Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  [Her justifications.]

  Her chance came walking up from the side of the restaurant a few moments later. Stefanos wore a dark red windbreaker and blue jeans, looking more like a weekend sailor than anything else. He smiled and waved, then indicated to Rachel to walk his way.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, shaking her hand.

  Placing the Reaction Beat

  You can put a reaction beat in the middle of an action scene so we know how the character is feeling. Dean Koontz’s Intensity is pretty much a nonstop cat-and-mouse game with a killer. Chyna, the Lead, is in a store, trying to avoid being seen:

  She could not at first see the killer, who was at one with the night in his black raincoat. But then he moved, wading through the darkness toward the motor home.

  Even if he glanced back, he wouldn’t be able to see her in the dimly lighted store. Her heart thundered anyway as she stepped into the open area between the heads of the three aisles and the cashiers’ counter.

  The photograph of Ariel was no longer on the floor. She wished that she could believe it had never existed.

  The last line is a reaction beat, a moment of reflection in the midst of intense action (thus the title of the novel).

  These major chords, action and reaction, were called scene and sequel by writing teachers Dwight Swain and Jack M. Bickham. They allow the narrative to unfold in a logical fashion.

  Character takes action, is frustrated by conflict, and usually ends up with a setback. He reacts to this development, thinks things over, and decides on another action.

  It is not necessary to ping pong between these two chords every time. As shown above, you can place reaction (or sequel) as a beat within action. There are other variations (see Bickham’s Scene & Structure). But if you handle action and reaction well, your plot will move along smartly.

  Setup

  Setup scenes, or beats, are those units that must occur in order for subsequent scenes to make sense.

  All novels need a certain amount of setup.

  We have to know who the Lead character is, what he does, and why he does it. We have to see how he gets into whatever predicament is going to dominate the book.

  Further, there may need to be some setup beats in the course of the story.

  How, then, do you do this without writing dull exposition?

  You simply build in a problem, however slight, to the setup scene. It can be anything from the character feeling anxious, to an argument, to a problem that must be dealt with immediately.

  Setup scenes are minor chords, and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Usually they occur early in the book.

  The opening pages of Gone With the Wind are for setup. They give us Scarlett O’Hara and reveal her character. How? She is having a coquettish argument with the Tarleton twins. We get some setting and the flavor of the book to come.

  Then Stuart Tarleton declares that Ashley Wilkes is going to marry Melanie Hamilton, producing the following reaction beat:

  Scarlett’s face did not change but her lips went white — like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened.

  Deepening

  Deepening is to the novel as spice is to food. This chord of fiction is generally not a full scene. It is, instead, what you add to the mix to deepen the reader’s understanding of character or setting. Make it fresh, drop it in strategically, and the flavor will be exquisite.

  But like spice, deepening must not be overdone or it will ruin the taste.

  In his novella, The Body, Stephen King takes a short, spicy break from the narrative to have Gordie tell one of his famous stories to his friends. It concerns a certain large boy named Hogan, some castor oil, a number of pies he eats at a contest and the “revenge” he exacts on the town as a result. (One might pick a better metaphor than spice for this particular deepening episode.) Why did King take this digression? Because it is just the kind of story these boys would like. It deepens their relationship as they continue their journey. It adds something to the story that straight narrative would not.

  What a Scene Isn’t

  Summarizing is when the author tells us what has happened “off scene.”Think of this as the stuff that is not unfolding for the reader in linear time, beat by beat. A scene is like this:

  John took a step toward her.

  “Stop,” she said. She picked up a hammer.

  Laughing, John shook his head. “That’s pitiful.”

  Summarizing would look like this:

  He had tried to attack her, but she had picked up a hammer. When he laughed about it, she actually used it on him. His headache lasted five weeks.

  You use summarizing primarily as a short cut, to get you from scene to scene as quickly as possible. In the following summary, we are in linear time but we’re skipping the beats that would make a scene:

  Holding his head, John drove to the hospital. Traffic was terrible. It took him two hours to get there.

  Then you get back into a scene:

  “Hoo boy, what happened to you?” the nurse said.

  “I attacked a hammer with my head,” John said.

  GET HIP TO YOUR SCENES

  In order to be successful, you must write scenes that always give readers their money’s worth. You can do it if you master these three essentials: hook, intensity, and prompt (HIP).

  Capture Them at the Beginning

  The hook is what grabs the reader’s attention from the start and gets him pulled into the narrative. And here is where many a writer stumbles.

  Feeling there needs to be an adequate description of the location first, then the characters, a writer may tend to start his scenes slowly. This is, of course, a logical choice. We think in a linear fashion, and figure we have to get the readers seeing the location, then the characters in the location, before we can get to the good stuff, like action and dialogue.

  Don’t fall into this trap. Readers don’t care about the natural order if they are intrigued. You have a number of options to choose from in order to make that happen.

  Here is an example of the linear way:

  We were back in his office. I sat in the armchair in front of Pistillo’s desk. His chair, I noticed this time, was set a little higher than mine, probably for reasons of intimidation. Claudia Fisher, the agent who’d visited me at Covenant House, stood behind me with her arms crossed.

  “What happened to your nose?” Pistillo asked me.

  In Gone for Good, however, Harlan Coben starts the scene like this:

  “What happened to your nose?” Pistillo asked me.

  We were back in his office. I sat in the armchair in front of Pistillo’s desk.

  Dialogue is the stronger hook here. It starts the scene off with a question, and makes us want to know what the narrator is going to answer. Coben then drops in one paragraph of setting and gets back to the action.

  Another hooking technique is the teaser. This is a subtle promise to the reader that a tense scene is about to occur. Coben begins a Gone for Good chapter thus: “I fell into such a deep sleep that I never heard him sneak up on me.”

  Who is he? What happened after he snuck up on the narrator? Coben teases first, then unfurls the answers.

  Still another hook is action, pure and simple. Again Coben: “Claudia Fisher burst into the office of Joseph Pistillo.”

  This raises the question of why Claudia burst into the office, instead of knocking or strolling. We read to find out.

  Even description can work as a hook, so long as you make it do double duty. Each place or character you describe should not only create a picture for the reader but also establish the proper mood. In “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” a story about a man’s darkest moment, Stephen King begins this way:

  It was a Motel 6 on I-80 just west of Lincoln, Nebraska. The snow that began at midafternoon had faded the sign’s virulent yellow to a kinder pastel shade as the light ran out of the January du
sk. The wind was closing in on that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country’s flat midsection.

  Even though this is description, notice the mood created by fading light, dusk, wind, emptiness. We are being set up to feel the inner life of the character even before we meet him. And when readers feel something, they want to keep reading.

  So work hard to grab readers at the start of every scene. Try different opening paragraphs. Vary your methods. Alternate dialogue with action, description with teaser. You’ll soon happen upon the hook that feels right.

  Hold Readers Tight

  Once you have the reader’s attention, you can concentrate on the second essential of scene — intensity. Every scene must have it, to a greater or lesser degree. Without it, your scene will sit there like a deflated blimp — it may have potential, but it ain’t gonna fly.

  Masters of the craft know this. Dean Koontz’s aptly titled Intensity is filled with scenes of impending danger as a woman tries to escape a sadistic killer. As the story builds, so does the possibility that she will be discovered by the villain. Virtually every scene in the first half of the book is built on the chance she’ll be found out:

  He stood just outside the cab door, thirty feet from her, stretching almost lazily. He rolled his big shoulders as if to shake weariness from them, and he massaged the back of his neck.

  If he turned his head to the left, he would see her at once. If she didn’t remain absolutely still, he would surely spot the slightest movement even from the corner of his eye.

  The intensity level of your scenes should increase as the story moves toward the climax. In the Koontz novel, the heroine, Chyna, is captured. The last half of the book chronicles her attempts to escape with another prisoner before they are killed.

  Chyna stretched out on her stomach, leaned into the skylight, and used the mop to push the stepstool toward the back of the hall and out of the way. Dropping down onto it, one of them might have broken a leg.

  They were so close to escape. They couldn’t take any chances.

  This occurs just before some killer dogs come after them (Dobermans are intense by definition) and we’re moved to a scene of even greater intensity. Koontz holds us in his grip by increasing the physical peril as the book progresses.

  Literary fiction, on the other hand, usually concentrates more on the emotional turmoil of the characters. John Fante’s classic novel, Ask the Dust, has numerous evocative scenes showing us the yearnings of the young writer Arturo Bandini:

  Now I prayed to St. Teresa again. Please, sweet and lovely saint, gimme an idea. But she has deserted me, all the gods have deserted me, and like Huysmans I stand alone, my fists clenched, tears in my eyes. If someone only loved me, even a bug, even a mouse, but that too belonged to the past …

  The language here is fiercely personal (gimme an idea; if someone only loved me) with emotional images (fists clenched; tears). The tension level is just as great as a scene about physical actions.

  So pack your scenes with tension. How? Primarily through the writer’s best friend: conflict. When two characters with opposing agendas meet, you have built-in tension. A cop tries to question a witness who doesn’t want to talk; a would-be lover tries to get a woman to give him the time of day and she won’t; a parent tries to find out what his wayward teenager is doing but can’t. Your novel’s central story should present endless possibilities for conflict — if it doesn’t, this isn’t the novel you should be writing.

  Even scenes with allies — two characters who agree on a goal — should have tension. Otherwise, you’ll end up with dull exchanges of informational dialogue.

  That’s how the best buddy movies work. Lethal Weapon partnered a straight-arrow, soon-to-retire cop (Danny Glover) with a suicidal wild man (Mel Gibson). The tension in their scenes elevates the movie above the standard cop thriller.

  And we all remember the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when Butch is trying to get Sundance to jump into the river. The heat in their argument rises until Sundance lets loose his dark secret: “I can’t swim!”

  Always go over the scenes you’ve written with an eye for intensity level. If it isn’t strong enough, try to ratchet it up. Even a relatively quiet scene (which you use to modulate the pace of your novel) can give us the thoughts of the viewpoint character, showing us her worries or anxieties, thus allowing for emotional intensity.

  If a scene still doesn’t provide adequate intensity, use the writer’s next best friend: the delete key. Your readers will be happy you did.

  Make Them Read On

  Finally, you need to end scenes with a prompt, something to make readers turn the page. So often new writers let their scenes fizzle out, ending on a boring note: People walk out of rooms, drive off in cars, or offer dull parting phrases like “Good-bye” and “Nice talking with you.”

  Don’t ever let your scenes droop at the end. You have many ways to move the reader along.

  One of the best “read-on prompts” (ROPs) is impending disaster. In Intensity, Chyna is hiding from the villain in a convenience store. Koontz ends the scene this way:

  As she stepped out of the aisle to hide at the end of a row of display cases, Chyna heard the door open and the killer enter. A growl of wind came with him, and then the door swung shut.

  The danger can also be to the emotions, as when Arturo in Ask the Dust leaves the woman he longs for:

  As I closed the door all the desire that had not come a while before seized me. It pounded my skull and tingled in my fingers. I threw myself on the bed and tore the pillow with my hands.

  Another ROP is portent, which can be given through a haunting image. In Stephen King’s Needful Things, Hugh Priest has fallen under the spell of Leland Gaunt, the mesmerizingly creepy proprietor of a shop that has items people feel they must have. Hugh Priest feels that about a foxtail that brings back warm memories.

  Gaunt refuses money for it. Instead, he asks about a woman named Nettie Cobb, or “Crazy Nettie” to the town:

  “Now listen to me, Hugh. Listen carefully. Then you can take your fox-tail and go home.”

  Hugh Priest listened carefully.

  Outside it was raining harder, and the wind had begun to blow.

  Here are some other great ROPs to end scenes with:

  A mysterious line of dialogue

  A secret suddenly revealed

  A major decision or vow

  Announcement of a shattering event

  Reversal or surprise — new information that turns the story around

  A question left hanging in the air

  If a scene seems to sputter to a close and you’re not sure what to do, here’s a great tip: try cutting the last paragraph or two. You don’t have to write every scene to its logical conclusion. In fact, it’s often the best choice not to. Cutting creates interest, a feeling of something left hanging — and that makes readers want to find out why.

  Remember Hitchcock’s Axiom. Get HIP and you won’t have to worry about dull parts showing up in your fiction.

  THE INTENSITY SCALE

  One of the best plot rules, of course, is show, don’t tell. But this is not a law. Sometimes a writer tells as a shortcut, to get on to the meaty part of the scene. Showing is essentially about making scenes vivid. But if you try to do it constantly, the parts that are supposed to stand out won’t. And your readers will get exhausted.

  So when do you show and when do you tell? A little tool called the Intensity Scale will help you answer that question. Every scene in your story is going to vary in emotional intensity. And the intensity level within each scene will shift around. This is the natural ebb and flow of fiction.

  In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity. The most intense moments, the places where you want the reader to feel the greatest emotion, must not only come at the right time; they must also stand out as the most vivid parts of the narrative.

  With the Intensity Scale
, you have a way to accurately gauge those moments. Simply put, you judge each scene you write on a shifting scale from 0–10. A 0 means there is no intensity at all; a 10 is over the top. As your scene moves along in time, the intensity level will move around.

  As a general rule, your scenes should never drop to a 0 and rarely get to a 10. Almost all of your scenes should be written somewhere in between.

  Furthermore, most scenes will have a natural build. They will start in the lower intensity range, then elevate to the higher.

  There is room for variation, of course. Sometimes you may want to jump into a scene in medias res (in the middle of things) and stay there. Another technique is to start high, drop back to low, and build again. Whatever your choice, the Intensity Scale helps make the decision regarding show and tell.

  The diagram illustrates a common pattern: A scene that begins around 1 or 2, gradually builds to a 7 or 8. It doesn’t go over the top (a book can only sustain one or two such scenes), nor does it fall into coma land (a reader can stand no such scenes).

  Now look at a scene you’ve written and gauge it by the scale.

  The simple rule is this: when your scene goes above the median line (5), you are in the “show zone.” Lean toward showing as much as you can.

  When you are below the median, in the “tell zone,” you can err on the side of tell. Why? Because the reason your scene exists, if you are doing it correctly, is what happens in the show zone. If it is not, then you seriously need to think about cutting that scene.

  Some Examples

  In Greg Iles’s thriller, 24 Hours, there is a little setup scene with Karen and Abby, a mother and her young daughter. The father, Will, has just left for a trip: