by Jack Bickham
To summarize this point, sequels may be very, very long indeed, and in a specialized technique may not only link scenes logically and emotionally, but virtually replace many scenes by reviewing them after the fact.
But the important point for you the author to remember is this: Even when the final structure of a novel so emphasizes sequel, and downplays scenes, the author had to plan all the story in classic scene-sequel sequence to be able to present it in this unusual fashion.
You must always plan the normal, fully developed scene-sequel sequence, however you may end up presenting the material to your reader.
Just as some writers tend to write very long sequels, more tend to write short ones. Further, just as it was not always necessary to "play" the internalization of a stimulus-response transaction for your reader when the transaction was very simple and straightforward, you may find that there are times in the actual writing of your story when the character's emotional response is so obvious, and his next course of action so clearcut and immediately required, that you either do no more than hint at a sequel in a sentence or two —and get right on with the next scene —or possibly even cut a possible sequel entirely.
Let's consider each of these options.
SEQUEL VARIATIONS
Given a scene-ending disaster which demands immediate new responsive action by the viewpoint character, you may write a sequel that collapses all the classic sequel elements into the briefest wordage, something like this:
As she saw Brad slump back in the pilot's seat and the Cessna start to roll, (Emotion) Connie froze with terror. (Thought component skipped.) (Decision) All she could do was try to take over. (Action) She grasped the control yoke and . . .
And Connie is into the next scene—in this case fighting the aircraft as if it were a live antagonist, her goal being to get it under control and safely down.
Sometimes the pressure is even graver, and scenes must simply collide because insertion of a linking sequel is not only unnecessary but would appear absurd if you tried to stop the story action long enough to put one in.
Suppose, for example, that your scene-ending disaster was a "Yes, but!" development: Your hero stubbornly questioned the suspect in the suspect's apartment, his goal being to get the suspect to admit he owned a .45 automatic. At the end of the scene, the disaster is as follows:
Simpson walked to the desk and opened a drawer. "All right," he said, face contorted by rage. "You want to know if I own a gun like the murder weapon? Yes."
As he spoke, Simpson took a .45 automatic out of the drawer and aimed it at Hero's head.
"I'm sorry," Simpson said, thumbing the hammer of the weapon back. "But now you have to die."
Hero saw Simpson's hand start to tighten on the trigger.
Given a disaster of this magnitude, obviously demanding such an immediate response, our hero better not be allowed to try to start having a classically developed sequel. If he does, he's a dead man. He has to act, and the range of his options is not very great: duck, jump, roll, yell something (though the good Lord only knows what that might be!) —or die.
This kind of pressure of time is the greatest killer of sequels known to man. Even if your hero is presented with a much more complex situation, with many more possible options, none of which looks very good, time pressure may force him to do something right now. Faced with entrapment in a burning building or a child's plunge through thin ice into the freezing lake, for example, your character might have all sorts of terrible emotional reactions and complex thoughts if there were time. But since there is no time, he has to act at once, without the luxury of sorting through his feelings or considering possible alternative actions. In the burning building, he has to get out, possibly trying to rescue someone with him. Faced with the child screaming from the hole in the ice, he has to throw a rope, jump in himself, run for help or whatever. But in no case does time allow much thinking about it.
Thus you will find that some scene-ending disasters are of a nature that make sequel unnecessary or impossible. But it's a funny thing about most fiction readers: They understand scene-sequel structure so well at a subconscious level, having read it all their lives, that they expect sequel to follow scene, and like it if you can provide some aspect of sequel to a given disaster—even one demanding immediate action. It's as if the reader unconsciously knows that a sequel should "play" immediately after the father sees his child fall through the ice; the reader also knows there is no time for a sequel then and there. But later there may be some time. And that's when the wise fiction writer will allow the viewpoint character to recall, or talk about, how he felt and what he thought in a flash at the moment after the disaster.
You'll see the hero somehow manage to save the child. You'll see a trip to the hospital, a talk with doctors, all manner of action, perhaps, immediately following the fall through the ice. But, at some point later in the narrative, the wise writer will often go back to the moment of possible sequel and tell about it after the fact to satisfy the reader's innate sense of form and yearning for completion of pattern.
Something like this:
It was midnight, ten hours after the incident. Sitting in front of the fireplace, Madison sipped his brandy and shuddered violently. "When I saw Jimmy fall through the ice," he said slowly, "it was as if someone had hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer. I've never experienced such sheer horror. I knew I didn't have time to think, but in a single instant it was as if. .." (etc., etc.)
Is there a moral here for you when you are planning and writing your sequence of scenes and sequels? I think so, and it's simply this: Anytime you skip a sequel, however good the reason, you should ask yourself if you need to tell something about that sequel later in the story —when there is more time, perhaps —to satisfy your reader's need for structural completion of a scene-sequel cycle.
Sometimes your answer will be "yes," and you will devise a quiet moment in the story in which your hero can ruminate, inwardly or aloud to another character. Such reviews by a character out of the normal order of things can be effective devices to intensify reader understanding and sympathy.
Other times you will decide that the time pressure which forced omission of the sequel in its natural sequence was so obvious —and his resulting action so inevitable —that no later rumination is necessary. If you make this decision, then of course you need not create a moment later in the story to allow such reflection. Which course you take depends on the factors already mentioned, and others, such as how well the reader already knows the character from earlier portions of the story, how intense the time pressure on your character continues to be, and how you want to control the general pace of the tale. (More about some of these factors in chapter 8.)
As a working assignment to clarify your thinking about sequels and how they work, let me suggest that you take the scene cards with which you worked earlier, designing scenes and then working to find some which would logically link. Now design sequels which would fit between these scenes, linking them more closely, identify each compartment of the sequel, and write at least a sentence or two describing that emotion, that thought segment, that decision, that new action.
Having done this work, look at some of your previous writing and see how well you have practiced classic sequel structure in the past. See if you might improve any transitional passages now that you understand so much more about sequel structure. Even if the pages you revise do not happen to be part of a manuscript you consider potentially salable, the work will pay dividends in engraining better work habits and making the structure of both scene and sequel ever more clear as you actually create within the boundaries of the structures.
Another exercise which my students have found most helpful over the years is to select a published popular novel, preferably one of your favorites, and mark up a few chapters for scene and sequel —and also the component parts of each scene and sequel. (I personally detest marking in my books, but this work is so potentially helpful that I make the suggestion an
yway.)
If you do this marking, you will find variations in structure of the kinds we have already discussed, and perhaps some that are yet to be described in this book. The analysis —again—will help you not only by showing you classic structure, but those interesting variations as well.
Always—when you find a variation, study it carefully and ask yourself why the writer handled the structure as she did. Make notes in your workbook, your journal, or elsewhere —questions yet to be answered, observations about techniques that will be of use to you, or whatever.
In addition, you may wish to devise a series of imagined story disasters with an obvious and predictable emotional reaction and final decision—then work to plan out a sequel in all its steps which would move the character through reactions and thoughts unlikely to be anticipated by the reader, and to some decision that is not the obvious one —one the reader would not easily predict.
The second excerpt in Appendix 4 provides an example of such a sequel. It was vital to me as the author to get my heroine away from the place where she fell. The most obvious thing for most people to do, however, would be to sit tight and wait, hoping to be rescued. As you study the excerpt, notice how the heroine's feelings and thoughts are subtly moved along to bring her to the author-desired decision and new action — movement.
For your exercise, consider some of the following disasters which would tend to have a predictable sequel pattern and resulting new decision. Then devise different sequel patterns that would logically lead to quite a different new decision.
Here are some sample "workbook disasters":
1. A man very much in love with his wife learns that she is having a long-term, passionate affair. (Instead of being hurt or outraged, and confronting her or her lover, can you devise reactions and thoughts which would instead convince him to feel relief — and decide to buy her a nice present while saying nothing?)
2. An executive of a large manufacturing firm is notified that her plant has just burned to the ground. (Instead of shock or dismay, and plans to rebuild, can you devise a sequel in which she would feel only a remote sadness —and decide to go on an ocean cruise?)
3. A young woman is told she has won a coveted scholarship to medical school. (Instead of pleasure and new plans to move to the school, can you devise a sequel that would have her burst into tears and logically decide to take a job in the local factory instead?)
It would be cheating you of the work to suggest possible solutions to these example problems. Besides, you may wish to devise your own list, and work through those.
Only after study of the excerpts and work on sequel planning of your own will you be ready to move on to the next chapter of this book.
See Appendix 4.
CHAPTER 8
SCENE-SEQUEL TRICKS TO CONTROL
PACE
Once Upon A Time there was a very young, unpublished writer (who shall be nameless, except that his initials were J.M.B.) who decided after having written several unsold novels that he would write the wildest, fastestmoving, slam-bang adventure he could think of. He made a list of exciting, stirring events, and wrote the novel from the list. To his great astonishment and greater chagrin, the novel turned out slow-moving, pseudo-thoughtful, and generally dull and insipid.
At the time he was thoroughly baffled. It was not until some years later—having had scene structure drilled into his head by professional writing coach Dwight V. Swain —that he was able to understand what had happened: He had written most of his "action book" with very long sequels and very short scenes. It was a valuable, if painful, lesson.
And the moral of this reminiscence? What did I actually learn?
If you have been drawing some of your own inferences while you study along in this book, you may be smiling because you already see what it took me so long to understand.
Scenes are exciting, conflictful, densely packed with action and dialogue, and therefore fast-reading.
Sequels, on the other hand, are thoughtful, can be extended, have summary in them, and are therefore slow-reading.
To put this another way, the scene portions of your book seem to the reader to go very fast. The sequels seem to go much slower.
What does this imply for you as a novelist? Simply this: You can control the pace of your novel at every turn by how you handle your scenes and sequels. If it seems to be going too slowly, you need to build your scenes and possibly trim or cut out some of your sequels. On the other hand, if it seems to be going too fast, you need to do the opposite: Trim or cut some of your scenes, and build up your sequels.
TECHNIQUES TO SPEED THE STORY ALONG
Suppose the story seems to be going too slowly. Here, more specifically, are some of the things you can do to speed things up:
1. In those places where you find a developed sequel linking two scenes that follow one another in a fairly straightforward and logical way, consider yanking the sequel entirely and simply butting the two scenes back-to-front. If the goal and opening of conflict in the second of the two scenes seem to grow logically out of the previous disaster, your reader is not likely to be confused — and you may need speed here more than logical explanation to the nth degree.
2. Look for places where you might not be able to simply butt scenes end to end, but where a very simple transitional statement might get the job done. There's nothing swifter-moving than the brief transitional statement such as "Three hours later ..." or "In New York, at the Plaza . . .". If you find such spots, and they are presently occupied by even a truncated or abbreviated sequel, jerk out the sequel material and substitute the simple, lightning-fast transition.
3. Study your sequels with an eye toward trimming out some of the present verbiage. Ask yourself questions like "Does all this emotion have to be described?" and "Does he really have to review all of these story events at this time?
(Sometimes, of course, you will ask yourself these questions and decide that yes, every word about the emotion is necessary here, or yes, because this plot has gotten so complex, the character must think about everything that's happened to avoid losing the reader. If so, fine! I'm asking you to consider such trims or boils; I'm not ordering them.)
4. Look for places where you might have inadvertently skipped a chance to write in a big, exciting, extended scene. Analyze the dramatic potential of every confrontation between major characters, and ask yourself if you have possibly missed a chance to motivate them to struggle over some story issue at this point. Is it possible to invent some reason for one or both of the characters to enter this meeting with a stronger, more pressing immediate goal? Can you extend and intensify whatever argument already exists by raising the stakes or making the participants more desperate as a result of a preceding sequel? Have you (God forbid!) overlooked a chance to include some major confrontation that your plot has already set up as possible or even likely?
If you find such slips, by all means write the scene now and slip it into the story.
5. Examine all your present scenes and ask yourself if you can find ways to raise the stakes, increase the intensity of the conflict, add to the viewpoint character's sense of desperation, or add some secondary issues, heretofore overlooked, that the adversaries could also fight about here.
6. Consider the nature of your scene-ending disasters. Have you inadvertently made any of them less disastrous and upsetting than they might still logically be?
7. Look at the timing behind the disasters you have chosen. Have you perhaps set up a disaster so that the hero has a week or ten days to react, when it might be possible to change the disaster only marginally and make it one which requires a sequel and new action right away}
8. Consider the thinking of both the hero and the villain-figure in every scene, and in general. How might you change their assumptions and plans in such a way as to tighten the time frame of the entire story, forcing scenes to come one after another much more swiftly?
Now, it's all fine and wonderful for me to give you such a list of alter
natives designed to speed things up; I don't have to do it in your story, right? "Easy for you to talk!" you may think. But believe me, questions like those above go through my mind any number of times during the writing of one of my novels. Pacing is something that worries most novelists constantly. And the questions do not just preoccupy me during the writing. During revision, when I'm trying my hardest to stand back a little and perceive the general pacing of the entire story, such questions are again uppermost in my mind.
But perhaps your problem is just the opposite. Perhaps you've written a manuscript that seems far too fast: Events gallop in on the tail of other events; story people don't ever seem to find time to think; things happen so fast and furious that it almost gets ludicrous at times; it's exciting and fast, but a lot of it doesn't seem to make much sense.
In these cases, you have to slow things down. How?
Occasionally you may be able to find a scene that can be eliminated entirely, its action revealed in a later sequel. Far more often, however, you must search for scenes that you might trim or soften to shorten them. At the same time, you must search for sequels you might have failed to write in at all —and now consider supplying them; you should also study the sequels which do presently exist in your manuscript, and think about ways to expand their content and make them longer.
The list of things you do to accomplish these ends reads almost like the mirror image of the "speed-up list" just offered. But before we get to a specific list of recommendations, perhaps a word of explanation is in order. For, if I earlier sold you on the requirement that scenes be told moment by moment, with no summary and nothing left out in terms of steps in the conflict, you may very well be muttering a protest right now when you read about "trimming" a scene. "How can that be possible," I can almost hear a voice demanding, "when you can't summarize and you're supposed to follow the action moment by moment in stimulusresponse fashion?"