Types of problem
Many problems are physical – locked doors are popular and so are cliff edges, raging torrents and landslides. If you are writing a fantasy quest, you can choose from an even wider selection, including man-eating spiders, fire-breathing dragons and forests of moving trees designed to lure travellers to their doom. Any danger can work provided it fits into your story and strikes fear into the hearts of your readers as well as your characters.
Weather is a good provider of physical problems, which is one reason why the final scenes in a drama often happen during a storm. Strong winds can block roads with fallen trees, whip calm seas into mountainous waves and make walking outside a dangerous activity. Rain can cause floods, wash away vital footprints and chill travellers to the bone, while snow blankets the footprints that haven’t been washed away, makes places look completely different and puts lives at risk when it tumbles down mountainsides in devastating avalanches.
But not all problems are physical. Many of the best ones come from the characters in your story and from the way they interact with each other and with the world. Face them with difficult decisions, give them past experiences that affect the way they react to the present, reveal secrets when they are sure to have maximum impact and never, ever let the course of true love run smooth. That way you’ll end up with a story packed with various types of conflict, even if you’re still not sure what the word actually means.
The trouble with phones
Once upon a time, it was easy to put your characters in a tricky situation packed with problems. They could get lost, wandering for hours in forests or deserts with no idea where they were. They could find themselves in danger but unable to call for help. They could be in desperate need of information but not know where to find it.
Then someone invented the mobile phone (or cell phone for those of you in the USA). Thanks to that handy gadget clutched in their hands, your characters can easily find vital facts, contact other people and, worst of all, call for help. And they are very rarely lost. As soon as they find themselves in unfamiliar territory, they can just turn to their phone and call up Google Maps. They’ll not only discover exactly where they are – they’ll also get directions on how to find their way home and probably be able to call a taxi to pick them up.
One way to avoid the phone issue is to set your story back in time before they were invented or move it forward to a time when the wretched things are banned. But if you’re definitely writing about the present day, you’ll need to make sure that your main character doesn’t have a phone with them at times when having one would wreck the story. Luckily the fragility of phones means that they can be rendered useless by:
Dropping them on something hard.
Treading on them.
Running them over with a car.
Dropping them into water.
Setting them on fire.
Failing any of those disasters, phones can run out of battery, which is very likely when a character is on the run and unable to plug in a charger. They can also be out of signal range. This frequently happens in my living room so it seems reasonable to believe that it would happen on a mountainside or deep in a forest.
Luckily the bad guys are as aware of phone problems as we are so the first thing they are likely to do when they capture someone is to take away their phone. If you think your character will need it later in the story, make your villains put it somewhere safe: it can then be found at a convenient moment. Otherwise they can dramatically destroy it in front of your character’s eyes to make their situation even worse.
Of course, phones don’t always get in the way in a story. They can also provide problems for your characters in the form of anonymous messages or incriminating photographs, and they can allow the bad guys to pinpoint their position. There are even rumours that security services can turn on a phone’s microphone from a distance to use as a bugging device – a process that could add another complication to your story.
Putting theory into practice
Let’s go back to Future Proof to see how we can add problems and dilemmas for Seb and Jane to keep the story running and readers turning the pages. Phones (or their future equivalent) aren't an issue as I've decided ordinary people aren't allowed to use them. But disagreement is always a good cause of problems. That's why I’m going to make Seb want to take the diary to the rebels, but Jane not be quite so sure. She’s not convinced that the situation is as bad as it says. Surely she’d know if there really were aliens running the world? Anyway she’s got responsibilities looking after her dad. She can’t just leave him. There must be another solution: someone in authority who can help them get the information into the right hands.
She turns to her boss at the museum for advice. But he betrays them to the police, who try to arrest them. Seb and Jane escape just in time, but Jane is still unwilling to leave her dad because he is sick and dependent on her. She can’t leave him behind so she insists on going home to collect him.
To her surprise, Dad believes what the diary says. But he refuses to go with her, because he’ll slow her down. Jane argues, unable to accept they have to separate. Then the police arrive, and there is no more time for goodbyes.
Dad pushes her out the back door, promising to slow the police as long as he can and point them in the wrong direction. Seb and Jane run away while the police arrive, interrogate Dad and shoot him. The realization that her dad has sacrificed himself to save her and the diary gives Jane the reason she finally needs to commit herself to search for the rebels with Seb.
That last scene is going to take some thought. Is Jane going to watch the police arrive or am I going to switch viewpoints to let readers see what happens to Dad while she’s not there? However, I don’t have to decide on all those details while I’m plotting. I can sort out them out when I’m doing the actual writing.
In that section, one problem led naturally to another. Now let’s put in one that adds an unexpected twist to the plot. It’s going to happen much later in the story, and it might make a good end point for book one if I do decide to write a trilogy.
Seb and Jane have met Gareth, fellow opponent of the elite who joins their search for the rebel headquarters. A strong love triangle has developed, and Jane has been in a quandary for some time, trying to resolve her growing feelings for Seb with her strong attraction to Gareth. Finally she and Gareth are alone together, and they move towards each other. With a thumping heart, she lifts her face to kiss him but as she does so, she sees a flash of silver in his eyes and realizes he is an alien.
This neatly turns the story in a new direction and faces Jane with new questions and dilemmas. Is Gareth a traitor or a spy? Should she tell Seb? Should she kill Gareth? If he’s a spy, can she turn him into a double agent? But in order for the scene to work, I’ll have to go back in the plot to plant the fact that the diary says aliens have silver eyes but warns that they can hide this except at moments of great emotion. I can also plant a couple of clues to Gareth’s true identity that are subtle enough for readers to miss but obvious enough that when the big reveal comes, they say “of course” rather than “no way”.
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Pacing your book
If you are planning a car journey, the fastest route between your starting point and your destination is a straight, fast road. But that’s likely to be so uninteresting that it causes the dreaded cry of “Are we nearly there yet?” from your passengers. They will be less bored if you take them on a route that provides ups and downs and changing scenery, but you need to keep an eye on where you’re heading or you might get lost in a multitude of leafy lanes.
The same applies to plotting. If you choose the most obvious route to the end of your book, your readers will find it so easy to guess what’s going to happen that they’ll lose interest and stop reading. To hold their attention, you need to keep them guessing and keep them caring by adding unexpected twists and turns while always keeping moving towards that final satisfying end.
If you
succeed, you should find that the closer your readers get to the end, the harder they find it to put the book down. When someone tells you they’ve read into the small hours to find out what happens, you know you’ve got everything right. In particular, you’ve paced the story well with rising tension to keep them reading and no boring bits to make them lose interest.
Tension can be tiring
Although we want the tension to rise throughout the book, it doesn’t have to build at the same rate all the time. If it did, the shape of your story would look like this:
That can be exhausting for readers. It’s better to intersperse tense sections with quieter moments to give readers time to relax slightly before the tension starts to build again.
The exact shape will vary from book to book: yours will probably be different from my diagram. But the important things to remember are:
Always have peaks and troughs.
Make the final peak higher than any of the others to provide an exciting ending.
Don’t let any of the troughs go right back to zero. Always keep some tension running to hold the interest of the reader. If you don’t, they may stop reading because they don’t think anything else interesting is going to happen.
Keeping interest going
A good way to introduce a change in pace is to switch to a different story strand for a while. For example, the detective may leave the search for clues to deal with something at home, or the tumultuous romance may be interrupted by something happening at work. A change of viewpoint can also provide a way to change the pace without dropping the tension too much. For example, you could leave one character on a mountainside, dangling from a rope that’s about to snap, and switch to the viewpoint of his friend who is waiting for him to come home, unaware that anything has gone wrong.
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What’s at stake?
The way your readers react to your story will depend on what’s at stake. To show you how that works, let’s imagine we’re watching a wildlife documentary about foxes. There are three scenes, each of which follows a different fox as she hunts a rabbit.
Scene1: This fox is plump, well fed and not hungry. She just fancies killing something for fun.
There’s nothing at stake for the fox. She doesn’t need to kill so I want the rabbit to get away.
Scene 2: This fox is thin and weak from lack of food. If she doesn’t catch this rabbit, she may starve to death.
This time the fox’s life is at stake so she has my sympathy. I understand her need to kill and, although I still feel sorry for the rabbit, I want her to catch it.
Scene 3: The fox is weak from hunger and has four starving cubs who will die if they don’t eat soon.
Now it’s not just her life at stake. The survival of four innocent babies depends on this hunt: I’m on the edge of my seat, urging her to succeed.
Increasing what’s at stake for the fox has increased my sympathy for her. The more she stands to lose, the more I care about the outcome. And the same is true in stories – the more that will go wrong if your characters don’t solve their problem, the more your readers will want them to succeed.
Life-or-death situations always create tension, but they don’t fit neatly into every story. Luckily life isn’t the only thing that can be lost: threats to happiness, freedom, love, family relationships, money, security and faith can all up the stakes enough to keep the tension in your story rising. In the children’s story we looked at near the beginning of this book, it’s Madeleine’s happiness that’s under threat. She’ll be unhappy if her new bear isn’t there when she wakes up in the morning, so the bear keeps trying to reach her and we keep urging him on.
You can have different things at stake in different strands of the story. In Future Proof, the central story has the ultimate danger – a threat to the future of mankind – while the dangers Seb and Jane meet in their search for the rebels will put both their lives at risk. But the story strand about the love triangle between Seb, Jane and Gareth has something else at risk: their individual happiness.
Increasing the stakes
One way to add rising tension to a story is to gradually increase what’s at stake. Suppose a plot starts with a detective trying to solve an apparently straightforward murder. What’s at stake at the beginning is justice for the victim. However, the detective gradually discovers that this murder is connected to corrupt politicians who are willing to do anything to stop him discovering what they are doing: a situation that puts first his job and then his life at risk. When he finally discovers the politicians are trying to cover up safety problems at a nuclear power station, there is even more at stake – the safety of everyone who lives in the area – and that will lead to a really tense climax to the book.
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Handling time
The way you handle time in your book will make a big difference to its pace. Over the years, I have learned that the shorter the time span the story covers, the easier it is to hold the readers’ attention. As a result, I usually try to compress events into a few days rather than a few weeks, but sometimes that’s just not possible. Then I have to use other techniques to stop the story dragging.
Time jumps
The fact that your story takes place over weeks, months or years doesn’t mean you must include every detail of every day. It’s better to concentrate on the main events of the plot and jump over the intervening time. Small time jumps are common in novels – in fact, it would be hard to find a story without at least one – and many books contain huge jumps, especially when the story covers a large part of a character’s life.
You can often deal with small jumps in a few words such as “Four weeks later” or “The next four weeks flew past in a flurry of preparations.” Longer gaps of months or years may need a bit more explanation. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë skips over eight years in five paragraphs at the start of chapter 10 to move the story from Jane’s childhood experiences to her life as an adult.
Another way to deal with large time jumps is to divide your book into sections with each new section starting a new time period. The number of sections is entirely up to you. In The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett successfully uses six sections plus a prologue to cover 54 years.
But you don’t need to work out all the details of how you are going to handle your time jumps at the plotting stage. You can just note that the time jump is there and decide how you are going to handle it when you are doing the actual writing.
Time travel
Books on time travel have time jumps for a different reason. To help your readers keep track of what’s happening, you may want to put a time at the beginning of each chapter or section. Of course, that’s not compulsory, and you may not want to do it if it removes an element of surprise from what comes next. On the other hand, if it suits your story, this approach can save you writing long passages of explanation and provide a useful reference point if your readers get confused.
Timelines
It’s not just your readers who risk being confused about time. You can get in a muddle yourself, especially when you are trying to keep track of several story strands and characters at once. Then it’s easy to make someone go out in the dark on a midsummer evening when it should still be light or pick an apple off a tree when it’s supposed to be April.
A simple way to deal with this is to draw a timeline for your book, noting what happens when (day of the week, time). Depending on your story, you may also want to add the actual dates as well and write in any real historical events that are relevant. There are some useful websites that can tell you the day of the week for any date – past or future.
I sometimes draw several timelines underneath each other, one for each character or storyline, so I can check how the different steps line up and make sure that everyone is in the right place at the right time. For some stories, it’s also useful to have another timeline showing events in the outside world.
In addition to or instead of a timeline, you can put the date and time
on each step of your step outline or on each step where the time actually matters. This isn’t essential but it can be useful with some stories, especially ones which include time travel or flashbacks.
Flashbacks
Flashbacks are a popular way to provide background information about characters or events. They let you use action and dialogue to dramatize scenes that happened in the past which is much more interesting for readers than just having one character relate what happened. However, they need to be used with caution or they may cause more trouble than they are worth.
The problem is that it’s easy for readers to forget that what they are reading is a flashback. Then they get a shock when you return to the normal time in which your book is set, and that shock can jolt them out of the story completely. Interestingly, the same difficulty arises with dream sequences, so making your character dream the flashback doesn’t avoid the issue.
Of course, you can avoid this problem completely by not using any flashbacks at all. They are not essential, and many books work well without them. But if you’re sure that’s what your plot needs, there are several ways to avoid causing confusion.
Plots and Plotting Page 10
