Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  PARALLEL PLOTS

  In a parallel-plot novel, you switch back and forth between the plot lines. If you can manage to end each section in a fashion that makes readers want to read on, you’re going to achieve that magical effect — I couldn’t put it down!

  Parallel plots are just that: two or more plot lines that run along the same forward path. You may have a main plot — featuring a lead character you wish to emphasize — and one or more parallel plots to go with it. Or you can equalize among the plot lines.

  The Fan, a thriller by Peter Abrahams, is a simple, two-track story. The first track is about Gil Renard, a salesman, and how his life is slowly coming apart. The second part is about Bobby Rayburn, a millionaire star baseball player, and what he is going through.

  Gil does some bad things, but we keep reading because what happens to him could happen to us. He starts losing his edge in sales, his child is a disappointment to him, he has a key sales meeting that he misses and loses the client. He attacks the man his ex-wife has married. He is let go from his job at the company his father had started. His wife gets a restraining order preventing him from being around her or his son.

  So he goes back to his hometown and takes up with a childhood friend who is now at the criminal end of the spectrum. He starts burglarizing with him, and eventually that leads to murder.

  While this is going on, we cut from time to time to Bobby’s troubles as a star baseball player. Back and forth until Gil makes his way into Bobby’s life by killing his rival on the team, then eventually getting a job working as a landscaper for him after saving Bobby’s kid from drowning in a pool. The supreme stalker. How will it end?

  Stephen King’s The Stand has several plotlines that run along the same path. Gradually these plotlines converge, eventually all coming together for a shattering climax.

  Dean Koontz produces the same effect in Strangers.When you unpack the book’s plot, it’s really about a fifty-page science-fiction suspense story. But by adding several parallel plots, Koontz transforms the book into a seven-hundred-page epic.

  You Must Make Each Plot Work On Its Own

  Of course, to make this type of complexity work, each of the plotlines has to carry its story weight. If one of the plotlines sags, it will dilute the effect. You’ll have readers giving a sigh of disappointment every time they come back to that line.

  So how do you do that?

  You use the LOCK system on every plot. You make sure you create a Lead readers will want to follow, with an objective that is crucial to her well-being, and forces that confront her all the way until that knockout at the end.

  COMPLEXITY FROM PLAYING WITH STRUCTURE AND STYLE

  Some novels and movies are told in nonlinear fashion. They jump around in time, and things don’t unfold in the way we normally think of for three acts.

  But you will notice that the best of these work because the LOCK elements and the information necessary for the beginning, middle, and end eventually line up to create a coherent story.

  As a trial lawyer and teacher of trial advocacy, I would stress to students that the jury is looking first of all for the story. They don’t care about the law during the taking of testimony. They want to know what happened. Evidence comes to them in a choppy way. They’ll hear from various witnesses on different aspects of the facts, usually in a nonchronological fashion. But what they are doing all the time is trying to fit the pieces into a coherent narrative.

  In closing arguments, the lawyers — if they are doing their job — weave a narrative and only then apply the law to the facts.

  Your readers will be doing the same thing if you write a nonlinear plot. It can work, so long as you help them fit it all into a coherent pattern.

  A classic example of a nonlinear narrative that works well is the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. The story of Charles Foster Kane is told through the flashback remembrances of various characters who knew him, jumping around the various stages of his life. Each remembrance brings us a little closer to the full story.

  Another example is the cult favorite The End of the Night, by John D. MacDonald. It is a story of four young people on a cross-country killing spree. It could have been told in a straight line, but MacDonald lets the story unfold in another way.

  The prologue is a letter written by a prison guard to his friend Ed. It describes the electrocution of four murderers. It is written in a singular voice (“All I can say is, I’m damn glad they didn’t spread the four out, say about two weeks apart. A man would hardly have no love life at all. Ha, ha.”). So, in a unique way, we get the end of the story first.

  Chapter one is written in the omniscient point of view (POV). It has the feel of a documentary in describing the lawyer, Riker Deems Owens. Language such as “Should the discerning reader detect …” is almost Victorian. Then the chapter switches to a memorandum Owens wrote, so it is naturally a first-person POV. The memo describes the killers who became his clients, known as the Wolfpack.

  Chapter two is a third-person account of Helen Wister, who became the last victim of the Wolfpack murderers.

  Chapter three introduces the death-house diary of Kirby Stassen, one of the Wolfpack. In first person, he tells about himself and the events leading up to the murders.

  The chapters then bounce back and forth among the Owens memo, third-person accounts, and Stassen’s death-house diary.

  Each chapter gives us a little more of the story, until we have it all by the end. And by changing styles in each chapter, MacDonald creates different tones that also add to the effect. I highly recommend you hunt this little gem out at your local library or used bookstore. MacDonald was a master plotter.

  Another great plotter is David Morrell. In Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing, he explains his thinking about the structure of Double Image. His hero, Coltrane, is a photographer, and the events of the book reveal that his life has a “double image.”

  The novel starts out in the past, in Bosnia, with Coltrane photographing Ilkovic, a war criminal. Coltrane barely escapes from the experience with his life. We then cut to present-day Los Angeles, where photographer Coltrane meets Randolph Packard, an old, dying, legendary photographer. Packard suggests doing a project with Coltrane. Eventually, this project leads to the old house of Packard’s that Coltrane wants to buy. Within that house is a mystery: photos of a beautiful woman. Who was she?

  Coltrane starts getting strange messages on his machine. Like someone is playing with him. Who? On page 95, he figures out it’s Ilkovic, back to hunt him. From there until about page 215, there is stalking and action until Ilkovic is killed by Coltrane.

  So the Ilkovic plot has intruded on the mystery plot. Now Morrell moves back to the “who is the woman” plot. Double plots. Double image.

  The range of play within structure is wide. Just remember that when the reader gets to the final page, he’s going to want to know what happened.

  EXERCISE 1

  Make three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, record the rich details that stand out in your scenes. In the middle column, list your main characters. In the last column, catalogue the significant settings. Now look for connections between the columns. Connect a detail with a character and place. Or work the other way, from place to character to detail. Pick the strongest two or three connections, and see if you can weave them into your plot as motifs or symbols.

  EXERCISE 2

  Determine the take-home value for your novel, and put it into one line. This can be done at any stage of your plotting. If you do it early, keep it in mind as you develop your scenes. But be careful of heavy-handedness when you do. The message must come out naturally.

  EXERCISE 3

  Music is a great way to brainstorm images for your novel. Relax and do some deep breathing. Put on a piece of music that moves you — perhaps a movie soundtrack, classical music, or jazz. Don’t play anything with lyrics. You want the music to wash over you. As it does, close your eyes and let images and even scenes suggest them
selves to your imagination. Stop and record these on paper or in the computer. Repeat this exercise from time to time as you write.

  Chapter 9

  The Character Arc in Plot

  Read, or better, study the immortals and you will be forced to conclude that their unusual penetration into human character is what has kept their work fresh and alive through the centuries.

  — Lajos Egri, The Art of Creative Writing

  Great plots have great characters. While this is not a book on character creation and implementation, we can’t let the subject of plot go without touching on at least one aspect of character work that is all important: character change.

  What makes a plot truly memorable is not all of the action, but what the action does to the character. We respond to the character who changes, who endures the crucible of the story only to emerge a different person at the end. It may be a major difference, as with Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Or it may be a subtle change, as when Scarlett O’Hara finally matures at the end of Gone With the Wind (just not soon enough to keep Rhett).

  What deepens a plot is when characters grow. Events happen and should have impact on the characters. Are there novels where the characters don’t change? Sure. But these are not usually classified as “enduring.” In a detective series, for example, the main character may remain rather static, the only change from book to book being the nature of the case.

  Even in a series, however, subtle changes in the character over time can elevate the books from mere entertainments. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Robert B. Parker’s Spencer are examples.

  So look to create character change in your novels in a way that deepens the plot and expresses a theme. For when a character learns something or suffers because he changes for the worse, it is an expression by the author about the larger canvas — not merely what happens in the novel, but what happens in life.

  THE CHARACTER ARC

  As opposed to the plotline, the character arc is a description of what happens to the inside of the character over the course of the story. He begins as one sort of person in the beginning; things happen to and around him, gradually moving him in an “arc” that ends when the story is over.

  Your lead character should be a different person at the other end of the arc.

  For example, in the film version of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy begins as a dreamer, a farm girl with her head in the clouds. She dreams of finding a better life “over the rainbow.”

  At the end, she realizes “there’s no place like home.”We might describe this arc as going from discontentment to contentment, an arc of 180 degrees. Or from dreamer to realist.

  However we put it, we are saying that Dorothy has grown because she has learned a life-changing lesson.

  The character arc has a build to it. It must, or the change will not be convincing. A good character arc has:

  A beginning point, where we meet the character and get a sense of his interior layers (more on layers in a moment)

  A doorway through which the character must pass, almost always reluctantly

  Incidents that impact the layers

  A deepening disturbance

  A moment of change, sometimes via an “epiphany”

  An aftermath

  Let’s take a look at each step in more detail. We’ll use the example of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as our prime example. This is the greatest character-change story ever written. It’s a good model.

  Beginning Point

  When we first meet Ebenezer Scrooge, he is described as a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” Dickens goes on to provide a biting physical description of Scrooge, and then proceeds to show us what Scrooge is like. In one instance, some men have stopped by Scrooge’s place of work to seek donations for the poor. Scrooge snaps:

  “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments, I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”

  “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

  “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

  A bit later, Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, once more requests the day off after Christmas. It is, after all, only one day a year. As you know, however, Cratchit’s simple request is denied, further illustrating the heartless nature of Scrooge.

  The Layers

  We all have a core self. It is the product of many things over the years — our emotional makeup, our upbringing, our traumas and experiences, and so on. Most of the time we’re not really thinking about who we are. Yet the core is there.

  And we will do what we can to protect this core because, by and large, people resist change. So we surround that core with layers that are in harmony with our essential self. Working from the core outward, these layers include: (1) beliefs; (2) values; (3) dominant attitudes; and (4) opinions.

  If you think about it, these layers get “softer” as they move away from the core. Thus, the outer layers are easiest to change. It is much easier to change your opinion, for example, than one of your deeply held beliefs.

  But there is always a ripple effect when a layer experiences change. If you change an opinion, it will filter through to the other layers. Initially, there may not be much effect. But change enough opinions, and you start to change attitudes, values, and even beliefs.

  On the other hand, suddenly changing a core belief automatically affects the other layers because it’s such a strong shift.

  How might we describe Scrooge’s core self at the start of A Christmas Carol? He is a miser and a misanthrope. He loves money and hates people.

  His beliefs include the pointlessness of love and charity.

  He values money over people.

  His attitude is that profit is more important than good works.

  In his opinion, Christmas is a humbug, clerks are always trying to take advantage, and so on.

  The Force Field of Character Change:

  Pressure from the outside penetrates the layers. When all the outer layers are sufficiently changed, the core — self-image — changes automatically.

  To make Scrooge into a new person, these layers are going to have to be disturbed. How is that to happen?

  Ghosts, of course.

  Scrooge is to be visited by three ghosts. The first, the Ghost of Christmas Past, takes Scrooge to a familiar scene:

  “Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!”

  The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man’s sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten.

  “Your lip is trembling,” said the Ghost. “And what is that upon your cheek?”

  Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.

  Scrooge is crying! This hard-bitten man who seems so intractable has, at a scene from his boyhood, connected with long-forgotten emotions. They affect him. He attempts to divert the Ghost’s attention. It is the first, small indication that somewhere inside Scrooge’s cold, uncaring body is a warm person who may re-emerge.

  The Ghost takes Scrooge to see the shop where he was a young apprentice, Old Fezziwig’s. Scrooge remembers how generous Fezziwig was to his employees, how he brought joy into their lives. This brings Scrooge to another moment of reflection on his own relationship with his employee, Cratchit. The moment results in a softening toward Bob Cratchit, whom we met earlier in the story when Scrooge barked at him. Some of the outer layer of Scrooge has been affected.

  An
d the plot advances.

  Impacting Incidents

  The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge for a look at the Cratchit family. What Scrooge witnesses there is the joy of Christmas as shared by a poor family, including Tiny Tim:

  “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

  He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.

  “Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”

  “I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

  “No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”

  We are starting to get into deeper levels with Scrooge here. There is an interest “he had never felt before.” The shadows are doing their work.

  Before the Ghost of Christmas Present leaves, Scrooge sees one more image that sears into him — under the Spirit’s robe are two young children tainted by poverty and want:

  “Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

  “Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

  The bell struck twelve.

  Notice how Scrooge’s own words (the references to prisons and workhouses), planted early in the story, now come back to haunt him.

  This is a powerful technique for character change. If you can repeat a motif, or have the character somehow come face to face with his “earlier self,” the reader will see the pressure to change powerfully conveyed.