Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure

by Jack Bickham

  Earlier discussion of reader identification with the viewpoint character, as well as our study of reader desire to worry about a central story question, have already shown why such a dominant viewpoint allocation is mandatory. If you start spreading the viewpoint too evenly around in the story, the reader will not only fail to identify as strongly as we wish, he will also tend to get mixed up about which of the viewpoint characters' goals is the one he is supposed to worry about most.

  3. Different viewpoints should be different. They should not all hold identical opinions about everything, react to disasters in exactly the same proportion of emotion and thought, etc. For example, if one major character feels very strongly about working to improve women's rights, fine. If several characters tend to talk incessantly about the same issue —and with the same set of beliefs — the characters will blur together, and none of them will be believable. If one character tends to react to every setback with major emotional outbursts — tears, gestures, and long-developed internalizations and sequels —then not every other character should show the same emotional pattern; perhaps another should be very cool, and experience little strong emotion, while a third might react strongly, but control his reactions sternly so that he shows little, and forces himself not to brood during his sequels.

  4. Viewpoint ordinarily should be changed only when necessary to enhance reader curiosity and suspense.

  Authors sometimes switch to a different viewpoint merely to show what the other character is thinking at the moment when revelation of that thought really doesn't give the reader anything more to worry about. Such changes should be avoided. On rare occasion you may find it desirable to change viewpoint to characterize the person taking the viewpoint, or perhaps to show that secondary character's opinion of the major viewpoint character and his plight. But fully 90 percent of your viewpoint changes should be done to heighten reader tension.

  5. If and when you change viewpoint, the best place to change is immediately after a disaster has ended a scene. The next-best place is in the thought portion of the sequel. Third-best is at the moment of new decision in the sequel.

  If you pause a moment to remember that we are working to keep the reader on tenterhooks, you will see why changing viewpoint in the places listed above is best. Any time a disaster falls at the end of the scene, the reader turns the page eagerly, wanting to see how the viewpoint character is going to react, and what he is going to do next. If your reader turns the page and finds himself plunged into some other viewpoint, he is going to be thrown momentarily off stride, and will read eagerly to get back to the viewpoint plight he just read about.

  If you choose to carry the same viewpoint character into his sequel before changing to another viewpoint, the best places to change them are in the thought segment or at the moment of decision. The rationale for this is not as obvious until you think about it. If you can drop out of a viewpoint at the time that character is trying desperately to sort things out, you are still in effect leaving his viewpoint in crisis. This is suspenseful for the reader. If, on the other hand, you carry on to the moment of new decision, you will then be switching to another viewpoint just as the new decision has been reached, which gives the story a forward thrust, and the reader a potential new scene question to worry about.

  In regard to leaving the viewpoint at the moment of decision, there is also another way to worry the reader by leaving at this point. And that is by writing something like, "Then he knew what he had to do." And change point of view without telling the reader what it is that the character just decided. This kind of a holdout drives readers nuts; use it sparingly, or they'll start writing you nasty letters.

  You can see, I am sure, how this device of changing viewpoint at a moment of high reader tension and curiosity creates the kind of story that's hard to put down. As you plot with multiple viewpoint, you play a suspense-game of hopscotch with your reader. You take Character A to a disaster, let us say—and immediately switch to Character B. And where do you later leave the viewpoint of Character B? Again, at a disaster, or in his thought process as he evaluates and worries, or just as he makes a new goal-oriented decision. So now the reader is hooked again—and again reads eagerly.

  But what about returning to the viewpoint of Character A? How do you again reorient the reader's focus to him? The answer: You pick Character A up exactly where you left him in terms of the structure.

  By that I mean simply this: If you left him at the moment of disaster, then structurally the next thing that should happen is the emotional part of his sequel, and that is precisely where you return to him. Similarly, if you left him in the middle of thought, you pick him back up again still thinking about it. If you left him at the moment of decision, you repeat that decision as the opening lines of the section where you return to him — and then immediately show him moving into new action.

  By maintaining such structural integrity, you will seldom if ever confuse the reader, or give him much trouble reorienting to a viewpoint. The reader will probably have no idea that you left a viewpoint at the disaster and picked him up later at the precise moment he started his sequel, for example —the reader doesn't know structure and he doesn't know the terminology. But since the progression of parts of scene and sequel are so true to human behavior, the reader will reorient instantly, and without much trouble.

  Does this mean that you always have to go back in time to where you left a viewpoint when you return to it? By no means, and this is another beauty of the way the structure works. You can leave a viewpoint character for quite a bit of story time—you can even move him around offstage while you're in other viewpoints — and then you can pick him up later, and even in some other place, and simply continue his structural pattern as if there had never been a break in his viewpoint. You can leave a viewpoint character at the moment of a disaster befalling him in San Francisco on a Thursday, for example, and then follow one or more other viewpoints for several hours or even days. When you're ready to go back to the original viewpoint character, you don't have to "flashback" to Thursday in San Francisco. You could, if you wished, plot it so that in the hidden story he flew to Jakarta. You can then rejoin his viewpoint in Jakarta the following Monday, and the reader will have no trouble at all with the space-time transition if you observe structural integrity — if you open his new segment showing him still stuck in the next structural compartment he should be in, the emotional part of the sequel following the San Francisco disaster.

  For the reader, it will be as if no time had passed, and the transition simply doesn't matter to him because structurally nothing has happened. All you would have to do is write something like this:

  Tim was still reeling with shock from the outcome of Thursday's board meeting when he walked into the Jakarta hotel the next Monday morning.

  Thus the author has brought the reader back to Tim's viewpoint precisely where his viewpoint was last seen, structurally speaking. The author left Tim at the moment of disaster, and now picks him up again in the throes of his emotional reaction to the disaster (the first part of his sequel to that disaster). The transition in space and time is irrelevant; nothing has been left out in terms of logical, classic structure.

  Such devices allow for a swift-moving story and heightened reader suspense while keeping complex developments clear.

  SCENE AND SEQUEL CONTENT TRICKS TO KEEP THE READER WORRIED

  Of course most of what has gone before centered on keeping your reader worried —glued to his chair. There are many other tricks you can play with the content of scenes and sequels which will also add to the reader's pleasant discomfort.

  In a Scene

  1. Drop hints about things the antagonist seems to know which the viewpoint character doesn't. This can be as simple as having the antagonist say, "I am quite aware of the rival company's plans for its new product," when the hero doesn't know diddly. This raises an ancillary question or worry in the reader's mind, and he'll mentally fuss over it for quite some time. Just remember t
hat you have to satisfy his curiosity sometime!

  2. Have the antagonist reveal something that the hero didn't know when he started the scene. This bit of bad news can alter all your viewpoint character's assumptions about how the scene might unfold —even force him to deviate slightly from his stated scene goal. This puts the hero at a decided disadvantage—which worries the reader more. For example:

  "I know you came in to ask for a raise, John," the personnel manager said. "But perhaps you didn't know that we're considering downgrading your position from Level Five to Level Three."

  3. Conversely, show new information in the scene which makes it clear that your viewpoint character had faulty intelligence coming in, and assumed something that is not so. Perhaps he comes in to argue for a promotion to a new job that's opening up —but learns that job is not opening up. Now he has to scramble around to try to salvage something in the interview, perhaps information on other jobs that may be opening.

  4. Have your antagonist set a ticking clock on the duration of the scene, perhaps by saying something like, "I've got exactly five minutes to give you. You'd better make it good and you'd better make it fast."

  5. Show that the stakes are higher than the viewpoint character had realized. The antagonist might reveal that a sought-after promotion involves not only a pay raise, as our hero had thought, but also a profitsharing program and use of a company car.

  6. Have your viewpoint character think about (in internalization) or even orally hint at the fact that he has more of an agenda here than the reader can be fully aware of. (This is only possible when you are writing from a very cool viewpoint, and in the preceding sequel held back some or most of the details of his plans for this scene.)

  In Sequel

  1. Set a clock ticking so that the character has only so many minutes to reach a decision. Some other character may set this time limit, or the viewpoint character may set it on himself.

  2. In the thought segment, have the character realize whole new dimensions of the previous disaster and his present plight that he hadn't thought of before.

  3. Consider having the character's emotional reaction overwhelm him, so that he plunges back into the story battle with insufficient thought.

  4. Devise a way to insert a "roadblock" scene in the early stages of the action segment so that the viewpoint character must, in effect, have a sidebar fight of some kind to find his way back to the next scene which he sees as relating directly to his long-term story goal.

  5. Hold out on the new decision, as mentioned under No. 6 in the list of scene devices just above. You write something like, "Then he knew what he had to do." But don't tell the reader.

  6. Stage an interruption —an outside stimulus —which forces the character to "stop sequelizing" and meet the new threat.

  You will find as you work more with dramatic narrative structure that some of the devices mentioned herein can often be spotted in published stories. You will also notice how some authors "mix and match" their techniques, using a hint of one trick and parts of one or more others. This should not discourage you. You now understand the basics and can work the same magic yourself.

  CHAPTER 12

  SPECIALIZED SCENE TECHNIQUES

  In The Writing Of A Very Long story such as a novel, many troublesome, hard-to-handle plot situations can arise. As we have seen, you can work through many of these by reassessing some of your plot assumptions or rearranging some of your classically structured scenes and sequels. There are other problems and story needs, however, that require a bit more invention on your part. Nearly always, the answer is not to jettison classic structure, but to know how to bend it.

  We have already looked briefly at some of the ways you can alter or rearrange structural components to solve a particular problem or achieve a certain desired effect. What follows is a deeper discussion of some of those specialized techniques, and why you sometimes need to use them. Topics:

  1. Scene interruption

  2. Scene-in-scene

  3. Scene-in-sequel

  4. Scene to delay a sequel

  5. Scenes started by a nonviewpoint character

  6. Flashback scenes

  7. Scene fragmentation

  8. All-dialogue scenes

  9. All-action scenes

  10. Maneuver scenes against an unseen opponent

  11. Multiple-agenda scenes

  SCENE/SEQUEL TECHNIQUES

  It might strike you as particularly ironic that the first topic on the list is scene interruption, when only a few pages ago I was warning you against allowing scenes to be interrupted except under very special circumstances. The warning was against inadvertently setting up your story situation so that an unwanted interruption seemed to just happen. Here we're dealing with a special story situation in which you need to interrupt a scene for thought-out dramatic reasons.

  Why might you want to interrupt a scene? Perhaps to further tease and tantalize your reader. Suppose that the scene is the most crucial yet in the novel, and you feel supremely confident that the reader is hanging on every word and action taking place. Every so often it's a neat suspense trick to create some diversion which forces a temporary postponement of completion of the conflict. When this happens, your viewpoint character wants to get on with things, but is thwarted, his scene quest postponed. In a small way, he will usually experience this delay as a setback—a minidisaster if you will —and may even have a lengthy internalization which almost becomes a sequel as he reacts. The reader, too, is disappointed when the scene is interrupted, because he has been thwarted in his desire to learn the answer to the scene question. Therefore, the effect of carefully planned scene interruption can be an intensification of suspense.

  On most occasions, when you interrupt a scene, you can set up a small ticking-clock situation by having either your viewpoint character or his antagonist set a timetable for resumption of the conflict. "I'll be back in two hours!" the antagonist says, hurrying out of the office in response to the telephone call. Or, "We can't wait past midnight!" your viewpoint character reminds the antagonist. The setting of this little clock also heightens reader worry and anticipation.

  Scene interruptions are most commonly caused by the intervention of some other character who emerges from the hidden story. This character brings in news or a demand for immediate action on some other, possibly related problem. On occasion, the new character who enters the scene can demand a scene of his own, right then and there, so that we have the second technique mentioned in the list above, a scene interrupting a scene already in progress and taking precedence over it.

  The scene that plays within an interrupted scene ordinarily is not very long. That's because such an interrupting scene is seldom put there for its own sake, but for what it can accomplish. It is not often important in itself so much as it functions as a stimulus which will change the motives of a character in the main scene already under way. You have already seen how this works in an example given in chapter 9.

  Given the fact that such an interrupting scene is primarily a tool or motivating gimmick, and the scene it interrupts is still the main line of the plot action, it could be deadly if the writer allowed the interrupting scene to run on so long that the reader might forget what is really at issue in the main scene. The reader's attention must not be diverted very long; his attention should be taken back into the original scene quickly, so that the cause-and-effect relationship of the new information and change of motive-behavior in the original scene is as clear as possible.

  Appendix 6, just mentioned, contains a good example of a scene being interrupted by the arrival of a third party, and then a brief scene playing inside the original one with the result that a character's actions are radically changed. You may have studied this appendix earlier, but this might be a good time to review it.

  The employment of a scene within a sequel is also usually an attempt to introduce new information. You may wish, for example, to bring in some previously unknown part of the backstory to
help explain the present feeling-thinking state of your viewpoint character. You saw an excellent example of this in Appendix 5. There, you will remember, the fugitive KGB agent in Canada recalled parts of several scenes as he reviewed the backstory.

  Or you may have a character alone, taking a walk late at night in sequel, let us say. His problem is so difficult, and he is so devastated by the recent disaster, that it does not seem credible that he would work through a sequel to new action anytime soon.

  Often you the author must intervene in such cases, most often to give the viewpoint character a demonstration of support —or possibly poorly advised criticism — that will jar him out of the emotional segment of his sequel. In such cases, a sympathetic character walks onto the scene and gives the hero encouragement or love, and this cheers him enough to go on to trying to think further into the sequel (rather than continue circular feelings of woe). On other occasions when it doesn't seem that encouragement would get the job done, or your plot is such that you don't have a friendly character handy to bring onstage, you might intervene with a hostile or neutral character whose unfounded criticism jars the viewpoint character into anger that will quickly translate into wanting to get on with things.