly left town without a word, presumably having some culpability in the Virgin's death. Seventeen years later, Abby vows to learn who the Virgin was; meanwhile, Mitch returns to Small Plains. A storm of secrets is unleashed.
The book's climactic sequence also involves a storm: this being Kansas, a tornado. The sequence in which the tornado rips through Small Plains is an extended one, seen from a number of points of view. Mitch is one of those who sees it coming:
He was facing southwest, looking straight into the leading edge of the blackest, biggest, baddest storm he had seen since he left his hometown. My God, he thought, did I ever take these for granted? Did I used to think this was no big deal? The line of black was huge, rolling for miles horizontally, and also up, up, up until he had to bend his neck back to see the top of it. He'd seen dramatic clouds in the city sky, but nothing had the overwhelming drama of this panorama in which he could view the whole front edge, and watch it marching toward him.