by Jack Bickham
Before wading into this morass of variations, however, let me restate two important points:
1. A novel can be successfully written in the straight, classic sceneand-sequel structure you now know, both in terms of the internal structure of each scene and sequel and in terms of the larger sequential structure into which the scenes and sequels are arranged, Scene #1 (classic pattern) being followed immediately by its Sequel #1 (classic pattern), followed by Scene #2 (classic pattern) followed by its Sequel #2 (classic pattern), and so on, all the way to the climax of the book.
What does this mean to you the author? Simply that you already know enough to produce a narrative structure that's entirely salable in today's markets.
2. If you have good plot reasons for doing so, you may depart from these classic structural patterns. But no matter how far you wind up straying, in the structure of your final manuscript, you should plan your story originally in classic scenes and sequels, arranged in the classic straight sequential pattern, with nothing skipped anywhere and no part of anything out of its normal order.
To put this another way, what I'm saying here is that you plan, basing your whole book's architecture on Scene #1 — Sequel #1 — Scene #2 —Sequel #2 — Scene #3 — Sequel #3, etc., with every part in its natural order, nothing left out, and no variations of any kind. Then, having laid out your entire story blueprint, maybe you will want to introduce some variations for good reasons.
Having said that, we can turn now to a more detailed look at ways you may elect to depart from the established structural norms, first in terms of scene, later in terms of sequel.
VARIATIONS IN SCENE STRUCTURE
Let's look at the five major ways you can vary your scene structure.
1. You can start your presentation somewhere other than at the classic (and logical) entering point, which is statement of goal.
2. You can end somewhere short of a fully pronounced disaster.
3. You can interrupt the scene virtually anywhere by having other action intervene.
4. You can interrupt the conflict component by having the viewpoint character's internalization in response to a stimulus develop into "a sequel in the middle of things."
5. You can present the goal-conflict-disaster segments out of their natural order.
We'll consider each in turn.
1. You can start your presentation somewhere other than at the classic (and logical) entering point, which is statement of goal.
Why might you start a scene other than with the normal statement of the viewpoint character's goal? A couple of possible reasons were suggested in chapter 8. It could be that the character's goal in this scene is so obvious that it needn't really be stated at the outset. Or it might be that the goal was so well articulated in the preceding sequel decision that it doesn't have to be stated again right away.
Suppose, for example, that a scene just ended in which our hero, an Indiana Jones type, struggled with the villain and as a disaster was hurled backward to fall through a hole in the floor into a pit of snakes. This kind of disaster allows no time for a sequel, and Indiana's new goal is pretty obvious: Get outta here! This new scene would hardly need to articulate the goal; our hero would simply start fighting the snakes and/or looking for a way out.
Or suppose you have just had a long sequel in which your hero has decided that his next goal-oriented step must be to patch up the quarrel with girlfriend Jill. This is carefully stated as his new decision-goal. We now start the scene with him appearing at Jill's door, a beautiful bouquet in hand. Can anyone imagine that he has to state his goal immediately when we already read about it in the preceding sequel and have evidence of it now in the bouquet?
There is a third obvious reason for starting a scene somewhere other than with the goal statement, however, and here again we get into seeming paradox. We might plunge straight into the conflict portion with the goal—and even the stakes — unclear at the outset with the express intention of shocking and momentarily confusing the reader—getting him to sit bolt upright in his chair, disoriented and off balance, saying, in effect, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?"
This can be a useful device if not overdone. Once in a while it can be used with devastating effect in terms of hurrying your story along and giving the appearance of a great and unexpected twist in the action.
As an example: Midway through a suspense novel I'm currently writing, the hero of the story must slog along through several conversations with murder suspects; he has to go through these scenes—all conflictful but none highly dramatic —to learn some crucial information that next sends him to interview a doctor. Each of these brief scenes is presented in classic order. I began to worry that the story's pace was beginning to bog down, and that readers might start getting bored. Therefore, in moving into a new chapter that was to start with the hero interviewing the doctor, I chose to jump well into the new scene—halfway through, as a matter of fact—with my hero already reacting in shock to what he had already learned.
So the first draft of the new chapter began something like this:
"Doctor Johnson," Bradley said, "I hope this won't take more than a few minutes. I know you're a busy man. But I've got to know what that physical exam showed."
All well and good — and rather routine in terms of pacing and structure. So the second draft leaped into the middle of the scene, with a new chapter opening with the following words:
Bradley jerked back with shock. "Are you telling me the exam didn't test for drugs?"
Johnson's eyes looked like slate. "Was there any reason for the clinic to do so at that time?"
"What did you test for? Why was he here?"
Faster, I feel sure you would agree—and also momentarily upsetting to the reader, who surely will be jolted out of any somnolence by the unexpected, the disorienting. There are few things as likely to regain your attention as the realization that you suddenly aren't sure where you are, or what's happening.
One warning about this last device, however: Even used sparingly, it calls for some later explanation of what the goal was at the outset —and why—and where we are now. You can fascinate your reader with puzzlement only so long, and then if you don't supply the structural component he instinctively knows should be there—in this case a goal to worry about—he will give up on your story in disgust. Also, readers like to be puzzled and thrown for momentary losses, as this device will do, only so often. Then they'll get tired of constantly wondering what's going on, and they'll recognize what you're doing to them—creating artificial momentary suspense by withholding information they ordinarily would already have. At this point you've overdone a good thing and lost your reader. In my draft manuscript mentioned above, I use this particular speed trick twice in a 90,000-word novel.
How do you show later what the withheld goal was at the outset? Maybe you allow your viewpoint character to restate his opening goal— the one you haven't started with this time—during the course of the conflict. This is likely, actually, because strongly motivated characters tend to restate their scene goal several times, perhaps even in the same words, several times during the playing out of conflict. If, on the rare occasions when the goal does not become clear through this kind of restatement, it will become apparent only when we see what kind of disaster finally befalls our hero.
The point to remember here is that however it happens, the goal must be made clear at some point not too far down the line. The reader has to know, ultimately, what was intended and at stake, even if he's told only after the fight is over.
Here is the next way you may deviate from classic structure:
2. You can end somewhere short of a fully pronounced disaster.
How would this work? Suppose that you have set things up earlier in the story so that the reader knows something that the viewpoint character in this scene does not know. For example, the reader might earlier have been in the viewpoint of the antagonist, and heard him say that he intended to trick the hero, in their next confr
ontation, into coming out to the country house where hero can be ambushed and kidnapped. Now, with the reader knowing this, we see the heroic viewpoint character walking into the scene with the goal of getting the old family papers from his brother-in-law, the villain of the piece. They argue about this. At the end of the conflict, the brother-in-law throws up his hands and says something like, "All right! You can have the damned papers! They're out at the country house. We'll go get them right now."
This varies from normal structure in that the viewpoint character has no sense of disaster, so that the scene seems to stop short of any kind of disaster. It's seen as a "Yes, but!" disaster only in the eyes of the reader, who in this case has more information than the character does.
You can go even further than this, actually, with sophisticated readers. They don't know that every scene ends with a disaster. They don't know the terminology, much less the technique. But they know to expect the worst at all times. So, in the scene example given just above, most of your readers would be instantly suspicious of trickery ahead —the existence, in other words, of a hidden disaster here—even if they hadn't gotten any previous information about the villain's plans. This is a wonderful thing about fiction readers. They'll worry sometimes even when you don't add the disaster, because they know it's there somewhere.
3. You can interrupt the scene virtually anywhere by having other action intervene.
This third variation is a device that seems to be used a bit more frequently than either of the first two. Here are some examples of how it might work:
• Viewpoint character walks into office of antagonist and states his goal for the scene. Some other character walks in or calls on the telephone and gives one character or the other some new information, or starts her own scene with either of them; or perhaps—rarefy—accident intervenes: The telephone call says the antagonist's wife has had an accident, and so this scene we've just started will have to be postponed.
Why would you choose to do something like this? Usually as a device to introduce additional temporary suspense. Having been told the scene goal, your reader will have already formed a scene question, which he will now worry about until the conflict plays and the question is answered.
• The scene is under way and the fight is on. But—again—another character intervenes so that her scene takes momentary precedence over our original scene. You have a scene-within-a-scene, and probably our main scene will not get to play out to its conclusion until the interrupting scene has concluded. Sometimes this device is necessary to jog the original scene's conflict pattern out of circularity, or change the motives of one of the antagonists a bit; the disaster ending the scene-within-the-scene could be such that either our viewpoint character or his antagonist would suddenly find himself standing on different ground than he occupied before new action interrupted the ongoing conflict.
You will find further discussion of this particular technique in chapter 13. You may, however, wish to turn now to Appendix 6, where an example of this strategy is given. The situation there—briefly—is that the author needed to change the motivations of the viewpoint character on a moment's notice during the unfolding of a scene; she had to accept a date with a character whom she ordinarily would not agree to see again; to motivate her to accept the date, the author brought in another character, initiated a fight between this interloper and the viewpoint character—and had her decide to accept the date with the other man to spite the man who had just come in and started a scene-within-her-scene.
4. You can interrupt the conflict component by having the viewpoint character's internalization in response to a stimulus develop into "a sequel in the middle of things."
This scene structure variation can be very useful, but paradoxically you may find that it tries to happen all the time during your scenes, and you have to keep fighting to prevent its happening too often.
Here's why. You already realize that the internalization within a stimulus-response transaction and a sequel between scenes are two demonstrations of the same underlying dynamic.
The stimulus-response pattern: External action (small); internalization (small); new external action (small).
The scene-sequel-scene pattern: External action (big); sequel (a big internalization); new external action (big).
So, because the basic dynamic is identical in the two kinds of transactions, what happens during harshly conflictful scenes is that various stimuli sent by the antagonist are so powerful and upsetting to the viewpoint character that his momentary internalizations tend to want to get out of hand and grow into virtual sequels. Most of the time you can't let this happen; the show (the scene) must go on. Often you will find yourself saying, in effect, "Hal Hero really wanted to have a sequel here, but he just didn't have time. Instead, he responded, 'You're wrong, J.B.! I —' " (Etc.)
To put this another way, one of the things you have to work hard on, when your scenes are really going well, with strong stimuli flying, is keeping internalizations under control so that they don't grow into sequels.
Which is why it's relatively easy to let a sequel happen in the middle of a scene if and when you believe it might be tactically desirable. All you have to do sometimes is have the antagonist hurl a particularly brutal stimulus, and your viewpoint character can plunge into an internalization so well developed that it is, for all practical purposes, a sequel inside a scene.
Why would you want to do this? Often, it's to make sure the reader is fully in tune with the thoughts and feelings of the character as the scene is playing out. Sometimes it's to have the character remember some background information that wasn't worked into the story earlier. Sometimes it's necessary to explain, ahead of time, why the viewpoint character is about to pull some unexpected gambit or seem to change his scene goal a bit, or try an unexpected scene strategy.
As mentioned earlier in a different context, your reader will sometimes accept these moments in the story when present time stops, and it's as if the characters stand frozen, in a twilight zone, while the viewpoint character's mind races through internalization. But as with all these variations, if you overdo it, the reader will get sick of it. To be used sparingly, and only with good plot reason!
5. You can present the goal-conflict-disaster segments out of their natural order.
Here the reader can be plunged into the scene very late in the conflict segment; then the disaster falls, but it's only as the viewpoint character tries to continue the scene, reiterating what he wanted, as opposed to what he's gotten, that we fully appreciate either the goal or the scope of the disaster. So that the pattern of the entire scene might look like this: conflict (already well under way)—disaster (not entirely clear)— more conflict (as the viewpoint character tries to continue fighting, during which time he finally restates the) —goal—followed by the antagonist repeating the disaster.
And in fact professional writers use most of these variations at one time or another, and ring up all kinds of changes and permutations on them. A sequel-like long internalization will stop the present scene dead in its tracks; then, during the interrupting sequel, the hero remembers some previous scene, to which he then flashes back with the result that some of it seems to play onstage in the story "now." At which point the viewpoint character comes back to the present and continues this fight, at which point another character rushes in and interrupts this scene again with her new scene, and so on and so on.
Complicated? Yes. Confusing? Not necessarily. You can always get back on track after a structural variation if you just remember where you left the classic structure, and return to the same point. The potentially chaotic mishmash of segments interrupting other segments, such as the scene-in-sequel-in-scene-interrupted-by-scene just described above, for example, would work just fine as long as the writer remembered to return to the ongoing conflict segment in the current scene after she has done all her wandering around. But confusion would come in a hurry if she forgot where she had left the track, and came back to the present in, say
, some other scene a day later— or in the middle of the viewpoint character's sequel to some later scene which had also been skipped.
There is, to be sure, a danger the reader might get confused. The writer who uses all sorts of variations on the standard scene structure must often rewrite and rewrite again, focusing on the viewpoint character's primary worry and preoccupation at the present time in the story, so that the author can show clearly how the various deviations from normal scene structure are tied into the story through the character's interpretation of them. As just one example, a character might be thrust into the middle of a scene which might make little sense unless the author kept reminding the reader that information about the crime is badly needed; then the character might —in the middle of this scene seeking information — flashback to some previous episode; although the previous episode might be played as a scene-within-a-scene, the reader will not be confused if the author pauses a few times during this segment to reiterate the character's preoccupation with his need to collect information.
What does all of this mean to you the writer? It means that you can deviate from the norm in scene structure if you have good reason to do so. But you should always plan everything in the straightforward, normal scene-sequel pattern first. Every deviation from the norm puts extra stress on your talent and ability to maintain the reader's focus and storyorientation.
VARIATIONS IN SEQUEL STRUCTURE
Because it does not demand tight, moment-by-moment development and is loosely organized around the ever-changing feelings and thoughts of a viewpoint character, sequel may vary in structure in an almost limitless number of ways. We will consider only the most common variations, which are as follows: