Revision And Self-Editing

by James Scott Bell

  They crowded eagerly forward, each one trying to edge the others aside. "Mrs. Mead?" the foremost one said.

  "Wha-what is it?" she quavered.

  -"Post-Mortem"

  She had signed her own death warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar-butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn't own a car. And it wouldn't be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more.

  -"Three O'clock"

  To vary the pace, you can cross up the reader by starting pleasant, then hitting with a surprise. Woolrich's novel I Married a Dead Man opens like this:

  The summer nights are so pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover. The stars are warm and friendly here, not cold and distant, as where I came from; they seem to hang lower over us, be closer to us. The breeze that stirs the curtains at the open windows is soft and gentle as a baby's kiss. And on it, if you listen, you can hear the rustling sound of the leafy trees turning over and going back to sleep again. The lamplight form within the houses falls upon the lawns outside and copperplates them in long swaths. There's the hush, the stillness of perfect peace and security. Oh, yes, the summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield.

  But not for us.

  The opening disturbance is anything that puts ripples in the surface of the character's life. It doesn't have to be a major threat. But following Hitchcock's axiom, something needs to happen that takes us out of the placidity of everyday life.

  Mythic structure begins with the hero's ordinary world. The disturbance is often the call to adventure.

  In Star Wars, Luke is living an ordinary life with his aunt and uncle. But then his uncle buys some secondhand droids. While tinkering with one

  of them, Luke sets off the hologram of Princess Leia calling for help. This is something different, something strange. It piques interest.

  In The Wizard of Oz, the opening disturbance comes in the very first shot. Dorothy is running home to the farm with Toto close behind. She is frightened. We learn immediately that it's because Miss Gulch just threatened to have Toto taken away.

  A few minutes later, the disturbance intensifies as Miss Gulch rides to the farm and gets custody of the dog.

  So very early in your novel you need to have this challenge to the status quo. Some examples I listed in Plot & Structure:

  • The Lead gets a phone call in the middle of the night.

  • The Lead gets a letter with some intriguing news.

  • The boss calls the Lead into his office.

  • A child is taken to the hospital.

  • A car breaks down in a desert town.

  • The Lead wins the lottery.

  • The Lead witnesses an accident. Or a murder.

  • The Lead's wife (or husband) has left, leaving a note.

  The Use and Abuse of Prologues

  One of the most popular TV shows of the late 1950s and early 1960s was Peter Gunn. The series, starring Craig Stevens as a cool, jazz-loving private eye, didn't start with credits. It jumped right in with a shocking incident, usually somebody getting murdered. It lasted about two minutes.

  Then the famous Henry Mancini opening theme burst on, with the credits. The rest of the show was about Gunn's getting to the bottom of what happened. This was the proper use of a grabber prologue, because (1) it was short and dramatic in and of itself, and (2) it had something to do with the main plot.

  Dean Koontz's Midnight begins with a prologue (even though he calls it chapter one). It works for the following reasons.

  The opening line:

  Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.

  Koontz begins many of his books this way, with a named character, in motion, and something intriguing. Running at night presages mystery.

  As Janice runs, Koontz also gives us some details about Janice and the setting. Using mood details like light and fog, an ominous scene unfolds.

  As she ran down the sloping main street, through pools of amber light, through layered night shadows caused by wind-sculpted cypresses and pines, she saw no movement other than her own— and the sluggish, serpentine advance of the thin fog through the windless air.

  Koontz also drops in backstory elements: a short paragraph about Janice's childhood, how darkness soothed her, and another about her late husband and how much she misses him.

  With these small bits of backstory in place, the reader's sympathy is with Janice as she jogs in the dark. Koontz spends the remainder of the chapter building the suspense of a horrific chase and, eventually, the stunning death of Janice Capshaw. The death has more impact because the background details bonded us, even briefly, to the character.

  A prologue can be used to set up the story to come by giving us some essential history mixed with a tone of anticipation. The rather long prologue to Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides is like that. It gives the family background of the narrator, Tom Wingo, and his twin sister, Savannah, who has twice attempted suicide. The prologue wraps up thus:

  The truth is this: Things happened to my family, extraordinary things. I know families who live out their entire destinies without a single thing of interest happening to them. I have always envied those families. The Wingos were a family that fate tested a thousand times and left defenseless, humiliated, and dishonored. But my family also carried some strengths into the fray, and these strengths let almost all of us survive the descent of the Furies. Unless you believe Savannah; it is her claim that no Wingo survived.

  I will tell you my story.

  Nothing is missing.

  I promise you.

  To write a prologue like that, style is important. The sound of the words and the mood created is what gives this prologue its power.

  Backstory

  Backstory is any account of events that take place before the main narrative. This element of fiction must be handled with great care. Use too much of it in the beginning, and the story may bog down. But use none of it and essential character bonding won't take place.

  Try for a good balance by starting with action. My rule is: Act first, explain later. In fact, it's best to withhold as much information as possible in your opening chapter. Later, you drop in only what is essential.

  Quite often I'll read the opening chapter of a young writer's manuscript and it will go something like this:

  Victoria stepped off the stagecoach onto the dusty street of Tumbleweed, New Mexico. The smell of dust assaulted her nostrils. She heard the tinkling of a piano coming from somewhere, then saw the huge sign Saloon hovering over her.

  All right, we've got a character in action, arriving in town. Good. But shortly after this, maybe halfway down page one, comes the following;

  She thought wistfully of her home in Boston. She missed it already. She had been happy there.

  Her father had warned her not to go West. When she was sixteen...

  And then comes page after page of backstory. The true opening has stopped and we are given what I call backdumping. Many times the young writer will spend most of that first chapter on backdumps, returning to the present only near chapter's end.

  It's an understandable fault. The writer thinks readers must know all about who the Lead character is and how she got here before the story can take off. It's an attempt to bond readers to the character, get them to care, then start up the action.

  Understandable, but doomed to failure. The problem is it puts on the brakes. The actual story stalls while we get all the background information.

  Readers will wait a long time for full explanations if you give them interesting or troubling circumstances up front. But you can drop in some backstory elements to increase the reader's interest in the characters.
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  Backdrops can be done with skillful dialogue, as Colleen Coble demonstrates in chapter one of Alaska Twilight:

  Augusta cupped Haley's face in her hands and looked deep into her eyes.

  "I'm so proud of you. You're brave enough to face it now."

  She was in her Doris Day encouragement mode. Haley was in no mood for it. "I'm not being brave," she said. "I want my movies, my friends, the malls, and especially my powdered donuts. This is not my idea of a good time. I'm only here because my shrink said this would help bring closure, so I'm going to see it through. If I reconnect with Chloe, maybe the nightmares will stop."

  If the writing is good enough it can make backstory a pleasure to read. In Phil Callaway's wistful novel The Edge of the World, the narrator begins chapter two with: On August 4, 1976, the Rapture of the Church took place. I was sleeping at the time. But before I tell you about it, allow me a little more background.

  Having captured our attention with the first lines, Callaway gives us some family information, but not in plain vanilla language.

  I am the youngest. The caboose, my brothers call me. A mistake, my third-grade teacher once said. I sometimes wonder if they'd miss me at all if I packed my bags and hopped a boat bound for my grandparents' homeland of Scotland. But I'm quite sure they would. I may be the caboose, but they seem to like knowing I'm back here.

  Both Koontz and Stephen King have used more extensive backstory in the early pages of some of their most successful books.

  In The Dead Zone, one of King's best, he introduces three characters— Johnny, Greg, and Sarah. Each character starts off in action. Then each is given extensive backstory. On page 9, for example, there's a section on Greg, referring back to his father's rages. This deepens our interest in and sympathy for Greg.

  Pages 17 through 21 are dedicated to Sarah's backstory.

  The reason these sections work is twofold. First, King starts off with action, then drops back. That's the way it should always be.

  Second, the backstory is essential detail, contributing to the reader's sense of why the character is involved in the action.

  Dean Koontz's first bestseller was Whispers, and he actually attributes this success to his conscious decision to deepen his characters. Up to that time, he'd done a lot of action, good action, but felt it was surface level. With Whispers, he created deep backgrounds.

  Whispers has one of the most famous, chilling action scenes in suspense fiction—the attempted rape of Hilary Thomas by Bruno Frye. He attacks and chases her in her own house, from pages 24 to 41!

  But what precedes it? The backstory of Hilary Thomas from pages 7 through 11. Why is this so important? Because it sets us up to care intensely for her in the attempted rape scene. Without it, we'd be watching the action but not be as engaged.

  We learn in those pages of her bad upbringing, resulting in an inferiority complex, which she now fights against (a rooting interest is thus established). Koontz takes us back to her dingy Chicago upbringing and how she used her imagination to escape (explaining why she's a writer now).

  The backstory ends with a scene where she has reached her dream, a big movie contract. But she can't entirely enjoy it, fearing it won't last, just like everything else in her life to this point. Now we really understand her.

  By the time she gets home, on page 24, we are in love with this character. So when she finds Bruno Frye waiting for her, we can't stop reading.

  The longer backstory works because the writing of Koontz and King is focused and sharp. So until your own skills are finely honed, err toward shorter backstory.

  The Chapter Two Switcheroo

  One great technique is the chapter two switcheroo. You try out chapter two as your new chapter one and see how much faster things move.

  Here's the opening of a manuscript from a writing student:

  "Come on, honey. We're going to be late."

  Kathleen Jones stood at the backdoor watching her husband as he jogged up to the patio. William Carter Jones was the love of her life. They had met in junior high school, gone to separate high schools, and met up again in college. Kathleen would have done anything to win the heart of Will. He took her breath away the first day she saw him in their biology lab. Dissecting frogs wasn't the most romantic thing in the world, but they enjoyed being lab partners. Over time, romance bloomed and they promised to live until death parted them. That was twenty-two years ago. Now they had the house of their dreams, a daughter in college, and a revolving back door. Only the wall by the patio showed evidence of all the teenagers that had come in and out of the Jones's home over the years. Many still stayed in touch, but some were lost in the world somewhere. Kathleen prayed to herself every time she passed the pictures.

  While dialogue is great way to open, everything else is backstory and exposition. I suggested the student make chapter two her new opening chapter. If she had essential information from chapter one she could sprinkle it in throughout the novel.

  I advised her to be ruthless in leaving out any information that didn't absolutely have to be there.

  In the student manuscript, chapter two (which became chapter one) opened like this:

  As the credits rolled and Tammy slept, Fancy wished life was really like the chick flick they had just watched. But happy endings only happen in the movies.

  Fancy sighed as she shook Tammy. "Tammy. Time to go get in bed. Come on, it's late." "I hear you. I'm awake. What time is it?" "It's after eleven o'clock." Fancy started turning off lights and reached across Tammy to pick up the popcorn bowl.

  This is so much better. Something is happening.

  MIDDLES

  Most of your novel is going to be the middle portion, or Act II. It is the record of the confrontation between the Lead and various forces against her. Middles, of course, are open to infinite possibilities. So just how do you choose what to write? It depends.

  NOP vs. OP

  In Plot & Structure I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of two approaches. NOP stands for "No Outline People." OP stands for "Outline People."

  Some writers like to move along daily, without knowing what's going to happen a few scenes ahead. They reason that if the writer doesn't know what's going to happen, surely the reader won't.

  This is a tad misleading, as decisions have to be made sometime, and if they're deferred until the actual writing of the scene, that doesn't mean it still won't be predictable.

  And the danger is that it will be so off the track that it leads to "rabbit trails," and there will be a whole lot of rewriting to do.

  However, if you are of the NOP persuasion, if you can't stand the idea of mapping out a story, don't despair. I would advise you to try to do at least a little mapping, as it will help your structure skills.

  But at the very least know your LOCK elements! (See chapter three.)

  If you do, then when you dream up scenes on the run, they'll have some relationship to the story engine—the conflict between a crucial objective and a stronger opposition.

  Robin Lee Hatcher, who is a prolific NOP, says:

  For me, writing a novel is all about the joy of discovery. If I know too much about how the story will play out or how it will end, then I lose my passion for telling it. So I go to my computer every day, wondering what will happen next. I'm not sure how it happens, but it all falls together in the end.

  Sometimes this gets a little scary, Hatcher admits, especially when a deadline is approaching.

  But I have learned, through trial and error, that this is the way I create, the way that works best for me.

  If, however, you like the security of an outline, do as much as you can. There are various methods (scene cards, spreadsheets, extended synopses, etc.).

  One of the more prolific writers ever, Richard S. Prather (author of the Shell Scott mystery series) said he would try to get "a fresh idea and just keep working with it. I'd fill up about a hundred or two hundred pages, single-spaced, with just plotting stuff. You know, ideas, characters, and bits o
f dialogue, actions and reactions."

  From here, he'd create chapter notes on pages, one or two pages for each chapter. He'd put these in a notebook and write the novel from there.

  My advice to OP is to allow your story to "breathe" a little, and if you come to a point where you feel the story needs to veer off a bit, be ready to revise your outline.

  Some writers are in the middle (NOOP?) and outline the opening act strongly, then use "signpost scenes" for the rest of the outline (I fall into this camp).

  A signpost scene is a scene you know has to be in the book: a major confrontation or complication. It can even be a little vague in your imagination. You might just have a feeling about it. Jot that down on a card or in your outline somewhere. As the story progresses, you'll fine-tune what lies ahead.

  Your approach to writing should evolve. As you write that long middle, be aware of feel, of various techniques, and experiment with different approaches. Keep some notes on what's working for you.

  Refer to those notes when you start your next project. Just keep writing.

  ENDS

  Novels have to end, and in a way that isn't predictable yet is satisfying to the reader.

  Endings tie up loose threads, unless you're writing literary fiction, which allows for more ambiguity.

  Rules for writing endings can barely exist, because endings are tied to the unique story elements of each novel. Your imaginative powers will be tested most when it comes to creating a satisfying conclusion.

  Beginnings are easy. Endings are hard.

  It's relatively simple to hook readers from the start. It's a bear to leave them happy that they've read your book after the last page.

  "Your first chapter sells your book," Mickey Spillane famously said. "Your last chapter sells your next book."

  But it will help if you know the five types of endings:

  1] The Lead gains his objective (the "happy ending").

  2] The Lead loses his objective (unhappy ending).

  3] The Lead gains his objective but loses something more valuable (classic tragedy).