Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (14 page)

Then, as you write the scene, alternate between action, thoughts, dialogue, and description. Take your time with each one. Milk them.

Let's say you have a woman being stalked by a man with assault on his mind. It could start this way:

[Action]
Mary took a step back.

[Dialogue]
“Don't be afraid,” the man said.

[Thought]
How did he get in here? The doors are all locked
.

[Action]
He swayed where he stood, and [
Description
] she could smell the beer on his breath.

[Dialogue]
“Get out,” she said.

[Action]
He laughed and slid toward her.

Want to stretch even more? Good. Do it. Each item — action, thoughts, dialogue, description — can be extended:

[Action]
Mary took a step back, bumping the end table. [
Description
] A vase crashed to the floor.

[Dialogue]
“Don't be afraid,” the man said. “I don't want to hurt you, Mary. I want to be your friend.”

[Thoughts]
How did he get in here? The doors are all locked.
And then she remembered she'd left the garage door open for Johnny.
Stupid, stupid. You deserve this, you always deserve what you get.

Extending beats can even stretch tension when a character is alone. The secret, once again, is in the setup material.

In
One Door Away From Heaven
, Dean Koontz has a scene early in the book where Leilani, a nine-year-old girl, walks through a trailer home to find her drugged-out mother. Doesn't seem like much of a problem, except Koontz sets the scene up with this description: “Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.”

From there, for seven pages, Leilani continues step by step. The suspense builds until the revelation at the end of the scene. This section, which many writers would have dealt with in a paragraph, adds enormously to the overall tension.

Your ability to orchestrate beats so they conform to the tone and feel of the story you're trying to tell is one of the most important skills you can develop. Here are three key questions to ask before you write a tense scene involving physical action:

• What is the worst thing from the
  outside
  that can happen to my character? This may be in the form of another person, a physical object, or a circumstance outside the character's control.
  
• What is the worst trouble my character can get into in this scene? You may come up with an instant answer. Pause a moment and ratchet it up a notch. This may suggest further possibilities.
  
• Have I sufficiently set up the danger for readers before the scene? Remember, they need to know what's at stake before they start worrying.
  

Of course, a scene does not have to involve physical peril to have tension worth stretching. Trouble can be emotional as well.

When a character is in the throes of emotional turmoil, don't make things easy on her. We humans are a circus of doubts and anxieties. Play them up! Give us the whole show.

In chapter one of
The Deep End of the Ocean
by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Beth's youngest son, Ben, disappears in a crowded hotel. The next forty pages cover hours, not days. Emotional beat after emotional beat is rendered as Beth goes through the various manifestations of shock, fear, grief, and guilt.

For example, when the detective, Candy Bliss, suggests Beth lie down, Mitchard gives us this paragraph:

Beth supposed she should lie down; her throat kept filling with nastiness and her stomach roiled. But if she lay down, she wanted to explain to Candy Bliss, who was holding out her hand, it would be deserting Ben. Did Detective Bliss think Ben was lying down? If Beth ate, would he eat? She should not do anything Ben couldn't do or was being prevented from doing. Was he crying? Or wedged in a dangerous and airless place? If she lay down, if she rested, wouldn't Ben feel her relaxing, think she had decided to suspend her scramble toward him, the concentrated thrust of everything in her that she held out to him like a life preserver? Would he relax then, turn in sorrow toward a bad face, because his mama had let him down?

Notice how Mitchard uses physical descriptions that show rather than tell:
throat kept filling with nastiness; stomach roiled
.

She places us in Beth's mind as her thoughts come one after another, accusing her. Then Mitchard goes back to the action of the scene. And so the beats continue.

In Brett Lott's story “Brothers,” the beats come mainly through dialogue. During a drive through the desert after picking up a chair for someone, the narrator tries to understand his younger brother: “Tim had been chewing on something since we'd picked up the rocker recliner.”What Tim is chewing on is the subject of the story, related through Tim's emotional account of a neighbor's death.

We keep reading to find out what impact this has on the narrator. Does he really know his brother? What will the revelations do to him? Lott keeps up the tension by delaying answers until the end.

To stretch inner tension, ask these questions to get your raw material:

• What is the worst thing from the
  inside
  that can happen to my character? This encompasses a whole universe of mental stakes. Hint: Look to the character's
  fears
  .
  
• What is the worst information my character can receive? Some secret from the past or fact that rocks her world can be stalking her through the scene.
  
• Have I sufficiently set up the depth of emotion for readers before the scene? We need to care about your Lead characters before we care about their problems.
  

Think of tension stretching as an elongation of bad times. This can be on a large scale, as in Jeffery Deaver's
A Maiden's Grave
, a novel about a one-day hostage crisis. Each chapter is marked by a clock reading, for example, 11:02 a.m. The chapters then give the full range of dramatic beats.

The tension can also be stretched on a micro level. Usually this happens when you're revising. You come across beats that pass a little too quickly for the rhythm you're trying to create.

In
A Certain Truth
, featuring my early 1900s Los Angeles lawyer, Kit Shannon, I have Kit sharing a meal with the temperance champion Carry Nation. The first draft of the scene had this:

Their laughter was interrupted by the figure of the Chief of Police, Horace Allen. He stood at their table with one of his uniformed officers. Kit knew immediately this was not a social call.

“Kathleen Shannon.” The Chief's voice was thunderous.

“Good evening, Chief.”

I felt the moment, for dramatic purposes, needed a little more time. I rewrote it, adding more beats:

Their laughter was interrupted by the figure of the Chief of Police, Horace Allen. He stood at their table with one of his uniformed officers. Kit knew immediately this was not a social call.

“Kathleen Shannon.” The chief's voice was thunderous, causing all conversation to cease within the place.

Kit felt the silence, sensed the social opprobrium flowing her way from the gentile patrons. A pleasant evening was being rudely interrupted, and that was not why people came to the Imperial. “Good evening, Chief.”

The best way to get the right amount of tension into your novel is to stretch it as much as possible in your first draft and then look at what you've got.

Go for it, and don't worry about overdoing it or wearing out the reader. You have that wonderful thing called
revision
to save you. If you write
hot
, packing your scenes with physical and emotional tension, you can always revise
cool
, and scale back on rewrite. That's much easier to do than trying to heat things up the second time around.

Of course not every scene should be a big, suspenseful set piece. A novel can sustain only a few of those, and you want them to stand out. But any scene can be stretched beyond its natural comfort zone. Get in the habit of finding the cracks and crevices where troubles lie and burrowing in to see what's there. You may strike gold. And your readers will be thankful for the effort.

In the classic Warner Bros. cartoon
The Scarlet Pumpernickel
, Daffy Duck is earnestly pitching his new script to the unseen Jack Warner. As Daffy tells the story, we see it unfold, performed by the great stock company of Daffy, Porky Pig, Sylvester, and Elmer Fudd.

But it soon becomes clear that Daffy does not have an ending for his movie. Warner presses him. “Then what happens?” Daffy keeps reaching, and Warner keeps asking for more.

In desperation, Daffy says, “The price of foodstuffs skyrocketed!” And we see a picture of a little bitty kreplach on a plate.

Poor Daffy. In his zeal, he forgot that adding any old plot development is not enough to make a gripping story. You've got to have something important on the line, something that matters. Daffy should have been asking himself,
Who cares
? That's a question all novelists must repeat, over and over, as they write. Is there enough going on to make readers care about what happens? What does the Lead character stand to lose if he doesn't solve the central problem of the novel? Is that enough?

If you can create a character worth following and a problem that must be solved — and then along the way raise the stakes even higher — you're going to have the essential elements of a page-turner.

There are three aspects of stakes that you should consider — those flowing from plot, character, and society.

Commercial fiction, which is sometimes called
plot driven
, needs to have large stakes. Something that is a threat to the Lead character from the
outside
. Almost always this is in the form of another person trying to do the Lead harm — physically, emotionally, or professionally.

In Jack Schaefer's famous Western,
Shane
, the homesteaders in 1889 Wyoming are a thorn in the side of rancher Luke Fletcher. Fletcher wants them off what he considers his cattle range. The homesteaders, led by Joe Starrett, want to stay.

Here the stakes are high to begin with. On the ranchers' side is a whole way of life, earned by blood and toil over a long period of years. On the other side is a new way of life, a chance to own and work a piece of land, and raise a family. Both values are worth fighting for. A loss by either side is going to severely impact a number of people.

A lot of posturing goes on between the two factions, especially when Starrett hires a mysterious man named Shane to help work his place. Tensions rise until a fight occurs between Shane and Fletcher's men. Joe Starrett intervenes to help, and the fight is won.

Starrett's son, Bob, the narrator of the story, thinks the fight means that Fletcher is finished. But his father explains:

Fletcher's gone too far to back out now. It's a case of now or never with him. If he can make us run, he'll be setting pretty for a long stretch. If he can't, it'll be only a matter o' time before he's shoved smack out of this valley.

And Shane adds, “By talking big and playing it rough, Fletcher has made this a straight win or lose deal.”

Indeed, shortly thereafter a gunfighter named Wilson arrives in town “carrying two guns, big capable forty-fives, in holsters slung fairly low and forward.”

So now the stakes have been raised to the highest level — this conflict is going to end with somebody dead.

Stakes can also be raised in a plot by arraying an ever stronger opposition force against the Lead.

Early in James Grippando's
The Pardon
, Jack Swyteck, a lawyer, is being threatened by a man who may be a killer. The stakes are raised when the man murders Jack's former client and sets Jack up as the prime suspect.

Now Jack doesn't have to deal with one man. He's got the police force and the prosecutor's office after him as well.

Naturally, the threat of death is high stakes. But note that the “death” can be professional as well. The down-and-out lawyer who gets one final (seemingly hopeless) case; the disgraced cop who has one last chance to do it right — these are a couple of examples of those who must win or leave the world they know.

Sometime during your plotting — whether you outline extensively or fly by the seat of your pants — spend some time asking questions like these:

• What physical harm can come to my Lead? How far can I take that threat?
  
• What new forces can come into play against my Lead? What other characters can I introduce that will make things worse? How would these outside forces operate? What tactics would they use?
  
• Is there some professional duty at stake here? What's the worst thing that can happen to my Lead's career life?
  

What goes on inside a character can be just as important as what happens outside. In literary fiction, the stress is usually on this inner aspect. But the question remains the same — what problem is big enough to make the readers care?

In J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
, the danger to the Lead, Holden Caulfield, is not physical but psychological. He needs to find some sort of reason to live in the world, a world occupied primarily by what he deems “phonies.”

When he leaves his prep school one night to begin an odyssey through New York City, it is an obvious quest for meaning. The psychological stakes get raised as the story moves along.

We know from the intensifying language just how perilous this inner search is. “I swear to God I'm a madman,” Holden says at one point. And by the end of the book, he just may be.