Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (30 page)

Perhaps you are an OP, and you have the story in your iron grip. But suddenly, around 10,000 words into the novel, you come to a grinding halt. You are troubled. And you get up from your desk thinking perhaps you need a Red Bull or Mountain Dew to get you back on track.

But when you return to your screen, the trouble remains. Suddenly you are not so confident about your outline or what you planned to write.

You may be fighting a tangent.

The tangent is a side road that was not on your original map. It is a suggestion of your writer's mind.

What do you do?

You have a couple of choices. You can ignore the tangent and move on, gritting your teeth and digging ahead like Charles Bronson in
The Great Escape
, knowing what the plan is and sure that you will find daylight soon.

Or you can follow that tangent awhile because it may be leading to the very place that will mean your freedom.

What I suggest you do is open a new document on your computer — or take out a blank legal pad or a pile of napkins — and write a free-form outline of your next few scenes, as if you had no idea what was to come next.

Begin this way: Close your eyes and ask your movie projector to show you a vivid scene of its choice. You don't have to force anything. Your characters will appear of their own accord, called into service by your inner projectionist.

Watch this scene unfold for a little while. Then stop and record what happened in the scene, not in full detail but in a few lines, as if you were summarizing it.

Now take a moment and ask yourself, “If this scene took place in my novel, what consequences would follow?”

New scene ideas will suggest themselves. Write them down in summary form. You can use index cards for this exercise or another favorite way of recording ideas.

Take a break. Go for a walk. Drink that Mountain Dew.

Come back to your scene cards or notes. Think about them rationally. Does the tangent suggest a story line that is fresher and more original than the one you had in mind? If so, be ready to revise any outline you have done and go for it.

If the tangent seems a bit too radical, you may use the material you've recorded as fodder for future scenes, worked in naturally.

If you go through this exercise, it is likely that your plot block will be removed. Your mind itself will have taken a little tangent or vacation of its own, and is now ready to get back to work on the story.

A good night's sleep before making major decisions is another good idea.

You've heard writers who say,“My characters took over the story.” They usually say this with a half smile of satisfaction.

Here is a bit of my free-form journal for a female lawyer character I had to stop and get to know better:

I'm a thirty-two-year-old lawyer in private practice. When I bite, my jaw locks. I will not give up. I can't, because I once lost a case I should have won! I'm driven by the need not to lose another case!

So how do I feel about life? I think you have to work yourself almost to death, or the shadows will destroy you. You have to keep going, stay ahead of them. My attitude about all this is stoic realization: we're all we have, baby, and that's that. I can't suffer fools or phonies, and I'll tell you so.

It helped to put those words down and hear the voice of my character. I was able to go on with a better handle on her and continue with the novel.

And don't forget to use our old friend, the movie mind. Your inner projectionist is waiting to show you a film or a scene that could be just the ticket for you.

I can't remember who suggested the following exercise, but it's a good one for generating new plot material based on getting to know your character better.

Close your eyes and see your character vividly. Dress her up for a night on the town. Have her go to a social event where she will see a number of old friends as well as some of the most powerful people in her world. She opens the door, steps into the party, and then what happens? Watch this scene in your mind. Hear the sounds, smells the smells, make it as real as possible.

At some point have someone come over to your Lead and throw a drink in her face.

What does she do? What do the others around her do or say?

Let the scene go on of its own accord.

Then take your character back home, have her getting ready for bed. She's talking to someone she lives with, or her dog, about what happened. What is she feeling? Get into her emotions.

You can do this movie-mind exercise any time during your writing, of course. And when you're not writing. At home, just before nodding off to sleep, ask yourself what your character is doing right now.

Maybe you'll dream a scene, or more likely wake up the next morning with some thoughts to record on that pad you have on your nightstand.

You do have a pad, don't you?

So you're in the middle of your novel and the writing has become tough slogging. You feel like you're running a marathon in mud.

This is not uncommon, even for writers who use outlines. Sometimes even the best laid plans are not enough — we look at the immediate horizon and see just lifeless scene cards lying there.

Of course this can happen to NOPs as well, and that's fine because it is part of the process. The question is, what do you do?

There are three main strategies.

[1] Go back.
First, you can back up. Is there some place in your earlier pages that seems dull? Or beside the point? Have you lost sight of the Lead's objective at any point? Are there long blocks of dialogue that are really about nothing more than the characters exchanging talk?

Keep going back until you find a spot where you felt good about the writing, about being on track.

Now ask yourself if you can cut any of the subsequent material. Come up with a better scene idea than the one that is already there. Perhaps your Lead can take another angle on the problem, talk to a new character, or be hit with something out of left field — like a new item of negative information.

Take some time to brainstorm possible scenes to take you from the spot you are now parked in. Maybe you'll come up with something that restarts your engine; at the very least, if you take a break you might come back to your original story line fresher.

You also might consider doing a 180. That means going in the very opposite direction.

I did this in a novel of mine,
Deadlock
, where I reached a point of dullness in the story. It just didn't feel like it was working, and the scenes I'd come up with in my planning were shouting at me not to write them.

I tried to picture something better, but no pictures worth recording came on.

Finally, a little desperate, I went back to a character who had been hospitalized, close to death, but was now miraculously recovered.

I looked at her for a moment — she was in bed and feeling good — and I decided she had to die.

A 180. I know she was probably not pleased about that, but she wasn't the author. I was. And that 180 was just what the plot needed. I went on from there without another hitch.

[2] Jump cut.
In filmmaker terms, the jump cut is a move ahead in time, sometimes within the same scene, but always with the same characters.

Try taking the characters in the scene you just wrote and moving them forward in time. Switch them to a different location if you wish, with different people around them, but give them some sort of problem — especially your Lead.

Sometimes you can jump ahead in your story, come up with the scene, and then think about how to connect your story up to that scene. Do a scene that has a lot of conflict or otherwise grabs you. This can get the juices flowing again.

After you've done the future scene, drop back and fill in the gap. You'll find material in that future scene that you can drop in. You might also find some material in the gap that you want to incorporate into the future scene you wrote.

It's all part of the alchemy of writing.

[3] Open a dictionary at random.
Pick a strong word from that page. Now open to another page and pick another strong word.

Write something that puts those two words together. Get the literary muscles moving again.

What does this suggest about your story?

So what if your imagination just shuts down? Nothing there. System crashed. Your movie mind is on strike; the projectionist is reported missing. They're just showing dull retreads.

Do not despair! This happens to every writer from time to time, and it's nothin that can't be cured. Here are a few ways out, and I guarantee one of them will work for you.

[1] Recharge your battery.
Sometimes writing a novel feels about as rewarding as turning a spit in the fires of hell. Worse, you may not feel you can turn the spit even one more revolution. Or you may feel
you're
on the spit. You need a recharge.

What's stopping you may be your inner editor, yelping at you
as you write
. Shut that voice off. Give yourself permission to be bad. Write first, polish later. That's the golden rule of production.

A more insidious form of blockage is loss of confidence, the feeling that everything you're putting on paper is a foolish waste of time. It is the fear, writes Ralph Keyes in
The Courage to Write
, “of being exposed as a fraud who conned a publisher into thinking I could write a book.”

It helps to know that 98 percent of professional, published writers feel this way every time they sit down to write a new book. The other 2 percent I've never seen interviewed.

Take comfort in that.

“All writers without exception are scared to death,” wrote Dick Simon, founder of Simon & Schuster. “Some simply hide it better than others.”

Take a day off.
Follow the advice found in chapter five
, and push through your wall.

[2] Relive your scenes.
Not rewrite. Relive. Have you ever imagined yourself to be the characters? Tried to feel what they are feeling?

Then try it now. It's not hard. Be an actor.

Often after I've written a scene, I'll go back and try to live the emotions. I'll act out the parts I've created. Almost always what I feel “in character” will make me add to or change the scene.

You can also vividly imagine the scene, step by step, in your mind. Let it play like a movie. But instead of watching the movie from a seat in the theater, be in the scene. The other characters can't see you, but you can see and hear them.

Intensify the proceedings. Let things happen. Let the characters improvise. If you don't like what they come up with, rewind the scene and allow them do something else.

Look at the beginnings of your scenes. What do you do to grab the reader at the start? Have you spent too much time describing the setting? Often the better course is to start
in medias res
(in the middle of things) and drop in description a little later.

Examine scene endings. What have you provided that will make the reader want to read on? Some great places to stop a scene are:

• At the moment a major decision is to be made.
  
• Just as a terrible thing happens.
  
• With a portent of something bad
  about to
  happen.
  
• With a strong display of emotion.
  
• Raising a question that has no immediate answer.
  

Keep improving your scenes, and your novel will soon develop that can't-put-it-down feel.

[3] Recapture your vision.
What does your novel ultimately
mean
? What is it saying about life beyond the confines of the plot? How does it illuminate your vision of life? Every story has a meaning. So does every author.

John Gardner, novelist and author of
On Moral Fiction
, said, “I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life … that is worth pursuing.”

So what are you writing for? If it is only for money or fame, you'll miss the spark that makes both of those things possible. Go further.

And I don't mean you have to change the whole world. Writing so readers will be transported is also a valid goal. Good entertainment is a release, and we need that. But start by asking yourself what moves you. Put that into your novels, and the entertainment value will skyrocket.

Develop a vision for yourself as a writer. Make it something that excites you. Turn that into a mission statement — one paragraph that sums up your hopes and dreams as a writer. Read this regularly. Revise it from time to time to reflect your growth. But have something in writing that will inspire you.

Root that inspiration in the world — your observations of it, and what it does to you. “I honestly think in order to be a writer,” says author Anne Lamott, “you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let's think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.”

If you stay true to your own awe, your books cannot help being charged with meaning. That's not just a great way to write. It's a great way to live.

Make a list of the major plot problems you face. Have a friend who knows your work give you his opinion. Prioritize this list by putting the biggest problems first. Using the material in this book and others, create a plan to strengthen your craft in these areas.