by Jack Bickham
CHAPTER 1
THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN FICTION
Mention Words Such As Structure, form, or plot to some fiction writers, and they blanch. Such folks tend to believe that this kind of terminology means writing by some type of formula or predetermined format as rigid as a paint-by-numbers portrait.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality, a thorough understanding and use of fiction's classic structural patterns frees the writer from having to worry about the wrong things, and allows her to concentrate her imagination on characters and events rather than on such stuff as transitions and moving characters around, when to begin or open a chapter, whether there ought to be a flashback, and so on. Once you understand structure, many such architectural questions become virtually irrelevant—and structure has nothing to do with "filling in the blocks."
Structure is nothing more than a way of looking at your story material so that it's organized in a way that's both logical and dramatic. Structure is a process, not a rigid format. Structure in fiction is not static, but dynamic.
We need structure in our fiction for many reasons, but the main one goes to understanding. We need structure (a) as writers, so our stories will "hold together" and make sense. We need structure (b) as readers, so we can understand this story we're reading, and feel something as a result.
The structure of a story is internal. It's a bit different from form. The form of a story is external. The two interrelate, but they're not exactly the same thing. Structure is more like the pattern of 2 x 4s, braces and other materials inside your house. Form has to do with what's been done with the structure — whether the house is colonial or contemporary, large or small, one- or two-story, for example.
Obviously, however, it's hard to talk about structure without considering form, and vice versa. A builder planning to build in the form of a tenfloor office building would not use all the same construction materials in the walls—or other structural components — that he would in building a one-floor bungalow. On the other hand (lucky for the builder!) many of the same principles of construction would apply to both projects. In both he would have to remember that there are practical limits to how long a span can be without bracing of some kind, for example —and in both he might want to remember that a building needs a solid foundation and a good roof! Thus, whatever his form, his fundamental principles of structure would be the same.
It's the same in fiction. Story length, author intention, traditional expectations of the audience, and all sorts of things may affect the form a story may take. But underneath most forms lies the same structure —the same unchanging principles, the same creative laws.
Those are what this book is mainly about.
The short story writer is taught that a short story has "a beginning, a middle and an end," or perhaps "a situation, a complication, a climax and a denouement." The novelist may hear advice such as "paint a broader picture," or "give the characters more depth," or even "make all your chapters twenty pages long" —none of it very darned helpful when you're sitting at your word processor with tiny droplets of blood oozing from your forehead. But once you understand structure, you'll see with growing clarity that short story and novel alike have many of the same basic elements of structure — so that whatever your form, long or short or in the middle, you can always work with the same basics.
THE HISTORY OF STRUCTURE
This wasn't always true. The first English novelists, for example, knew they wanted a very-long-story form. They had epic poems as their only obvious guideline. Literary historians generally agree, however, that the first novels in the English language had a far simpler form and internal structure than much earlier long narrative poems such as Beowulf.
In writing for a broad, popular audience (they hoped!), the first neonovelists came up with a very simple device: the personal letter. The letter itself had no formal internal structure beyond that of [salutation] + [reporting and comment] + [signature]. A sequential series of such relatively unstructured letters became the form for the book.
The earliest English novelists like Richardson used this device well. The letter, however, always removed the reader somewhat from the action because everything had to be told —obviously—some time after the event actually took place.
Writers who took the next step in developing internal structure for the long prose narrative made it a small step: They built their novels around a series of entries in a journal or diary (Robinson Crusoe being a good example). This form allowed a bit more informal personal commentary on the action by the writer, and also worked well at the time. Again, however, the reader was being told the story after it took place, rather than seeming to experience it as it unfolded. And even a journal or diary was obviously a literary device that took a certain amount of extra imaginative effort on the part of the reader if he was to "really get into it."
The next step, also a short one, was more significant because it tried to attack the limitation problems of letter-diary-journal structure. This was the adoption of a "conversational" structure with the first-person narrator writing you, the reader, his story as if he were telling it to you in his living room, with all the asides, explanations to "dear reader" and loose associational tone that such a structure allowed. More important, in jettisoning the "documentary" approach, it freed the novelist to tell the story more as if it were happening in the story "now" rather than as something being documented after the event; in other words, it added some sense of immediacy.
It was only after all these early experiments had been tried that later novelists —notably the greatest of them all, Charles Dickens—began developing the kind of structure more familiar to modern readers: a sequence of scenes played in the story here-and-now as if they were taking place as the reader read and imagined them, and told (often first person) from the viewpoint of a character in the series of scenes as they took place.
Novels and short stories structured around letters, diaries or author conversation use time-honored devices, and you can find an occasional novel of one or another of these types that achieves success. There are, however, a number of other general forms.
TYPES OF FORMS
The first-person novel, told by a character inside the story action, remains a form that is often seen today. It offers the strength of seeming actuality, and helps the reader identify with the central character because only the story "I" ever shares thoughts or feelings.
More common today is the story told in the third person, but with the viewpoint limited to only one character within the story action. This is almost always the character with the most to win or lose as the story unfolds—a hero or heroine.
More ambitious (in terms of length) novels often slightly alter this form, still telling the story in the third person, but jumping around to many character viewpoints. It is a measure of the sophistication of the novel today, however, that careful study will usually show that the viewpoint in such multiple-viewpoint novels remains limited to a single character in most structural compartments or scenes of the book.
And of course there are other, less-common forms of the novel today such as stream of consciousness, wherein the reader is plunged into the almost-chaotic ruminations of a character's wandering mind; the "document novel," in which medical records or the contents of a computer data bank or some such are presented in seemingly chaotic form to tell someone's story indirectly through the documentation; and what might be called the "collection novel," in which a series of short stories is presented between one set of covers and the reader is left to find their common denominator—or not—as she can.
The point to be m
ade here, however, is that at least 95 percent of the popular novels published today —whatever their general form —depend on the structure of the scene to make them work.
To put this a slightly different way: Most successful fiction today is based on a structure that uses a series of scenes that interconnect in a very clear way to form a long narrative with linear development from the posing of a story question at the outset to the answering of that question at the climax.
In the chapters to follow, we'll look at some general fiction strategy, then examine the internal structure of the scene—and how a series of scenes can be linked into a larger architectural plan to form the modern story. We'll concentrate on the novel form, because such a long form makes scene structure most necessary as a way of maintaining logic and pace. But whether your form is short or long, you'll find that an ability to plan, write, and then link scenes is the key to effective storytelling in today's world.
CHAPTER 2
STRATEGY: HOW TO START YOUR STORY AND HOW TO END IT
In Chapter I You Got a glimpse of how structure relates to form, and how the internal structure of the modern novel developed out of simpler forms. Before getting down to the nuts and bolts of the new structure, however, we'd better take a general look at how popular narrative fiction works —or ought to.
In doing so, we'll not only get a clearer picture of the general form and strategy of long fiction today, but we'll also hope to give some insight into some of the questions that always seem to plague novice novelists. Questions such as —
• "How long should my novel be?"
• "Where should I start my story?"
• "How and when should I end my story?"
• "Do I need a lot of subplots?"
• "Does it have to have a happy ending?"
And so on!
The answer to the first common question —about length —may be answered in a general way: Length may be determined by the requirements of your publisher, especially if you plan to work in a genre. Harlequin romances, for example, are written to a rigid length requirement. On the other hand, if you have no such genre or publisher guidance, then you should plan to keep your novel's length somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 words.
(You may be wondering how many manuscript pages these totals represent. The answer is not clear-cut, since the typeface size you use on your typewriter or printer will determine the average number of words per page. Also, a story with a considerable amount of brief dialogue — many partial lines per page — may average considerably fewer words per page than a manuscript with little dialogue and a great amount of longparagraph narration or description. As a general rule of thumb, start out with the assumption that the 60,000- to 90,000-word parameters represent page-lengths in the range of 240 to 360 finished pages. But to be sure about your own averages, the best advice is to count—carefully— the number of words on ten filled pages pulled at random from your manuscript; then determine your own average.)
Books shorter than 60,000 words are published, certainly, and a novel of 50,000 words has a chance. But lengths falling far below the 60,000-word norm are rarities that many publishers don't often buy because they don't fit traditional production and selling strategies. Books longer than 90,000 words are very expensive to publish, will cost more at the bookstore, and consequently represent what may be an unacceptable risk for many publishers.
Granted, this still leaves an area for potential confusion about your manuscript and how long it should be. But once you have a general idea of story strategy, your worries about length and many other problems will be eased. So let's look.
YOU ARE HERE
There was a wonderful time, not so long ago, when a writer planning to produce a novel could start virtually with her main character's birth, or at least as early as his early childhood, and simply tell almost the entire story of a person's life. But readers today are more hurried and impatient—and jaded by swiftly paced television drama; they want condensation, speed and punch.
(This was nowhere more vividly demonstrated to me than in a recent conversation with a high school senior. He was moaning about having to read A Tale of Two Cities. Asked why he was experiencing difficulty with the book, he said, "It's boring!" So, if readers today can think A Tale of Two Cities is boring, we'd all better learn the fastest-moving, tightest methods of telling a story that we can discover.)
So it's not very likely that you're going to be able to start page 1 of your story "at the beginning" as you may have imagined it in planning the entire flow of the yarn. You are going to have to find a time later than a character's birth or earliest childhood.
Similarly, it's not very likely that you're going to find any readers patient enough to wade through practically every interesting event in your character's life, all the way to his death, even if you start your story well into that life. You've got to select!
How, then, do you know where to start?
Generally, as implied in chapter 1, most storytellers today, even novelists, try to start their story as late in the total imagined chronology of events as is possible. Given the imagined sixty-year lifetime of a main character, the professional writer today will pinpoint those few days, weeks or months in the character's life span that form the dramatic core of his existence; the writer will then present only that brief time span in the manuscript—starting on June 10 of the character's forty-fourth year, for example, ending on July 4 of the same year, perhaps flashing back to earlier life events (but only if absolutely necessary), and giving nothing whatsoever of later events in the character's long life.
It will help you to select such a late starting point and early ending point for your story if you will remember the following facts about readers:
1. They are fascinated and threatened by significant change;
2. They want the story to start with such a change;
3. They want to have a story question to worry about;
4. They want the story question answered in the story ending;
5. They will quickly lose patience with everything but material that relates to the story question.
What follows is an explanation of these points.
Readers are fascinated and threatened by change in their real lives, and nothing else fascinates or threatens them so much in fiction. Why?
Because each of us carries around inside ourselves a mental picture of the kind of person we are. "I'm an efficient secretary," we may say. Or, "I'm an outdoorsman who loves to hunt." Or, "I'm a hometown boy not interested in travel far from home." This self-concept is at the heart of our opinion of ourselves —how much we like ourselves, how much confidence we feel, etc.—and we live our lives in large measure to be in consonance with this self-concept, and to enhance it. Our self-concept is our most precious mental and emotional possession.
Any significant change can and probably will threaten the selfconcept. Suppose the woman who defines herself as an efficient secretary is suddenly confronted by a new office situation so chaotic (or filled with new and confusing computer equipment, let us say) that she no longer can feel that she is operating at peak efficiency. In other words, some external change in her environment (the office situation) has put her out of kilter vis-a-vis her self-concept. In such a case, the woman who defines herself as an efficient secretary is going to be worse than unhappy; she is going to be profoundly shaken. If she is to be happy again, she will have to take some action. She may struggle to learn about computer systems to regain her old efficiency; she may quit her job and find a simpler one; she may try to convince the boss to go back to the old way of doing things in the office; she may elect some other course of action that will somehow get her self-concept back in tune with her everyday reality.
You may be thinking that the simplest thing for our secretary to do would be change her self-concept to something like, "I'm an old-fashioned kind of office worker who doesn't learn new tricks." But it's been psychologically proven that the self-concept is so deeply engrained, and
so devoutly protected, that most people will go to almost any lengths to protect it as it stands today.
If you wish to see this concept in action, you may consider any number of classic or popular novels, such as Dickens's Great Expectations, in which Pip's life is profoundly changed at the outset and he is off to London; The Dreadful Lemon Sky, one of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, which begins with the shattering sound of McGee's burglar alarm being tripped by an unexpected, desperate visitor; John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, opening with an inheritance and a banker's challenge to make a risky investment; Prelude to Terror, by Helen Maclnnes, in which a man leaves his lodgings and is followed by a sinister character; Forfeit, by Dick Francis, in which a man dies and a letter arrives —all in the first sentence; the classic opening of The Savage Day, by Jack Higgins, in which an imprisoned man has an unexpected caller and as the narrator says bluntly, "everything changed" (see Appendix 1, Excerpt 1), or even my own novel, Twister, which begins with a tornado. Once aware of the principle, you will notice examples all around you in the stories you read.
What does this say to you as a writer? Simply this:
For maximum effectiveness, you should start your story at the time of the change that threatens your major character's self-concept.
You will determine what this change will be in your story by thinking about your main character in considerable depth. Having done so, you will then write down his self-concept in a maximum of ten or fifteen words. You will then devise a fictional event that will represent threatening change to him, make him feel miserable and out of sync with his environment—and ready to struggle to make himself "feel right" again.
To put all this another way: Significant change that threatens your character's self-concept is where your story starts.
