Friday, October 30, 2009

INTRODUCTION

"Fiction reveals what
truth may hide."


Welcome to my Breakout Novel set in 17th century Siam. It's a work in progress, anything can, and will, keep on changing as I rewrite. I don't even have a title yet. Please feel free to comment and give advice.

Here's the logline: "Roger Davenport goes to the Indies to make his fortune, gets involved in privateering, falls in love with a Siamese princess, but risks everything to save the Greek-born prime minister, his hero and mentor."

Unfortunately, you're a little early because the blog is still under construction. Come back in about a month. I will put up the chapters as I finish them (eight so far), and also blog on various aspects of novel writing.

In the first part of the blog (look to the right) I've summarize rules and tips concerning creative writing gleaned from numerous books, bibliography provided. The purpose is to have this information at my fingertips when those books aren't physically available to me. I also like to listen to it (the blog) on Odiogo.com. I trust this is within the bounds of "fair use". If not, please inform me. No plagiarism is intended.

1. Below: Novel Writing Made Easy. If you're new to novel writing, this video will tell you briefly what's involved.

2. Below: Joyce Carol Oates - On Writing Characters.

3. Below: The American Novel Since 1945 - Yale Course (26 videos!). If you don't have an MFA or didn't study literature, this series will give you a good and entertaining grounding.

4. Below: How to Write a Compelling Book Title (Three parts). Only after the publication of my first book of short stories did I realize how important book titles and covers were.

5. Below: Lisa Tener's inspirational "How to Write Your Book," not necessarily fiction.

6. Below: David M. Harris gives some useful advice for beginners. He mentions Proust's questionnaire, which I wasn't aware of. You can look it up on Youtube.

General Rules of Creative Writing

  1. Avoid highfalutin’ words.
  2. Avoid purple prose.
  3. Avoid qualifiers and other wimpy words.
  4. Beware of It.
  5. Create interest by mixing ideas.
  6. Don’t overexplain.
  7. Eliminate all unnecessary uses of That.
  8. Juxtapose words and ideas to evoke humor and irony.
  9. Keep related words together.
  10. Learn to use, not abuse, metaphor and simile.
  11. Listen to the music of the words.
  12. Never let the truth get in the way of your story.
  13. Never use two words when one word will do.
  14. Replace adjectives and adverbs with vivid nouns and active verbs.
  15. Show, don’t tell.
  16. There’s an exception to every rule.
  17. Use interesting contrasts.
  18. Use parallel construction.
  19. Use short paragraphs when possible.
  20. Use the active voice.
  21. Vary your sentence structure.
  22. Watch out for word repetition.
  23. Write cinematically.
  24. Write sentences in the positive form.
  25. Write. Rewrite. Rewrite.

Bibliography:

  • Nancy Lamb, The Art and Craft of Storytelling.

Point of View (POV)

[Point of view] isn't only about a character's viewpoint. It's where character meets language, the actual essense of fiction in print.
--Alicia Rasley.
Point of view is the perspective from which the reader experiences the action of the story. Perspective means perception, thought, and emotion, and POV determines whose perceptions (five senses), whose thoughts, whose emotions you get as you read a passage.
Figure 1.
Figure 1, (left) shows the basic types of POV:
a. Omniscient;
b. Single - first and third persons;
c. Multiple - first and third persons.

Figure 1, (right) shows the elements of POV:
a. Narration;
b. Perspective;
c. Introspection;
d. Voice.
Figure 2.
Figure 2 shows what POV can do for your story:
  1. Give readers the vicarious experience of a certain perspective on an event, such as from Roger Davenport's experience or from Luang Petch's experience.
  2. Create an interactive experience of the story, by inviting readers to participate with the characters and second-guess their decisions and actions.
  3. Increase reader identification, so the POV character's goal and conflicts become, for the moment, important to the readers (keeps them turning pages).
  4. Convey (or conceal) information that is known to a particular character in order to create affiliation (or suspense) with the readers.
  5. Individualize characters and distinguish them from each other by showing how differently each feels and thinks about the same event.
  6. Provide the contrast between the apparent and the internal in order to create subtext.

I'm writing a historical novel and have decided to use first person for the protagonist, Roger Davenport, and third person for Luang Petch, a second protagonist. The book has three parts; the first and third parts are narrated by Roger in first person; the second part centers on Luang Petch, in third person.

How many points of view are you allowed? A general rule of thumb is: Have as few points of view as you can get away with and still tell the story you want to tell.

Caution: Combining Points of View: The Hybrid Story.

What does not usually work is the beginner mistake of combining first person and third person narrative.

However, at least one person made it work brilliantly: William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, which combines first-person narrative with a last section featuring Dilsey, a family servant written in third person. You really have to be a Faulkner to get away with this.

Oh well, perhaps it's back to the drawing board!

First Person.

Advantages:

  • Immediacy. We are inside the character's head, so our experiencing his sensations feels natural and plausible. What's happening to the fictional "I" seems to be happening to the reader "I".
  • Language. Tells us a great deal about the character, in terms of class and education, before we have so much as one fact.
  • Range. The character's thoughts range easily over memory, opinion, and impressions because they're his thoughts. We're already inside his head, and these are things people naturally think about.

Disadvantages:

  • You cannot include any scene at which your POV character is not present.
  • You cannot include any information that your POV character would not naturally have.
  • You must include all information that your POV character does have; to do otherwise is considered cheating.
  • You are limited to your POV character's view of the world. This is why some writers consider first person "claustrophobic." If your POV character is naturally suspicious, then all the other characters must be described in suspicious terms. You can show that another person is actually honorable, but you cannot tell us that because no matter what she does, the POV character will interpret it suspiciously. [I sidestep this problem by opting for at least two points of view.]
  • The largest danger of first person is that you already have an "I" in your head--yourself. Beginners tend to assume that because you feel a certain way, so will your fictional "I". First-person POV demands that the writer also becomes the "reader" and judge objectively what is written, and not what is in the writer's mind. This limitation is why many writers consider first person the hardest POV to do well.

Points to Ponder:

  • In one sense, first person seems the most natural mode for storytelling because we all use it all the time. In reality, however, it's not that simple.
  • The first problem inherent in first person is that it's not natural. People tell others stories about themselves, but they don't tell four-hundred-page stories with perfectly recalled conversations and detailed descriptions.
  • You can lessen the artificiality of first person with one of two strategems: write a frame story with an introduction that frankly acknowledges that the story is over and the narrator is now looking back on it; or, an older character frankly admitting, before he recounts his story, that it's over. The author continues throughout the whole book to interpose comments from his older self among dramatized scenes of his childhood.
  • First person is most artificial in its presentation of dialogue. But there's no way around it. Put in all the dialogue in your first-person story, artificial or not.
  • The great advantage of first-person is not what you can say but how you can say it. This choice of POV allows us to "hear" the natural voice of the character. There is no better way to let us know who your character is than by letting us hear his thoughts in his own words. Is your character cynical? Then his vocabulary will be cynical as well, faintly mocking.
  • In first person, the author is invisible. He has merged completely with the narrator and thus has no way of giving us information or interpretations that the narrator does not share. The writer must become the character.
  • It also works well when you want an older-and-wiser character who has learned from life. By telling his own story directly, the more experienced narrator can provide interpretations of events as sophisticated as the author's while recalling the freshness of the character's encounter with the plot when he was younger.
  • Done well, first person is rich indeed.
  • Point of view is like perspective in a realistic painting--it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters, objects, and events in accordance with their proximity to the viewer.
  • The novel is the only imaginative form that must have both action and point of view, suspense and reflection. In this it seems to mimic the way life feels.
  • Defoe's great technical innovation was narrating in the first person rather than the third person. It changed the nature of the novel, plunging it into the subjective realm and shifting the balance between the inner life and the outer life. The narrative still moved between actions and reflections, but now the actions were depicted entirely through the filter of the narrator's mode of reflection.
  • If we take Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White as an example of a novel (a mystery) in which the plot must work, Collins's method, of entering the viewpoints of various characters (all a bit clichéd), works admirably-each diary document pictures the somewhat ridiculous action vividly, implies that there is more here than meets the eye, and hits the special emotional note that character is there to supply. The variety enlivens the proceedings, and the reader is carried along perhaps in spite of herself.
  • The same is true of Dracula--if we had to see Count Dracula from a single point of view over and over again, he would lose his dangerous powers by becoming too familiar to us; but seeing him intermittently, combined with witnessing each character's speculations and dreads, gives the count power without overtaxing the author's inventiveness.
  • For many authors, the best combination of clear observation and immediacy is a first-person narrator narrating his or her "unfolding." A wonderful example of this technique is Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, a short novel about the inner life of an adolescent girl. Kincaid's style, which is very controlled but rich, works to finesse the two most serious pitfalls of first-person narration--the temptation of digressiveness and the tempation of self-dramatization.
  • If the world of the novel gets too complex to efficiently portray, the first-person narrator can lose himself in the mix and comes off as paler and less interesting than the other characters, but if the narrator seems interested in himself to the exclusion of all the other characters that seem potentially interesting to the reader, he can seem solipsistic and dull.
  • But views on this vary, and an author can make a case for anything--the contemporary novelist William T. Vollmann's argument for writing in the first person, including theoretical and nonfiction works, is that to write in the first person is to acknowledge that all ideas and opinions are subjective and to take responsibility for them.

Bibliography:

  • Nancy Kress, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint;
  • Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover;
  • James Moffett and Kennetch R. McElheny, Points of View, An Anthology of Short Stories;
  • Alicia Rasley, The Power of Point of View;
  • Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel.

Characterization

A writer can never know about a character's feelings what is not somewhere mirrored in her own.
--Katherine Patterson.

The Methods of Developing Character.


  1. Point of view.
  2. Exposition.
  3. Description.
  4. Action--character in action is what fiction is.
  5. Gestures and mannerisms.
  6. Setting, taste, and interest.
  7. Other's opinions.
  8. Dialogue.
  9. Thoughts, interiorization.
  10. All of the Above.

First Aid for Character.

  1. Make sure the character has a physical presence, leaves footprints in the damp grass, breathes, has a smell, etc.
  2. Sharpen the character's sensory perceptions, and give those perceptions an individualistic slant.
  3. Rewrite all the character's lines of dialogue serially to keep them keyed to the character and expressive of it.
  4. If the character is the point-of-view character, change from first person to third, or vice versa. (You will get a different character.)
  5. Sharpen motivations and compulsions.
  6. Arrange scenes so that other characters are conscious of, and have opinions on, the character in question, in dialogue or point of view.
Points to Ponder.


  • The difference between a good story and a great one is often the depth to which the author examines the characters who people the pages.
  • A good way to make sure your characters are fully developed is to think of them as four-dimensional persons (the photograph, the videotape, the stage play, and the participatory theater.
  • First-dimension characteristics are those you would observe looking at a photograph of a person. Such qualities include height; weight; age; coloring; body type; distinguishing physical traits such as scars, tattoos, or unusual proportions; type and style of clothing.
  • Second-dimension traits are those you could observe by watching a videotape of a person. These characteristics are primarily ones of descriptive action, such as "lumbers," "ambles" or "strolls."
  • Third-dimension traits are those revealed when you watch people interacting or reacting to circumstances, as you do in a play. Here you get some of the character's intelligence; sensitivity level (e.g., tactful, unaware, empathetic, uncaring); social type, etc.
  • Fourth-dimension traits are found in the same list as third-dimension traits, but there are two differences. The first is that fourth-dimension traits deal strictly with the private persona, that is, the person stripped of pretense and deception; second, in order to come to the deepest understanding of the person, the author must answer the question, "Why?" Two people may behave in exactly the same way for very different reasons, and unless you understand their motives, you cannot really know them.
  • What is characterization but determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? - Henry James, THE ART OF THE NOVEL.
  • Shading is a method of characterization of building a character out of contradictions. A coldhearted character would be first presented in a state of passion so that the reader could then have the pleasure of discovering that was not the true character.

    Bibliography:

  • Brandilyn Collins, Getting Into Character;
  • Oakley Hall, How Fiction Works;
  • Nancy Kress, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint;
  • Nancy Lamb, The Art and Craft of Storytelling;
  • Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover;
  • Meg Leder, Jack Heffron, Editors of Writer's Digest: The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing;
  • Jessica Page Morrell, Bullies, Bastards & Bitches.

Conflict, Action & Suspense

Description & Setting

In every piece of fiction... setting is one of the three major elements--along with characterization and plot--that the writer must weave together to create the narrative.
--Connie C. Epstein

Dialogue

Dialogue is a very useful tool to reveal things about people, and novels are about people and what they do to each other.
--Thomas McGuane

Emotions

Plot & Structure

First Scene

The first scene in your narrative bears the greatest burden of all, because it must do all of the following:

  • Hatch your plot in the form of your significant situation;
  • Introduce your protagonist and provide a brief glance into his inner or outer struggles;
  • Establish a distinct, rich setting and subtly evoke the senses without being overbearing;
  • Set up a feeling of dramatic tension that hints at complications and conflict to come.

First scenes are most successful when they begin with an air of mystery, a question or situation that needs and answer, or a crisis from which the protagonist needs to be extricated. The first scene should be compelling enough--with enough action and plot information--that the reader does not need any backstory or expository summary in order to keep reading without getting confused.

What does your first scene need to be successful? The following, for starters:

  • A significant situation that challenges your protagonist's status quo. Roger is on a ship sailing across the Bay of Bengal which is attacked by a privateer.
  • A catalyst with whom the protagonist can interact. Captain Coates forces Roger to change his plans and go to Mergen instead of Pegu.
  • A quick introduction to your protagonist's immediate intentions. Roger had intended to go to Pegu in search of his brother.
  • A glimpse of your protagonist's personal history and personality, which should shed further light on her motivation. The reader gets a quick glimpse into Roger's life as a clerk at Madras who is jilted by Betsy Eden.
  • A course of action or a decision on the part of the protagonist that leads immediately to more complications. Life gets more complicated for Roger by scene's end, as he is now about to leave his old life and let chance take him where ever it may.

The Core Elements and the First Scene.

  • Setting; It's tempting to paint a dramatic canvas of setting in the first scene, but be careful not to let setting absorb the attention of your scene, which should be lightly drawn unless the setting itself is part of your signficant situation in some dramatic way (like if your protagonist is lost in a wild jungle or scaling a mountain).
  • Subtext and Dramatic Tension; Subtext foreshadows aspects of your plot through the strategic placement of thematic imagery, subtle indications of character behavior, and by showing parallel actions in the background of the scene. Not all genres need as much subtext. Literary fiction often relies upon more subtext, since the genre emphasizes lyrical language, slower pacing, and richer character development.
  • Pacing; Pace should match the emotional content of your scene. First scenes should get going with an emotional bang--start big or dramatic, ratchet up the suspense or lay on the fear, since you're capturing the reader here.
  • Ending the First Scene. Eventually, your significant situation will have to taper off to its close. No matter what kind of plot you choose--a quiet, character-driven one, or an action-based one as your genre and writing style demand--end your first scene with a feeling that trouble, conflict, crisis, or a dilemma has only just begun, and you will almost certainly guarantee the reader keeps on going to the next scene. To do this: Leave the consequences of the significant situation unresolved; End the scene before the character makes a major decision; Allow your protagonist to have a disturbing realization that ultimately changes everything in his life; Let your protagonist have a knee-jerk reaction to a signficant situation.
First Scenes vs. Prologues.

A prologue is a short scene or chapter at the very beginning of a narrative--it is the very first part of the narrative that will be read, and it comes before the first scene and chapter. A prologue may actually take place in the future, or even in the distant past. In fact, it may not fit into the linear chronology of the narrative at all, because its purpose is to provide information that the narrative will not or cannot just yet, but that is somehow needed. Some writers use a prologue as a hook--to tempt the reader with information that the plot will not deliver for many more hundreds of pages. Some writers believe that the first scene should successfully provide that hook, and that if you work hard to write an effective, enticing, vivid first scene, you won't need a prologue.

Points to Ponder.

  • Plot and character cannot be separated. Your significant situation is the something bad, difficult, mysterious, or tragic that happens to your protagonist in real-time action--in other words, it feels as though it is happening at the moment the reader reads it because it isn't narrated in exposition and it isn't a flashback scene. The action is happening now!
  • This monumental event is what sets your story in motion, what compels your character to take action, because, after all, the problem belongs to your protagonist first and foremost. Through other plot twists and complications, the significant situation may lead to a whole host of trouble for other characters, but not at page one. The opening scene belongs to your main character.
  • Your significant situation should happen within the first couple of paragraphs. If you force the reader to wait too long for the event that they hope is coming, you stand to lose them before ever getting to it.
  • When you kick off your significant situation, be sure that it directly involves your protagonist and reveals something about her character--whether you only show her actions, or you let us into her interior world. Your situation should challenge your protagonist's status quo. Plot and character are bound together and one without the other will cause your first scene to flop.
  • In your first scene you aren't going to focus too much on character development; your goal is to introduce your protagonist as quickly and with as little intrigue as possible while getting your story started and hooking the reader.
  • Introduce your protagonist and the significant situation simultaneously.
  • Match your pace to the emotional content of the scene.
  • Use thematic images to foreshadow an outcome. If your protagonist's life is in danger, set an eerie mood, and use setting objects that conjure up images of death or darkness--a knife, a raven, even a shift in light from bright to dark.
  • Unbalance the reader's expecations through setting by employing what is not expected, such as featuring a monastery as the site of a violent crime, or a prison as a setting of a surprising revelation of innocence.
  • Keep a tight pace--notice if you are using too much explication or description that drags the pace down; and watch for lengthy, unbroken passages of dialogue or actions that push the pace too quickly.
  • End with your protagonist in trouble or with an uncertain fate, setting up the next scene.

Bibliography.

  • Jordan E. Rosenfeld, Make a Scene, Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time;

Scenes

What is the pattern of a scene? Fundamentally, it is: Statement of goal. Introduction and development of conflict. Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster.
--Jack M. Bickham.

Scenes are capsules in which compelling characters undertake significant actions in a vivid and memorable way that allows the events to feel as though they are happening in real time. When strung together, individual scenes add up to build plots and storylines.

OR, Scenes are those passages in narrative when we slow down and focus on an event in the story so that we are "in the moment," with characters in action.

The recipe for a scene includes the following basic ingredients:

  • Characters who are complex and layered, and who undergo change throughout your narrative;
  • A point of view through which the scenes are seen;
  • Memorable and significant action that feels as if it is unfolding in real time;
  • Meaningful, revealing dialogue when appropriate;
  • New plot information that advances your story and deepens characters;
  • Conflict and drama that tests your character and ultimately reveals their personalities;
  • A rich physical setting that calls on all the senses and enables the reader to see and enter into the world you've created;
  • A spare amount of narrative summary or exposition;
  • Dramatic tension, which creates the potential for conflict in scenes;
  • Scene subtext, which deepens and enriches your scenes;
  • Scene intentions, which ensure characters' actions are purposeful;
  • Pacing and scene length, which influence the mood and tone of individual scenes.

Each new scene has a responsibility to the idea or plot you started with, which is to communicate your idea in a way that is vivifying for the reader and that provides an experience, not a lecture. Scene launches pave the way for all the robust consequences of the idea or plot to unfurl. Each scene launch is a reintroduction, capturing your reader's attention all over again.

You want to start each scene by asking the following questions:

  • Where are my characters in the plot? Where did I leave them and what are they doing now?
  • What is the most important piece of information that needs to be revealed in this scene?

The Different Types of Scene Launches:

  • Character Launches: Get your characters on the page sooner rather than later. The majority of scenes should involve your main characters. Don't let your scene launch go on for too many paragraphs in passive description or narrated ideas without characters coming into play; if your character isn't present by the second paragraph in any given scene, you're in danger of losing the reader.

SET SCENE INTENTIONS FOR CHARACTERS.


  • Action Launches: The sooner you start the action in a scene, the more momentum it has to carry the reader forward. If you find yourself explaining an action, then you're not demonstrating the action any longer. To create an action launch: Get straight to the action; Hook the reader with big or surprising action; Be sure that the action is true to character; Act first, think later.
  • Narrative launches: A scene launch is actually one of the easier places to use a judicious amount of narrative summary, so long as you don't keep the reader captive too long. The afternoon before I planned how I would tell her. I would begin with my age and maturity, allude to a new lover, and finish with a bouquet of promises: grandchildren, handwritten letters, boxes from Tiffany sent in time to beat the rush. I sat in my apartment drinking Scotch and planning the words. Amanda Eyre Ward's novel How to Be Lost.
  • Setting Launches: Sometimes setting details--like a beach that's going to be hit by a tsunami, or moonlight sparkling on a lake--are so important to plot or character development that visual setting must be included at the launch of a scene. To create an effective scenic launch: Use specific visual details; Allow scenery to set the tone of the scene; Use scenery to reflect a character's feelings; Show the impact of the setting on the character.

If you grabbed the readers attention with an evocative scene launch, the middle of your scene is the proving ground, the opportunity to hook the reader and never let her go.

UP THE ANTE: COMPLICATIONS.

Techniques to up the ante:
  • The withhold--emotions, information, and objects;
  • The Element Danger--put the protagonist or someone he loves in danger;
  • The Unexpected Revelation--he was adopted, his wife cheated on him, wrongly accused of a crime.

Techniques to increase Dramatic Tension:

  1. Thwart the protagonist’s goals—delay satisfaction.
  2. Unexpected changes (the reader doesn’t know the reason for them).
  3. Constant shift of power from one side to the other.
  4. Pull out the rug, throw in some plot information that changes the character.
  5. Create tension in atmosphere.

SCENE ENDINGS.

Zoom-in endings--anything that invites intimacy or emotional contact with the characters and their plight at the end of a scene has a zoom-in effect on readers, drawing the readers closer;

  • Character Summaries;
  • Revelatory Dialogue;
  • The Cliffhanger Ending.

Zoom-out endings--pull away from intimacy or immediacy. The reader often needs a bit of emotional relief from an intense scene, and pulling back provides him an opportunity to catch his breath or reflect on all that has just transpired.

  • Visual Descriptions;
  • Philosophical Musings;

The Conclusive Ending--there comes a time when a scene simply needs to end without anything fancy to get in the way; your ending doesn't need to portend any future event, or lend thematic resonance; its job is just to conclude something that has happened or to tie up a plot point.

Points to Ponder.

  • The scene is a misunderstood element of writing; unlike other elements, it is not a singular thing, but a sum of all the parts of great fiction.
  • If you can understand what a scene is, how all its elements collaborate to create a vivid and compelling snapshot, and how those moments add up to a story, you'll write your drafts differently and become a more self-assured writer with a page-turner on your hands.
  • The audience is watching. Never forget this. Even though the audience isn't actually present at the moment of your writing, you should write (and especially revise) as if the reader is sitting behind your desk, awaiting your finished pages; i.e., it is your job to entertain and inform the reader through clear writing and powerful scenes; if you are using fancy prose or showy strategies to amuse yourself or prove something, you aren't keeping your audience in mind.
  • The one thing in that list that makes a scene a scene is action--events happening and people acting out behaviors in a simulation of real time--but well-balanced scenes include a little bit of everything. Mixing those ingredients together in varying amounts will yield drama, emotion, passion, power, and energy; in short, a page-turner.
  • Some scenes need more physical action, while others may require a lot of dialogue. Some scenes will take place with barely a word spoken, or with very small actions. Other scenes may require vivid interaction with the setting.
  • Dramatic tension will make the reader worry about and care for your characters and keep her riveted to the page. Subtext can build imagery and emotion into deeper layers of scenes so that your writing feels rich and complex. Scene intentions help to guide your characters and take them through changes in as dramatic a way as possible. By pacing your scenes well and choosing the proper length for each scene, you can control the kinds of emotional effects your scenes have, leaving the reader with the feeling of having taken a satisfying journey.
  • One of the benefits of writing in scene form is that the ending of a scene provides a place for the reader to comfortably take a pause.
  • Generally speaking, if a scene runs to more than fifteen pages, it's on the long side. Long scenes don't need to be avoided, but they should be peppered in sparingly. Too many long scenes in a row will cause your narrative to drag.
  • Use long scenes in the novel when you want to: Intentionally slow down the pace after lots of action or intense dialogue to allow the protagonist and the reader to digest what has happened, and to build new tension and suspense; Include a lot of big action in a given scene (fights, chases, explosions)--so the scene doesn't hinge on action alone; Add a dialogue scene that, in order to feel realistic, needs to run long.
  • A scene that takes place in ten or fewer pages can comfortably be considered short. Short scenes often make readers hungry for more. But too many short scenes in a row can make the flow of the plot feel choppy, and disrupt the continuity that John Gardner said creates a dream for the reader.
  • A short scene has to achieve the same goals as a longer scene, and in less time. It must still contain main characters engaging in actions based upon scene intentions. New information must be revealed that drives the plot forward. The setting must be clear. In the short scene, you have even less room for narrative summary.
  • You're best using short scenes when you need to: Differentiate one character from another; Pick up the pace right after a long scene; Leave the reader hungry for more or breathless with suspense; Include multiple scenes within a chapter; Create a sense of urgency by dropping bits of information one by one, forcing the reader to keep reading.
  • Each scene needs to have its own beginning, middle, and end. The beginning should be vivid and memorable, and help immediately draw your reader into the scene. Scene middles are the vast territory where the stakes must be raised, characters get caught in conflict, and consequences follow that keep your plot interesting. Scene endings, of course, set the stage for the scenes that follow, and leave a feeling or taste with the reader that should be unforgettable.

Bibliography.

  • Jorden E. Rosenfeld, Make a Scene, Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time;
  • Sandra Scofield, The Scene Book, A Primer for the Fiction Writer;

The Big Scene

How do you get through the middle of your novel? By strategically positioning your novel's plot points to carry readers from start to finish. Every good novel uses obstacles and various small crises to build conflict and suspense. But plot points are bigger than these lesser crises; they are the scenes after which the plot pivots and moves in a different and more suspenseful direction. While any novel will have some form or lesser crisis in nearly every scene, it may have only three to six big scenes that lead up to the biggest scene of all--the climax.

After you've mapped out the essential story, use the five steps described here to make sure your novel moves, from minor crisis to big scene, connecting beginning to end. Together these steps allow you to continually foreshadow ever greater conflict, playing one big scene to the next, stepping up the suspense until you release your readers at the climax, satisfied and eager to read your next book.

Name the Big Scene.

Whether your big scene is as sweeping as the destruction of a village by a tsunami or as sweet as a first kiss, readers will look forward to it with dread and anticipation only if you alert them to the event's impending arrival. Let your narrative, character conversations, or internal thought speak of the coming big scene--and even name it.

Provide a preview scene.

In novels, we can be more subtle in creating previews that mirror big scenes or reflect their essence, signaling readers of what lies ahead. A preview scene also offers the author a chance to develop the explanations, details, or technicalities that would bog down the heightened drama and pace of a big scene.

Create a Contrasting Scene.

You might consider this step in negative/positive or positive/negative terms. If your big scene adds negativity to your characters' lives, then make the scene that precedes it positive, or vice versa. Usually this contrasting scene is short because the author begins to pick up the pace for the plot point that lurks just around the corner.

In contrasting scenes, readers feel the pressure building because something is going to happen. The contrasting scene is the calm before the storm, or the storm before the calm. You may think that your readers might lose interest by knowing exactly what's coming, but attentive readers know the big scene is just a page turn away. Reading the present, contrasting scene builds suspense and is nearly intolerable--it's the moment in the old-time monster movies when an audience member yells, "Don't open that door!"

The Big Scene.

When the much-anticipated scene arrives, you must execute your promise in full detail, which means you let your readers share thoughts and feelings of the point-of-view character, and everything that character smells, tastes, hears, touches, and sees. Make your reader feel what your character feels, whether that event involves saving a child, consummating love, grieving a death, or suffering an attack. In the life of your characters, each crisis is of monumental importance. Remember, no matter what kind of big scene you create, you must not deprive readers of its significance by glossing over it.

Disaster and Revelation.

All minor and major crises in a novel should end with a disaster and a revelation. Whether the disaster is implied or explicit, it does need to be clear so readers don't flounder along with your protagonist, not knowing which direction the plot is headed.

The revelation that follows each plot point won't change your overall story goal. That must remain the same from the inciting incident to the climax. What changes is the strategy pursued by the protagonist, which is what creates the plot pivot I mentioned in the opening. You can distinguish these bigger scenes from a smaller moment of crisis by checking to see if there's a revelation that changes the direction of the novel.

And if you leave out the revelation that delivers the meaning of the event to the protagonist, then you've left out characterization and you're asking readers to continue reading based on plot alone.

Linking It All Together.

By taking time to craft all the five steps in each of your book's big scenes and positioning your big scenes throughout the plot line, you ensure your reader suspense throughout your novel. Of course, you'll still have calm scenes, tender scenes, scenes of minor crisis and partial resolution. But beneath even these should be the drumbeat of tension and conflict, because readers will know that coming soon is the confrontation with Dad or the taking of the driving test or the breaking of the engagement or whatever scene you've casually named. They'll savor lessor crises and wonder how these foreshadowed the bigger ones.

Play with your plotting, looking for ways to keep your readers constantly caught in the web of suspense. Get as much work out of each step in a big scene as possible. But never skip a step. A story's sagging middle often comes from omitting the preview, the contrasting scene, or even the big scene itself! The first three steps work in concert to build a crescendo aimed at getting readers to the crisis with maximum dramatic impact. Omit any of them and your story will weaken.

Bibliography.

Meg Leder, Jack Heffron, and the Editors of Writer's Digest, The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing;

Hero's Journey

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
William Butler Yeats.

All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies. They are known collectively as The Hero's Journey.

At heart, despite its infinite variety, the hero's story is always a journey. A hero leaves his comfortable, ordinary surroundings to venture into a challenging, unfamiliar world. It may be an outward journey to an actual place: a labyrinth, forest or cave, a strange city or country, a new locale that becomes the arena for his conflict with antagonistic, challenging forces.

But there are as many stories that take the hero on an inward journey, one of the mind, the heart, the spirit. In any good story the hero grows and changes, making a journey from one way of being to the next: from despair to hope, weakness to strength, folly to wisdom, love to hate, and back again. It's these emotional journeys that hook readers and make a story worth watching.

The stages of the Hero's Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature "heroic" physical action and adventure. The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero's Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable and dependable.

THE STAGES OF THE HERO'S JOURNEY.

  1. Ordinary World;
  2. Call to Adventure;
  3. Refusal of the Call;
  4. Meeting with the Mentor;
  5. Crossing the First Threshold;
  6. Tests, Allies, Enemies;
  7. Approach to the Inmost Cave;
  8. Ordeal;
  9. Reward (Seizing the Sword);
  10. The Road Back;
  11. Resurrection;
  12. Return with the Elixir.

1. The Ordinary World.

Most stories take the hero out of the ordinary, mundane world into a Special World, new and alien. Roger is on board a ship in the Bay of Bengal; this is the Ordinary World.

2. The Call to Adventure.

The hero is presented with a problem, challenge, or adventure to undertake. Once presented with a Call to Adventure, he can no longer remain indefinitely in the comfort of the Ordinary World. The Call to Adventure establishes the stakes of the game, and makes clear the hero's goal: to win the treasure or the lover, to get revenge or right a wrong, to achieve a dream, confront a challenge, or change a life. What's at stake can often be expressed as a question posed by the call.

Roger's ship is captured by a privateer and is diverted to Mergen. He meets Samuel White, who offers him command of another privateer.

3. Refusal of the Call (The Reluctant Hero).

This one is about fear. Often at this point the hero balks at the threshold of adventure, Refusing the Call or expressing reluctance. After all, he is facing the greatest of all fears, terror of the unknown. The hero has not yet fully committed to the journey and may still be thinking of turning back. Some other influence--a change in circumstances, a further offense against the natural order of things, or the encouragement of the Mentor--is required to get him past this turning point of fear.

Roger refuses the offer and decides to travel to Ayuttaya to seek Phaulkon's help.

4. Mentor (The Wise Old Man or Woman).

By this time many stories will have introduced a Merlin-like character who is the hero's Mentor. The relationship between hero and Mentor is one of the most common themes in mythology, and one of the richest in its symbolic value. It stands for the bond between parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, god and man.

The function of Mentors is to prepare the hero to face the unknown. They may give advice, guidance or magical equipment. However, the Mentor can only go so far with the hero. Eventually the hero must face the unknown alone. Sometimes the Mentor is required to give the hero a swift kick in the pants to get the adventure going.

Phaulkon becomes a Mentor; he is a close friend of Roger's brother and promises to help him.

5. Crossing the First Threshold.

Now the hero finally commits to the adventure and fully enters the Special World of the story for the first time by Crossing the First Threshold. He agrees to face the consequences of dealing with the problem or challenge posed in the Call to Adventure. This is the moment the story takes off and the adventure really gets going. The balloon goes up, the ship sinks, the romance begins, the plane or the spaceship soars off, the wagon train gets rolling.

Movies are often built in three acts, which can be regarded as representing 1) the hero's decision to act, 2) the action itself, and 3) the consequences of the action. The First Threshold marks the turning point between Acts One and Two. The hero, having overcome fear, has decided to confront the problem and take action. He is now committed to the journey and there's no turning back.

In return, Phaulkon asks Roger to undertake a dangerous mission to Patani. Roger agrees, thus Crossing the First Threshold.

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies.

Once across the First Threshold, the hero naturally encounters new challenges and Tests, makes Allies and Enemies, and begins to learn the rules of the Special World.

Roger undergoes other tests, such as capturing the New Jerusalem, and takes part in suppressing the Makassar uprising. Makes allies and enemies, and learns the rules of the Special World.

7. Approach to the Inmost Cave.

The hero comes at last to the edge of a dangerous place, sometimes deep underground, where the object of the quest is hidden. Often it's the headquarters of the hero's greatest enemy, the most dangerous spot in the Special World, the Inmost Cave. When the hero enters that fearful place he will cross the second major threshold. Heroes often pause at the gate to prepare, plan, and outwit the villain's guards. This is the phase of Approach.

Approach covers all the preparations for entering the Inmost Cave and confronting death or supreme danger.

Roger assists Phaulkon in plotting to arrest Petracha and Sorasak.

8. The Ordeal.

Here the fortunes of the hero hit bottom in a direct confrontation with his greatest fear. He faces the possibility of death and is brought to the brink in a battle with a hostile force. The Ordeal is a "black moment" for the reader, as we are held in suspense and tension, not knowing if he will live or die.

This is a critical moment in any story, an Ordeal in which the hero must die or appear to die so that he can be born again. It's a major source of the magic of the heroic myth. The experiences of the preceding stages have led us, the reader, to identify with the hero and his fate. What happens to the hero happens to us. We are encouraged to experience the brink-of-death moment with him. Our emotions are temporarily depressed so that they can be revived by the hero's return from death. The result of this revival is a feeling of elation and exhaustion.

Every story needs such a life-or-death moment in which the hero or his goals are in moral jeopardy.

They enter Pra Narai's palace but are captured by Sorasak and his men. Phaulkon is murdered and Roger is thrown into prison.

9. Reward (Seizing the Sword).

Having survived death, beaten the dragon, or slain the Minotaur, hero and reader have cause to celebrate. The hero now takes possession of the treasure he has come seeking, his Reward. It might be a special weapon like a magic sword, or a token like the Grail or some elixir which can heal the wounded land.

From the hero's point of view, members of the opposite sex may appear to be Shapeshifters, an archetype of change. They seem to shift constantly in form or age, reflecting the confusing and constantly changing aspects of the opposite sex. Tales of vampires, werewolves and other shapechangers are symbolic echoes of this shifting quality which men and women see in each other.

The hero's Ordeal may grant a better understanding of the opposite sex, an ability to see beyond the shifting outer appearance, leading to a reconciliation.

The hero may also become more attractive as a result of having survived the Ordeal. He has earned the title of "hero" by having taken the supreme risk on behalf of the community.

Petch rescues Roger and tells him that Phaulkon is dead. They hurry to warn Lady Guimar, Wanlapa and Maria Osaki, and hide Phaulkon's treasure.

10. The Road Back.

The hero's not out of the woods yet. We're crossing into Act Three now as the hero begins to deal with the consequences of confronting the dark forces of the Ordeal. If he has not yet managed to reconcile with the parent, the gods, or the hostile forces, they may come raging after him.

This stage marks the decision to return to the Ordinary World. The hero realizes that the Special World must eventually be left behind, and there are still dangers, temptations, and tests ahead.

Roger, Petch, and the women flee to Bangkok, hoping to find protection with the French.

11. Resurrection.

The hero who has been to the realm of the dead must be reborn and cleansed in one last Ordeal of death and Resurrection before returning to the Ordinary World of the living.

This is often a second life-and-death moment, almost a replay of the death and rebirth of the Ordeal. Death and darkness get in one last, desperate shot before being finally defeated. It's a kind of final exam for the hero, who must be tested once more to see if he has really learned the lessons of the Ordeal.

The hero is transformed by these moments of death-and-rebirth, and is able to return to ordinary life reborn as a new being with new insights.

Sorasak gives chase to the fugitives. Lady Guimar is betrayed by the French commander.

12. Return with the Elixir.

The hero returns to the Ordinary World, but the journey is meaningless unless he brings back some Elixir, treasure, or lesson from the Special World. The Elixir is a magic potion with the power to heal. It may be a great treasure like the Grail that magically heals the wounded land, or it simply might be knowledge or experience that could be useful to the community someday.

Sometimes the Elixir is treasure won on the quest, but it may be love, freedom, wisdom, or the knowledge that the Special World exists and can be survived. Sometimes it's just coming home with a good story to tell.

Unless something is brought back from the Ordeal in the Inmost Cave, the hero is doomed to repeat the adventure.

Maria Osaki takes Lady Guimar's place and is surrendered to Sorasak instead. Roger and Wanlapa escape in their sloop to Mergen, taking Lady Guimar and her child with them. Petch returns to Ayuttaya to be with Maria Osaki.

THE ARCHETYPES.

In the world of fairy tales and myths, there are recurring types and relationships: questing heroes, heralds who call them to adventure, wise old men and women who give them magical gifts, threshold guardians who seem to block their way, shapeshifting fellow travelers who confuse and dazzle them, shadowy villains who try to destroy them, tricksters who upset the status quo and provide comic relief.

Looking at the archetypes as flexible character functions rather than rigid character types can liberate your storytelling. It explains how a character in a story can manifest the qualities of more than one archetype. The archetypes can be thought of as masks, worn by the characters temporarily as they are needed to advance the story. A character might enter the story performing the function of a herald, then switch masks to function as a trickster, a mentor, and a shadow. Another way to look at the classic archetypes is that they are facets of the hero's (or the writer's) personality. The other characters represent possibilities for the hero, for good or ill. A hero sometimes proceeds through the story gathering and incorporating the energy and traits of the other characters. He learns from the other characters, fusing them into a complete human being who has picked up something from everyone he has met along the way.

HERO.

Dramatic Identification: The dramatic purpose of the Hero is to give the reader a window into the story. Each person reading a novel is invited, in the early stages of the story, to identify with the Hero, to merge with him and see the world of the story through his eyes. Storytellers do this by giving their Heroes a combination of qualities, a mix of universal and unique characteristics.

Heroes should have universal qualities, emotions, and motivations that everyone has experienced at one time or another: revenge, anger, lust, competition, territoriality, patriotism, idealism, cynicism, or despair. But Heroes must also be unique human beings, rather than stereotypical creatures or tin gods without flaws or unpredictability. Like any work of art they need both universality and originality.

A well-rounded Hero can be determined, uncertain, charming, forgetful, impatient, and strong in body but weak at heart, all at the same time. It's the particular combination of qualities that gives an audience the sense that the Hero is one of a kind, a real person rather than a type.

Growth: Another story function of the Hero is learning or growth. Heroes overcome obstacles and achieve goals, but they also gain new knowledge and wisdom. The heart of many stories is the learning that goes on between a Hero and a mentor, or a Hero and a lover, or even between a Hero and a villain. We are all each other's teachers.

Action: Another heroic function is acting or doing. The Hero is usually the most active person in the novel. His will and desire is what drives most stories forward. The Hero should perform the decisive action of the story, the action that requires taking the most risk or responsibility.

Sacrifice: People commonly think of Heroes as strong or brave, but these qualities are secondary to sacrifice--the true mark of a Hero. Sacrifice is the Hero's willingness to give up something of value, perhaps even his own life, on behalf of an ideal or a group.

Dealing with Death: At the heart of every story is a confrontation with death. If the Hero doesn't face actual death, then there is the threat of death or symbolic death in the form of a high-stakes game, love affair, or adventure in which the Hero may succeed (live) or fail (die).

True heroism is shown in stories when Heroes offer themselves on the altar of chance, willing to take the risk that their quest for adventure may lead to danger, loss, or death.

The most effective Heroes are those who experience sacrifice. They may give up a loved one or friend along the way. They may give up some cherished vice or eccentricity as the price of entering into a new way of life. They may return some of their winnings or share what they have gained in the Special World. They may return to their starting point, the tribe or village, and bring back boons, elixirs, food, or knowledge to share with the rest of the group.

Character Flaws: Interesting flaws humanize a character. We can recognize bits of ourselves in a Hero who is challenged to overcome inner doubts, errors in thinking, guilt or trauma from the past, or fear of the future. Weaknesses, imperfections, quirks, and vices immediately make a Hero or any character more real and appealing. It seems the more neurotic characters are, the more readers like them and identify with them.

Flaws also give a character somewhere to go--the "character arc" in which a character develops from condition A to condition Z through a series of steps. Flaws are a starting point of imperfection or incompleteness from which a character can grow. They may be deficiencies in a character. Perhaps a Hero has no romantic partner, and is looking for the "missing piece" to complete his life. This is often symbolized in fairy tales by having the Hero experience a loss or death in the family. Many fairy tales begin with the death of a parent or the kidnapping of a brother or sister. This subtraction from the family unit sets the nervous energy of the story in motion, not to stop until the balance has been restored by the creation of a new family or the reuniting of the old.

In most modern stories it is the Hero's personality that is being recreated or restored to wholeness. The missing piece may be a critical element of personality such as the ability to love or trust. Heroes may have to overcome some problem such as lack of patience or decisiveness. Readers love watching Heroes grapple with personality problems and overcome them.

MENTOR: WISE OLD MAN OR WOMAN.

An archetype found frequently in dreams, myths, and stories is the Mentor, usually a positive figure who aids or trains the hero. This archetype is expressed in all those characters who teach and protect heroes and give them gifts.

Dramatic Functions

Teaching: Teaching or training is a key function of the Mentor. Of course the teaching can go both ways.

Gift-Giving: Giving gifts is also an important function of this archetype. It may be a magic weapon, an important key or clue, some magical medicine or food, or a life-saving piece of advice. Nowadays the gift is as likely to be a computer code as the key to a dragon's lair.

Gifts Should Be Earned: Donor characters give magical presents to heroes, but usually only after the heroes have passed a test of some kind. This is a good rule of thumb: The gift or help of the donor should be earned by learning, sacrifice, or commitment.

The Hero's Conscience: Some Mentors perform a special function as a conscience for the hero, though the hero may rebel against a nagging conscience.

Motivation: Another important function of the Mentor archetype is to motivate the hero, and help him overcome fear. In some cases a hero is so unwilling or fearful that he must be pushed into the adventure. A Mentor may need to give a hero a swift kick in the pants in order to get the adventure rolling.

Planting: A function of the Mentor Archetype is often to plant information or a prop that will become important later.

Sexual Initiation: In the realm of love, the Mentor's function may be to initiate us into the mysteries of love or sex. Seducers and thieves of innocence teach heroes lessons the hard way. There may be a shadow side to Mentors who lead a hero down a dangerous road of obsessive love or loveless, manipulative sex.

Multiple Mentors: A hero may be trained by a series of Mentors who teach specific skills.

Placement of Mentors: Although the Hero's Journey often finds the Mentor appearing in Act One, the placement of a Mentor in a story is a practical consideration. They may show up early in a story, or wait in the wings until needed at a critical moment in Act Two or Act Three.

Points to Ponder.

  • Testing of the hero is the primary dramatic function of the Threshold Guardian. When heroes confront one of these figures, they must solve a puzzle or pass a test.
  • Heralds provide a motivation, offer the hero a challenge, and get the story rolling. They alert the hero (and the reader) that change and adventure are coming.
  • The Herald may be a person or a force. The coming of a storm or the first tremors of the earth may be a Herald of adventure. Often the Herald is simply a means of bringing news to the hero of a new energy that will change the balance. It could be a telegram or a phone call.
  • Heroes frequently encounter figures, often of the opposite sex, whose primary characteristic is that they appear to change constantly from the hero's point of view. Often the hero's love interest or romantic partner will manifest the qualities of a Shapeshifter.
  • Shapeshifters change appearance or mood, and are difficult for the hero and reader to pin down. They may mislead the hero or keep him guessing, and their loyalty or sincerity is often in question. An Ally or friend of the same sex as the hero may also act as a Shapeshifter in a buddy comedy or adventure.
  • The Shapeshifter serves the dramatic function of bringing doubt and suspense into a story. When heroes keep asking, "Is she faithful to me? Is she going to betray me? Does she truly love me? Is he an ally or an enemy?" a Shapeshifter is generally present.
  • A common type of Shapeshifter is called the femme fatale, the woman as temptress or destroyer.
  • Every hero needs both an inner and an outer problem.
  • How the reader first experiences your hero is another important condition you control as a storyteller. What is he doing the first time we see him, when he makes his entrance? What is he wearing, who is around him, and how do they react to him? What is his attitude, emotion, and goal at the moment? Does he enter alone or join a group, or is he already on stage when the story begins? Does he narrate the story, is it told through the eyes of another character, or is it seen from the objective eye of conventional narrative?
  • It can be very effective to show that a hero is unable to perform some simple task at the beginning of the story.
  • Fairy tale heroes have a common denominator, a quality that unites them across boundaries of culture, geography, and time. They are lacking something, or something is taken away from them. Often they have just lost a family member. Fairy tales are about searching for completeness and striving for wholeness, and often it's a subtraction from the family unit that sets the story in motion.
  • Heroes may possess many admirable qualities, but among them is one tragic flaw or hamartia that puts them at odds with their destiny, their fellow men, or the gods. Ultimately this leads to their destruction. Most commonly this tragic flaw was a kind of pride or arrogance called hubris. This fatal arrogance inevitably unleashes a force called Nemesis, originally a goddess of retribution.
  • Sometimes a hero may seem to be well-adjusted and in control, but that control masks a deep psychic wound. To humanize a hero or any character, give him a wound, a visible, physical injury or a deep emotional wound. The wound makes him edgy, suicidal, unpredictable, and interesting. Your hero's wounds and scars mark the areas in which he is guarded, defensive, weak, and vulnerable. A hero may also be extra-strong in some areas as a defense for the wounded parts.
  • For readers to be involved in the adventure, to care about the hero, they have to know at an early stage exactly what's at stake. In other words, what does the hero stand to gain or lose in the adventure? What will be the consequences for the hero, society, and the world if the hero succeeds or fails?
  • The Ordinary World is the place to state the theme of your story. What is the story really about? If you had to boil down its essence to a single word or phrase, what would it be? What single idea or quality is it about? Love? Trust? Betrayal? Vanity? Prejudice? Greed? Madness? Ambition? Friendship? What are you trying to say? Is your theme "Love conquers all," "You can't cheat an honest man," "We must work together to survive," or "Money is the root of all evil.?"

Bibliography:

  • Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces;
  • Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd. Edition;

First Draft

Dramatic Writing

Master Techniques--Fire in Fiction

Notes from The Fire in the Fiction, passion, purpose, and techniques to make your novel great by Donald Maas.

I've found this book to be a great resource when revising a first draught. By that time, you should have absorbed the basic rules of writing; this book goes a step further and explains the stuff you didn't know or have always wondered about. You can use it as a check list of all the points to be aware of; hopefully, with experience, all these points will become part of your repertoire which you can take into consideration as second nature.

Protagonists vs. Heroes.

  • Average Joes, Jane Does, and Dark Protagonists.
  • Cutting Heroes Down to Size.
  • Greatness.
  • Protagonists vs. Heroes.

Characters Who Matter.

  • Special.
  • Ordinary.
  • Antagonists.

Scenes That Can't Be Cut.

  • Outer and Inner Turning Points.
  • Dialogue.
  • Striding Forward, Falling Back.
  • First Lines, Last Lines.
  • The Tornado Effect.

The World of the Novel.

  • Linking Details and Emotions.
  • Measuring Change Over Time.
  • History is Personal.
  • Seeing Through Characters' Eyes.
  • Conjuring a Milieu.
  • Setting as a Character.

A Singular Voice.

  • Giving Characters Voice.
  • Details and Delivery.
  • Different Ways of Relating a Story.

Making the Impossible Real.

  • The Skeptical Reader.
  • Making Characters Afraid.
  • Focus on Villains.
  • Verisimilitude: Pseudoscience, Genuine Facts.
  • Scary Monsters.

Hyperreality.

  • The Secrets of Satire.
  • Funny People, Funny Places.
  • Sending up Society.
  • Funny Voices.

Tension All the Time.

  • Tension in Dialogue.
  • Tension in Action.
  • Tension in Exposition.
  • Transforming Low-Tension Traps.
  • Tension Where There is None.

The Fire in the Fiction.

  • Our Common Experience.
  • Our Uncommon Experience.
  • The Moral of the Story.
  • The Fire in the Fiction.

I. Protagonists vs. Heroes

There are many ways to turn a protagonist into a hero, a human being with extraordinary qualities.

  • When the protagonist is your average Joe Doe there is no particular reason we should care for him; to make this happen, add the secret ingredient, tension. Look at the opening lines: When you remember those times, they return to you in a series of photographs. (Thomas H. Cook, Red Leaves.) The narrator is speaking of happy times; by implication, the present is unhappy. What went wrong? Before we can even formulate the question we are reading ahead to find out, and Cook tells us.
  • In Sue Miller’s While I Was Gone, close to the opening her heroine Jo says: I knew he could console me, but consolation wasn’t what I felt I wanted. What does Jo want? Miller doesn’t say, but clearly it is more than just talking things over. By implication, Jo feels an urge to do something. She wants to take positive action. Without stating so explicitly, Miller hints that Jo wants to bring her past to light and find a way to move beyond it. The longing for positive change is a strength that we all can understand. That longing is understated, a fleeting impulse. But that is all it takes. It is a shaft of light in the darkness. It’s the hint that opens our hearts, and the one that many novelists leave out.
  • What if your protagonist is imperfect, even a person others do not like? Outsiders, outcasts and pariahs are plentiful in contemporary fiction. That’s nice, but too often the flaws are fatal. Quickly turned off, the reader finds little reason to continue reading. The way out is to establish quickly that our hero, despite the imperfections, is both human and caring.
  • Sometimes the protagonist is downright unpleasant. Why should we read about someone so despicable? The author must capture the reader quickly and make him care about a hero who deserves our scorn. But how? Perhaps it’s the funny side of the narrator’s self-deprecation, the pathos of being ill-treated as a child, the self-loathing that he feels. To put it differently, the protagonist has achieved self-awareness. He judges himself harshly, but even so he is open-eyed. He knows he is not perfect and we have to respect that. He is brutally funny about himself. His voice rings clear and strong.
  • What about protagonists who are simply lost, wandering, down-and-out, or without hope? Anxious to delve into their suffering, their authors forget to give the reader a reason to wish them free of it. How does the author make us care? There is only one way: We must feel compassion, and quickly, for his hero. Even the hopeless man has something to hope for, a cause to chase, a reason to push on, someone to save. In the gray wasteland, his human spirit lives.
  • Here, then, is some good news. The techniques of putting over dark protagonists are applicable to all protagonists. Find the secret strength in your character, and it won’t matter whether you are working with a hero or an anti-hero. Your readers will bond with you.

Cutting Heroes Down to Size

Genuine heroes present as big a challenge as downers.

  • If the protagonist is a kick-ass heroine of the type who dominates contemporary women’s suspense, outspoken, opinionated, take no you-know-what, got a big chip on her shoulder, then we need to see the other side of her. The author has to show that she’s not perfect; that she knows it, admits it, and at least a little regrets it. At this point we don’t need to know what the argument was about, or with whom, we just need to know that she is human. She is not the embodiment of an impossible ideal. She has personal problems, just like everyone. By quickly cutting the heroine down to size, the author makes her not only real but a character who has room for change; that, in turn, signals to us that there also is a story to come.
  • Sometimes the author immediately lets us know that the protagonist is not a superhero. What makes him appealing despite his all-too-typical psychological flaw is the self-deprecating humor that the author gives him. At least the guy can laugh at himself. If he’d been too perfect, cardboard, an example none of us could live up to, we’d already be pulling away from him. Wounded heroes and heroines are easy to overdo. Too much baggage and angst isn’t exactly a party invitation for one’s readers. What’s the best balance? And which comes first, the strength or the humility? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that one is quickly followed by the other.

Greatness

What makes a protagonist not only a hero, but great? Indeed, what is greatness? Perhaps we might agree on one effect of greatness: impact. Great people do not leave the world unchanged. Great characters similarly stir readers and stay with them. Is it possible to construct this effect? How?

It’s tricky. Fiction has little impact when it is timid, cliché ridden, uneventful, and formulaic. The same is true of characters. Stereotypes have little impact. They fail to engage us because we don’t believe them. Great characters are especially prone to this problem. If you create someone who is made of goodness, lives by high principles, performs actions of high valor, and is pretty much perfect, then your reader’s reaction is likely to be a sneering yeah, right!

  • Fortunately, you don’t have to create a paragon in order to conjure greatness. An aura of greatness comes foremost not from who a given character may be, but from the profound impact that character has on others. It is not strictly necessary for a character to have done anything at all for their effect on others to be apparent.
  • Most telling of all is another person’s awed surprise at finding himself in the presence of the great man. That is impact. It’s key is not the great man himself but the people around him. They, in a sense, make him great. Is your protagonist great? In establishing him at the outset, it is important to look not toward what he will do later in the story but the impact he has on others now. No doubt his actions will speak; but who in your hero’s circle already has respect, feels awe, so that we can feel it too?

Points to Ponder:

  • Who is at the center of your novel, a protagonist or a hero? Is he merely the subject of the story, or a real human being with extraordinary qualities? I hope it is the latter.
  • Every protagonist can be a hero, even from the opening pages. Indeed, that quality is essential if readers are to tag along with your main character for hundreds of pages more.
  • It doesn’t matter whether your intent is to portray someone real or someone heroic. To make either type matter to your readers, you need only find in your real human being what is strong, and in your strong human being what is real. Even greatness can be signaled from the outset.
  • How do you find the strong or human qualities in your protagonist? What will be most effective to portray? The answer to those questions lies in you, the author. What is forgivably human to you? What stirs your respect? That is where to start?
  • Next, when will you show the readers those qualities in your hero? Later on? That is too late. Why keep readers at arm’s length?
  • Novels are unique among art forms in their intimacy. They can take us inside a character’s heart and mind right away. And when you do, show us what you’re hero is made of. If you accomplish that , then the job of winning us over is done.

II. Characters Who Matter.

Secondary characters in published fiction often are weak. Supporting players are too often forgettable, as well. They walk on and walk off, making no particular impression. What wasted opportunities, especially when you consider that secondary characters aren’t born, they are built. So, how can you construct a secondary character whom readers will never forget?

Special.

Suppose you want a character to be special. You want this character to have stature, allure, or a significant history with your protagonist. How is that effect achieved? The eternal problem is the making of a character singular. Is there any description of beauty so effective that it would make anyone swoon? Is there a sexual allure that can seduce everyone who opens a book? Making a character uniquely compelling for all readers is pretty much impossible. What is beautiful, seductive, and dangerous for me may well be laughable to you. What is possible is to make momentous the effect of one character upon another. As with greatness, creating a feeling that a character is special is a matter of measuring her impact.

  • What is it that makes a woman beautiful? Her black skirt, dark gray silk blouse, and red lipstick? Her black crocheted shawl? Um, that doesn’t scream siren to me. No, rather it is the aura of light that the hero sees surrounding her. Would you or I see it? Maybe, maybe not. But the hero sees it, and his perception is what counts.
  • Sometimes the hero has to sway us with a heartfelt declaration of love. “Do you know what it’s like to love someone so much, that you can’t see yourself without picturing her? Or what it’s like to touch someone, and feel like you’ve come home?” It’s clear that to the hero, the woman was someone special.
  • How is it, then, that protagonists in many manuscripts seem to live in blissful isolation, self-sufficient, wholly self-made, and dependent on no one? Who are these people? They are not real. Consequently they are also unreal for readers. If they are to keep us deeply involved for several hundred pages, protagonists need a personal history.
  • Who in your story has a special stature? Is there an influential teacher, a spouse, a past love, a friend of long standing, a wizard at math, an egotistical-but-gifted auto mechanic? Is there a character in your story who could be given such elevated importance? It isn’t that difficult to do. Explore the effect that this paragon has on your protagonist, then find a meaningful moment for that effect to be expressed.
  • Singular human beings may be rare in life, but this is fiction. You can build them as needed. Who knows? You might even construct for yourself a whole new incarnation of the femme fatale.

Ordinary

Part of the gift of steady people in your life is precisely that they are steady. You don’t have to worry about them. That’s fine in life, but in fiction, characters who remain unexamined will be forgettable, even bland.

  • Contrast is the operating principle in creating sidekicks. The obvious contrast to the hero would be his philosophical opposite: a skeptic or scientific type, say, or serious, goal-driven, unlike the lackadaisical hero; their relationship would not be easy but instead knotty.
  • Another principle of effective sidekicks is making them human. That means giving them conflicts. But what kinds of conflicts? Ah. Author’s answers to that question are telling indicators that divide run-of-the-mill writers from true storytellers. One sidekick could be searching for a connection, another struggling with her family, which not only provide extra plot layers, but make human two people who could be too easily stereotyped.
  • Sidekicks can be regular folk (although different than expected and three-dimensional, we hope) or they can be eccentrics. It’s a matter of choice and what serves the story, but if you’re using misfits or originals, there are issues for you to consider. For oddballs and misfits to come across in a sea of secondary characters, they must be genuinely eccentric. But that comes with a problem: Such characters are hard to swallow. We won’t buy them unless they are carefully and convincingly constructed, and remain true to their weirdo selves. That’s not easy to do.
    What about you? How much development have you done of your sidekicks and other secondary characters? Do they provide contrast, yet also counter our expectations? Are they real and human, beset by conflicts with which we can identify? If eccentric, are they genuinely and deeply strange? In what ways? And are those ways justified and detailed?

Antagonists.

Cardboard villains never work. Far from frightening us, they generally have us rolling our eyes. Unchallenged by doubt, free of obstacles, never set back, blessed with infinite time and resources, able to work their nefarious schemes on a part-time basis (or that’s how it seems), these villains strike us as unrealistic and therefore silly.

  • Even worse can be stories in which there is no villain as such. Literary fiction, women’s fiction, romances, and coming-of-age tales are just a few types of stories that do not necessarily call for a classic wrongdoer. Even so, those who oppose the protagonist are often poorly developed and inactive. Lacking strong resistance, one wonders why the protagonist is having a hard time. It is possible to build conflict out of internal obstacles, of course, but over the long haul it’s wearisome and hard to maintain readers’ interest that way.
  • People are the most fascinating source of obstacles: that means antagonists, those who work against your protagonist. They can be active opponents or even friendly allies who cast doubt upon your protagonist’s actions or undermine his resolve.
  • Do you go through your days without experiencing friction from others? I doubt it. Do you have ongoing problem people in your daily routine, possibly even active enemies? If you do, then you know that those who oppose you are not easily deterred, and they may even have the best of intentions. Have you ever noticed how your critics are eager to help you? They willingly share what they see as wrong with you and have valuable suggestions for your improvement. Our enemies do not hide.
  • There’s no villain so scary as one who is right.
  • Not all protagonists are creepy or bad. Some are as human as a novel’s protagonist. The power of a three-dimensional antagonist is the power to sway our hearts in directions we would not expect them to be swayed to get us to see, even accept, the antagonist’s point of view. You may not want your story to be neutral. You may embrace a right and a wrong and write an outcome that makes your values obvious. That is your choice. At the same time, a wholly black-and-white story cannot engage us very deeply. The deck is too stacked, the players too shallow to stir or scare us in memorable ways. Whatever your intention, it’s worth investing time in your antagonist, opening up his unexpected sides, justifying his actions and even making him right. That only adds to the drama.

III. Scenes that Can't be Cut

  • Middles are tough. Too many middles in novels are routine, lackluster, just there, nothing special. What goes wrong? Is it poor focus? Is it a blank spot in an outline? Were these ho-hum scenes written on rainy afternoons when inspiration was lacking?
  • Many sagging middle scenes slump the way they do not because of bad planning or bad luck but because their purpose hasn’t emerged. Authors, as they plow through the middle portion of their manuscripts, tend to write what they think ought to come next; furthermore, they write it in the first way it occurs to them to do so. In successive drafts such scenes tend to stay in place, little altered. Unsure what to do, an author may leave a scene in place because… well, just because.
  • What can you do to fire up your middles? To answer that question, it’s first helpful to realize that every scene set down by an author usually has a reason to be. The author may not grasp the reason yet, but the impulse to portray this particular moment, this particular meeting, this particular action, springs from the deep well of dreams from which stories are drawn.
  • This scene has a point. The task is to draw that purpose out. How? Changing the words on the page won’t work. It’s the whole scene that needs to be explored again. Scene revision is less a matter of expression and more a way of seeing.
  • To re-envision a scene, look away from the page and look toward what is really happening. What change takes place? When does that change occur (at what precise second in the scene)? In that moment, how is the point-of-view character changed? The point of those questions is to find the scenes’ turning points.
  • Having identified the turning points, you will find focusing the scene becomes easier. Everything else on the page either contributes to, or leads readers away from, those changes. All the extra stuff—the nifty scene setting, clever character bits, artful lead-ins and lead-outs—are now expendable, or perhaps they are tools to help selectively enact the scene’s main purpose.

Outer and Inner Turning Points

  • Every change (which, after all, is the reason to include a scene in the first place) has two dimensions: 1) The way in which things change that everyone can understand; 2) the way in which the scene’s point-of-view character also changes as a result. To put it plainly, scenes work best when they have both outer and inner turning points.
  • In most manuscripts, tasks like these defeat their authors. Arriving somewhere, introducing people, and creating atmosphere are almost always low-tension traps. Scene after scene of slogging middle are taken up with getting the players and pieces in place so that something neato can happen later. So construct scenes in ways that make them matter.
  • This is the scene’s turning point: the moment when the protagonist’s fortunes take a turn. It could be a low moment, as when set up for new friends, the hero’s been let down by a trick. That realization is the demarcation point, the precise moment when things change. That would be good enough to give the scene shape, but turning points have both outer and inner components.
  • The hero longs to be like the others. This sudden ache is the inner change, the surfacing recognition that she needs friends. There is also an outward consequence: something happens and the hero’s life takes a fateful turn.
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini spans the Soviet occupation years, the Taliban era, and beyond. In addition to portraying the condition of Afghan women, Hosseini also wants to convey some of the magnificence of Afghanistan’s history.
  • Uh-oh. Portraying the majestic sweep of history is often a recipe for lengthy self-indulgence and low tension. How to do it right? The characters go to see the enormous twin Buddhas at Bamiyan. One their way from Kabul, one of them shouts taunts at passing Soviet tanks. Later, they see the remnants of many invasions. Their driver remarks: “And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another…Macedonians. Sassasians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets.” Many writers would let it go at that, but Hosseini knows that travelogue and story are not the same. One of the characters reveals something shocking: “As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it.” And that adds an element of tension to the day and the novel, and is the scene’s turning point for the hero. Her future now could be extremely different, possibly in a different land.
  • Hosseini also knows that every outer turning point has an inner counterpart. That occurs at the end of the chapter. The hero realizes that she loves Tariq. Hosseini thus accomplishes several things at once: He conveys the hero’s inner turning point, sets a larger conflict, and connects the violent history of Afghanistan directly to the lives of his characters. Not bad for a scene that began as a sightseeing trip. The scene advances the story but does so not through the mild action of visiting an historic site but by using that site as a springboard for twin turning points. (Petch visits Maria Osaki at the Portuguese settlement.)

Dialogue

  • Dialogue not only needs to do its own work, it also can bring clarity to middle scenes that would otherwise be muddy and inactive. Dialogue is strong (or can be). The process of stripping it down and finding the tension in it can be revealing. It can help define the purpose of a scene.
  • The dialogue should be kept short. The exchange doesn’t have to be rat-a-tat, but even so it’s quick. There’s tension between the speakers, however rudimentary it may be. Consider, too, what this snippet of the novel has to accomplish: it has to show that the hero is one thing, while the other character is not, and reveal a morsel of information about a third person, say.
  • We don’t have to be on one side or the other. By remaining objective, with dialogue, the author leaves the choice to us. More to the point, a sloggy and potentially off-putting middle scene has become taut and dramatic.
  • How many of your dragging middle scenes could be tightened and torqued up with dialogue? How tight is your dialogue generally? Is it lean and mean or is it choked with incidental action and lengthy attributive? Strip it down. Pump it up. Taut dialogue is one of the secrets of making sure that middle scenes are not candidates for cutting.

Striding Forward, Falling Back

  • Each scene has to have a strong structure. Each one needs to advance the story a step. How do you do that? By identifying goals and making sure that every element in every scene in some way makes the goal more likely or more remote. The author has to understand his characters, know how to fix them in any given moment, understand what they want, make that clear to his readers, and then keep us in suspense about the immediate outcome.
  • Step-by-step scene building is the business of advancing toward goals or away from them. Striding forward or falling back or simply playing with our expectations… it doesn’t matter. What’s importance is that each scene keeps moving. Toward what? Answer that question and you will find a scene’s purpose.

First Lines, Last Lines

  • Does it matter what is the last line of your scene, or the first? Apparently, many authors do not think it does. Most last and first lines in manuscript scenes are quite forgettable. That’s a shame. Like a handshake, an opening and closing line can create impressions and expectations. They can set a tone. They can signal where we’re going, or what we’ve done, or serve any number of other useful story purposes.
  • First and last lines need not be fancy. Even a utilitarian line can work well if it yanks us straight into, or amplifies, a scene’s main action.
  • What about your first and last lines? Suppose you did a first line/last line draft, doing nothing but honing the bookends of every scene in your manuscript. Would those little changes give your story a bigger and more effective shape?

The Tornado Effect

  • Novels need events. Things need to happen: little things, big things. Especially big things. Big events shake protagonists, change the course of lives, and stay in readers’ memories.
  • What is a big event? Is it only the kind of thing that makes the six o’clock news? Can it be an interior shift; a realization of the truth, say, that has a seismic jolt? Two truths of storytelling are: 1) Most novels don’t have enough big events; 2) What makes an event big is not its size but the scope of its effect.
  • To put it another way, a big narrative event is one that affects not just one’s protagonist, but everyone in a story. Making an event big, then, is not so much a matter of dreaming up a natural disaster (useful as that can be) but rather measuring an event’s impact on more than a few characters.
  • What is the Big Event in your current manuscript? How many people does it change? How many of those changes do you portray? To create the Tornado Effect, you will need to portray all of them. It’s extra work but the extra impact will be worth it.

IV. The World of the Novel.

  • In certain fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.
  • Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, it doesn’t seem that anyone can say exactly how to do it.
  • Obviously, merely describing how things look, sound, taste, feel, and smell is not, by itself, going to bring a location to life. Something more is required. The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is unique for your character, if not for you. You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your character’s experience.
  • In other words, you must instill the soul of a place into your characters’ hearts and make them grapple with it as surely as they grapple with the main problem and their enemies. How do you do that?

Linking Details and Emotions.

  • You remember what you remember about a place not because of the details themselves or the emotions they invoke in you, but because both those details and personal feelings are present. In other words, it is the combination of setting details and the emotions attached to them that, together, make a place a living thing. Setting comes alive partly in its details and partly in the way that the story’s characters experience it. Either element alone is fine, but both working together deliver a sense of place without parallel.
  • Is there anything more evocative of summer than Victorian homes with their wide verandas, wide lawns, gingerbread trim, and bright colors? The promise of badminton, lawn parties, and lacy parasols has probably seduced more homeowners into the money pit than any other style of architecture.
  • The details stand out because they are made highly specific: S’mores not just any old way but the Livingston way, charades not in the living room but on the beach, croquet played not simply at length but until sunset on the year’s longest day. These details are not generic. They are the particular memories of a protagonist who has lived them.
  • Look at how much we can learn about a character in these few lines: he once hated the lake but came back at forty, there’s a cloud in his past, plus he owed something to his father. No wonder John likes the loons. Compared to all that messy stuff the loons are simple. He longs for what is complicated. Family, flight, fog, cold, long, and contentment just out of reach… What is the author up to here? Is she setting the scene? Yes, but more than that she is building a metaphor for her protagonist’s precarious inner state.
  • Make both the specific images and the strong emotions work together. Don’t cobble the elements together but instead make them form a unity of man and nature, lake and loneliness, longing and peace. Scene openings are generally a no-no unless you can rapidly bring the world of the story alive.

Measuring Change Over Time.

  • There are other ways to bring setting alive. One of them is to measure the change in a place over time. Of course, most places don’t change much—only the people observing them do.
  • Who knew that the change of seasons could be measured by visions of Popsicles and cutoffs? By showing the reader the minute seasonal changes that a native of the place would notice, the author nails spring as seen by the hero. But that’s not all. This spring, the hero’s “breathless anticipation” is replaced by dread. The contrast is jarring—in a good way.
  • Leaf blowers, crew-neck sweaters, empty roads heading to the beach… the author uses these details to delineate the change in her protagonist’s perception of a place. There is emotion, as well; specifically, the hero’s inadequacy in knowing how to protect her now nearly grown daughter and her inability to let go, even now as the turning season demands it.
  • These two passes describing spring and autumn on either end of the novel are one of the ways in which the author creates a sense of dynamic movement—movement that doesn’t depend on plot. By measuring change by minute degrees the author not only heightens the tension in the hero’s dilemma but also amplifies the world of the story in ways that make it inseparable from her hero.
    History is Personal.
  • Historical novelists think a lot about what makes the period of their novels different than ours. They research it endlessly. Indeed, many historical novelists say that is their favorite part of the process. When the research is done and writing begins, though, how specifically do they create a sense of the times on the page. With details is the common answer, but which details, exactly, and how many of them?
  • Does everyone see their times in the same way? No. outlooks vary. That should also be true for your fictional characters. What is your hero’s take on their times? As in so many aspects of novel construction, creating a sense of times first requires filtering the world through your characters.
  • The author weaves an undercurrent of tension through these two paragraphs, a tension that derives from the hero’s mother’s longing for… well, what? Paris is dissatisfying. Venice, seemingly untouched by the war, is full of sunlight and memories. A mood of nostalgia would be enough here, but the author himself is not satisfied with a mere rosy glow. Venice is “improbable” and Grace’s lift of spirit is tinged with doubt: “She thought she might be happy again.”
  • That word “might” is a calculated choice. Do you get the feeling that the hero’s mother will not re-create in Venice the happiness of the pre-war party of the 1920s and 1930s? You are correct.
  • The opening also effectively evokes Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. Paris is “grim” and “grumbling.” The author mentions not just the city’s streets, cafés, and markets, but the flat on the “Rue du Bac” and the market on the “Raspail.” For all we know, the author could be completely making up those places. It doesn’t matter. It is their specificity that brings this Paris of good shortages and long memories alive.
  • Venice, by contrast, is full o f false sunlight and sweet memories. These memories themselves are highly specific: afternoon on the Lido, striped changing huts, Cole Porter. The author plucks from his research a few choice tidbits that hint at a life of gay carelessness and privilege. His narrator’s familiarity with them contributes to the passage’s reality. But it’s not only that. The details and the mood, the hero’s mother’s long and the hero’s cynical foreknowledge all roll together into a couple of paragraphs that create a unique moment of time.
  • Aim for the mixture of specific details of the place, as well as the character’s taut emotions, that together make this historical moment vivid and real. Also, note that the level of the historical detail that is mixed in could be very little, just a couple of facts. This suggests that a sense of the era does not depend on digging up tidbits that only existed way back when.

My God, this city stinks. Not everywhere—along the southern wharves where the ships dock, the air is heady with leftover spices, and on the Grand Canal money buys fresh breezes along with luxury—but everywhere we are, where crumbling houses rise out of rank water and a dozen families live stacked one on top of another like rotting vegetables, the decay and filth burn the insides of your nostrils. Living as I do, with my nose closer to the ground, there are times when I find it hard to breath.

The old man who measures the level of the well in our campo every morning says that the smell is worse because of the summer drought and that if the water falls any lower, they will have to start bringing the freshwater barges in, and then only those who have money will be able to drink. Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst. (Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan.)

  • Is the character right that Venice had a sharper stink to the short than the tall? I doubt it. Still, his keen sensitivity about his stature along with his cutting wit gives this otherwise familiar lament about Venice a special odor. “Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst.”
  • Creating a sense of the times, then, is not just about details, or even coupling them with emotions ; the times are also enhanced by infusing a character with strong opinions about both the details and emotions.

Seeing Through Characters’ Eyes

  • Let’s dig deeper into the relationship between character and time/place. Is there a technique more powerful than infusing a character with a strong opinion about his place or time? Yes. Infusing two characters with that.
  • Sometimes a passage is not about scene setting. It could be about the different values to two characters, as well as that for one of them the realization that the fulfillment of his ambition has a bitter side. Yet the author can weave in the period details: the Church of the Resurrection, the Bronx, immigrants, long-gone Fifth Avenue mansions.
  • Another way in which to deepen the sense of place and time is to let a point-of-view character observe an aspect of that place or time that we would not ordinarily expect her to notice.

But Malcolm had already stopped listening, staring out at the amazing sidewalk scene emerging all around them. Suddenly there was color everywhere, as if someone had just switched the screen to Technicolor, like in The Wizard of Oz, which he had seen six times back in Michigan. Men wearing green, and yellow, and red sports shirts. Men wearing porkpie hats, and Panamas, and fedoras, men in white and lemon-lime and peach ice-cream suits—even men wearing sharper zoots, he had to admit, than what he had on himself.

And women. He was sure that he had never seen so many beautiful women in his entire life. There were women everywhere, at least two for every man, not counting the clusters of soldiers and sailors gaping and gesturing at them on every street corner. Women wearing gold and ruby-red glass in their ears, and open-toed platform heels that made them sway with every step. Women in tight violet and red and blue print dresses, held up only by the thinnest of shoulder straps over their smooth, brown backs. Women striding up from the subways, stepping regally down from the trolleys and the elevated, and women, everywhere he looked, strolling out of smoking storefronts, as if their smoldering presence had touched them off. (Kevin Baker's Strivers Row.)

  • What a riot of color. Baker’s palette is a chaotic contrast to the severe black-and-white documentary of the 1940s that most of us carry in our heads. More surprising still is Malcolm X leering at the smoldering, swaying women of Harlem in their tight print dresses. He didn’t mention that in his seminal Black Power speech “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
  • One of the things we mean when we speak of richness in a novel is the depth with which the author creates the setting of his story. But what does depth mean? It means showing us more about a place than we would get on our own. How is that done? In a practical sense, that comes from details that take us by surprise and perspectives that are not our own. Those can only come from characters whose eyes and understanding are not merely a mirror of their author’s.
    Conjuring a Milieu.
  • What if your novel isn’t exactly about a particular time and place, but rather is set in a milieu? What if you are writing about the world of professional baseball, undersea salvage, nuclear terrorists, or bird watchers? Such stories may span many settings. A roman á clef may span many decades. In stories with such a variety of times and locales, how can you effectively bring the world of the novel alive?
  • In conjuring a milieu, invoking an air of mystery and importance can be useful.

Night watchmen still lingered in the misty streets when we stepped out of the front door. The lamps along the Ramblas sketched an avenue of vapor that faded as the city began to awake. When we reached Calle Arco del Teatro, we continued through its arch toward the Raval quarter, entering a vault of blue haze. I followed my father through that narrow lane, more of a scar than a street, until the gleam of the Ramblas faded behind us. The brightness of dawn filtered down from the balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light that dissolved before touching the ground. At last my father stopped in front of a large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Before us loomed what to my eyes seemed the carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows.

“Daniel, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see today. Not even your friend Tomás. No one.”

A smallish man with vulturine features framed by thick gray hair opened the door. His impenetrable aquiline gaze rested on mine.

“Good morning, Isaac. This is my son, Daniel,” my father announced. “Soon he’ll be eleven, and one day the shop will be his. It’s time he knew this place.”

The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library or seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.

“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.” (Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.)

  • The lesson for us is that a milieu exists not in a time or place but in the hearts and minds of the characters who dwell in it. Their memories, feelings, opinions, outlook, and ways of operating in their realm are what make it real.

Setting as Character.

  • Sometimes the setting itself may participate in the story. Blizzards, droughts, and other natural phenomena are obvious ways to make the setting active. But there are certainly more.
  • Find in your setting specific places that have extra significance, or places where events recur. You know, those spots that are legendary, perhaps where something violent—and symbolic-happens there.
  • It is also possible to given natural phenomena a plot function, was well. A tornado described by two different characters. That’s a perfect example of natural phenomenon at work in the plot.
  • What does the setting of your current novel mean to the characters in it? How do you portray that meaning and make it active in the story? The techniques of doing so are some of the most powerful tools in the novelist’s kit. Use them and you will not only give your novel a setting that lives, but also construct for your readers an entire world, the world of the story.

V. A Singular Voice.

  • Voice, that fuzzy literary term that embraces everything from prose style to sensibility to seriousness (or silliness) of purpose, is in the first place a matter of who you are.
  • Some authors have a plain style. That is said of often of John Grisham, James Patterson, and Nicholas Sparks. They are strong storytellers and bestsellers so I dare say they are not much bothered about it. Other writers are known almost entirely for their way with words. Reviewers swoon over their “lapidary” prose and their “closely observed” take on their subjects, which I sometimes think is code for not much happens. Prose stylists can sell well too, which implies that fiction’s punch and appeal is achieved in part by writing with force.
  • Now by that I do not mean just words as bullets; I mean that impact can be felt from the many ways in which the author’s outlook comes across. Having something to say, a theme, is important but just as powerful can be how you say it, or how your characters say it.

Giving Characters Voice.

  • Do you have an acquaintance who will blurt out anything, wears horrible bow ties or skin-tight jump suits zipped down to the naval, flies to Borneo on a whim, flirts with your mother, shoots cactus tequila, believes in astral projection, named a cat Richard Nixon, does calculus for pleasure, drives a hot pink hearse, got arrested once in Omaha? No? wouldn’t it be fun? It would be great to meet some outrageous characters in manuscripts, too.
  • Any character can stand out without being a ridiculous caricature. It may only be a matter of digging inside to find what makes him different and distinct from you and me. It can be as simple as giving him his own unique take on things.
  • Character’s outlook can be as distinctive as their way of talking. Their opinions speak for the story and, in a way, for the author. Why, then are many fiction writers reluctant to let their characters speak up? Often we cannot tell much of anything about what the protagonist believes, loathes, or even finds ridiculous. People have opinions. Authors are people. What happens to them while writing to muzzle their views and dampen their voices?
  • What kind of opinions do your characters have” how do they express them? You can develop the way they talk, or their outlook and opinions, or both. In doing so you will be developing not just characters more interesting to read about but a voice of your own that speaks with greater force and authority.

Details and Delivery.

  • Some novelists imaging it is best to have a narrator as neutral as a TV news anchor, a universal American into whom all readers can project themselves. Even the most ordinary people have a life that’s unique. The details that make it so are a secret source of what critics glibly refer to as voice.
  • Details are plentiful. If you don’t have them in your head, the library has them in books. Details are an automatic voice all by themselves. They might seem to limit a novel’s appeal, but in fact they bring it to life.
  • Bocce, OTB, sautéed squid, and a mother with a face baked like a calzone… this can’t be anywhere but Brooklyn. What creates the narrator’s unique voice is not his grammar or outlook but the details he chooses to convey.
  • Sometimes it is not the details but a manner of expression that creates a sense of voice. Such strained formality. Such depth of humility. The cultural authenticity here comes from the father’s extreme self-effacement. Also the number of commas, of parenthetical phrases, and the high and noble language in the passage, which so exquisitely expresses anguish.
  • In other words, a character’s voice, and by extension your own, can arrive through syntax as well as through the details you deploy in what he says, does, observes, and experiences.

Different Ways of Relating a Story.

  • There are many ways to tell a story, many points of view from which to look. What sort of storyteller are you? Are you a benevolent observer, reporting what happens to your characters with objective neutrality? Or are you an active participant: pulling strings, stacking the deck, letting your reader know how you feel, and calling attention to your themes?
  • What about point of view? Do you lurk in the third person or vocalize in the first person? Do you stick to your protagonist’s point of view, widen to others, or explore unexpected perspectives?
  • There is nothing wrong with any particular choices. What bugs is that many writers do not seem to have made a choice in the first place. Most manuscripts wander along in the way that it first occurred to their authors to write them. They do not confront me, insist that I listen, or seek to surprise me with a different way of seeing. They feel flat.
  • Is your focal character someone sort of like you? That’s not a bad way to go. It certainly makes the writing easier. It can also give heroes and heroines a numbing familiarity; a great many protagonists do not come alive as distinctive people.
  • Perhaps authors are afraid to make their characters stand out, appear foolish, look exaggerated, or in some other way put off readers. That can be especially true when protagonists are heavily autobiographical. Who wants to portray oneself in a light that is anything but kind and flattering?
  • That’s a shame because paradoxically heroes and heroines can be the most winning when they are the most different. You would think that seeing the world from the perspective of an autistic savant would be exhausting, but instead it is exhilarating.
  • When thinking about voice it is easy to focus on words, as if painting pretty pictures, capturing moments, and building metaphors is all there is to it. I’m not opposed to any of that, but the more I read the more I feel that skillful use of words and an author’s ability to get down a fleeting illusion of reality can cover up a novel’s core emptiness.
  • Not all beautifully written novels have a voice, or much of one. Potboiler plots may be exciting, but also may have little flavor. It is when the words on the page demand that I, the reader, take notice that I begin to hear the author’s voice. It isn’t words alone that do that, but rather the outlook, opinions, details, delivery, and original perspectives that an author brings to his tale.
  • Above all, a singular voice is not a lucky accident; it comes from a storyteller’s commitment not just to tell a terrific story but to tell it in a way that is wholly his own.

VI. Making the Impossible Real.

  • In real life amazing things don’t always happen, or at least not easily and despite the high odds posed in a well-plotted novel. Even character-driven stories such as sagas, coming-of-age novels, and women’s and literary fiction present events that are not everyday occurrences. What happens in all fiction is to some degree preposterous and yet readers go along. Or not.
  • What are the methods by which a story is made to feel real? More than that, how can we construct the high level of dramatic events that make a novel a powerful and transformative experience—and at the same time do so in a way that has our readers never doubting and even cheering all the way?
  • Readers, generally speaking, are not paranoid. It is important for suspense novelists to accept this. Why? Because their first task is to convince readers that the improbable is not only possible, not only likely, but actually is happening.
  • They fail to frighten. The failure lies not in the selection of a terrifying possibility. No, the real failure is to overcome our rational resistance. It can’t happen. That is a reader’s first assumption. A thriller writer’s first responsibility is to convince us, yes it can.
  • How? Essentially, you must pulverize every particle of reader resistance. Every single rational objection must be obliterated, one at a time. Every bit of help for the hero must be taken away; every obstacle for the villain must be overcome. No problem, you are thinking, but virtually all thriller manuscripts fail to meet those challenges.
  • Even established bestsellers find it difficult to frighten us with the improbable. That is why they have developed certain narrative strategies to help. Three recur in successful suspense fiction. What are these magic formulae?
  • First, ignore the reader and instead make believers out of the story’s characters. Second, focus strongly on the human villains. Third, convince the reader of the improbable by overwhelming her with brute force pseudo-facts, and simultaneously by eliminating every reason why this scary whatever-it-is wouldn’t happen in the real world.
  • All of these are ways of getting around a reader’s natural skepticism. I emphasize, again, that these techniques are not simple or easy to apply. They require an extreme level of commitment. Be warned. If you want to frighten readers, deeply and for real, then you are in for more work than you’ve ever imagined—and more pages too. Did you ever notice that most thrillers are fat? There’s a reason.

Focus on Villains

  • There’s another way to overcome reader skepticism about scenarios that, in reality, are unlikely if not impossible. It involves convincing a reader to fear not what’s happening but who is doing it.

Verisimilitude: Pseudoscience, Genuine Facts

  • For purposes of storytelling it doesn’t matter whether either you or I are right. What matters is that we both can make a case in detail. That is important in thriller writing because, while the case for human cloning, or whatever, may not be persuasive to many readers, the case nevertheless needs to be made exhaustively if only to make the motivations and convictions of your characters believable. We may not buy your premise, but we’ll buy that there are people who buy it.
  • I hope you like research. If you do, that’s good. You’ll need tons of it no mater what kind of thriller you’re writing. But wait, can’t you just postulate the crazy idea behind your story and ask readers to go with it? After all, science-fiction and fantasy writers have been doing that for eons. Sorry SF and fantasy readers know that what they’re reading isn’t real. Thriller writers haven’t got that luxury.

Scary Monsters.

  • What stands out? What got your attention? Was it the backstory review of training wardens, the ghoul attack, the Red King and peace negotiations? Or was it the hero’s not-so-buried anger? I’ll bet it’s the emotion that has the impact. (During the pirate attack, Roger’s emotion—particularly when he harpoons one of the attackers—has the impact!)
  • There’s plenty of action, including a series of angry ghoul attacks. The author writes violence effectively yet the hero’s matter-of-fact narration doesn’t aim to shock us, surprise us, or creep us out (much) with visuals. The author knows we’ve seen it all on TV. Instead, the horror comes largely from inside the hero; that is, from his feelings. (Ditto for Roger.)
  • In all examples, notice that what makes monsters scary is what makes them human. Indeed, the trick of frightening readers has always been to first make the world of the story highly believable, then gradually add what is weird. From Wilkie Collins to H.P. Lovecraft to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King to Joe Hill, what is scary is not the buildup of what is supernatural but the buildup of what is real.
  • What is missing in so many manuscripts is passion. How is passion expressed in a thriller? Is it exhaustive knowledge of the underlying threat? Certainly. But that by itself is not enough. That kind of passion we can get from any conversation with a conspiracy nut in a bar.
  • Passion in a suspense novel means giving a protagonist the author’s own paranoia, either gradually or right away. It means constructing a villain out of compelling motives and high convictions. It means pouring research-gleaned details into the story both to feign verisimilitude and to build believable character motives.
  • If what you feel genuinely is paranoia, great. Use it. But don’t confuse paranoia with passion. Passion is patient and hardworking. It’s crafty. It doesn’t rest until every last consumer is turning the pages without ceasing.
  • We have been talking about thrillers, but the techniques in this chapter have important applications in every kind of fiction. Even contemporary realism lifted straight from your own life will, at some point, strain credulity.
  • How can you counteract that? In the same ways we’ve been discussing. First, give your protagonist real reasons to act. Second, motivate your antagonist convincingly and at length. Third, and above all, find what is improbable in your story and remove every shred of reader objection and answer every reason why these improbable things don’t happen in real life.

VII. Hyperreality.

  • Your outlook is sunny. If that describes you right now, stop working on your manuscript immediately. You may be seeing the world and its woes in a way that is calm and rational. Nothing could be worse, at least for your fiction. Effective storytelling doesn’t minimize problems, it exaggerates them. To the passionate novelist, everything isn’t smaller than it really is—everything is bigger.
  • The world of story is hyperreality. In a passionately told tale, characters are larger than life, what’s happening matters profoundly, the outcome is important in the extreme, and even the words on the page have a DayGlo fluorescence.
  • Often protagonists, places, and problems don’t stand out. There’s a sense of same-old to them that’s not a good thing. From a novel I want an experience more unusual or at least more vivid, than the humdrum beat of a regular day.
  • In practical terms, what constitutes a hyperreality? How does it get on the page? Satire by definition exaggerates. That’s how it works. Luckily, the techniques of satire have applications in every story.
    The Secrets of Satire.
  • For humor to come through in a novel it needs to be bigger and more relentless than most authors realize. The methods of mirth are so plentiful. Here are a few of them:
    hyperbole.
    wit.
    biting comment (think insults).
    ironic juxtaposition and reversal.
    escalation of the mildly ridiculous.
    being extremely literal (“who’s on first?”).
    funny name and word choices.
    deadpan delivery of dumb remarks.
    deliberate misunderstanding.
    unlikely points of view.
    extreme personas or voices.
    stereotyping.
  • There are a thousand ways to be funny but it is hyperbole that fiction writers should master. It’s a universal leavening. It is a crucial element that can punch up description regardless of the type of novel you are writing.
  • If I describe the pancakes served at a diner as humungous, you get the idea. But if I instead have your waitress, Dixie, slam down a platter of whole grain banana-peach pancakes that are the size of Firestone Extreme Service truck tires, doesn’t that have more visual impact? That’s hyperbole.
    Funny People, Funny Places.
  • What about your manuscript? Are your similes merely apt? are your metaphors mild? How do you paint emotions? Try feeding them amphetamines. Rev them up like a motorbike, maybe to a point where they become ridiculous. That’s the idea. When infected with a case of the blahs, a novel doesn’t need less, it needs more. It doesn’t need small, it needs big. The right medicine may be a dose of hyperbole.
    Funny Voices.
  • There are a thousand ways to be funny. Another of them can embed itself in one of the most common of elements of fiction writing: the narrative voice.
  • Novelists who work with first-person narrators have a natural advantage when creating funny voices, but third person can work, too.
  • Try it yourself. Invent any disaster, oh, say an airliner plummeting toward a remote mountainside, both its engine trailing smoke. Now play against the expected tone employing your point of view character: Figures, he thought, wouldn’t you know the drinks cart hadn’t yet reached his row? He really needed a Jack-and-Coke. Condemned to die, and he wasn’t even getting a last request.
  • In other words, you don’t have to make the events of your story funny in themselves. You don’t need the zany voice of a first-person comedian. You don’t need a big target like Washington, D.C. you don’t need a dictionary of words that are automatically funnier than your everyday vocabulary. All you have to do is construct an unexpected contrast to what is happening.
  • If nothing else, try a little hyperbole. Every writer wants humor in her novel. Few have it. Even a serious novel needs to occasionally exaggerate for effect. Try it out. Who knows? Maybe you will discover that you have the sensibility of a satirist. If so, you can make shish kebab out of everything in life that bugs you.

VIII. Tension all the Time.

  • If there were a test that measures whether any given fiction writer has what it takes to be a career novelist, that test would put heavy emphasis on one particular trait: an instinct for tension.
  • Conflict is story. What many do not grasp is that what keeps us turning hundreds of pages is not a central conflict, main problem, or primary goal. If that was all it took to keep readers involved to the end, then all you would have to do is set a principal plot problem at the outset. Then you could indulge yourself however you liked for hundreds of pages.
  • What is it, then, that keeps us reading all the way? Is it conflict within each scene? Is it a character in every chapter who has a clearly stated goal? Is it avoiding low-tension traps such as backstory, aftermath, landscape, and weather openings, empty exposition, and unneeded dialogue? Is it keeping the action moving? Is it throwing in sex and violence for occasional jolts of adrenalin and allure? Is it luck?
  • What keeps us reading every word of every page of a novel is none of that. Holding readers’ attention every word of the way is not a function of the type of novel, or a good premise, tight writing, quick pace, showing not telling, or any of the other frequently taught principles of storytelling. Keeping readers constantly in your grip comes from the steady application of something else altogether.
  • Micro-tension.
  • Micro-tension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story but in the next few seconds. It is not a function of plot. This type of tension does not come from high stakes or the circumstances of a scene. Action does not generate it. Dialogue does not produce it automatically. Exposition—the interior monologue of the point-of-view character—does not necessarily raise its level.
  • When you don’t have micro-tension, you are slowly losing your reader. When you do have micro-tension, you can do anything. You can open with the weather, linger over the landscape, leave in backstory, describe at length, write about pure emotion, build anticipation from a wisp of atmosphere, and even make a riveting passage out of nothing at all.
  • So, let’s start with this concept: micro-tension has its basis not in story circumstances or in words: it comes form emotion and not just any old emotions but conflicting emotions.

Tension in Dialogue.

  • Info dump is nevertheless info dump even when it’s batted back and forth in dialogue. But some authors can make an exchange of facts riveting. How do they do it? What makes such dialogue gripping is not the inherent fascination of the topics of viral engineering, corporate case law, or somebody else’s crazy family.
  • The tension could come from the hero’s reluctance to accept what the other character is saying. His opening salvo sets his resistance to accept what that person is saying: “Let me get this straight…” From there onwards he prompts the character to justify his position.
  • In other words, it is not information itself that nails us to the page; rather, it is doubt about the facts and skepticism of the deliverer. Tension in dialogue is emotional, not intellectual. It comes from people, not topics. What we want to know is not whether a debate will settle a point of contention but whether the debaters will reconcile.
  • This testing and defending of the facts is, by the way, the secret behind the best-selling stories that depend on large doses of explanation. Does your thriller require that the readers understand a lot about security systems? Are there complex interwoven relationships in your family or historical drama? Do your romantic leads have many reasons to hate each other, especially arising from their past history? If so, it will be necessary to dump a lot of information on your readers.
  • That is usually dull. Info dump is deadly. Backstory bogs things down. Zipping up information to make it more frightening or relevant doesn’t help. Information is still just information. It’s dead weight. Many authors attempt to get around that by disguising info dump as dialogue, but unfortunately that does not automatically work. Dialogue drags unless it is infused with tension; but, as we’ve seen, even that will only be effective when it is a tug-of-war between talkers.
  • There is delicious inner conflict underneath the hero’s actions. What keeps us reading is partly a desire to learn the truth of water and elephants (say), but more powerfully the deeper mystery of what makes the hero so prickly on the subject? The author is clearly going to answer that question, so we eagerly read on.
  • What about dialogue between friends? If there is no animosity to exploit, how do you generate tension? In such dialogue the operating principle is friendly disagreement. The polite tone of their disagreement only underscores its importance.
  • Where is the tension in your dialogue? Is it present in every line? Why not undertake a dialogue draft? Check every conversation in your story. Are you relying on the circumstances or the topic itself to make it important for us to listen in?
  • That is dangerous. Instead, find the emotional friction between the speakers. Or externalize your focal characters’ inner conflicts. Or pit allies against each other. True tension in dialogue comes not from what is being said, but from inside those who are saying it.

Tension in Action.

  • Action, when related in strictly visual terms, feels flat. Handled objectively, it does not move us. Emotions are needed to give action force. The pirate attack!
  • Even then, routine emotions are unlikely to get through to us. Fear! Shock! Horror! Uh-huh. What else have you got? We are inured to clichés, and that is as true of overused feelings as it is of familiar words and phrases. How to be original in inserting emotions into fast-moving action? Sometimes nothing more is required than honesty, authenticity, and understatement.
  • As action goes, this is pretty tame. A raft drifts. A car door opens. A woman winks from sight. Despite that, the passage is quite arresting. What makes it so? Is it the nude woman wringing her hair? That’s nice, but what gives it its high tension is the contrast between the peace that follows the hero’s decision (“I would tell her everything”) and the menacing physical details that quickly follow.
  • The author does not need to tell us that the hero is deeply in love, nor does he need to elaborate that the hero feels guilty because he is hiding something. That is obvious. It is the mix of the hero’s contentment and guilt that snares us in his moment. They are contrasting emotions, almost opposites. They get us because they are difficult to reconcile—and that’s the point.
  • Because we cannot square the hero’s peace and his torment, we want to. Unconsciously, our brains are seeking to make sense of a contradiction. To work on that we… well, what do you suppose? We keep reading.
  • Tension in action comes not from the action itself but from inside the point-of-view character experiencing it.
    Tension in Exposition.
  • Most novels today are written in the intimate third-person point of view. That is to say, we experience the story from inside the head and heart of a point-of-view character. We see what she sees, hear what she hears, think and feel what she thinks and feels. We become the character.
  • It is a rare novel that does not include healthy doses of what’s going on inside its characters’ minds. Relating that on the page is an art that is poorly understood. Many novelists merely write out whatever it is that their characters are thinking or feeling; or, more to the point, whatever happens to occur to the author in a given writing session. That is a mistake.
  • Much exposition stirs faint interest. To write a page-turner means to make it so that your readers read every line on every page. It probably is more important when you are writing literary fiction, because the subjects of a lot of literary fiction, such as characters’ emotional damage, for instance, require that the interior lives of the characters create constant tension.
  • In other words, exposition always matter. Yet the exposition in many novels gets the purple highlighter. The most common reason is that such exposition merely restates what is obvious from what we have read: emotions that we felt earlier, thoughts that have already occurred to us. It’s easy to skim because there’s nothing new in it.
  • The author constructs conflicting feelings in this passage. On the one hand the hero is happy, relieved, and content. On the other hand he is worried. We unconsciously want his conflict resolved, and so this simple dichotomy causes us to continue reading to see what will happen. This is how Roger felt when Phaulkon promises him things and yet asks him to undertake a dangerous mission.
  • The same effect can be produced when it’s not emotions that are involved, but ideas. Thinking can be as conflicted as feeling. Pure intellectual debate is not often found in fiction for the simple reason that it is dry, but even so, wrestling with one’s own mind can produce dramatic tension.
  • Have you ever described frustration as a “Kansas”? Have you ever felt that your own sense of inadequacy is “rigorous and good”? The hero stretches to find the beauty in being unable to find forgiveness in his heart.
  • The author plagues the hero’s mind with contradictory concepts: judgment vs. forgiveness. He tries to find beauty in his dilemma. He is searching for grace and not finding it. Despite that, his attempt to feel good about his desolation is simultaneously a deep expression of his faith. The hero is fighting a battle between conflicting ideas and thus we have a strong reason to keep reading. How will it come out for the hero? Fifty-five pages later in the novel you will find out.
  • How do you handle exposition? Are there passages of interior monologue in your manuscript that are just taking up space? If there are, you can cut them, or possibly you can dig deeper into your character at this moment in the story and find inside of him contradictions, dilemmas, opposing impulses, and clashing ideas that keep us in suspense.
  • To put it another way, exposition is an opportunity not to enhance the dangers of the plot (exposition doesn’t do that) but to put your characters’ hearts and minds in peril. Remember, though, that true tension in exposition comes not from circular worry or repetitive turmoil; it springs from emotions in conflict and ideas at war.
    Transforming Low-Tension Traps.
  • Weather openings are common—and dull. Most writers are trying to use the weather as foreshadowing, a hint of storms to come. That’s fine, but most of the time the tension wafts away.
  • The author uses the drizzle not to invoke atmosphere but as a concrete factor in the story’s kickoff, or rather, as an element in the doubt she is planting. Check again the opening line: “The following might have happened on a late-fall afternoon…” You may not notice it, it passes so quickly, but that tricky little phrase triggers subconscious suspicions. Is the author telling us the truth?
  • To put it differently, the weather has an effect on us not because it is an outward portent but because it is tied to an inward storm. A lightning flash in the sky is just a cliché until it is fused to a bolt of interior tension. Describe the plain old weather and who cares? Provoke anxiety in the reader first and then—brrr—the icy November drizzle gives us a chill.
  • Surveying-the-landscape openings are just as common as weather starts and equally ineffective. So what is it about Coney Island that gives it extra interest? Is it the details of its decline? Is it the thumbnail history? I’d say neither. In fact, as presented there is nothing inherently interesting about Coney Island at all. That’s the point. It’s the ragged end of nowhere. There’s nothing left of it.
  • Nothing, that is, except the evident sadness—or is it anger?—that the narrator feels about the state of this one-time seaside playground. What keeps us reading is that the narrator demands an answer to an impossible question. He needs to understand something that cannot be understood. Tension exists not in the place itself but the one observing it.
  • Backstory is the bane of virtually all manuscripts. Authors imagine that readers need, even want, a certain amount of filling in. Notice how much backstory the author slips into the passage. But is that the point of the passage? No; it is, rather, to develop the hero’s sense of duty toward another character and set it against his feeling of isolation. He can confide his problems to no one yet he longs to open his heart. You see? Inner tension. That in turn stirs our own curiosity to learn what will happen to the hero. Nothing in the backstory itself does that; only Fitz’s torn emotions cause us to care. (Roger and his feeling of dread at having to go off to Patani.)
  • To put it more simply, the author uses the past to create present conflict. That is the secret of making backstory work.
  • There was a time when aftermath passages were considered essential to a novel. Even today, some fiction instructors preach the pattern of scene-sequel-scene. The theory goes that after a significant story development, the protagonist (and the readers) needs a pause to digest the significance of this new situation, to make decisions and gather resolve to go forward.
  • I do not believe in the aftermath. The human brain moves faster than any author’s fingers can type. The importance of any plot turn is, for most readers, immediately apparent. Mulling it over on the page doesn’t add anything fresh. The reader’s minds are already racing ahead. In any event, I find that most aftermath is the easiest material in any manuscript to skim. It lacks tension. Usually.
  • And there you have it: emotional conflict. Competing desires, be safe or be happy. What keeps us reading here is not the protagonist’s mulling over the pros and cons. We know those. It’s her indecision itself. What will she do? You can pretty much guess but even so the author keeps a modicum of mystery going by detailing the protagonist’s inner struggle. Onward we read.
  • Tension in aftermath comes not from contemplation but from inner conflict.
  • Also easy to skim in many manuscripts is travel. What does it take to bring us along for the ride? The vividness of the hero’s interior life on his trip makes the journey unusually absorbing. The author uses the details of the dining car not to set the scene but in service of a moment of awareness: for the first time the hero is fully present on a train, his travel not theoretical or planned, and therefore more real. As great as the distance he has traveled is, the distance between his old and new self is even greater.
  • It is not the road that keeps us reading but the inner life of the traveler. Note, though, that in the passage the author does not simply relate how his protagonist feels. It is more dynamic than that. Change is delineated, and that in turn raises anticipation in us. What is going to happen to the protagonist? For now it doesn’t matter. The change in him is enough to keep us engaged for a while longer.
  • Violence ought to be a sure-fire attention grabber, but in the majority of manuscripts it is easy to skip through. What makes this killer scary? Is it his precision? His bloodless hollow-tipped bullets? His appetite for an early lunch? I would say it is none of those things but rather the line: “Harry was almost disgusted with how easy this was going to be.” There isn’t enough challenge. This killer craves the thrill of the hunt and is contemptuous when he doesn’t get it. Those mixed feelings make me wonder how the hero is going to fare against this whacko. (Sorasak is contemptuous of Roger and allows himself to be bribed to let him go.)
  • In sex scenes, mechanical tab-A-into-slot-B descriptions of the physical act are not arousing. After that it’s pretty much a matter of atmosphere, suggestion, and metaphor. How to get it right? There’s a move that might help: inner conflict.
  • What creates tension is the hero’s simple disbelief at what is happening. She wants him yet can’t believe that he wants her. Voilà. Conflict. Will she get him?
  • Duh. Of course. Yet it’s the uncertainty underlying the hero’s experiences that keeps us reading to see how things will turn out. In sex scenes as much as any other part of fiction, true tension flows not from the outer actions but from the inner conflict.

Tension Where There Is None.

  • Certain passages in manuscripts are antithetical to tension. Among these are passages of description. How can you remedy that?
  • What strikes you about the protagonist’s house? Is it the banisters made from interwoven deer antlers? Is it the portentous hidden drawers or unadorned windows that let the outer darkness in? The house is indeed a model of a rustic Adirondack style, but by themselves those are just empty details.
  • It is the truth behind them that makes them matter. The house is entirely an expression of the masculine needs and ego of the protagonist.
  • The author understands that description itself does nothing to create tension; tension comes only from within the people in the landscape. A house is just a house until it is occupied by people with problems. When the problems are presented first, then the house builds a metaphor.
  • Similarly, description of anything can create tension by working backwards to make plain the conflicts of the observer. How would you describe a yak? The author has a big problem in writing the story of Jesus: We know how it turns out. Creating narrative tension is therefore a bit challenging. There’s really no way to do it except by finding tension elsewhere, and that is primarily within the protagonist.
  • Given that emotional conflict is a nuclear generator of tension in all dimensions of a novel, you would think that writing about pure emotions would be a sure bet to keep readers involved. Not so. Plain emotion can be as dull as description. Just because a character is feeling something doesn’t mean we will feel anything other than indifferent.

Harris Arden came up around the side of the house. He was not used to so much emotion. It wore him out. This had all caught him off guard. He’d come upon a new road and taken a few steps down that road and now he saw it wasn’t the road he was going to take after all. He was going back to the road he knew and would continue walking where he’d been walking for a long time. He’d been walking on that road for a long time for a reason. It suited him, didn’t it? Well there wasn’t any use in asking whether it suited him or not, it was where his duty took him and where his life had put him and where he would go.

He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him. It had been too sudden. But hadn’t it been sudden with Maria also? Why, it could go on being sudden with girls if you let it, one had to put a stop to it somewhere along the line. Having a baby would put a stop to it. Maria was the one he would stop with. And Maria loved him, that was certain. He could not be certain about this new woman. After the brightness faded who knew what would happen, he hardly knew her. (Susan Minot’s Evening.)

  • Minot’s handling of Arden’s feelings is deft. Note how in the first paragraph his reasoning is plodding and detached. Then he thinks of Ann (the new woman): “He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him.” For a second his mind is alive, but then he shuts it down again, rationalizing his choice. Is he worn out by emotion, as he supposes? No, he is pushing it down. He is suppressing his anguish. Had Minot merely portrayed Arden’s sadness it would have been fine but it would also have been ordinary.
  • Because Arden is struggling, we are drawn in. without being aware of it we are wondering whether he will think away his passion or whether his heart will win. It is a small tension, perhaps, but enough to keep us reading a few pages farther.
  • Foreshadowing foretells peril—not for the characters but for the novelist. Why? Have you ever groaned over a thudding and clunky piece of portentousness? Then you know. Foreshadowing can have the opposite of its intended effect. Is there a way to cast a shadow without being ridiculously obvious?
  • Foreshadowing is most effective not when it thunders at us but when it stirs within the story’s characters a shift of emotion. The signs in the sky are only smoke, really, unless they mark a subtle contrast with the characters’ feelings.
  • Every story has static moments; that is, times when nothing in particular is happening. Can those be put on the page? Many writers inadvertently do so. That may seem a failure of self-editing, but many writers pen such passages because they sense something important in them. What is it they are hoping to capture? And what is the point in trying when there is nothing at all with which to work?

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angels, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it he hated the sight of it. (The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.)

  • What is it in this classic opening paragraph that actually captures our interest and keeps us reading? The ceiling? No. it’s just a ceiling. What keeps us in suspense is whether Alan Grant’s boredom will be relieved.
  • In other words, tension can be made out of nothing at all; or at least, that’s how it can appear. In reality it is feelings, specifically feelings in conflict with each other, that fill up an otherwise dead span of story and bring it alive.
  • Do you feel that your manuscript is brimming with tension? Do agents, editors and reviewers, and vast legions of readers agree? Not yet? Then there is work to do; specifically the work of finding the torn emotions in your characters and using them as the foundation for true tension in dialogue, action, exposition, and anywhere that tension is needed to keep us unsure of what will happen next. Where is that tension needed? Everywhere.

IX. The Fire in the Fiction.

  • What gives a novel not only freshness but the force of the new? Originality comes not from your genre, setting, plot, characters, voice, or any other element on which you can work. It cannot. It isn’t possible. Originality can come only from what you bring of yourself to your story. In other words, originality is not a function of your novel; it is a quality in you.
  • Are you writing, let’s say, a mystery novel? You can make your murder and your detective utterly and uniquely your own.
  • Plenty of mainstream and literary novels do not show us the world in a different way, let alone rock us to the core. What gives any novel the impact of the new is something that does not come from plot or milieu but from a perspective: yours.
  • Where so many manuscripts go wrong is that, if they do not outright imitate, they at least do not go far enough in mining the author’s experience for what is distinctive and personal. So many manuscripts feel safe. They do not force me to see the world through a different lens. They enact the author’s concept of what their novel should feel like to read rather than what their inner storyteller urgently needs to say. Novelists by and large do not trust themselves. They do not believe that their perspective is important.
  • Everyone’s angry about something. Everyone has been through different things than you or I. Others notice stuff that you and I miss, get passionate about matters that the rest of us haven’t considered, or at least not in that way. People are fascinating, don’t you find? that means so are you. Your take on the world is not only valid, it is necessary. Your story is not any old story, it is a story that only you can tell and only your own way.
  • That, at any rate, is how it can be but so often is not. Finding the power buried in your novel is not about finding its theme. Rather, it is about finding you: your eyes, experience, understanding, and compassion. Ignore yourself and your story will be weak. Embrace the importance of what you have to share with the rest of us and you have the beginning of what makes novels great.
  • The fire in the fiction is many things, but above and beyond all others it is the fire in you.
    Our Common Experience.
  • What does it mean to write for the ages? Must one have a moral or reveal a universal truth? Or is it enough to merely plumb the depths of human experiences so that we all can relate? It doesn’t matter. Power in fiction comes from touching readers. Touching readers comes from your own compassion.
  • Whether you are burning to say something or immersed in curiosity about your characters and what happens to them, what’s important is to get it all down in detail and with conviction. Merely writing well is not enough. Fine prose is empty unless it is charged with your own deep feeling.

The Moral of the Story.

  • What if your intent is precisely to make a point? Suppose you want to stack the deck, run the game, play God, or in some other way manipulate your story for a purpose? How is that done without being hokey and undermining your own message?
  • The author encourages our expectation of a happy romantic outcome precisely so she can thwart it. How do you shape the events of your story to your purpose? Are you afraid that if you did so readers would reject what you have to say? You are not alone. It has become unfashionable to make statements in fiction. In our politically correct, post-9/11 world, is it perhaps even unwise to assert our views?
  • I believe that the danger lies in not doing so. Stories draw their power from their meaning. Challenging readers’ beliefs is not a weakness but a strength. Did you ever have someone tell you the harsh truth about yourself? It was hard to hear, wasn’t it, but today aren’t you glad you listened? A similar dynamic is at work in fiction. Truth can be uncomfortable. Whatever it is, it is necessary to speak it.
  • Writing fiction is not an activity taken up by those without heart. If you know love, if you have lived life, then you have stories in you: stories that are completely yours. For those stories to resonate it is important not to tell them in the same old way that others have.
  • Think about it. Hackneyed plots and stereotypical characters don’t work. We brush them off. Stories that stretch our minds and characters who challenge our view of ourselves… ah, those are the ones we remember. They are the stuff of which classics are made. So start by making sure that you put yourself into your novel: your views, your hurts, your questions, your convictions, your crazy-weird take on it all. Give all that to your characters or simply give it to yourself when you write. You’ve kept it inside for too long. It is time to let it out and to let it make a noise.
  • If you are worried that your plot will feel calculated or contrived to your readers, don’t. actually, the more you let your passionate self inform your novel, the more it will strike your readers with a moral force.

The Fire in the Fiction.

  • What is the truth that you most wish the rest of us would see? That is the purpose of your novel. That is your message. I wish more manuscripts had them. A great many do not.
  • Many contemporary novels focus on daughters, journeys home, and the aftermath of significant events. Another trend is to make characters of Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle or to borrow their creations. What has happened to us? Have we lost confidence in our own imaginations? Are we afraid of portraying grand characters and big events? Do we identify only with victims? Is the story of our age no more than a tale of survival?
  • Contemporary fiction reflects who we are. And who are you? How do you see our human condition? Where have you been that the rest of us should go? What have you experienced that your neighbors must understand? What have I missed? What makes you angry? What wisdom have you gleaned? Are there questions we’re not asking? Do the answers of the past no longer serve, or are they more apt than ever?
  • Simply put, what the hell do you want to say to me? If I remember nothing else, what would you have me recall when I close your novel’s covers?
  • Having something to say, or something you wish us to experience, is what gives your novel its power. Identify it. Make it loud. Do not be afraid of what’s burning in your heart. When it comes through on the page, you will be a true storyteller.