Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  EXERCISE 1

  This week, choose two ways to get ideas. Set aside at least one hour of writing time for each exercise. Do them.

  EXERCISE 2

  Pick the idea you like the best from the previous exercise, and give this idea a hook, line, and sinker.

  EXERCISE 3

  Now, apply Bell’s Pyramid to your idea. Is there enough passion, potential, and precision to make you want to continue?

  EXERCISE 4

  Even if you decide not to dedicate a whole novel to this idea, going through the process will help you the next time. But if you like the idea, use the rest of this book to get it into fighting shape.

  EXERCISE 5

  Resolve to set aside a few hours a month just for getting ideas. Stay alert to the idea possibilities all around you. Jot down notes. Rip out newspaper items. Once a month, go through your ideas and nurture them.

  Chapter 4

  Beginning Strong

  We start to make up our minds about other people within seven seconds of first meeting them.

  — Roger Ailes, You Are the Message

  Act I, the beginning portion of the novel, has several tasks to perform:

  Get the reader hooked.

  Establish a bond between the reader and the Lead character.

  Present the story world — tell us something about the setting, the time, and the immediate context.

  Establish the general tone of the novel. Is this to be a sweeping epic or a zany farce? Action packed or dwelling more on character change? Fast moving or leisurely paced?

  Compel the reader to move on to the middle. Just why should the reader care to continue?

  Introduce the opposition. Who or what wants to stop the Lead?

  Do these things well, and your plot will have a strong foundation. Your readers will feel they are in the hands of a competent storyteller. And that’s not a bad thing to be, is it?

  GETTING YOUR READER HOOKED

  The first task of your beginning is to hook the reader. Period.

  And remember, that first reader is going to be an agent or editor. Tough crowd. These are people who have too many manuscripts to go through each day. They are just itching for a reason to put yours down.

  Don’t give them that reason.

  Then you have the bookstore browser, who might (because the marketing and design departments have done their jobs) open up to the first page to see what’s there.

  This is the battle you fight. There are nine billion other things the reader can do besides read your book.

  First impressions are tough to shake. Make a bad one, and you have to work twice as hard and twice as long to get back to square one. You may not even get the chance.

  So it pays — in life and in fiction — to make a great first impression. Here are some ways to grab readers from the start.

  Opening Lines

  Take a look sometime at the openings of Dean Koontz’s novels. Often, they are one-line paragraphs with a named person and some sort of immediate interruption to normality:

  Katharine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it.

  — Dance With the Devil, written as “Deanna Dwyer”

  Penny Dawson woke and heard something moving furtively in the dark bedroom.

  — Darkfall

  Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.

  — Dragon Tears

  In his onyx-walled room in the occupation tower, Hulann — a naoili — had disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain.

  — Beastchild

  What are the successful elements of these opening lines? First, they give the name of a character. This specificity creates the illusion of reality from the get-go. A variation on this is to begin with a pronoun: She heard something moving in her bedroom.

  What I like about the Koontz approach, however, is that a name gives that extra measure of verisimilitude and makes the “willing suspension of disbelief” that much easier.

  The second thing to notice is that something is happening or about to happen to the character. And not just anything — something ominous or dangerous. An interruption to normal life.

  Give readers a feeling of motion, of something happening or about to happen. Give them this feeling from the very start.

  If you begin with long, descriptive passages (something that was much more acceptable in the past), the feeling you’ll create is not one of motion but of stasis.

  Don’t misunderstand. Descriptions are not out of bounds — so long as you include text that gives the feeling of motion.

  And only a character can be in motion. So — give us a character as soon as possible. Take a look at this next example from Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe:

  The world outside the window was in flames. The leaves on the pistachio trees shone fire-red and orange. Mattie studied the early morning light. She was lying on the side of the bed where her husband should have been sleeping.

  Here Lamott starts with description. But she gets a character into it in the third sentence. And then she drops in a line of something amiss — her husband is not there, where he should have been.

  We have a feeling of motion, that Mattie is in the midst of a troubling situation and is going to have to do something about it.

  That’s what a feeling of motion is. Not necessarily overt action (though that works, too) but the sense that action is or is about to take place.

  Unless something disturbing happens to your Lead early on, you risk violating Hitchcock’s Axiom: A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.

  So stir up the waters.

  What happens doesn’t have to be huge, like a house blowing up. It can be something as seemingly innocuous as a telephone call in the night or a bit of unsettling news.

  For example, we meet Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara at the very beginning of Gone With the Wind this way:

  Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

  This is Scarlett and her world at the beginning — she can catch men with her charm. She likes to do so.

  She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be …

  So far so good. Scarlett is charming the twins, controlling them. Then the conversation turns to the upcoming barbecue at Twelve Oaks. The twins want to tie up Scarlett for the waltzes, and promise to tell her a secret if she’ll consent. The secret is that the engagement of Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton is going to be announced at the party.

  Scarlett’s face did not change but her lips went white — like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened.

  Disturbance! A few pages later, we learn why:

  Ashley to marry Melanie Hamilton!

  Oh, it couldn’t be true! … No, Ashley couldn’t be in love with Melanie, because — oh, she couldn’t be mistaken! — because he was in love with her! She, Scarlett, was the one he loved — she knew it!

  So the world Scarlett thought she ruled — the world of beaux and marriage — has been riled up.

  Consider the opening from Jonathan Harr’s brilliant book, A Civil Action. This is nonfiction, the true story of a complex case involving several deaths and illnesses caused by two large companies that recklessly poisoned the water supply of a small town. But it reads like the best fiction, and it does so right from the start.

  The first sentence reads: “The lawyer Jan Schlichtmann was awakened by the telephone at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning in mid-July.”

  What this does, from the very start, is give you a Lead
character and a phone call that wakes him up. We’ve all received late night or early morning calls, and they usually portend bad news. So we want to read on and find out why the call was made. We’re hooked from the very first sentence.

  The opening chapter then goes on to reveal that the call is from a creditor telling Schlichtmann that if he doesn’t pay up, his car will be repossessed. Twenty minutes later another call comes from the County Sheriff, who is coming for the car. We learn Schlichtmann is involved in a huge case and is at the end of his financial rope. Things are so bad he could lose everything — his business, his home, his possessions. And we learn that the jury is out, deliberating on this case that will make or break Schlichtmann. We follow the now carless Schlichtmann as he walks down to the courthouse to wait in the corridor while the jury begins another day of deliberations. Our last image is of this lawyer, alone, waiting.

  This brilliant opening now allows the author to drop back in time and spend the rest of the book bringing us back to the point where it begins. We want to read because we have a character who is immediately sympathetic and interesting, tied up in the battle of his life. We were there from the very first sentence.

  Here are some other ways to grab readers from the start.

  Action

  James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice begins: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

  We are, as they say, in medias res — in the middle of things.

  Another form of immediate action is dialogue. If there is an element of conflict in there, so much the better. I chose this for my opening in Final Witness:

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Going into your third year?

  ”“Yes.”

  “Second in your class?”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Isn’t it true you have a motive to lie?”

  “Excuse me?” Rachel Ybarra felt her face start to burn. That question had come from nowhere, like a slap. She sat up a little straighter in the chair.

  This cross-examination style plunges us into instant conflict between two characters.

  Raw Emotion

  The Quiet Game by Greg Iles begins with a father holding his four-year-old daughter in a line at Disney World:

  Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.

  “Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”

  I do not look. I don’t ask where. I don’t because Annie’s mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.

  We bond with the Lead through his deep feeling of a universal emotion.

  Look-Back Hook

  Still another way to capture attention from the start is with the look-back hook. Here is how Stephen King does it:

  The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

  — IT

  The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about — when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all.

  — The Dead Zone

  The idea is to immediately suggest there is a not-to-be-missed story about to unfold.

  Attitude

  When using first-person narration, especially in literary fiction, your can capture attention through voice and attitude as J.D. Salinger does here:

  If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

  — The Catcher in the Rye

  Grab your readers with judicious use of the methods outlined above. You still have a long way to go to keep readers turning the pages, but at least you’ll be off to a good start.

  Prologues

  The use of prologues is a venerable one, used by all sorts of writers in many different ways. But the most effective prologues do one simple thing — entice the reader to move to chapter one.

  All of the rules we talk about in this chapter apply to prologues as well, with one primary exception: The prologue does not necessarily have to introduce your Lead character. It does, however, eventually have to connect to your main plot.

  The primary ways prologues are used are as an action hook, as a frame story, and as a teaser.

  Action Prologue

  With the action prologue, a staple of suspense fiction, we start off with some sort of big scene, many times involving death. This sets up the tone and stakes right away. Chapter one will begin the main plot, and what has just happened will hover over the entire story.

  Sometimes the Lead character is involved in the prologue. In Final Seconds, by John Lutz and David August, the prologue involves a bomb scare in a New York public school. Harper, the Lead character, is a grizzled veteran of the New York Police Department’s bomb squad. He arrives on the scene with his young partner. Tension builds as Harper tries to defuse the bomb. Finally, left holding a bit of explosive, Harper is almost there when … boom. And his hand is mostly blown off.

  Chapter one opens two-and-a-half years later, with Harper going to see his partner — who was at fault for the accident. Harper is no longer with the NYPD.

  Thus we get a prologue of incredible excitement and suspense, and as chapter one begins, we wonder how Harper has handled life after this traumatic experience.

  Another example is Harlan Coben’s Tell No One. The narrator, David Beck, opens by recounting an anniversary trip with his wife Elizabeth to a romantic lakeside, a place of good memories. Eventually they go swimming in the dark lake, make love, and lounge on a raft.

  Then Elizabeth steps onto the dock. Beck stays on the raft. He hears a car door slam, and Elizabeth is gone.

  Beck swims to the dock, shouting his wife’s name.

  He hears her scream. As he gets out of the water, he’s struck by something and topples back into the lake. He hears her scream again, “but the sound, all sound, gurgled away as I sank under the water.”

  That’s the end of the prologue. Chapter one begins eight years later.

  More common is the prologue involving characters other than the Lead — characters who may or may not show up in the main plot.

  In Dean Koontz’s Midnight, we are introduced to Janice Capshaw, who, as we know from earlier discussions, likes to run at night. As she jogs through the foreboding darkness, Koontz gives us some of her background, building up identification and even sympathy.

  Suspense starts to build as Janice gets the feeling that someone — or something — is following her. How right she is. And at the end of the prologue, she is killed by some mysterious, horrible creatures.

  The first chapter begins with Sam Booker, the Lead, arriving in the little town where the killing took place.

  Which offers up this rule: If you do not introduce your Lead in the prologue, make sure you do it in chapter one! Readers want to know whom they are supposed to follow.

  Note: Koontz labeled this prologue chapter “1” and the real opening chapter, chapter “2.” That’s a choice you can make if you so desire. What matters is not the tag, but the function.

  To use an action prologue, remember:

  Make the action big enough to justify a prologue.

  Keep it relatively short.

  End with trouble — something bad happens or is about to happen.

  Make sure you tie in the prologue with the main plot at some point, or at least explain what happened.

  Framing a Story

  A prologue can also give us the view of a character about to look back and tell the story. Why do this? In order to set up a feeling that what is about to un
fold has consequences that reach into the present and the future.

  Stephen King’s novella, The Body, begins with the narrator looking back to 1960, a “long time ago,” when he first saw a dead body. But he indicates that the incident was much deeper than a visual image — it was one of those things that “lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried. …”

  The Catcher in the Rye is a frame story, though Salinger does not mark it with Prologue or Epilogue. That comes out purely in the writing.

  The narrator, Holden Caulfield, informs us he is going to tell about “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”

  Where is here? We don’t find out until the last chapter, where we learn Holden is in a sanitarium.

  With a frame prologue:

  Establish the kind of feeling and tone you want to hover over the main plot.

  Make it good reading in and of itself, not just dry telling. An interesting voice is essential.

  Show us how the events about to unfold are affecting the prologue character now.

  The Teaser

  Though rarely used, the teaser can work on occasion. Mary Higgins Clark has done it more than once.

  In the teaser, you present a scene at the beginning that will happen later on in the book. It’s like a preview of a coming attraction.

  Why do it this way? Because you grab the reader with action. You don’t play the scene to full fruition, leaving a mystery. You leave the reader wondering, How did this character get herself into this predicament?

  When you get to that scene in the novel, you then play it out, and answer the reader’s initial question.