by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
Meanwhile, Toni, in her subplot, pursues custody of her kids and deals with the impending divorce from her husband. Richard feels she is an unfit mother because of what she has wrought on his family as a result of her antiabortion activities. Toni, through her interaction with courts, lawyers, and state agencies trying to protect her children from her, comes to terms with what happens when strangers interfere in your life in such fundamental ways. Where do people draw the line involving moral and ethical principles that force them to interfere in the conduct of others? The last scene will be Toni and Greg at Jennifer's bedside struggling to communicate and express themselves but not really finding the words that describe the depth of their feelings as Jennifer is wheeled out to deliver her baby.
It might be a useful exercise to try and invent several of the dramatic scenes that highlight the forward movement of this story, including the scene where Toni and Greg meet at the end and forge some sort of forgiveness of each other. The first question you need to ask is, What is the story's theme? The answer would seem to be involvement or interference.
It would also be useful to completely replot this story, exploring the possibilities of Jennifer's likely full recovery if the baby is aborted.
In the movie The Fugitive, as another example, when Kimble confronts and defeats Sykes, the one-armed man, in the subway train, it concludes the subplot about catching the man who killed Kimble's wife. But by this time, he knows Sykes worked for someone else—a doctor named Nichols who is also Kimble's best friend (or so he thought) and the man really responsible for Kimble's wife's murder. During the confrontation with Sykes, a cop gets killed. This ratchets up the emotional power of the climax with Nichols, because now Kimble has not only got Gerard hot on his heels, but the entire Chicago police force determined to shoot to kill because they think Kimble's a cop killer. In this case, the subplot has provided a springboard to an increased intensity in the climax.
In general, the structural sequence should be something like this: Subplot number two ends, then slightly more important subplot number one ends, then finally, in a grand finale, your main plot concludes.
It often doesn't work out that neatly, however.
In the movie Diehard, based on a novel by Roderick Thorp, in the main plot a bunch of commando-like thieves pretending to be terrorists take over a skyscraper. The thieves hold a bunch of people who were at an office party hostage long enough to pull off a robbery.
Bruce Willis is a cop named John McClane who finds himself on his own and at large, and he scurries around like a rat in the wainscoting, waging a guerrilla war against the thieves. His goal is to bring an end to the siege and rescue the hostages, one of whom is his estranged wife, played by Bonnie Bedelia.
In a subplot, a TV reporter outside the building has located McClane's kids and put them on TV, much to the dismay of their parents and also greatly enhancing the danger that McClane and his wife find themselves in. However, there's no way this subplot can end before the main story ends, because McClane would have to sneak out of the building, deal with the reporter and then sneak back in again, which would be a stupid thing to do, even if he could do it, and completely unbelievable. So the main plot has to end first, which it does with a great flourish of bombs and bullets and dead people. Now, with the main plot over, the audience's interest level has dropped dramatically as has their emotional involvement in the story. So the subplot has to end quickly and without subtlety. So what the filmmakers do is have McClane's wife march out of the building with her husband, spot the TV reporter, walk over to him and punch his lights out. It's an emotional tweak that works, even though it's an anticlimax to the main story, because viewers have been following the cop's wife on and off throughout the whole of this ordeal and it rounds off and concludes her story. The TV reporter subplot is thus really the wife's story, not McClane's, even though it affected his story line.
A FINAL NOTE ABOUT SUBPLOTS
What subplots help to do is increase the emotional temperature of the main story, vary the main story's pacing and control the flow of plot information to the reader. One final point to consider is that while you won't kill off your principal character in your main narrative, you might well feel, for emotional impact reasons, you want to do that in your subplot (unless, of course, the star of the subplot is also the star of the book!).
The novelist Ed McBain, in his 87th Precinct police procedural novels, does this in several books in the series. Secondary characters in the squad room you've grown to know and care about unexpectedly find themselves in the middle of a shootout or a robbery, and they get hurt and sometimes killed as a result. It is an unexpected, emotionally shocking experience for the reader that helps underscore the main character's vulnerability. Danger can come at any time in police work, particularly when you least expect it.
EXERCISES
1. Find out what you're writing about. Think about the theme of your current project. Don't worry if you can't come up with one immediately. The point is to be aware. Keep writing. The moment will come.
2. Develop a subplot for the following main plot: A marine comes home and learns that his son has been brainwashed into a religious cult. So the father joins the cult to try to find his son.
As you think about what might be an appropriate subplot for this book, look at some of the ideas in the main plot. In this case, some key topics are searching, military, religious cult.
What is it about those concepts that may suggest a subplot that echoes some of the ideas in the main plot, or runs counter to them, and will eventually link up to them?
Chapter Eleven
Pace
Our literary agency receives, on average, about twelve thousand pieces of mail a year. Yes, you read that correctly—an average of one thousand unsolicited query letters, proposals, and manuscripts per month. About 95 percent of the material that gets sent to us is rejected.
Why? Because the vast majority of the manuscripts all have at least one mistake in common—the pacing of the story is off. About two or three in a hundred are paced too quickly. That is, the writer has rushed through his story, skipping over things, writing an extended synopsis in effect. About 95 percent of the rest, that is, the vast majority, are paced too slowly. There are setup scenes, unnecessary scenes establishing unimportant plot or character points, unnecessary words, scenes repeated from alternate viewpoints that didn't have to be repeated, unnecessary paragraphs, and so forth.
Alas, most writers simply write too many words that don't mean much or add much to the flow and progression of the story. Their stories, while often containing an interesting premise, quickly become bland, generic and, worst of all, dull.
Fixing this structural problem is what we're going to talk about in this chapter.
MOVING CHARACTERS CLOSER TO THEIR FATE
You might recall that when we talked about writing scenes, we said that each scene needs to move the story forward. After you've written a draft or two of your story, look honestly at
each scene in your manuscript and ask yourself, Do the characters in this scene somehow move inexorably closer to their fate?
If they don't, you have to rewrite the scene, or possibly get rid of it. You don't want anything in your book that is doing the same work twice. That is, you don't want a word, paragraph, sentence, or scene that is doing work already being done by another word, paragraph, sentence, or scene.
It may help, for structural purposes, if you think of your story as being divided up into story events and other information. Gary used to measure the progress of a student by taking her manuscript and underlining everything in the manuscript's first ten pages that he considered a story event, that is, forward movement, some sort of action the character was taking. Then, with a different-colored pen, he looked for and underlined everything he thought of as other stuff—description, background material, static stuff that didn't have any dynamic movement to it. You might take a break from reading this book now and do the same exercise to a scene from your
manuscript.
What Gary found was that the student usually puts in maybe two, three, or four forward-moving story events—that is, story-progressing sentences—in as many pages. Then he took one of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels and did the same exercise. (Actually, it could have been almost any well-published writer's work, but Gary was a fan of Parker's and chose him for that reason.) Gary found a ratio of four to one, that is, four sentences of information to one sentence of action. It might well be small movement, such as someone going for a Coke, but, while this shouldn't be thought of as a formula in any way, in general your book needs to be close to Parker's ratio. One out of five of your sentences should advance the story.
Let's take a couple of examples from other writers to see how the ratio stands up. Here's a passage from The Rosewood Casket (Dutton/Signet), by Sharyn McCrumb. The story event sections are underlined for emphasis:
Kayla had awakened to a quiet house. She dressed herself in tiny jeans and a red sweatshirt from her canvas suitcase and went downstairs, calling out for her mother, but all was quiet. Kayla was not particularly disturbed by this. Until recently, her mother had worked changing shifts at a twenty-four hour dry cleaners in Nashville, catering to people in the music business, who kept odd hours themselves. Since night shift child care was almost impossible to find, much less afford, Kellev had dispensed with it on the weeks she worked eleven to seven, reasoning that Kayla might as well sleep in her own bed, and that the money would be better spent on food and clothes for the child. Kayla was used to waking up alone. She rummaged through the refrigerator, and found orange juice and homemade jam. The bread was in a wooden box at the back of the kitchen counter, but by dragging the chair over to the counter, she found that she could reach it and the toaster beside it.
DOES ANYBODY CARE?
Pacing, then, is about the speed at which you tell your story. There are several techniques you can use to effectively pace your story, including flashbacks, transitions and getting rid of all the unnecessary parts of your narrative—the stuff everyone skips in order to get to the good stuff, what happens next.
One of the things you want to think about in your writing at any given point in your manuscript is, Does anybody care? Are you writing something that has no humanity to it?
Here's an example from one of Gary's student's early work:
Sunrise began to paint its kaleidoscope of pastels on the desert of New Mexico. The cool August morning gave way rapidly to rising temperatures, and to the grey, violet outline of butte and cactus. These forms, hidden for hours in darkness, now appeared in changing hues of pink and orange. Step by step the sun's palette distributed its gentle splendor onto a vast canvas of silvers. All night long, the man-made glare of white light shone from massive staging platforms and block shaped buildings that made up section 4 of Holliman Airforce Base. The strong white dots from these lamps now became less and less intense as the sun set to work establishing its light and warmth over all of the base's 160 square miles.
OK, first problem, as we've discussed earlier: There's no established viewpoint. It's pretty stuff, but there are no people present. Who is doing all this observing? And because there are no people present, there's no forward story movement. The writing is static and boring. It's setting up a scene, but there's no need to set up the scene this way.
Joe Bloggs watched the shadows of dawn give way to the beginnings of a glaring, colorful morning in the New Mexican desert, as the sun's growing warmth took the chill out of the air over Holliman Airforce Base below him.
Now we've established in a sentence (if a touch purple-prose-like, admittedly) what was not established in six sentences (actually more, because the example goes on like this for a couple of pages). If you find yourself waxing lyrical like Gary's student, writing a lot of pretty words but nobody is doing anything, you are going to have to cut them. No one cares. There's no emotional involvement.
Sometimes Gary would say this to writers and they'd say, "Well, Gary, I saw something in a book I read, and it's the same thing." They're talking about something they think they saw.
Here's an example. It's the lead from Scott Spencer's book Endless Love, which was one of Gary's favorite pacing examples. And with good reason. At first glance the passage may appear to he something rather precious and pretty, even somewhat pretentious in its tone, but as you'll see, it would be a mistake to think that way. We'll go over this passage in some detail and examine how Scott Spencer paces his story:
When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment ruined everything I loved. I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now years have passed, and the night of August 12,1967, still divides my life.
Despite the heavy-handed literary tone of this passage, it has the feel of movement to it. Why? Let's look at it again:
When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment ruined everything I loved. I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now years have passed, and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.
There are eleven things happening in that passage (all underlined) all actions that foreshadow the story or move it forward. The passage is filled not only with active, action words, but words that bear directly on the story that is about to unfold in the coming pages.
FORESHADOWING
Foreshadowing is something that comes through planning your story's twists and turns and through rewriting.
At its simplest, foreshadowing ties one seemingly unrelated incident to another that occurs later on, making readers see that second event in a whole new light.
For example, suppose a detective is investigating a kidnapping. During the course of the story, the detective finds a brass button embossed with an anchor crest. This is a kind of foreshadowing if the button proves to be a material clue to who kidnapped the child. Say, for example, that later on in the story, the detective searches the child's uncle's bedroom and finds a blazer with a button missing. The button he found earlier matches the blazer's other buttons.
Perhaps the protagonist hates heights and has to struggle with his vertigo when he ventures onto a cliff face to recover the brass button. This makes the discovery of the button much more dramatic and sets up the solution of the mystery as well as a dramatic conclusion.
Let's assume the climax of the story takes place on a Ferris wheel. Because you foreshadowed the hero's fear of heights, the denouement has much more drama. Readers can see it coming and start to feel apprehension and then fear for the character even before the character starts to experience these emotions.
Even better, instead of searching the villain's bedroom, what if, at a fairground, the hero discovers who the villain is because the villain (still the child's uncle as you originally planned) wears his blazer with the missing button? Suppose a chase ensues that forces the protagonist onto a Ferris wheel where the villain has taken refuge in some manner.
The best structure is not a series of parallel, sometimes intersecting, lines, but coils. The story seems to swoop back on itself; however, it does not return to where it started, but instead arrives at another plane and heads in a logical (because of what has gone before), but unexpected direction (because of a different way of looking at those events). In some senses, writing a narrative can be thought of as posing and then solving a series of lateral-thinking problems.
Here's an example of what I mean: A man's car develops a flat tire in the middle of a teeming rainstorm. In the course of changing the tire, he knocks over the hubcap in which he's been keeping the wheel nuts
, and they all roll down a drain, never to be seen again. Now, how does he get the wheel back on the car and drive safely home?
The answer is that he takes one nut from each of the remaining three tires and drives cautiously but safely home on four wheels fastened with three nuts each. Lateral thinking. It is one of the narrative storyteller's most potent tools when used properly. (If you are interested in reading more about this, check out the work of Professor Edward DeBono, who, in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote a series of books about lateral thinking.)
TRANSITIONS
During Gary's video workshop it started to rain while he was giving a lecture outside. In order not to get wet, he had to hightail it into the house. The scene in the video then switched from Gary outside, trying to avoid getting wet, to Gary running inside from the rain.
As it happened, there were only a few minutes between each scene, but the passage of time between the two events could have been an hour, a week, even a year. The juxtaposition of putting one scene immediately after the other so it matches the details of the scene before suggests there is no serious lapse of time, just a change of camera viewpoint.
But suppose there had been a year in between Gary getting wet outside and resuming his lecture inside. How would a viewer feel if she were forced to sit and watch Gary tell her about everything he did during that period of time between scenes?
"Oh yeah," he'd say, "I dropped off at the plumbing supply store and got myself a few gaskets. And I ran into my friend Josephine. She's still doing pretty well, and we chitchatted about her mother-in-law for a while. Then I stopped off at the diner. Got myself a tuna fish sandwich," and on and on.
It would get pretty boring, wouldn't it? The reader isn't interested in what happened between the scenes; she only wants to know what happened in the scenes themselves. That's what relates to the story.
Your reader doesn't care about transitional material. She doesn't care what happened between events in the story. She cares only about what happened next—about the events. So you want to minimize the transitions.
