Though the scene ends without anyone getting shot, the sense of peace and camaraderie that developed before the knife incident is gone, and a climate of mistrust has returned between hostages and terrorists. This scene sets the stage for further character changes down the road. Will Gen dissolve
into a fearful mess? Will Thibault maintain his brave facade? It is necessary to read further scenes to find out.
CHARACTER AND PLOT
Hopefully the illustration above made it clear that plot and character are married to one another. Your protagonist ought to be indelibly caught up in the plot situation and information of every scene, and should bear or participate in the consequences that follow. Similarly, your plot should not be able to advance or get more complicated without the active participation of your protagonist.
With that in mind, when developing your characters you should always be thinking about how the plot situation of a given scene will affect the character, and what it will cause him to do, think, or feel.
In every scene you should ask: What is plot-relevant? What is character-relevant? How are the two related? Your plot should be unable to carry on without your protagonist.
A Note on Character Behavior
If you've ever turned up in the aftermath of an exciting incident like a fight or a police chase, you will probably agree that a bystander's account is never as dramatic as witnessing it for yourself. The same is true of character behavior in scenes; inevitably you'll take shortcuts, hoping the reader will take your word for it that "Charles didn't want to live any longer," or "Frederika had a magnetic personality." Well, okay, both details might be true, but unless the reader gets to witness the plot situation of Charles standing at the edge of the bridge ready to leap off, or, through character interactions, sees multiple characters fall in love with Frederika, the reader has no proof of what you tried to quickly summarize.
If you follow the formula for developing characters set forth in this chapter, your characters will have no choice but to become complex, plot-relevant people who feel vivid and real to the reader.
Without the human mind and consciousness to give significance to the events that happen to us, life is just a series of events unfolding over time to people everywhere. This randomness is one of the reasons that many people turn to literature—inside the pages of a book you trust that you will be led on a meaningful journey revealing insights and giving your spirits and emotions a jolt. In fiction, this is called a plot.
Some people confuse plot for story and think it is enough to have a sequence of events lined up one after the other. A story is just a string of information about a cast of characters in a given time and place. Boy meets girl. Stranger comes to town. The doctor is found dead.
A plot is the method by which that story takes on tension, energy, and momentum, and urges a reader to keep turning pages. Plot transforms "boy meets girl" into Romeo and Juliet—with secret love, wild fighting, and tragic conflicts along the way.
In short, plot is the related string of consequences that follow from the significant situation (often referred to as inciting incident, but I prefer my term because many narratives begin less with one single incident and more with a type of situation) in your narrative, which darn well better get addressed, complicated, and resolved through engaging, well-crafted scenes by the end. Some people refer to this relationship of events as causality, but that's a sterile-sounding word. Here we'll just call them consequences.
In chapter two we discussed how any narrative is a series of scenes strung together like beads on a wire. This chapter will look at what element inside each scene is essential to plot. The simplest answer is information.
Plot is constructed out of crucial bits of information—the consequences of, and explanations for, the significant situation and the characters who must deal with it. Plot is best delivered teasingly to the reader in small bites to keep them hungry for more. In a well-written plot, the reader gets just a little bit smarter, a little bit more clued in, as he reads. Each scene should provide one more clue to the puzzle of your plot.
PLOT INFORMATION BASICS
Most writers are as fond of a beautiful sentence as they are a good plot element. It's fun to write lyrical passages, to wax philosophical, and to create images of beauty. Surely there's no harm if a scene digresses from the plot to meander and muse, right?
Nope!
Sorry to be the plot police, but here's the cold truth: Every scene in your narrative must pertain to your plot. Every single one. Even if a character muses or meanders, that activity must be plot-related. A character under suspicion of murder may drift off into thought, but those thoughts had better be about why he's been wrongfully accused, how he's going to prove his innocence, or who the true murderer is, not random memories of whale-watching or hiking.
Scenes exist in order to make the events in your fictional world real to the reader. You want the reader to be knee-deep in your action and emotional drama, to feel for your characters, to hope and dream and want for them.
Each scene, then, must deliver, at minimum, one piece of new information that speaks to one of the following questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
Every scene.
You must be thinking, how can I possibly do that? Simple—don't end a scene and begin another one until new information has been provided. Providing information is one of the most important functions of a scene and is the foundation of a plot.
New information has three main responsibilities:
1. It must fill in another piece of the puzzle, so that both the character and the reader get a little bit smarter.
2. It must change the course of your main character's thoughts, feelings, or actions.
3. It must lead to new consequences, actions, or behaviors that carry your plot forward.
Every scene must reveal some piece of new information that enlightens the reader just a little bit more. Here we'll look at the different types of plot information more closely.
Who
Much scene time is devoted to characters, since they are generally the most important element of any fictional narrative. You'll want to include a bit of general character information in your narrative—what kind of work your protagonist does, his religion or lack of one, his habits. Does he, for instance, go to AA meetings twice a week, or sing in a gospel choir? These details tell us who your character is in general, not necessarily who he is in relationship to your plot. Character-related plot information, on the other hand, tends to come up over the course of a narrative, often having to do with identity or hidden origins being revealed; someone's past catching up with him; a dark secret being brought to light; or a surprising change of heart. Here's an example of plot-related character information from Ann Patchett's novel The Magician's Assistant, in which the protagonist, Sabine, learns after her husband and partner's death, from his lawyer, that he was not who she thought.
"Parsifal's name wasn't Petrie. It was Guy Fetters. Guy Fetters has a mother
and two sisters in Nebraska. As far as I can tell the father is out of the picture—either dead or gone ..."
"That isn't possible," she said.
"I'm afraid it is."
When it comes to characters and plot, think about how your characters can surprise each other, and the readers, by revealing new information about themselves (and not necessarily after death), about things they have hidden or covered up, or about something that is being denied or protected. Most importantly, when you reveal this character information, you should do it directly, through speech or dialogue if possible. Or, if the person has died, either in the form of correspondence he left behind, or through the mouth of another person. Try to rely as little as possible on the thought bubble—in which a character thinks a revelation.
What
What is perhaps the widest possible category of all plot information. It is, in essence, what is often described as your hook—the storyline or angle that makes your narrative unique and from which all othe
r plot events will flow.
In The Magician's Assistant, for instance, Parsifal's death is the significant situation of the novel—the first big piece of what information—that launches the book. The necessity of sharing the information about Parsifal's death with his family sets the next plot events in motion, and leads to great insight and change in Sabine and the other characters. These two main pieces of information drive the entire plot, and each has its own string of consequences that each scene deals with in one way or another.
In every scene you should ask yourself, literally: What is next? What piece of important information do I need my characters to learn, and my readers to become aware of? Remember that every scene needs a new piece of information, or else there's no point to writing it.
Where
Where is one of those lucky bits of information that does light duty in terms of plot most of the time. Occasionally setting is crucial to your plot, especially if one must trace the steps of a murderer, or revisit a place in order to learn something new, or if your narrative is specific to a geographical location. Most of the time, place serves as a backdrop for the other bits of information. In Sabine's case, she has to travel from Los Angeles to Nebraska, two vastly different worlds. Sabine meets with cultural challenges due to the differences between Nebraska and California ways of life, but the plot does not depend upon much information being imparted about place in every scene.
On the level of the scene, when place does come into play it may serve more as a spoken reference—the maid was found dead in the drawing room; Jacques had last been seen in Cancun before he disappeared; my father had a second family in a small town in Florida.
If place does turn out to be crucial to your plot, remember these points:
• New details must be revealed in any scene to make it play into your plot. For instance, a mansion might turn out to be haunted, or a beautiful countryside might also be a Native-American burial ground.
• The new information about the place must have an effect on your character. His thoughts, feelings or actions in the scene should all reflect the information given. For instance, say Jack and Jill planned to honeymoon in the mansion. Once Jack learns the mansion is haunted, he refuses to stay, causing a fight with Jill.
• The actions generated by the new information must lead to other plot-related consequences. For instance, Jill decides she will stay in the mansion by herself, and he can stay in a motel, causing conflict, and building tension.
When
When, in relation to your plot, is the time at which some important action in your narrative takes place: either time in history, or time of day. When tends to be important in mystery plots, to determine when a murder or a crime was committed, to employ alibis, and to figure out how long a victim has been dead. Time as a form of information often comes into play in reference to when a crucial plot action takes place. For instance, a man may learn that his wife got pregnant during a time when he was in the army, and therefore, the baby can't be his. Or a mother may learn that her missing child was actually being held hostage in the neighborhood in the days after she thought he was gone. Or a character's innocence may be called into question when it turns out he does not have an alibi.
When is information that will best serve your plot when it brings to light startling, contradictory, or unexpected results.
Why
Ah, motive, that tricky devil. Why is very much at the crux of plot. Betrayal, murder, deception, unusual kindness, obsessive love, and many more facets of human behavior will fill up the pages of many a plot. Why is often the very thing the novel or story is seeking to understand. Small explanations will be necessary along the way if the reader is to keep up with your plot.
This type of information often gets tossed into narrative explanations and pace-dragging passages of backstory. It's easier just to tell the reader why than to let actions, dialogue, and even flashback scenes tell the truth for you. Don't fall into the habit of explaining why in narrative summary. If your scene needs to reveal why a character behaved a certain way, committed an action, or kept a great secret, return to the chapters on character development and scene intentions in order to get why across.
How
How—the method by which things are done—plays a great role in plot. It's usually the piece of information that ties up the investigation, reveals the missing clues to tragedies, and explains how the impossible really was possible. Law and science often play a role in revealing how something was done. Was the heiress murdered with a gun or a poisoned cup of tea? Was the fire started by arson, or by a cigarette butt tossed carelessly aside?
How is often linked directly to why. If a character is plotting revenge, for instance, the method of his crime will probably be specific to the injury he believes he suffered—a spurned boyfriend might try to publicly shame the woman who dumped him by scrawling inflammatory words on her house. An insulted bigot might try to attack a person's race.
How really can't be an afterthought. You need to know how things were done by the time you get to the scene in which it is revealed, and then the information should be imparted in as direct a way as possible, most often as dialogue: the reading of police reports, evidence in court, a deathbed confession, and so on. But you may also choose to use a device like a letter, a message played back from a machine, or an e-mail found on a computer—something that a character stumbles across that contains the answer to how.
WHEN TO DOLE IT OUT
How you reveal information is just as important as what that information is. The most tempting way to pass on plot information is to narrate in a rushed, matter-of-fact way. But information is best served like food at a fancy French restaurant—in small, elegantly presented courses that neither stuffs the reader, nor leaves him overly hungry. You want the reader to have room for dessert—which is, of course, the end of your book or story.
Some scenes will involve revealing multiple kinds of information, while others may be all for the purpose of revealing one very important kind of information. There's no way to know what to advise without seeing a specific manuscript, but as long as you know that you must have at least one type of new information in every scene, you're on the right track.
You must always be thinking about the span of your narrative. The length of your narrative, whether it is a ten-page story or a five-hundred-page novel, will affect how soon information is revealed to the reader. A short story has less time to get things across, and often has to drive to a brisk emotional impact with a less complex plotline.
The First Part
I'm fond of dividing a narrative into thirds, which I'll refer to as parts (although they are sometimes referred to as acts). In the scenes of the first part you should do the following:
• Lay the foundation. Introduce only enough information to ground your reader.
• Thrust the reader into the action of the significant situation. Make sure the reader knows what the plot is.
• Create a sense of mystery or suspense by withholding information.
The Middle Part
Drive the plot forward by providing more information than you did in the first part. (However, don't give away secrets or crucial plot information, because then what motivation does the reader have to keep reading?)
• Up the ante by throwing in new and surprising information.
• Information should lead to conflict and danger that forces your characters to change or redirect.
• Throw in red herrings, or false leads, that let the reader think you're filling in missing information, or, in the mystery genre, that you're solving the mystery.
The Final Part
The final part of your narrative is in some ways the most difficult because you must use it to successfully tie up all the threads you've started. The reader should not have very many, if any, questions by the time the final part is concluded.
• Answer questions and reveal truths.
• Conclude drama. Don't introduce new information, b
ut you may introduce surprising endings to plot avenues.
• Let characters settle into their changes.
• Lead the reader toward a sense of conclusion by turning down the emotional and dramatic tone of information revealed.
The final part is where many writers discover the holes in their plot—they can't tie up all the threads. If that happens to you, revisit your plot, ask what information is missing, and fill in those holes.
Putting the Plot Pieces Together
Of all the core elements, plot can seem like the most complex element, because it isn't specific to one area of your scene, but must relate to all of them. At root, a plot allows for the reader to experience a sense of mystery, as scenes withhold just the right amount of information for just long enough. The reader can see only one bread crumb at a time in the dimly lit forest of your narrative. Of course, the mystery must be solved eventually, and the plot information must add up to a satisfying whole.
Following are examples from Toni Morrison's acclaimed novel Beloved, in which plot information is doled out carefully and builds on itself. A scene in the first part of the book opens with a woman called Beloved walking out of a pond fully dressed. She is soon discovered by Denver, one of the main characters, and taken home to Denver's mother, Sethe—a woman with a past full of dark secrets. Through dialogue, the reader learns that Beloved is not like other people. She has hazy origins and behaves unusually. This information is delivered bit by bit in scenes.
"Something funny 'bout that gal," Paul D said, mostly to himself.
"Funny how?"
"Acts sick, sounds sick, but she don't look sick. Good skin, bright eyes and strong as a bull."
"She's not strong. She can hardly walk without holding on to something."
"That's what I mean. Can't walk, but I seen her pick up a rocker with one hand."
That scene achieves the three responsibilities of new information. One, the reader and the characters get smarter: Under the category of who, they learn that Beloved is not like other people—she behaves quite oddly. Two, the reader is led to change his feelings about Beloved. Three, motivation comes into play—why. Because the characters now see Beloved differently, they begin to act differently with one another in response to her, and their changed behaviors affect the plot consequences.
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