Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure

by Jack Bickham

  DRAMATIC PRINCIPLES AND DEVICES

  Every novelist should have one question in mind at every step of planning, writing and revising her novel: How can I make sure the reader isn't getting bored? For if you can keep the reader on tenterhooks, eagerly turning pages to see what's going to happen next to characters he really cares about, then you have succeeded as a fiction writer.

  Now, there are probably some authorities around who would contend that wonderful characterization is the key to keeping the reader on the edge of his chair. Others might argue that a strong story theme is what primarily fascinates. Still others might suggest that high story stakes, or colorful locale, or richness of research background, or some other aspect keeps the reader glued to your story. These are all good ideas, but my own opinion — obviously — is that readers are initially interested, then held enthralled, and finally satisfied primarily by excellent handling of narrative structure.

  Solid handling of mega-scale structure — how cleverly and well you arrange and develop your scenes and their linking sequels — gives you a framework in which story happenings can be presented in their most fascinating and suspenseful way. It also provides the framework in which you can best develop your characters, for the heart of every scene is conflict, and in fiction conflict not only reveals character, it virtually creates character as the story person is tested again and again in harrowing struggle—and disastrous developments which might destroy a lesser character.

  Further, a well-organized story with inexorable forward movement—inevitable if the scenes are working right—will sweep the reader along like a raftsman being carried pell-mell down a rushing river; there will simply be no place where the reader can relax and hop off. Well-thoughtout sequels, arranged properly in your story, will provide not only impeccable story logic, but a depth of vision into every character who is given a viewpoint.

  Good structure, in other words, is in my opinion the key to getting every other aspect of your fiction right. A few specific principles underlie such good structure.

  Probably most important in the matrix of ideas underlying sound novel structure is the concept of what literature teachers sometimes call rising action. By that they mean story action which seems to become more and more intense, more and more affecting, more and more involving, somehow, with each succeeding major development. We talked earlier about the need to build scenes around crucial issues. But now, in addition, if we are to be sure we have rising action, we need to make certain that the reader's tension in scene 20, say, is higher than it was in scene 10, and that the tension generated in the reader by scene 10 was greater than that built in scene 5.

  This is another of those "easy to say, hard to do" operations. But if your scenes are arranged in the correct—i.e., most dramatic —order, so that each disaster puts your major viewpoint character deeper into trouble or seemingly farther from his story goal, then that character's desperation and worry will intensify. At the same time, the reader's worry and tension will increase proportionately, assuming you've achieved reader identification with this viewpoint character.

  And how do you achieve such identification? First, as outlined earlier in this book, simply by establishing the viewpoint. Second, by making sure to make clear that the viewpoint character's story goal is vitally important to him. And third, by being careful to assure that this story goal is one that your reader can sympathize with, and also see as important.

  Thus good arrangement of your scenes to tighten the noose around your viewpoint character's neck, combined with thoughtful handling of viewpoint and story goal, will put you well on your way to achieving rising action in the plot.

  A plot with scenes arranged in the most dramatic order will work in one of the following ways:

  1. The scenes will move the viewpoint character farther and farther away from any quick shortcut to the original goal. (Remember the old woman and the pig?)

  In such an arrangement, your character from an earlier chapter who wanted to climb a mountain might find himself ten scenes into the book trying to get his brother to lend him fifteen dollars so that he can put some gas in his car so that he can drive to Dallas so that he can get copies of his military records out of a bank safe-deposit box there so that he can hurry back to Oklahoma City so that he can prove to the credit bureau that he has a valid GI insurance policy 50 that he can get a cleaned-up credit report 50 that he can make a new appointment with the banker 50 that he can go back and reapply for the loan so that he can start assembling climbing gear 50 that—well, you get the idea. Your hero has been working his fool head off, meeting disaster after disaster and trying again and again, and the further he goes into the story, the further he seems to be away from the attainment he really seeks. He thinks about this, and feels increasingly frustrated and scared with each new development moving him further away from a straight line to the mountain. The reader worries and gets tenser, too. But your character keeps going, doggedly moving backward. Your reader admires him for his tenacity—and worries all the more.

  2. The scenes will develop through a series of disasters which heap new and unexpected woes on the character's head, but do not obviously relate to one another.

  With this kind of development, the character is not moved so much along lines of increasing distance from, and immediate relevance to, his story goal. In this kind of story tightening, most of the disasters are not delays or new, temporary side-shoot plot vectors, as just above, but truly new and more pressing immediate trouble.

  In this kind of arrangement, by scene 10 your wishful mountainclimber may find himself in a rotting jungle jailhouse in the Central American highlands because he was mistaken for a drug cartel kingpin because he flew into the local airport because he had to find his missing brother because he learned his brother was missing when he went to New Orleans to visit him because his brother called to say he was ill because—again, you see how this works.

  One example of such development can be found in the John D. MacDonald novel Cinnamon Skin. Starting out to solve a murder, Travis McGee later finds himself in Mexico, where the disappearance of a woman suddenly forces him to abandon his original quest for a time and search for the missing person —and those involved in her disappearance. The relationship between the original story line and the Mexican adventure is tenuous, at best. It only works because Travis realizes that he has to work through the new, more pressing problem before he can get back to the old.

  Now, on the surface, the two techniques we've been discussing here — backward development and the piling on of entirely new sources of trouble—seem similar. They are in the sense that both put the viewpoint character further from his ultimate goal. But in the one case, if he can ever get the first domino to fall, he may make a lot of progress very fast, just as the old woman did with her pig. But in the second case, the new disasters that have taken him further and further afield are not obviously related in a domino-falling relationship; our hero may escape the Central American jail and be no closer than that — still several disasters separated from getting back on what looks like the right track.

  3. The scenes will develop in such a way that the hero must take on some entirely unrelated, shorter-term goal-quest to clear the decks for an eventual return to the original story line.

  Here's an example wildly exaggerated to make the point clear: Your hero started out wanting to climb the mountain. But when he goes to see the banker, the banker tells him, "I don't have time even to discuss this right now. My daughter has been missing for three days and I'm worried sick." Our hero decides to try to help, because in this scenario his young daughter went to school with the missing child. He starts asking questions, is slugged in an alley and left for dead, gets patched up and heads for a mountain cabin that he knows the banker's family sometimes rented, and . . . It's a long time before he gets through all this subplot and back to the bank loan officer.

  4. The scenes will be arranged in an interleaved pattern with scenes representing other plots — sub
plots — most of which will relate in some distant way to the central quest, but some which may not have anymore obvious link than the fact that they are playing out in the same setting at the same time.

  In such development, the viewpoint moves around in the story, our main hero's viewpoint clearly dominating, but the spotlight swinging regularly to other viewpoint characters with strong problems of their own. Your reader will tend to get interested in all the story lines if the characters are generally sympathetic, and have their own goals. Every time the main viewpoint character strikes a particularly bad snag (disaster), making the reader most intensely interested in what is going to happen next, the viewpoint switches to one of the subplot characters until the reader gets re-interested in that story line, at which point this viewpoint character, too, encounters a page-turner of a disaster—at which point the viewpoint swings to someone else again, or back to the main story line.

  This kind of interleafing of story lines radically slows the reader's progress through a longer story simply because there is so much more to read. This slowing-down in itself creates some additional reader tension. Furthermore, there is a cumulative effect of intensifying reader interest as more and more viewpoint characters struggle and meet with disasters, and rise to fight again. This accumulation of reader worries makes him tighten still further, turn the pages faster—and lose some sleep tonight because he "couldn't put it down."

  5. Scenes can be arranged under a plot assumption that puts a clearcut time limit on the story action — a deadline which must be met—so that a clock is always ticking.

  And with every tick of the clock, the reader gets tenser—the story has better rising zcton —because time is running out.

  As you recognize how well this principle leads to rising action, you may be amazed to notice how often published novelists plant some bit of business or otherwise unnecessary plot assumption to set up a ticking clock. Once such a clock is ticking and time is running out, the action rises intensely as both the viewpoint character and the reader sweat worse and worse—whether it's a time bomb hidden somewhere in the courthouse and set for 3 o'clock or the heroine's impulsive decision that "I'll force him to make his intentions clear during our date tonight —or else!"

  6. The scenes will be arranged so that options dwindle.

  Here, as the character tries first one thing and then another —reevaluating remaining options open to him in various sequels — the author makes it clear that first there may be ten things that might still be tried to get to the story goal. . . but later the character sees that there are only five options left, after five have already failed . . . and later, "If this doesn't work, there are only two things left I can see to try, and they both look miserable to me. If they both fail, what am I going to do? Will it mean I'm finished}"

  7. Plot complications and potentially terrible developments previously hidden from the reader can be revealed.

  Here, in effect, has been an author holdout. For example, the author might know quite well, in planning her story, that some character who seems like a minor player in the early parts of the book did some terrible deed ten years before the time of this novel, and now he is himself like a ticking time bomb, slumbering innocently—as far as the viewpoint character and reader can know —until, at the end of some scene, this hidden ogre's longtime vendetta crashes into the present story to make things infinitely more complicated for the hero than he had previously guessed.

  This brings us to another general point about dramatic plotting which the beginner often overlooks in focusing so hard on the plot developments she intends to show onstage, in the story "now": every narrative is really composed of three parts: the backstory, the present story and the hidden story.

  The backstory is everything that took place before you started page 1. Sometimes you must imagine many years of development before you have set up all the factors that will make the present range war or starcrossed romance "work right." In planning one of the early novels in my Brad Smith suspense series for Tor Books, for example, I had to go back two generations in a family and plot out crucial things that happened to the parents of my heroine as well as her grandparents before I could start chapter 1 knowing that she had a lost brother she did not know of. In Appendix 5, already looked at from another standpoint, one of the functions of the sequel is to introduce a considerable amount of that backstory.

  The novels of the late Ross MacDonald, especially those featuring detective Lew Archer, were rich in backstory. Their usual plot showed something happening in the story "now" that seemed insignificant; yet terrible things then began happening, only slowly was Archer able to dig back . . . back into the ghastly secret hidden so long, yet motive for all the tragedies he was currently investigating.

  The present story is the one you write in the story "now," of course. It's the present time shown between the covers of your book.

  The hidden story also takes place during the present time of the story action. But it is composed of things that happen to, or are done by, characters outside of the viewpoint character's knowledge. These are a bit like events taking place backstage while the play is going on out front for the audience. But in fiction, the hidden story must be as carefully planned, in sync with the present story events, as if you did plan to present the hidden actions.

  As an obvious example, suppose you plan for your hero to walk out of a hotel building and narrowly escape death when a heavy flowerpot falls from above and smashes to the pavement beside him. In terms of what you tell the reader, or let the viewpoint character know, this is something that simply happened. But you the author must have plotted out any number of possible actions, decisions and movements in the hidden story that you will know who dropped the pot, how he decided to do it and why, how he got to a good vantage point for the dropping at the precise right moment, etc.

  Careful planning of the hidden story must involve imagining scenes and sequels involving characters "offstage" at the moment the present story is being played on the stage. Often you must work just as hard planning and imagining these unseen story events as you do on the material that the reader will witness. You must also work hard on the timing of events in the hidden story.

  As an example of why you need both kinds of planning, consider the example of the flowerpot just above. If you are to put antagonist Jason in the building and planning to drop the pot, you have to imagine where Jason was earlier in the story, how he reacted to story events in which he was seen in the present story, and what plans he made, as well as why he made them. You can't just leap in at the last instant and drop a flowerpot out of heaven. In an identical way, you must plan the timing of Jason's movements. I have seen manuscripts in which the author did not carefully time the events imagined for the hidden story, so that a character operating momentarily in the hidden story would have to get from New York City, say, to Baltimore in sixty seconds.

  As a practical device to keep track of hidden story events and their timing, let me suggest that you find a large calendar of the type which shows a month at a glance, a rather large empty block being allowed for each date. Jot in notes for your present story scenes in black or blue, putting the events in the proper calendar date and, if necessary, listing various events on the same date by time of occurrence. Now plot out your events in the hidden story by using a red pencil or ballpoint to write them into the same calendar blocks.

  If your plot is very "dense" — which is to say, if you have many events taking place on the same days—you may need to abandon the calendar at some point and fill out a sheet of paper for each day of the story. If you do this, I suggest drawing a vertical line down the center of the sheet, top to bottom, and labeling the left-hand column "Present" and the righthand column "Hidden." I myself have gone so far as to show every hour of a really busy plot day, putting events in on both sides at the time I envision them happening.

  This may seem like a great deal of work, but it will assure that you allow time for people in the hidden story to ha
ve offstage scenes if needed to motivate them, work through sequels to draw up new plans, and have time to move through space from their last present-story location to the spot where they'll pop into present-story view, dropping a flowerpot or starting an argument or doing whatever you planned for them to do.

  Clearly, plotting the hidden story is vital, even if you never actually hand the viewpoint momentarily to some of the characters for whom you must plot out backstage thoughts and actions. But whether you are writing single or multiple viewpoint fiction, you can never afford to forget your important characters and what they might —or must, for the sake of your story—be doing when off the present stage.

  WEAVING SUBPLOTS INTO THE

  MAIN STORY LINE

  But let's suppose now that you will not limit your viewpoint to a single character throughout the novel. This will involve creation of subplots, because you should always remember that every viewpoint character should have a plot or subplot. In some cases, the subplot for "Character C" will be little more than following the main plot line and trying to help when he can. More often, however, secondary viewpoint characters should have more reason for being in the story than forming a cheering section.

  This, of course, makes it all more complex. Now you only have to juggle the timing and motives of everyone in the present and hidden story; you must also create subplots and figure out the most dramatic ways to weave them into the story that's told onstage.

  On this point here are a few observations to bear in mind:

  1. In any given segment (scene or sequel) restrict your viewpoint to a single character. (This was said before, but bears repeating because of its importance.)

  2. One viewpoint must clearly dominate in your manuscript. If, for example, you have 100 scenes, then major characters Bill and Dan must not each have the viewpoint in fifty scenes. If there were just two viewpoints, Bill and Dan, and, if Bill is your main character, seventy (or more) of the scenes should be told from his viewpoint. If you add a third viewpoint— Janis — then you will need to establish a "viewpoint hierarchy" which shows the relative importance of each character by the number of story segments given to each viewpoint. Working with our same example, Bill should still probably have the viewpoint 70 percent of the time, giving the #2-ranked character, Dan, 20 percent and Janis, who is #3, only 10 percent.