Elements of Fiction Writing - Scene & Structure Page 7

  It may seem paradoxical to beginning novelists that scenes work best when they move the lead character further from his story goal —that the best narrative progress often appears to be backwards.

  But even the simple little story of the old woman and her pig illustrates the point. As she got further and further from actually dealing directly with the pig, she seemed to be going further and further backwards. Progress in fiction is seldom two-steps-forward, then two more steps forward. Progress is often two-steps-forward, one-step-back, or even onestep-backward followed by another step backward.

  This does not mean that your story should run backward in terms of story time. But as the hours and days of your story move ahead—and your character struggles ahead (he thinks) in trying to reach his longterm goal —he should often find himself (as the result of a scene-ending disaster) facing yet another obstacle in his path, and seeming to be in worse trouble than he ever was before.

  To word this differently: Well-planned scenes end with disasters that tighten the noose around the lead character's neck; they make things worse, not better; they eliminate hoped-for avenues of progress; they increase the lead character's worry, sense of possible failure, and desperation—so that in all these ways the main character in a novel of 400 pages will be in far worse shape by page 200 than he seemed to be at the outset.

  It's axiomatic among professional novelists that when things are going hideously for the lead character, the book is probably going along just wonderfully, thank you.

  The following is one example of how all this works:

  In Tiebreaker, the novel which began my series of suspense books about the character named Brad Smith, Brad begins wanting mainly to be left alone and never bothered again by his former CIA masters. But in trying to convince them that he should be left alone, he is maneuvered into accepting an assignment in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, when that country wa? still behind the Iron Curtain. Brad goes to Belgrade with the assignment of helping a young woman escape the country. But as a result of trying, he becomes suspected by the Yugoslavian secret police and is then "dumped" by his CIA bosses, who tell him to forget the whole thing and come home. But as a result of this action by his bosses (and scenes in which he tried to be indifferent to the young woman, but instead fell in love with her), Brad finds himself, two-thirds of the way through the novel, not only still doing CIA-type work, and not only in Yugoslavia, and not only trying to get the young woman out, and not only a suspect being watched by the dread Yugoslav secret police, and not only now feeling vastly conflicted by his love for the woman, and not only with time running out, but also even in worse shape than all that because he is now working absolutely alone — with both the dread UDBA and his own former masters working to thwart his effort to get the woman out. All of which has put Brad in so much more trouble than he was at the outset that now it appears he won't get out alive, much less rescue the young woman. He has made enormous progress—backward. (An excerpt from this novel appears in Appendix 3.)

  I give you this illustration and ask you to think about it as you devise and write your own scenes. Remembering chapter 5—that it is possible to go too far in setting up disastrous results —you should not be afraid to keep making matters worse for your hero, and you should be quite pleased with yourself if he sometimes seems to be getting into worse and worse trouble—and further and further from his goal. It is of such seemingly reverse direction that tight plot suspense and reader fascination are built.

  Of course you can console yourself (but don't tell our readers!) with the secret knowledge that all of this seeming backward movement is only a dramatic illusion. As my man Brad stumbles into deeper and deeper trouble, he is in fact getting more and more desperate —learning more and more about his ghastly situation — trying various options and eliminating them as they disastrously fail — and running out of time. Metaphorically, at the start of the novel he stands at the wide end of a huge funnel of options and contingencies. But everything seems to end in disaster, scene after scene. But he plugs toward his story goal, going deeper and deeper into the funnel —his situation, his options and his time squeezing in tighter and tighter around him until there is finally only one option left —which he has to take at the climax of the book, or die.

  So now you see why point 6, listed earlier, fits so closely into this discussion:

  6. Readers will put up with a lot if your scenes will only keep making things worse!

  The process of apparent "backward progress" in working fiction can be seen as an elimination of options that is closing the walls in on your main character, and bringing him closer all the time to the inevitable final showdown. In planning your scenes, and writing them, this general pattern of tightening—of seeming to move backward, further from possible attainment of the story goal —should always be in your mind. Devise and write your scenes so that each makes things worse, never better. Seldom risk a scene ending with a disaster that only reaffirms the status quo. Don't fall into the trap of writing scenes which end saying, in effect, "Well, it was 33 percent bad before, and this is terrible because it's still 33 percent bad after this scene." Things must grow more and more gloomy, and the way you plan your scenes, remembering the big plot picture, can assure that this continual further darkening does take place.

  The result—making matters worse and worse for the character— will fascinate and worry your readers. They will put up with a lot of plot tinkering and even some cumbersome writing on your part now and again if you will keep things getting worse in this way! Remember that, and trust the dynamic of "backward movement" to keep them enticed.

  7. You can seldom, if ever plan, write or revise a scene in isolation of your other plans for your story, because the end of each scene dictates a lot about what can happen later.

  I believe our discussion has already shown why this is so. Good scenes have important goals and strong conflict. The conflict leads to meaningful disaster. A meaningful disaster changes things so they can never be the same again —puts the hero in worse trouble. Every scene, consequently, must have impact on further development of your plot. You simply can't have a "good scene" that has no later impact on events; good scenes always have impact on later events.

  Let me say this a different way, alluding to something discussed in chapter 2. Change is threatening. Your story starts with change. But the disaster at the end of every scene signifies new change, which is newly threatening. Just as your character had to react to the change that started the story, he must react to each change coming out of the scene-ending disaster. So he can never be passive, your story can never become static, and every scene must have effect sooner or later in the story —and probably sooner—because your lead character is going to react to this latest threatening change, and try to deal with that.

  This point is illustrated in the excerpt in Appendix 3. Brad Smith opens his scene with Collie Davis by being angry with Davis's unauthorized entry into his condominium, and having the goal of learning what Davis wants. By the end of the scene, Brad has a good idea of what Davis wants from him —which is bad enough —but Brad's concluding internalization notes that Davis is also a liar . . . which hints to the reader that this assignment will not be the piece of cake that Davis pretends. Brad is definitely in worse trouble as a result of the action that has just taken place. And because he is the kind of character he is, further action on his part is obviously coming.

  This dynamic, inevitable linkage between scenes in a cause and effect pattern is one of the reasons why I suggested to you at the end of the last chapter that you should plan some scenes, and expressed the hope that at least some of them would link. If the scenes you planned on your cards then did not link, let me urge you to try planning more scenes which do link in a cause and effect fashion. For just as stimulus brings on response, every scene should just as inexorably bring on another scene. Once you have this structural principle well in hand, every other aspect of your writing will begin to fall into place.

  TWE
LVE ADDITIONAL TIPS

  Finally, here are some other observations that should help you plan, write and revise scenes.

  1. Make sure that the stated scene goal is clearly relevant to the story question. Don't just assume that the relevance is obvious. Spell it out.

  2. Show clearly that the viewpoint character considers the oncoming scene as vitally important. Have him say so, or think so, or both! Never allow a lead character to enter a scene with a lackadaisical attitude.

  3. Make sure you have provided enough background for the opposition character—or have him state enough motivation at the outset—to justify his opposition to the lead character in the scene. Don't just have someone be antagonistic on general principles!

  4. Make sure your opposing character clearly states his opposition early in the scene, and never lets up.

  5. Mentally devise a moving game plan for both the lead character and the antagonist so that even if you don't tell the reader what either is thinking, you know what both are thinking. This awareness of your character's thoughts, as the conflict moves along, will help you to imagine and bring out more angles —more feints and parries —in the conflict as it develops.

  6. In searching for your scene-ending disaster, don't always grab the first idea that comes to your mind. Your reader will be guessing along with you, and you don't want him to outguess you and anticipate the disaster before you give it to him. Chances are that if you make a list of six or eight possible disasters that would work, one of them well down the list from your first idea will be fresher, brighter, worse for the lead character —and not predictable by the reader. You always want the reader kept guessing!

  7. Don't be afraid to have your antagonist try to get the lead character "off the point" of argument as one of his opposing tactics. Just make sure that your lead character keeps reiterating his scene goal—and fighting to keep the argument on the central subject.

  8. Don't hesitate to use dialogue at cross-purposes once in a while as a scene-building device. Such dialogue can be defined as story conversation in which the conflict is not overt, but where the antagonist either doesn't understand what's really at issue, or is purposely nonresponsive to what the lead character keeps trying to talk about. Dialogue at cross-purposes, or nonresponsive behavior by an antagonist, will be experienced by both the lead character and the reader as conflictual. After all, in such a situation the lead character feels thwarted in some way, and so struggles harder. If the opposing character does not start responding quite directly, the viewpoint character will fight harder.

  (Again, the excerpt in Appendix 3 illustrates the point.)

  One caveat, however: The use of this dialogue device cannot substitute for genuine conflict over the length of many chapters. It is for occasional use only, when information must be transmitted to the reader through a story conversation, and the author wants to avoid the dullness of one character simply lecturing the other about facts the reader needs to be told.

  9. Remember, in building conflict in the scene and in devising your disaster, that people are not always entirely rational, especially in stress situations. If your antagonist loses his temper and says or does something that would be crazy in other circumstances, maybe it's okay. Think about his character as you've built it, and if his craziness seems "in character," given this stressful conflict segment, then consider allowing him to blow up or make some stupid mistake. Your story people —even in the toughest scenes —are not wholly logical robots.

  10. Plan and write the scene for all you can get out of it. Revise if its impact suddenly seems too great for what your plot calls for next, and cut it only if you reread it later and sense that it may get dull in spots —or if the overall pacing of your novel requires that this particular segment be boiled to hurry general story progress along.

  11. Always be alert for ways to raise the stakes in a scene, as long as you don't turn it into Armageddon.

  12. Never let your characters relax or feel comfortable in a scene.

  Having given all this your best thought and effort, I hope you will be far along toward understanding how scenes are built, and how they form the essential action component in the structure of a novel. I hope, too, you see how they themselves are structured internally —and how they move a story along with the same narrative force that makes response follow stimulus . . . effect follow cause. As writers we come to understand more about how fiction works; it's delightful to begin to understand how structural principles are the same from line to line to scene to scene to chapter to chapter—how the governing law in all cases is that of cause and effect.

  In the next chapter we'll start considering how to connect scenes, and how better to motivate them.

  Oh, and in case you were wondering about the old woman and the pig, the climax came—much later—in a sequence something like this:

  The maid began to scold the cat, the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher, the butcher began to kill the cow, the cow began to drink the water, the water began to quench the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig, the pig jumped over the stile —and the old woman got home that night!

  As we'll see later, especially in chapters 11 and 12, plotting your novel with scenes will not result in a climax involving this kind of domino effect tumbling in reverse through the story's earlier causations. We've gotten a bit more sophisticated than that. But this ending was just fine for that two year old I was so long ago.

  CHAPTER 7

  LINKING YOUR SCENES: THE STRUCTURE OF SEQUEL

  If You've Been Following Along through the discussion of scene structure, with all its implications for linkage of such scenes, each leading to the next in cause-and-effect fashion, you have surely begun to see how a tight, logical, suspenseful plot can be built from scenes in a manner that provides continual surprises for the reader. But there was one major problem you might also have noticed: the requirement that the scene be told moment by moment to be as lifelike and reader-involving as possible.

  "Wait a minute!" you may have thought. "If I try to tell every bit of my story in scenes —and each is told moment by moment—then the story of a single day could turn out to be longer than War and Peace."

  And it may have also occurred to you that the moments of internalization that might take place during the stimulus-response transactions that make up a scene provide precious little time for the viewpoint character to think or feel —and little space for the author to write them down for the purposes of characterization of analysis of character motivation.

  Clearly, in any long story there must be some structural component besides the scene.

  There are essentially two: transition and sequel.

  Transition is a very simple device which provides a direct statement to the reader to the effect that a change in time, place or viewpoint has happened since the last scene. Such transitions can be as simple as the following:

  It was the following Tuesday when they met again. Or,

  At about the same time Joe met Bill, another meeting was taking place

  on the other side of town. Or,

  Three hours later . . . Or,

  In another office far from Gotham City ... Or even,

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .!

  Such simple transitions sometimes are enough to serve as the bridge to carry your reader from one scene to another. But clearly, if you want to deal in any depth with a character's emotional state, or show his thought processes as he analyzes his plight and makes future plans, or use his thinking process to give the reader information about things that happened before the story started (or in the time that has elapsed between chapters), then you need something bigger and better than a simple transition.

  That "something" —the sequel —is the glue that holds scenes together and helps you get from one to the next. It is a flexible structural component, and it provides you with all the tools you need for
in-depth characterization, analysis of motivation, explanation of character planning, etc.

  In an ideal Platonic world, there would be a sequel between every pair of scenes. Often you will see modern novels in which scene causes sequel which leads into next scene, which causes next sequel, and so on. Indeed, most novelists plan their stories in just this scene-sequel, scenesequel pattern. But because they are so flexible in length and content requirements, sequels are often much harder to spot in finished fiction.

  This, however, does not mean that they do not have a prototypical, ideal internal structure. They definitely do.

  A NEW START

  A sequel begins for your viewpoint character the moment a scene ends. Just struck by a new, unanticipated but logical disaster, he is plunged into a period of sheer emotion, followed sooner or later by a period of thought, which sooner or later results in the formation of a new, goal-oriented decision, which in turn results in some action toward the new goal just selected.

  And what do you have when the decision made in the sequel's decision segment is turned into some new, goal-oriented action? Add another character who will oppose the new action, and you have conflict —you are into the next scene.

  If you pause to think a moment about how people really react to disaster in their actual lives, you will see that the first reaction to such a setback is emotional. "My God!" Bill cries, and hits the palm of his hand to his forehead. Or, "How can that be}" Jean demands, tears filling her eyes. Or, momentarily crushed by his setback, David slumps to the floor in speechless, wide-eyed shock.

  We best see emotion as the first stage of reaction to disaster when we witness someone's loss of a loved one. Very often the emotional reaction is so intense that the bereaved person loses almost all control, dissolving in tears or becoming hysterical, sometimes requiring sedation. The length of time the purely emotional reaction retains domination of the person depends on the kind of person he or she is, the nature and depth of the shock, and perhaps other circumstances as well.