Elements of Fiction Writing - Conflict and Suspense (9 page)

It’s not as hard as you think
.

What is cover copy? It’s what marketing people put on the jacket or back cover of a book to try to generate enough interest that a consumer will buy it.

And here is their secret: It contains both conflict and suspense. It awakens in the reader (or potential buyer) the desire to know
what happens.

You should do this even before you write your book.

First, this will be gold to you, a way to keep you on track as you write your book. You will know if you have all the elements you need for a successful book if you have killer cover copy.

Second, this copy will eventually become the main paragraph of your query letters. It’ll be lean and mean by then.

Third, you can always tweak the copy as you go along and things develop in the book.

The main thing you want is to capture the
conflict
that your novel needs to have to succeed.

So how do you learn to write such copy?

Simple: You study how the pros do it.

You look at books in your genre and read a bunch of copy. You get the feel and the rhythm.

You can do this also by going to
Amazon.com
and reading the book descriptions there.

Let’s say your genre is contemporary suspense. You find a book like
The Sentry
by Robert Crais. And the product description that goes like this:

See the conflict? Gangs. Federal agents. Crime. Family betrayal. Vengeful, murderous forces.

And the suspense: Pike is a target. Will he get it in the back? Pike and Cole “stand in the way.”

Here is a foundation for a page turner.

Or maybe you’re writing romance. You find a book like
Taming Rafe
by Susan May Warren:

Notice also that the copy is usually the material up to the first doorway of no return. You’ve already nailed that in your planning, so it’s simple enough to draft copy up to that point.

Then you drop in a line that gives the gist of the continuing conflict.

See that? You’re a marketing genius all of a sudden.

Not bad.

One more example. This is from a literary novel. It may be a bit harder at first to find the juice, but you can do it if you try. Here is the description of John Grisham’s literary novel,
A Painted House:

Now it’s your turn.

You have your LOCK elements and know your doorways.

Write your cover copy now, and then get ready to structure your novel.

S
tructure is as important to conflict as a suspension bridge is to commerce. If you don’t have the Golden Gate Bridge, you don’t have enough trucks bringing in
pâté de foie gras
to San Francisco.

If you don’t have solid structure in your novel, the tension in your novel will dissipate and never be as strong as you’d like it to be.

Here’s why: What makes a novel is confrontation. The struggle against an opposing force with death on the line. For that confrontation to matter to the reader, the reader has to care. For the reader to care, there has to be a proper setup. Setup has to happen early, or the reader might set the book aside.

The setup is Act One, the confrontation is Act Two.

Then the book has to have a strong payoff at the end, Act Three, or the whole thing will feel like a letdown.

Structure is not there to hamper you; it’s there to help you create the kind of stories people can’t put down.

There are some who say structure is restrictive and unnecessary. They say there are other ways to write a novel. Just think of incident after incident. Just let yourself flow.

The books produced by this method are of two kinds:

1. They end up using structure without knowing it, because it is so natural and ingrained they can’t help it; or
   
2. They don’t sell.
   

Are there exceptions? Of course.

When you toss out structure, when you move toward more experimental forms of storytelling, you begin to confuse the reader. Confusion does not mix well with conflict.

It’s not that it can’t work, strictly speaking. But it will be a lot harder, and the audience for such a book will be much smaller.

That’s your call.

“But this is formulaic!” you might shout. That’s okay. Get it out of your system. Now think about it.

Why does a formula become a formula? Because it works.

When you’re sick, do you want a shot of what works? Or something experimental the doc has been working on in his spare time?

Structure is formulaic only in the same way a suspension bridge is formulaic. You can design it however you want. You can put in whatever elements please you. You can create your characters with wild abandon and make up twists to your heart’s content. You can have voice and style and everything else.

Where do you begin the story? With a disturbance. With something that happens—on the first page, mind you—that is something
different
in the Lead’s ordinary world.

As John le Carré once put it, “The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is.” Begin your novel at the point of disturbance, because disturbance is conflict.

It doesn’t have to be something big. You don’t have to use a car chase or a grisly murder in the point of view of the killer. It can be anything that is a ripple in the waters of the Lead’s ordinary world. Like someone who is asleep, when this happens:

Or this:

When you begin with a disturbance, you’re doing the most important thing you can in the beginning of your book: You’re starting to bond the reader with a character.

That’s why readers read (see the section A Lead Worth Following). Trouble for a character arouses immediate interest.

When I was going through a lot of trial and error to learn about structure, starting with Aristotle and working my way to Syd Field, one question defied explanation. In the three-act structure, especially in the world of film, the first “plot point” was absolutely crucial. That’s the point that happens just before Act Two.

The diagram looks like this:

The most I could find on the first plot point was that it “turned the action around” in some manner or other. Some people called this the
inciting incident
, though that term has been used to cover other parts of a story as well.

My question was always
Why does this work?

And then one day it came to me, and it revealed the ancient wisdom of the three-act structure. If you think about the plot of your book being that “death struggle” in the middle, the natural question to ask is
Why does the Lead character engage in that struggle?

Think about it. It’s death on the line! In mythic structure terms, the Lead character is out in the “dark world” where he can get killed.

Who wants to go out there if they don’t have to?

So here’s what has to happen: Something needs to
force
the Lead character into Act Two, into the death struggle, into the dark world. He wants to stay in Act One if he can. That’s home. That’s safe.

But there’s some occurrence pushing him through a
Doorway of No Return.
The Lead is forced through the doorway, and—most important of all—the door slams behind him. He is then
forced
into battle, the conflict, the confrontation, the trouble.

See how that will make the reader worry?

What the reader won’t worry about is a Lead who wanders out into the dark world because he’s not watching his step. Or says, “Oh, I think I’ll take a stroll in the dark world and see what happens.”

So the strength of your plot momentum is dependent on that first doorway of no return.

Let’s look at some examples.

In
Star Wars,
Luke is on his home planet, living with his aunt and uncle, helping them farm. He dreams of adventure but has no reason to go.

Until his aunt and uncle are killed and the farm destroyed.

This pushes Luke into Act Two, where he can fight the opposition that caused this.

In
Gone With the Wind,
Scarlett would be content to sit at home and flirt and scheme to get Ashley to marry her.

But then something happens that is going to force her to deal with all sorts of trouble, a little something called the Civil War. Scarlett doesn’t want this, but there it is. She is pushed through the doorway and it slams shut behind her. The old life will never return.

About one-fifth into
To Kill a Mockingbird
comes Scout’s first doorway of no return: Atticus has taken on the defense of a black man, Tom Robinson. Scout is taunted about this at school. At first she denies it, but then Atticus tells her it’s true. And once more, Scout will have to confront prejudice, observe attitudes, and figure out which way she is going to grow up.

As a rule of thumb, that first doorway should happen no later than one-fifth into your novel.

Where you place the first doorway is a matter of momentum.

The closer you put it to the opening, the faster the book takes off.

In Dean Koontz’s
The Good Guy,
Timothy Carrier is the quintessential ordinary man, having a beer in a bar. A stranger comes in and thinks Tim is the hit man he’s hired. Which is why he slips him ten grand in cash and gives him a photo of the woman he is to kill. And then takes off.

This is not the first doorway yet, because at this point Tim can just walk away. Give the money to charity. Warn the victim, and so on.

But then the real hit man comes in and mistakes Tim for the guy who hired him. Tim offers to give the man half the money as a “no kill” fee to save the life of the woman marked for death. But when the killer walks out of the bar Tim knows the gears are in motion. He has been pushed into the confrontation, which is going to be a struggle to save the life of the woman.

This happens at the end of chapter two. Koontz, as he often does, sets a rapid-fire pace. That’s perfectly in keeping with the style of this particular story.

Other stories will have that first doorway come in a little later. So long as there’s an opening disturbance, and we have characters in some kind of trouble, we can wait. But not too long.

In film structure terms, the first doorway usually occurs just under half an hour into a two-hour film. About one-quarter of the way in.

In a novel, I like to see it earlier than that. But no later. That’s when things start to drag.

At some point your story has to end. That’s the function of the second doorway. It’s the event that enables the Lead to engage in the final battle and settle things once and for all. Usually this event is some major clue or discovery that provides the essential information to proceed toward the climax. Or it may be a major setback or crisis that forces the Lead to dig deep and make a final push toward resolution.

In
To Kill a Mockingbird,
the major setback is the guilty verdict in the trial of the obviously innocent Tom Robinson. The pure unfairness of it hits Scout and Jem like a thunderbolt. And it unlooses a series of events that leads to Bob Ewell’s attempt on the childrens’ lives.

This setback happens with about one-fifth of the novel to go.

In the film
The Wizard of Oz,
Dorothy is captured by the witch and taken to the castle. This makes inevitable the final showdown when the three friends break in to save her.

In
Lethal Weapon,
Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) are partners trying to bring down a drug ring. The major crisis occurs when the bad guys kidnap Murtaugh’s teenage daughter. There is no way to avoid a showdown now.

And that really is all you need to know about basic structure.

In fact, if you know your LOCK elements (see chapter three), and design your disturbance and two doorways, that is often the only
outline
you need.

Even those of you who like to wing it every day (by the seat of your pants, as they say), having at least an idea of these factors will keep you more on track than you’ve ever been in your writing life—and still leave you plenty of that breathing room you so dearly love.

And, of course, if you like to do more extensive outlining, you are perfectly free to do so. You can lay out your scenes on the proper sides of the two doorways.

In a character-driven piece, the most important thing is what happens
inside
the character, how he changes or fails to change (as in a tragedy).

In a plot-driven piece, the most important thing is what happens
to
the character from
outside events.

Both need plot. The events of the story cause the character-driven Lead to confront himself, his past, his wounds, his secrets, and so on. The events of the story cause the plot-driven Lead to keep alive in some sense, either physically or professionally.

In a
plot-driven story
, the first doorway is an
event
. Something happens that virtually
forces
the Lead into Act Two. He doesn’t want to go. No one wants to enter a dark world of conflict and potential death unless he has to.

So … when Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle are murdered, it is the event that forces him into the conflict with the Empire. When the cyclone takes Dorothy to Oz, she is forced to find a way back home while fighting against a wicked witch who is hell-bent on killing her. When Dr. Richard Kimble (
The Fugitive)
is being bussed to death row, a botched takeover leads to his near-death escape, forcing him to stay ahead of the U.S. Marshall, Sam Gerard, until he can find his wife’s real killer. When John McClane (
Die Hard)
witnesses a terrorist murder the head of a corporation in a building that has been taken over, he must find a way to stay out of their clutches while trying to get the attention of the police.

Thus it is an event that forces the Lead into the conflict of Act Two.

But what about a character-driven plot? Here, the triggering event is something
emotional
that forces the Lead to look at himself and risk the danger of
change.

So … in
On the Waterfront,
Terry Malloy is content to live the life of a strong arm for the local mob boss, until the death of a childhood friend at the hands of the mob brings the victim’s sister back to the neighborhood. She wants Terry’s help in solving the murder, but Terry tries to tell her he can’t possibly do that—until he’s moved by her tears. Instead of walking away from her, he allows himself to be drawn to her humanity. He will be forced to choose what kind of person he is going to be from now on—living like an “animal” or being “part of everybody else.”

That first emotional prompt happens at the first doorway point.

In the character-driven plot, the Lead is forced by a strong emotional push to look at himself and wonder who he is, and if he has the courage to change. The first step in that change is a small step, but it leads through that first doorway, and makes the conflict of Act Two inevitable.