by Jack Bickham
It may be a birth, a death, a wedding, a divorce, a telephone call, a letter, a visit by an old friend, a new family moving in down the block, or the turning of the first leaf of autumn. If it's a change, and if it threatens the character, then it's a good place to start chapter 1.
Knowing this, you can much more easily decide where your own tale is to begin on paper. No matter how wonderfully interesting those first thirty years of your character's life may have been, you can probably jettison almost all of them if the change that this story is about happens when he is age thirty-one. In like fashion, you may have imagined that said character will live until age sixty or beyond. But you don't have to tell about all the later years of his life, either, because this story stops when he has gotten himself straightened around again in terms of his self-concept as it relates to this change that you started with on page 1.
Now consider your reader's psychological reactions when confronted with a concept-threatening change in the opening of your novel. Mr. Reader begins to worry. So far, so good; he may be willing to worry for a long time. But in today's hurried, impatient world, that Reader can't be expected to worry passively about the same vague and unchanging bad situation for several hundred pages. He needs something a bit more concrete to worry about.
You meet that need at the outset of your story when you show your character coming up with a vital intention or story goal, designed to "fix things" for him in terms of his sensation of being out of equilibrium with his environment. Every good fiction character is thus goal-motivated.
The moment your character thinks or says aloud what his goal is — as a result of the change and the need to fix things —you can count on your reader to latch onto that stated goal like a lifeline. The moment your character states his goal, the reader will begin to worry about that —will follow every later story incident and interpret its meaning in terms of your character's struggle toward that goal —will turn the goal statement into a story question — and keep reading avidly as long as the action relates to the question.
So a story starts with change, which leads to a goal, which raises a story question in the reader's mind.
But how do you end the novel? You do so by answering the story question you posed at the outset.
Thus, if your story began with the secretary shocked and scared because of the change in her office environment, your next step had to be the selection of her intention designed to fix things. Let's say you decided that she decided to learn how to operate the new computer system, or bust. The reader at this point can be trusted to translate this goal into a story question, and begin reading to learn the answer to "Will she learn the new computer system?" When you answer that question, the story ends.
This answering, which takes place at the climax of your story, must answer the question you asked. You can't cheat here. You can't end with a climax that shows her accepting a marriage proposal, for example, or falling down a flight of stairs, or winning the Florida lottery. Your reader has worried about "Will she learn the new computer system?" and that's what you have to answer; nothing other or less will do!
Do you see now how the sketchiest understanding of self-concept and the threat of change will help you decide where your novel starts, and where it ends? I hope so. This understanding helps answer several of our nagging questions:
How long should your story be? As long as it takes (within the general physical page limits mentioned earlier) to answer the story question you pose at the outset.
Where should you start? At the moment of threatening change.
How and when should you end the story? By answering the story question, however you have to show this to your reader and whenever in story time the answer is found.
Do you need a lot of subplots? No. But you can certainly have some if they are relevant to the story question.
And does it have to be a happy ending? By no means. It has to be a fitting ending —an ending that answers the story question.
A GAME PLAN
So how are you to use this information in the most practical way? Here is a brief "game plan" you might try:
1. Consider your story materials as presently imagined. Look for and identify, in terms of days, weeks or months, that briefer period of time when "the big stuff happens." Plan to eliminate virtually everything else.
2. Think hard about your most major character and what makes him tick —what his self-concept is, and what kind of life he has built to protect and enhance it. (Make sure that this character is the type who will struggle if threatened. Wimps won't form a story goal or strive toward it.)
3. Identify or create a dramatic situation or event which will present your character (and your reader) with the significant, threatening moment of change.
4. Plan your plot so that your novel will open with this event.
5. Decide what intention or goal your most significant character will select to try to fix things after the threatening opening change. Note what story question this goal will put in the reader's mind.
6. Devise the start of a plan formulated by your most significant character as he sets out to make things right again.
7. Figure out how much later—and where and how —the story question finally will be answered. You should strive to know this resolution before you start writing. Granted, the precise time and even the place and details of the outcome may be changed by how your story works out in the first draft. But —even recognizing that your plan for the resolution may change later—you should have more than a vague idea when you begin. (To use a somewhat farfetched example, a ship captain might begin a voyage planning to unload his cargo in faraway England; war or weather en route might finally dictate that he would unload in France; but if he had set sail with no idea of his cargo and no idea of an intended destination or route, he might have wound up in Africa ... or the North Sea ... or sailing aimlessly and endlessly until he ran out of fuel — or sank. A novelist, like a ship captain, should have a good idea of where he plans to end up.)
8. Plan to make the start and end as close together in time as you can, and still have room for a minimum of 50,000 words of dramatic development.
Having made these key decisions, you will have gone far toward answering all those common nagging questions listed at the start of this chapter. And you'll also be well on your way to understanding the functional form of the modern story.
As an example of how all this works, let me mention one of my own novels, Miracleworker. In this medical thriller, a country doctor has been using experimental drugs on patients —often with disastrous results —for more than a decade. The female physician who is the central figure in the novel grew up admiring the now-old man, and has known him for more than thirty years, but is unaware of his misdeeds. In the story, she is to return to the old hometown, slowly learn the old doctor's terrible secret, and reveal it to the world after a personal crisis and great physical danger.
In selecting a time for the novel to start (as late in the action as possible), I chose a letter from the old doctor inviting her to come visit for a part of the summer and help him at his clinic. As an ending, I chose to have my heroine almost killed by an accomplice intent on hiding the doctor's secret only about five weeks after her arrival. The opening letter constituted a change, which threatened my heroine because she feared her old idol might be dying; proud of her own skills and intensely loyal to the old doctor (major components of her self-concept), she goes with the goal of helping him regain his health, but an unexpected patient death arouses her reluctant suspicions, setting her onto a plan of action to find out what has really been happening in the town, with the resolution forced quickly when a doctor's associate decides the heroine must be killed to keep things secret.
Much later in this book we'll look considerably deeper into story development. But before that discussion can make much sense to you, we have to examine some of the basic structural building blocks—the pieces you fit together to get from A to Z—from the opening threat of c
hange to the answering of the story question.
We start doing that in the next chapter.
See Appendix 1.
CHAPTER 3
STRUCTURE IN MICROCOSM: CAUSE AND EFFECT
When Most Nonwriters Talk About "form" or "structure," they reverse the usual cliche and can't see the trees for the forest. They look at booklength elements —or even such nonstructural aspects as theme—and seldom get down to the nitty-gritty where modern fiction structure really begins. As a writer, however, you can't afford to do that. You need to understand structure in the larger elements (which will come later), but first you need to understand how the same structural principles work almost line-by-line in the modern story.
We're talking here about the simple laws of cause and effect, stimulus and response. Until you understand these perfectly, and can apply them in your fiction with unerring expertise, you can't hope to understand anything bigger in terms of structure.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
So what do cause and effect, stimulus and response, have to do with the structure of fiction?
Everything, that's all.
In the real, everyday world, accident, coincidence and fate often play a major role in determining "how things work out" in a person's life. Bad things happen to good people for no reason, and as today's politics all too often proves, the opposite is equally true. Given such evident random meaninglessness in real life, people sometimes grow cynical, or join the bad guys, or give up. Things often don't make much sense.
In most popular fiction, the situation is quite different. While the workings of luck, coincidence, fate, etc., may be shown from time to time, fiction must make more sense than real life if general readers are to find it credible. So, for example, in real life someone may fall ill for no apparent reason and with no evident cause. In fiction, the character would have to be seen depressed about recent developments and tired from overwork; he would then have to be seen walking into an office or home where people were already sick with the dread illness; and then one of the sick persons might even have to sneeze in his face—all before the reader would find credible what in real life would happen without apparent cause.
To restate this differently: in fiction, effects (plot developments) must have causes (background), and vice versa. If you want someone to fall ill (and want the reader to believe it!), you must first build in the background (perhaps a raging epidemic), a character who is overworked and weary, and who also is depressed enough to have a poorly functioning immune system, and then you have to provide the more immediate (present story time) cause, the entering of the house and finally the deadly sneeze.
Much of plotting from chapter to chapter deals with this kind of juggling of events so that one thing leads logically to another, cause-andeffect fashion. Writers over the years have probably sweated enough to fill Lake Erie as they tried to figure out how to motivate Priscilla to open the locked door (cause), or what next might happen after she did so (effect).
In real life, blind luck has to be accepted because, after all, there it is—it just happened, period. But the fiction reader demands more credibility than he usually gets in real life. So it's up to you, the fiction writer, to build your story in such a way that every cause you put in has an effect downstream in the story, sooner or later (and preferably sooner!), and for every effect you plot out, you have to figure out a cause that would make it happen.
Once you are good at this as a writer, you can make almost anything happen in your story; all you have to do is figure out what is to cause it. And once you have had that particular thing happen with good reason, then your next plotting step is infinitely simpler because all you have to do is take the next logical step and ask yourself, "Now that that has happened, what does it, in turn, cause to happen?"
However, this kind of cause-and-effect planning and story presentation does more than simply help the reader suspend disbelief. Because this kind of presentation shows a world in which things do make sense — in which everything isn't just meaningless chaos and chance—the resulting story also has the effect of offering a little hope to the reader: a suggestion by implication that life doesn't have to be meaningless, and that bad things don't always have to happen to good people for no reason ... a hint that maybe the reader can seize some control of his own life after all, and that good effort may sometimes actually pay off—and our existence may indeed even have some kind of meaning.
For a person like me, who isn't blessed with a very deep mind, the more far-reaching implications of this type of cause-and-effect rationality in fiction seem to be very far-reaching and important indeed. I suspect that when you write a story that makes sense through use of cause and effect, you are also implying, somehow, that life is worth living. Personally I like that.
So if you think at all as I do —or even if you don't, but would like to produce fiction that makes sense and has appeal — I hope you will ponder often and deeply about causes and effects in your own fiction. Look at every turn in the story —every event —and make sure that there is cause for it. Look for causes on which you may not have followed up with resulting events. For to do otherwise is to invite disbelief (at best) on the part of your readership.
I remember, for example, a student story handed in to me once at the University of Oklahoma. In this particular story, there was a violent windstorm at night, to which much description was devoted. (This made it a big cause of something, right?) But in the morning, none of the story characters mentioned it, the sun was shining, and the lawns beyond the house windows did not have so much as a blown-down leaf on them. It was easy enough to fix, but the writer had forgotten entirely to show the effect of the storm; if she had sent the story out in its present condition, it would have lost credibility for the editor-reader at that point very early in the going because a strong cause had been shown and its effects had to be shown as well, even if briefly —leaves on the lawns, perhaps a broken tree limb, comments by a character or two about the aftermath. All this could have been done very briefly, but it had to be done.
Similarly, I recall another student's novel in which the hero and the villain were together in a small starship hurtling through space. Suddenly the engines went dead and the two archenemies saw that they had only one escape pod — meaning one would live and one would die. This was all fine, but the story lost credibility for me at the instant the engines failed. Why? Because it was just bad luck. An effect had been presented without cause. (Again, it was easy enough to fix: The writer put in a brief segment ahead of the engine failure, showing the villain sabotaging it. Of course that required a bit of villain-motivation, showing why the villain thought it was a good idea, but again this could have been handled quite briefly by showing the villain intending only to slow the engines so his cronies might catch up, or some such.)
Please note that most such cause-effect story repairs can be handled in a few words. The key point here is not to exhaust the reader with great details, but simply to make sure that author-inserted causes are shown to have effects, and author-desired effects can be seen to have had causes.
STIMULUS AND RESPONSE
Cause and effect, however, are not operative only in such larger fiction elements as background, character motive, etc. Cause and effect work at an even more minute level, where they surface in the form of physical stimulus and response — and are every bit as important.
Stimulus and response are cause and effect made more specific and immediate. They function right now in the story, this instant —this punch making the other man duck, for example, or this question making the other person reply at once, or this bolt of lightning making Sally jump out of her shoes in fright.
Again, in real life we may see people do things for no apparent immediate reason. We may witness responses for which we can't find stimulus. A man or woman may burst into tears in the midst of what seems to us a perfectly casual conversation. Or Sally may jump in sudden fright for some reason we can't see or hear at all.
Conve
rsely, we may—in real life —see stimuli for which we would expect an immediate response, and yet get —nothing. Joe may say, "I feel terribly depressed" (a strong stimulus), yet his friend Mary may reply as if no verbal stimulus was sent, saying nothing at all or maybe saying something like, "It was certainly an exciting game Saturday." You may stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, and receive no response whatsoever, not even a silent, hostile stare.
Such responses without stimuli or stimuli that get no discernible response are believable in everyday life, of course, because—as in the case of larger cause-and-effect elements —the incredible transaction is simply there, in the actual world, and one can hardly refuse to believe the evidence before one's own eyes.
We constantly struggle to make our fiction credible, however, because our readers can at any moment stop believing our story. Therefore, in even the simplest transactions in fiction, we must always remember a few simple rules:
• Stimulus must be external — that is, action or dialogue, something that could be witnessed if the transaction were on a stage.
• Response must also be external in the same way.
• For every stimulus, you must show a response.
• For every desired response, you must provide a stimulus.
• Response usually must follow stimulus at once.
• When response to stimulus is not logical on the surface, you must ordinarily explain it.
A few examples should make these rules clearer in your mind.
Let's suppose you have a segment in your story where Joe and Sam are playing catch with a baseball in the front yard. If you show the following stimulus —
Joe threw the ball to Sam.
Then you must show Sam's response, such as —