Plot
A story is a character trying to resolve a problem.
I use to say a story was a problem that needed to be resolved. Using Write It Forward, I now see my blind spot. I was leaving out the part of writing that I was weakest at in my definition of plot: character.
A plot is a series of events that outline the action of a story. Notice it says action. Things have to happen.
The characters’ motivations drive the plot toward the climax. The number one thing you must know about every character is their primary motivator.
Time is linear. Usually. We’ll discuss time in more detail later. I realized I had to do a twelve year time jump in Duty, Honor, Country. I was struggling for weeks on how to cover those twelve years. Every solution I came up with had either too much detail or not enough. I couldn’t find the balance until I went to my Beta Reader and asked for help. I gave each of the six main characters a single important historical scene in those years that showed whether the character was changing or staying the same, so that by the time we resume a normal timeline in the Civil War, the reader isn’t jarred by the characters when they meet again.
Plot: By Aristotle
An interesting character facing a problem
Story is solving the problem
Tragedy: In solving the problem, it gets worse, which leads to the dark moment, which leads to the turning point
Character must plausibly solve the problem
There are six good questions to ask yourself before you begin writing:
What do I want to write about?
What do I want to say about it?
Why do I want to say it?
Why should anybody else care?
What can I do to make them care?
What do I want readers to do, think or see?
What I have found is that most writers can answer the first three, but not the last three. The last three focus on the reader, while the first three on the writer.
The longer I write, the more I write like a reader, rather than a writer. That might sound strange, but as I write, I put myself in the position of the reader. Have I hooked the reader? Am I maintaining suspense? What does the reader know up to this point? Remember, you’re trying to get a story that’s inside your head, into the reader’s head. I try to constantly be aware of what I’ve developed in the reader’s head.
The key to all the techniques and tools is that they must be used to insure smoothness. By smoothness, I mean that your writing must not jar the reader either in term of style or story. The reader is interested in the story. Reading is the means by which they learn the story, but it is only a medium. The medium must not get in the way of the story. When the reader is pulled out of the story into the writing because you didn't use the proper technique, or didn't use it correctly, you stray away from the story.
A good maxim to keep in mind is: "Don't let them know you're writing."
Backstory
Backstory is everything that happens before you start your story. You need to know it, but the question is how much does the reader need to know? And when?
The key is to not info dump. The moment you pause the story and start explaining what happened, you’re giving too much backstory. It’s hard for the writer to see this during draft, so don’t worry too much about it until you are in rewrite stages and working on tightening down story. Remember the reader is interested in what is happening now, not what happened ten years ago, even if it is part of the story, it needs to be weaved in only when the reader must know it in order for the story to make sense.
Narrative Structure
Narrative structure can be used as a frame for your outline. I use the template of the five elements of narrative structure.
Inciting Incident
Escalating Conflict
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
Inciting Incident
This is a dynamic event and should be seen by the reader. It upsets the balance of forces and the rest of the novel is an attempt by your protagonist to restore the balance or change things for the better. Often the inciting incident is brought about by the antagonist. A good way to twist the inciting incident is to have what appears to be a good thing turn out to be the worst thing that could possibly happen. We’ve all heard stories of someone winning the lottery and it ended up ruining their life.
Your opening scene is going to do one of two things: introduce the problem or introduce the protagonist. When you make this decision, right away you are signaling to the reader which you believe to be more important. You could start with the protagonist in the problem, but both have backstory and it could be overwhelming to the reader to get that all at once.
Whichever one you open with, generally the next scene introduces the other. Thus, by the end of the second scene, the reader should know who the protagonist is and what is the problem that needs to be resolved. Don’t be a secret keeper—withhold the plot from the reader thinking this engages them. This just upsets readers.
The initiating event is where things change, the fights starts, the balance has been upset. You definitely need a hook within the first few pages of your book. Something that engages the readers emotions and gets them excited to go on the ride that is your story.
If you have a flashback or memory in your opening scene, perhaps you need to rip that out and put it in normal time sequence and make it the opening scene? After all, it’s so important, that you need to toss it in there so quickly, maybe by itself it would be a great opening?
One lesson I learned writing thrillers was to introduce the protagonist before they become aware of the problem. In a thriller, since the plot stakes are so high, you usually introduce the problem first. Then we go to the protagonist. What you want to do is give a brief view into the protagonist’s ‘normal’ life before they become aware there is this big problem. This is key because it ‘sets’ the core personality of that character in the reader’s mind. It’s a small, but important thing.
For example, in Peacemaker, the story starts with the problem: ten nuclear warheads are stolen, one is detonated to cover the bad guy’s trail. As that one goes off in red flame, we suddenly shift to blue water. The protagonist, Nicole Kidman is swimming laps. We get about ten seconds of that, then a Marine is standing at the side of the pool telling her ‘we have a problem’. What does that brief glimpse of her swimming laps tell us about her? She’s used to things being in order. She doesn’t like chaos. And she’s about to be thrust into chaos.
In Stargate, the story starts with the Stargate being found. Then we shift to the protagonist Kurt Russell, sitting in a young boy’s bedroom holding a gun in his hand. We find out that his son found his gun and accidently shot himself with it. This tells us Russell has nothing to live for. When he goes through the Stargate with that nuke, if necessary, he will detonate it and close the gate. Here’s an interesting question: did they pick Russell because of his skills as a commando, or because they knew about his son’s death and that he was the perfect person to send on what could be a one-way mission?
Why now? What’s changed? Why is the story starting today and not yesterday? You must know the answers to these questions. You can’t just randomly pick a start point. There must be a reason why the initiating even is the key moment.
Your opening shot/sentence is key. It’s often used to set mood and tone for the story. “It was a dark and stormy night” is a cliché, but clichés are truisms. Start focusing on what the first thing you see on film in a movie is—the first shot. I use the example of the large American flag in Patton. As soon it appears most people in the audience know exactly what movie it is even before seeing George C. Scott appear on stage. In the same way, do you remember the first opening shot of the movie Saving Private Ryan? Again, it’s the American flag, flapping in the wind at the top of the flagpole above the cemetery at Normandy. This tells you the tone of the movie.
Your opening scene often mirrors the climactic scene, except at a lower level. For example, in the movie Elizabeth, in the opening scene we see prisoners getting their hair cut off in prison prior to being burned at the stake. The climactic scene is Elizabeth cutting off her hair to become the virgin Queen.
Sometimes, your opening scene can actually be the protagonist and antagonist in conflict and the antagonist wins, normally at a much lower level than in the climactic scene. In the movie Broken Arrow, Christian Slater and John Travolta are boxing. John Travolta wins. The climactic scene, they’re battling over a nuclear weapon and Slater wins. They use the symbol of a $20 bill which John Travolta wins after the boxing match and then it’s floating in the air, singed, after Christian Slater defeats John Travolta at the end.
Something else I’ve noticed in both books and movies: the larger the story, the smaller the opening and the smaller the story, the larger the opening. It’s not a rule, but something to consider. For example, Dune, by Frank Herbert is a huge story. There’s an entire new universe to explore. But Herbert starts small and doesn’t overwhelm the reader. He wants to hook you in to character and the potential of story. So it starts with the protagonist sitting alone in his room in his castle. His mother comes in with a Mother Superior of her order. The Mother Superior tells Paul to put his hand in a hole in a box. She then places a needle against his neck. She tells him that if he removes his hand from the box, she will inject him with the poison in the needle and he’ll die like the animal he is. Then his hand begins to feel as if it’s on fire. He doesn’t take his hand out, even as the pain increases. Finally the Mother Superior turns the box off, turns to the mother and says “He’s the one.”
The one what? Don’t you want to know? But Herbert only slowly introduces us to this new universe and only when absolutely needed. We don’t learn about space travel until Paul is getting on a spaceship.
In the opposite way, The Day of the Jackal, is a pretty small story. Will the detective catch the Jackal before he kills? But it starts big: Paris early morning. We pan in over Paris until we get into a courtyard with a stake set in the ground. A French officer is led out, tied to the stake and executed by firing squad. We then find out why.
People question whether prologues can be used. Of course they can, but you must make sure you absolutely need one. The only thing that makes a chapter a prologue is that it’s out of time sequence with the rest of the book. Often prologues are used in thrillers when the problem occurs well before the start of the story.
Escalating Conflict
The conflict escalates for both the protagonist and the antagonist. People tend to forget that the antagonist’s brilliant plan is now falling apart. The Nazgul did not get the ring in the Shire. Now it’s in Rivendell. Oops.
Escalating conflict is a series of progressive complications that ups the stakes. As we peel away layers, the stakes for the characters get higher. One way to look at escalating conflict is through the use of Turning Points.
Turning points happen on two levels, internal and external. By focusing on these parts of your story when mapping out narrative structure it will help you keep things simple and focused on the main story line. A turning point is where both the plot and the character arc turn in a new direction, usually with higher stakes.
The stakes get higher, the suspense rises, and the pace of the story gets faster. While the reader actually still reads at the same pace, the book feels like it’s getting faster. If you consider a four act structure with three turning points, you’re looking at the first act being around 34,000 words or so; the second around 28,000; the third around 22,000 and then the fourth act being around 16,000 or so. Those are just rough figures, but the book picks up pace as the reader moves on.
Surprise is not suspense. Because the reader doesn’t know the surprise is coming. So even if you have a surprise (which is hard to pull off), you still need suspense.
Suspense comes from caring about character. Once we get involved with your characters, we care about their fate. We care what happens to them. That is why you have to get us into the characters quickly.
An example of this and use of an opening: Long shot: two lane highway in the middle of west Texas. Four boys sitting on lawn chairs in the middle of the highway drinking cokes. What does that tell us? Not much happening in Dancer, Texas Pop 81. The initiating event sort of happened two years prior to today, when the four boys are graduating high school later in the day. When they were sophomores they all went to the bus station and bought tickets to Los Angeles for the Monday after graduation. So they graduate and we follow the four boys through their weekend. We start rooting for this one to stay, and this one to go. On Monday morning, the bus shows up and two get on and two stay. The suspense comes from caring about who stays and who goes.
Make everything serve multiple purposes to tighten the story down.
Crisis
The darkest moment, when it looks as if all is lost. It’s usually a fight or flee situation for the protagonist.
You have many minor moments of crisis in your novel, but a single main one. It’s when the protagonist’s back is against the wall. The protagonist reaches the point where she has to make a decision: fight or flee. The decision leads to a course of action and it shouldn’t be an obvious choice, even though we know the protagonist will fight. Still, it has to seem that perhaps, if they were ‘smart’, they’d flee.
What you must do is give the protagonist a believable motivation to fight. In Don’t Look Down, Jenny and I sent our first draft in to our editor. She liked it, but also said that on page 254 the hero and heroine, if they were smart, would pack their bags and go home. There was no reason for them to hang around and fight the antagonist. We had to rewrite and add in a compelling motivation for them to take on the antagonist and see the conflict through to the climax.
That choice drives the protagonist toward the inevitable collision with the antagonist in the climax.
PLOT EXERCISE: What is your moment of crisis for your protagonist? Is it a fight or flee situation?
Climax
The choice comes to a conclusion.
It’s the Protagonist versus the Antagonist and one wins and one loses. Both are on stage. No proxies. Don’t have the police racing in at the last minute to arrest the bad guy, unless the police officer is your protagonist.
The climax is the solution to the problem introduced in the inciting incident.
You only get one climactic scene. No matter how neat and kinky it sounds, you don’t get a bifurcating climax, which means two climactic scenes. You get one. Because you have one main storyline. Everything else is subplots and you close out your subplots before the climax, usually in reverse order in which they were introduced: Subplots 1, 2, 3, 4, get closed out 4, 3, 2, 1.
The climactic scene is often the same or a mirror image of the opening scene, just at lower level. The protagonist has changed from who she was in the opening scene to the point where she can win. If you took your protagonist as she is at the beginning of the book and plunked her down in the climactic scene, she would lose. This is why, as soon as you finish reading a book, go back and re-read the opening chapter. Look for all the things you didn’t consciously notice the first time you read it. Also, think about the protagonist as you meet her and imagine her in the climactic scene.
The end is the solution to the problem that you introduced in one of the first two chapters. But remember all that expository information that you worked into your story? You must also close out all your subplots by the end, which sometimes can be quite difficult to do.
Study endings as much as you study beginnings. How did the author explain all the hidden details that bring the conclusion together? How many chapters did the author write after the climactic scene (hopefully one)?
The end line on the diagram is not as flexible as the "beginning" line. When the end comes in your story it comes. Because you have all those pages prior, you have lost a large degree of control over your ending. It should be a natural conclusion of the story itself. Sometimes I'm asked how long a manuscript should be and I always say long enough to reach the end.
I believe it is important that you have an idea what the climax of your book is going to be before you start writing it, as that is where the story is driving toward. Some writers don’t want to do that—you have to find what works for you.
I think we have all read books where the ending rang flat or disappointed us. The question you should have asked yourself, as a writer is why did that ending disappoint? A book should have a pay off for the reader which comes in the resolution, which we’ll discuss shortly.
Some writers work from their ending backwards. By this, I mean they know in their mind how they want the story to end and they write the entire book with that in mind.
I think you should have a good idea of your ending when you start writing because if you don't, your writing may tend to wander. It all goes back to outlining and whatever you feel comfortable with. Another problem with not having an idea of your ending is that if your plot is complex you might not conclude with an ending at all as everything simply unravels—or, more likely, you can't tie together all the loose threads to end the book succinctly and in a satisfactory manner.
Stephen King says he doesn’t have a clue what his ending is when he starts a book, but I think he is the exception rather than the rule. And he’s Stephen King. And recently he’s changed that opinion.
The most important thing about the ending is to close out your main storyline and all your subplots. Don't leave the reader guessing.
The climax ends the crisis.
Out of the climax, comes the resolution.
Resolution
The resolution is the pay off for the reader. This should be one, short scene.
Don’t leave any loose ends dangling. The reader cares about all the characters and events. You actually tie up your sub-plots before the climactic scene, usually in reverse order to the way they were introduced.
The resolution is the satisfying ending you promised the reader when you introduced the inciting incident. That balance has been restored and the protagonist has changed. Or we are introduced to a new reality.
We have to see the change in our protagonist. They must do something in the last scene that they wouldn’t have done at the beginning of the book. For example, in the movie The Verdict, Paul Newman was seduced and betrayed by Charlotte Rampling. The final scene is Newman in his law office, after having won the greatest case of his career. Every other time he was in his office he was drinking a beer. But now he’s drinking a cup of coffee. He’s different. The phone rings. It’s Rampling. He knows it’s her. He reaches for the phone, but forces his hand to stop. The phone keeps ringing. And ringing. And ringing. Fade to black, roll credits.
The key is that he didn’t answer the phone. Who he had been, he would have answered.
He changed.
PLOT EXERCISE: How is your protagonist different at the end of your book? How do you show this difference?
Fate vs. Coincidence
I used to believe you can’t have coincidence in plot. I called it author manipulation of the plot. I still think you have to be careful. A ‘coincidence’ has to be handled really well. But there is such a thing as fate. For example, in Duty, Honor, Country, I have the inciting incident be a cadet, Cord, getting challenged to a dual for getting the tavern keep’s daughter pregnant. My protagonist, Rumble, (not Cord) steps up and asks for the daughter’s hand in marriage, thus losing his cadetship.
Cut to the birth six month’s later. Rumble is with his wife as she’s in labor. U.S. Grant, Longstreet, etc. are with him. Cord, who is persona non grata now, is standing in the tree line about the cabin, waiting. That night, of all nights, I have the proxy of the antagonist ride up, bearing a message for Rumble.
Now in the big scheme of things, that seems a mighty big coincidence. Two years ago I would have not done that. But you know what? Why not that night? If I can keep the emotions of the two conflicts (the birth, the proxy vs. Cord) ramped up and emotional enough, why not? Why have the proxy show up two nights later?
The key to this is fate is layered on top of existing conflict. Coincidence is when the event is the conflict. Then it’s author manipulation of the plot. In the example above, the girl is giving birth—that’s the core conflict of the scene. The proxy riding up is layered on top of that.
Flashbacks And Memories
The two are not the same. If you’ve been divorced you know this. A flashback is what happened. A memory is what someone remembers happening. Memory is tainted and slanted by all that happened afterward and by what someone wants now. Entire stories revolve around different memories of the same event, such as Courage Under Fire where the protagonist gets everyone’s story of what happened in the desert, but only one version is the true version.
You can use both, but use them sparingly because the reader usually wants to know what happens next, not what already happened. And often there is no conflict in the flashback or memory because they already happened.
The real key to both is that you keep the reader oriented. The reader must know when they enter a flashback/memory and leave, very clearly. Much like your cuts in point of view.
Tightening Story and Chekhov’s Gun
A novel is similar to a bunch of strings woven together to make a rope. The tighter the strings (subplots) are woven to each other and to the center storyline, the stronger the rope (story) is. Also, you’ve got to make sure all the strings (subplots) end inside of that rope (story) to make it a strong one.
Chekov once said: “Don’t have a gun in Act One unless you fire it by Act Three.” This is true of writing. Don’t throw superfluous things into your story. The reader doesn’t know the significance of whatever you write so he assumes that everything is significant. You disappoint your reader if you have a scene that appears to be important, but you never refer back to it, and wrote it only to keep your action moving.
I amend Chekov’s rule though: Don’t have a gun unless you use it by act three. A really good writer will use the gun again, but not by firing it. They’ll use it in some unique manner.
I have often been misled when reading manuscripts for critique because I misjudge the importance of something in early chapters that is never mentioned again. In one case a writer had a large explosion occurring that destroyed quite a bit of property and killed many people. I assumed that this explosion was tied into the main plot; in fact, I figured that the bad guys had caused the explosion. Yet the explosion was never mentioned again nor really explained. The author had simply used it to set up the circumstances causing the hero to have to use a different escape route. It totally threw me off the original story for more than fifty pages as I kept anticipating a reference back to that explosion. That’s a story that’s not tight.
In the process of writing a book, look at everything that you write with an open mind and something minor can later turn out to be rather important. I call this planting subconscious seeds in your story. This is why you shouldn’t edit yourself to death. You might put something in your story that doesn’t seem significant, yet ends up being critical.
For example, in Agnes and the Hitman, we located Two Rivers, Agnes’ house on a point of land where a river intersects with the Intracoastal Waterway. We also put a tidal cut across the point of land, which at high tide, essentially makes Agnes’ house an island. An old wooden bridge is part of her driveway. I’m not sure why we did this initially. But here’s how it tightened down over the drafts:
1) The isolation of her land and the tidal cut reflected the way her life was isolated at the beginning of the story.
2)The old bridge that creaked ominously every time a car went over it reflected the overall state of her house. Agnes worried every time a car went over it, reflecting her worry about being able to pull off the wedding at Two Rivers.
3) The antagonist ends up attacking someone and they end up in the cut next to the bridge.
4) The antagonist ends up attacking the bridge to try to stop the wedding.
5) My hero ends up replacing the bridge for her in a rather, um, phallic way (you have to read the book) that brings the hero and heroine closer together.
Thus, a simple piece of setting, a bridge, and serves at least five purposes in the book. We didn’t think of all of those at once. They developed as we rewrote. Ultimately, the bridge represents connection between Agnes and the world.
I think this is an example of the power of the subconscious. You write three ways to tighten a story down and in this case we:
Knew from the very beginning that the bridge would be a symbol of connection. We added in events at the bridge as the plot developed and we found it to be central to certain parts of the action. We went back and rewrote things about the bridge to tighten the plot down.
The example I use for this is in Pat Conroy’s classic The Lords of Discipline. Far into the story the protagonist is in a bind. He must discover the identities of a secret group called The Ten. Earlier in the book, there’s a scene where he’s in the study of his roommate’s father. Pat Conroy described the study, noting the leather-bound notebooks on a shelf which the roommate had told him were his father’s memoirs which no one was allowed to read.
The protagonist discovers that the father was a member of The Ten when he was a cadet, so he figures the way to discover the current Ten is break in the study and read the journals.
The question is: Did Pat Conroy know that was the solution to the problem from the very start and thus, when writing the earlier scene in the study, he knew ahead of time the importance of those journals?
Or perhaps Conroy didn’t know the importance of those journals as the solution to the later problem and put them in there just to say something about the father? And then when the protagonist was stuck, Conroy was just as stuck. But looking back through what he’d written, much as the protagonist would look back on what he had experienced, he suddenly realized: The Journals! Perhaps, originally Conroy just put those journals in there as part of character development. But suddenly realizes he can use them in another way.
Or perhaps there were no journals in that study. Conroy was in the same bind as his protagonist. But being the master of the story, Conroy went back and inserted the journals as a solution to the problem. The issue with this, though, is that now Conroy has to rewrite the entire book with those journals in there. It might change minor things or it might change major things.
All three paths are ones you will use as a writer.
Every character, incident, location—everything—you put into your novel has to be examined very carefully. What additional use can you make of it? The more uses you can make of each subplot, the tighter the story. The tighter the story, the better the manuscript.
The Video on the side bar is of Bob's latest release: NIGHTSTALKERS THE RIFT. This marks Bob's 60th Book Published!