Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (33 page)

The difference between a mystery and a thriller is basically that a mystery is like a maze. The reader is going from clue to clue to try to figure out what happened.

In a thriller, the feeling is more like a vise closing on the Lead. And the events get tighter and tighter, threatening the Lead in some drastic way. The opposition character is the one who is cranking the vice.

At some point then, the Lead is going to have to defeat the opponent. Why not begin your plotting with that scene? Create a final climactic battle with the opponent, and make it as stunningly original as you can.

Then you have something to write toward. You eventually may decide to change the details of the scene when you get there, but at least you'll have a signpost.

And don't forget motivation. Give your opposition character a motive for doing what he is doing, and why he fights that final battle.

With a literary novel, the writer is mostly concerned with mood and texture. Why not think about the final impression you want to make on the reader? Think about resonance. Perhaps a final image or line of dialogue, something that creates a feeling that you're looking for.

You might even assign some music to this feeling. Find a song or a piece of music from a film score that creates a mood in you similar to what you're trying to create in the reader. Play the music in the background as you plot. Or, if you are a NOP, play the music as you write.

Romance has as its
objective
the pairing of lovers. All the other plotting revolves around that. Romance is as much about what doesn't happen as what does. Keeping the lovers apart is the great tension and frustration.

I mean getting together in the permanent sense. If your lovers do get together in the middle, they need to be driven apart by something.

So you might want to try plotting by thinking up all the ways your hero and heroine can be frustrated in their desire to be together.

It's easy to fall into romantic clichés. So work hard to freshen things up. Characters' pasts are good places to find original material. Give people dark secrets that are unique.

Restraint is often the most romantic choice. The longer characters who want to be together are kept apart, the sweeter the romance at the end.

Graphic sex scenes are passé.

The very nature of an experiment is to try new things. When you finish that first draft in a gust of experimental glory, put it away for a month. Come back to it, and pretend you are a starving student who has only a couple of bucks to spend on a book. Start reading and see if you would buy this book. Maybe there are some plot elements you can add that will make this stronger and more readable.

But it's your experiment. If it blows up, then at least you know one way that doesn't work. And that's how we eventually got the light bulb.

I said earlier that experimental fiction, by definition, defies plot conventions and structure. But that doesn't mean you can't approach it systematically, in a way that brings out your most original material.

If you want to write experimentally, here's a method for your madness: Each morning, says Ray Bradbury, “I get out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. I spend the rest of the day picking up the pieces.”

Which is to say, your material is lodged in your brain, and at night it floats around in ways you don't control. When you first get up, the sooner you can get something down on paper, the more likely you are to capture the stuff that skitters away, like trout going upstream, when you're fully awake.

Writing for ten to twenty minutes, without stopping to think about what you're writing, is the best way to do this. Just write. Those are the pieces. You pick them up later.

The joy of science (or speculative) fiction and fantasy is that anything can happen. And that is the danger as well. You have to work harder both to justify the “rules” of your story world and to keep them naturally woven into the narrative.

This kind of fiction can be bad when elements jump out, seemingly on a whim.

The rules of good plot apply here as well. Give us the LOCK elements, and justify them.

That is to say, it's not enough that someone has magic or access to advanced technology. That character has to be full in her own right. Give her a life beyond the speculative elements of the story.

Also, science fiction and fantasy are perhaps the best genres to write about
ideas
. You can put forth a view of the world as it exists through the creation of a world that does not exist. Because of this, it can be tempting to make the idea primary and pay less attention to the plot. A big mistake.

Don't get lost in the grandeur of your own imaginative vision. Get down and do the work of plot, and your story will be the better for it.

One of the books I read early in my attempts to learn the craft of fiction was Brenda Ueland's
If You Want to Write
. In this inspirational work, Ueland makes a startling assertion: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say. … Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his
true
self and not from the self he thinks he
should
be.”

I believed that then, and I do now. And with the tools of plot and structure, you will be able to pour your original voice into a novel that really connects with readers.

I wish you great success. Start pouring.

Pick two of the above tools at random, and apply them to your work immediately. Assess the results.

Choose a genre (not one with which you are familiar). Come up with a plot summary in that genre. This will stretch your plotting muscles.

Create your own file of tools and techniques as you learn new things. Accumulate and record as much material as you can. Every now and then, do a short outline of your material. What is a short outline? In law school, I used to create outlines for my classes, and then do short outlines based on that. When studying for finals, I'd mostly depend on the short outline, which was a quick way to go over the material.

Let's say you're reading Greg Iles's
The Quiet Game
, and you're hooked from the start. So you jot down what you've picked up. For example, you might have something like: “Capture readers by the emotion of the Lead in a first-person point-of-view novel, as Greg Iles does in the opening of
The Quiet Game
”:

Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.

“Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”

I do not look. I don't ask where. I don't because Annie's mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.

When you've collected enough of these tools, organize them into sections: Plotting, Characters, Description, Dialogue, etc. Then you can make a short outline. The above I would classify under Plotting, with a subsection, Openings. My short outline entry would look like this:

PLOTTING

Openings

• In First Person, grab with EMOTION
  

That's enough of a reminder for me. If I forget what I meant, I can go to the main outline and remember.

PLOT

Plot happens, and it's best if you know what the critical elements are and how to master them. If you decide, for artistic purposes, to ignore them, you'll know what you're doing.

The basic plot elements are summarized by the acronym LOCK. That stands for Lead, Objective, Confrontation, and Knockout.

Readers are drawn into a story primarily through a Lead.

You can create a Lead readers care about via identification, sympathy, likability, and inner conflict.

The objective is what gives the Lead a reason for being in the story. There are two types of objectives: to get something (information, love, etc.) or to get away from something (the law, a killer, etc.). It must be crucial to the Lead's well-being.

Confrontation is the engine of the major part of your plot. It is the battle between the Lead and the opposition. The opposition should be as strong as, but preferably stronger than, the Lead.