Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  Don’t let any of your characters plop into your plot like plain vanilla. Spice them up.

  Settings

  Can you take us to a place we’ve never been before? That will enliven any plot. And I don’t necessarily mean some place far away from home, although that’s an option.

  It could mean simply setting your scenes in places that are fresh.

  How many times do we have conversations between two potential lovers in a restaurant? Back and forth they go, with the only original element being what they are served by the waiter.

  Why not put them in a tree house? Or on the subway stuck in a tunnel? Or underneath the boardwalk by the sea?

  Setting also includes the details of life surrounding the Lead character. Tom Clancy created a whole new genre called techno-thriller because he put his hero, Jack Ryan, into a world of complex military hardware. That was new.

  Readers love to read about the details of other people’s working lives.

  Do research. Immerse yourself in some occupation, either by training for it or by interviewing an expert about it.

  Whatever you do, don’t show characters practicing their chosen professions in the same old predictable way. Dig deeper and find original details. You can still write about cops and lawyers and truck drivers, but only if you give them updated challenges and settings. Find out what they are and spice up your writing.

  Dialogue

  Dialogue is a great opportunity to spice up your plots. Don’t waste it!

  Dialogue helps to create original characters and move the plot along. If it isn’t doing either of those things, it probably should be cut.

  While the subject of dialogue alone is worthy of another book in this series, here are a few tips for freshening plot through dialogue. First, make sure your characters have unique ways of speaking. No two characters should sound exactly alike. And second, the words they use should tell us something about who they are.

  If a character is the charge-ahead type, he’ll speak that way. His words will be forceful and direct. Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is like that. Here he confronts the odd little intruder, Joel Cairo:

  I’ve got you by the neck, Cairo. You’ve walked in and tied yourself up, plenty strong enough to suit the police, with last night’s killing. Well, now you’ll have to play with me or else.

  But the dandy Cairo, smelling faintly of gardenia, uses fancier verbiage:

  I made somewhat extensive inquiries about you before taking any action, and was assured that you were far too reasonable to allow other considerations to interfere with profitable business relations.

  We know, simply from the words, that these are two very different characters. Think of dialogue as weapons used in the plot. Plot is about confrontation. It’s a battle. So verbal weapons are naturally going to be employed by characters who are trying to outmaneuver each other.

  There is a whole range of weaponry to choose from — anger, epithets, pouting, name-calling, dodging — virtually anything from the arsenal of human interaction.

  John D.MacDonald’s The Executioners (the basis for the two Cape Fear movies) is about a lawyer, Sam Bowden, whose family is stalked by the sadistic rapist Max Cady. Cady’s first act is poisoning the family dog, Marilyn. Sam has not been totally up front with his wife, Carol. She challenges him:

  “I’m not a child and I’m not a fool and I resent being … overprotected.”

  Her volley is direct, telling him she resents the coddling. Sam responds:

  “I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

  Sam’s apology is meant to diminish his wife’s anger. But his words ring hollow to her, and she continues to advance:

  “So now this Cady can roam around at will and poison our dog and work his way up to the children. Which do you think he’ll start on first? The oldest or the youngest?”

  “Carol, honey. Please.”

  “I’m a hysterical woman? You are so damn right. I am a hysterical woman.”

  Carol uses sarcasm, Sam tries again to soften her up, and she responds with a bitter observation and a curse word. Sam the lawyer tries another tack:

  “We haven’t any proof it was Cady.”

  She threw a towel into the sink. “Listen to me. I have proof it was Cady. I’ve got that proof. It’s not the kind of proof you would like. No evidence. No testimony. Nothing legalistic. I just know.”

  Seeing that this has no effect on her husband, Carol quickly shifts and brings out her heavy artillery:

  “What kind of a man are you? This is your family. Marilyn was part of your family. Are you going to look up all the precedents and prepare a brief?”

  She has attacked both his manhood and his profession. Sam attempts an answer but Carol cuts him off (interruptions are good weapons, too):

  “You don’t know how —”

  “I don’t know anything. This is happening because of something you did a long time ago.”

  “Something I had to do.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have. You tell me the man hates you. You don’t think he’s sane. So do something about him!”

  Carol wants instant action, and Sam knows he can’t provide it. The stress of the situation brings out weaponlike dialogue.

  The plot moves ahead with originality and pace because dialogue is used as a weapon.

  Words of Wisdom

  Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story was life, with the dull parts taken out.

  Everything in this book is, in some way, an attempt to follow Hitchcock’s Axiom. You would do well to keep it seared into your writer’s mind, and let it guide you always.

  SCENE SELECTION

  The choices you make for scenes, the raw “what happens” material, also contribute to your spice.

  But our minds naturally jump to clichés as we decide what to write next.

  That’s why it’s critical to develop the sort of imagination that considers several possibilities before deciding which scene to write.

  You can do this just by pausing, writing a quick list of possibilities, and waiting for something to click.

  Do this even within the scene you’re writing. Maybe you start out thinking that you’ll have a cop burst into a house and engage a bad guy in a gunfight, ending with the bad guy dead.

  Stop a moment. What if the cop ends up dead? Or there’s an innocent bystander in the house? Or a dog? Or there’s not really anyone there after all?

  Think about it. Choose something fresh.

  EXERCISE 1

  Set aside ten minutes of undisturbed writing time. For those ten minutes, write a freeform response to the following: When readers read my novels, I want them to feel ______ at the end. That’s because, to me, novels are ______.

  Write from the gut, quickly.

  When you’re done, analyze your mini-essay. What does it tell you about the type of plotter you might be? Are you suspicious of plot? Are you more concerned with the “gossamer wings” of literary style? If so, consider how your writing might be doubled in strength if you learn some plotting craft.

  EXERCISE 2

  Take some of your favorite novels off the shelf and analyze them using the LOCK system. See how each element is at work in the books you love. Use these questions to help you:

  What is it about the Lead character that captures you?

  What is it the Lead is trying to get or get away from?

  When did the story kick into “high gear”?

  What was the main opposition to the Lead’s objective?

  How did the ending make you feel? Why did it work?

  EXERCISE 3

  Write a quick plot for your current idea. Use four lines, one line each for LOCK.

  My Lead is a ______.

  Her objective is to ______.

  She is confronted by ______ who oppose(s) her because ______.

  The ending will be a knockout when ______.

  If you have filled in the blanks, you have the skeleton for a solid novel. T
he rest of this book will help you flesh it out.

  EXERCISE 4

  Start a collection of your favorite “spices” from the novels you read. Look for:

  Unique settings

  Colorful characters

  Dialogue that zings

  Scenes with tremendous impact

  When you come across these things, analyze them. Why do they work? What techniques did the author use?

  Chapter 2

  Structure: What Holds Your Plot Together

  If you build it, they will come.

  — Otherwordly advice from Field of Dreams

  And if you structure it, they will read.

  When my son, Nate, was four, he wrote a novel. It was four pages, each page containing one sentence. Very Hemingway-esque.

  Nate spelled the words phonetically. Here is the entire novel, sans the crayon illustrations. The spelling has been updated for modern readers: Robin Hood went riding. A bad guy came. They fought. He won.

  Now it is true he needed some work on pronouns and subject agreement. But the fact is he wrote a perfectly structured story. Somehow Nate had absorbed the essentials of plot construction — perhaps from Dad’s stories at bedtime or the movies he was starting to love on tape and television.

  The lessons drawn from this modest example can help us understand the value of structure in a novel. Simply put, structure is what assembles the parts of a story in a way that makes them accessible to readers. It is the orderly arrangement of story material for the benefit of the audience.

  Plot is about elements, those things that go into the mix of making a good story even better.

  Structure is about timing — where in the mix those elements go.

  When you read a novel that isn’t quite grabbing you, the reason is probably structure. Even though it may have good characters, snappy dialogue, and intriguing settings, the story isn’t unfolding in the optimum fashion.

  Of course, the author may protest that this is his way, and how dare anyone dictate what’s right and what isn’t about his novel!

  That’s an author’s prerogative. But if we are talking about connection with readers, we have to talk about structure.

  THE THREE-ACT STRUCTURE

  Why talk about a three-act structure?

  Because it works. It has since Aristotle sat down to figure out what makes drama.

  Why does the three-act structure work? Probably because it is in line with how we live our lives. A three-step rhythm is inherent in much that we do.

  As the writing teacher Dwight Swain pointed out, we are born, we live, and we die. It feels like three acts. Childhood is relatively short and introduces us to life. That long section in the middle is where we spend most of our time. Then we have a last act that wraps everything up.

  Daily life is like that, too. We get up in the morning and get ready to go to work. We work or do whatever we do. Eventually we wrap up the day’s business and hit the sack.

  We live each day in three acts.

  On a micro level, three acts is typical. Say we are confronted with a problem. We react. That’s Act I.We spend the greater part of our time figuring out how to solve the problem: Act II. After all of that wrestling, hopefully, we get the insight and answer — the resolution of Act III.

  There is something fundamentally sound about the three structure. As Buckminster Fuller taught, the triangle is the strongest shape in nature (thus it is the foundation of the geodesic dome he invented).

  Similarly, almost all great jokes are built on a structure of three — the setup, the body, and the payoff. It is never just an Irishman and a Frenchman entering a bar; you have to add an Englishman to make the joke work.

  In a novel, we must get to know some things in Act I before we can move on in the story. Then the problem is presented, and the Lead spends the greater part of the book wrestling with the problem (Act II). But the book has to end sometime, with the problem solved (Act III).

  It has been said in writing classes and books that the three-act structure is dead (or silly or worthless). Don’t believe it.

  The three-act structure has endured because it works.

  If you choose to ignore this structure, you increase the chance of reader frustration. If that’s your goal for some artistic reason or other, fine.

  But at least understand why structure works — it helps readers get into the story.

  Can You Play With Structure?

  Of course. Once you understand why it works, you are free to use that understanding to fit your artistic purposes. But you will soon come to realize that the further you move from sound structure, the harder it will be to bring your readers along with you. That’s okay, too. A little hard work never hurts a novelist, and readers sometimes need to be challenged. So grasp the worth of structure, then write what you will. See chapter eight for more on playing with structure.

  Another way to talk about the three acts is simply as the beginning, middle, and end. I like the way one wag put it: beginning, muddle, and end.

  Here, then, are the things that must happen in the three acts. We will be going into more detail on each act in the next few chapters.

  Beginnings

  Beginnings are always about the who of the story (chapter four goes into greater detail about beginnings). The entry point is a Lead character, and the writer should begin by connecting the reader to the Lead as quickly as possible — Robin Hood went riding.

  Imagine the courtroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird coming at the beginning of the book. What connection would there be with Atticus Finch? He’d certainly seem like a competent, caring lawyer, but our caring would not be as deep as it is later on. That’s because the beginning gives us glimpses of Atticus as a father, citizen, neighbor, and lawyer. We get to know him better through the eyes of his daughter, before we track him to court.

  Beginnings have other tasks to perform. The four most important are:

  Present the story world — tell us something about the setting, the time, and the immediate context.

  Establish the tone the reader will rely upon. Is this to be a sweeping epic or a zany farce? Action packed or dwelling more on character change? Fast moving or leisurely?

  Compel the reader to move on to the middle. Just why should the reader care to continue?

  Introduce the opposition. Who or what wants to stop the Lead?

  Middles

  The major part of the novel is the confrontation, a series of battles between the Lead and the opposition. They fought.

  This is also where subplots blossom, adding complexity to the novel and usually reflecting the deeper meaning of the book.

  The various plot strands weave in and out of one another, creating a feeling of inevitability while at the same time surprising the reader in various ways. In addition, the middle, which is discussed more in chapter five, should:

  Deepen character relationships.

  Keep us caring about what happens.

  Set up the final battle that will wrap things up at the end.

  Ends

  The last part of the novel gives us the resolution of the big story. He won. The best endings (and we’ll look at some examples in chapter six) also:

  Tie up all loose ends. Are there story threads that are left dangling? You must either resolve these in a way that does not distract from the main plot line or go back and snip them out. Readers have long memories.

  Give a feeling of resonance. The best endings leave a sense of something beyond the confines of the book. What does the story mean in the larger sense?

  What About Mythic Structure?

  Ever since Star Wars writer-director George Lucas credited Joseph Campbell for the mythic structure of the film, we’ve had a plethora of books and articles about the value of this template. And it is valuable because it is all about elements lining up — which is what structure means.

  Mythic structure, sometimes called “The Hero’s Journey” after the title of a book by Campbell, is an order of events. It
comes in various forms, but usually follows a pattern similar to this:

  Readers are introduced to the hero’s world.

  A “call to adventure” or a disturbance interrupts the hero’s world.

  The hero may ignore the call or the disturbance.

  The hero “crosses the threshold” into a dark world.

  A mentor may appear to teach the hero.

  Various encounters occur with forces of darkness.

  The hero has a dark moment within himself that he must overcome in order to continue.

  A talisman aids in battle (e.g., the shield of Athena for Perseus; the sword, Excalibur, for King Arthur).

  The final battle is fought.

  The hero returns to his own world.

  Why does this work? Because it perfectly corresponds to the three-act structure:

  ACT I

  [1] Readers are introduced to the hero’s world.

  [2] A “call to adventure” or a disturbance interrupts the hero’s world.

  [3] The hero may ignore the call or the disturbance.

  [4] The hero “crosses the threshold” into a dark world.

  ACT II

  [5] A mentor may appear to teach the hero.

  [6] Various encounters occur with forces of darkness.

  [7] The hero has a dark moment within himself that he must overcome.

  [8] A talisman aids in battle.

  ACT III

  [9] The final battle is fought.

  [10] The hero returns to his own world.

  A DISTURBANCE AND TWO DOORWAYS