Structure Your Scenes—All of Them

Coaches like Jack M. Bickham and Dwight Swain offer terrific suggestions for scenes, yet focus more on the building blocks than the writer’s perception of what happens next.

Tip: Plan your scenes to meet the goal of tension on every page.

Here’s an alternative: Character Goal…Hook…Hook.

~ The goal.

Know what your character wants. Instantly. Why can’t the character achieve this right now? And what’s the immediate result of failing?  “Instantly” and “immediately” are the key words. A casual, long-term possibility offers little at this moment. And readers, who have all sorts of other ways to spend their time, don’t want to wait. Don’t make them.

An added bonus: if you identify what your character desires, then you know where the scene needs to go. Win/win/win: characters get motive; readers get conflict; writers get strategy.

~ The hooks.

Use your protagonist’s goal to start every scene with a genuine hook, or anything that whets reader appetite.  Hint: it’s rarely just the setting. Consider these possibilities:

• Seemingly unwinnable goal
• Snazzy dialogue
• Question
• Short sentence that pops
• Secret
• Complex emotion
• Huge dilemma
• Grave danger
• Emotional upheaval
• “Ticking clock” (as Noah Lukeman put it)

Launch the scene with a hook, and conclude every scene but the last with another hook. Again, a bonus not just for readers, but for writers. Hooks help identify which material needs to be in scene while maintaining high tension right up to The End.

Now for the frosting. It’s often the writer’s motive, but less so the reader’s. Some examples:

Ø  Backstory

Ø  Themes

Ø  Symbolism

Ø  Allusions (literary or others)

Ø  Social commentary

Ø  History or geography or any other kind of “lesson”

Ø  Poetic moments

Like frosting, perfectly delightful. But in small doses, and never as a substitutes for the actual cake. The good news? Build scenes from hooks and goals, and you can add that delicious frosting without distracting from the plot. That’s where tension thrives.

The Psychology of Three

Writers and readers don’t necessarily experience fiction the same way.  Novelists usually love the set up, where they got the idea in the first place! Ah, the climax. It aptly rewards or disciplines, restoring moral order and communicating theme. Not to mention the relief of typing “The End.”

Readers might disagree. Because the characters are still unfamiliar, the stakes must be swiftly and enormously high. Theme is enjoyable only if subtle, credible, and deserved. If readers love a book, they rarely want it to end. Hard to say goodbye. The next novel might be less appealing.  Many readers, then, favor the middle. There the conflict escalates, the characters breathe. Choices surprise, while events seem motivated yet unpredictable.

Perhaps the middle causes more trouble for you than your characters. What’s the strategy?

~Accelerate the inciting incident.

Start with a symbolic Big Bang. An explosion like that will organically engender a chain of events that force your protagonist to learn the requisite lessons for a happy ending. Deliver the inciting incident immediately, and choose one you needn’t explain.

~ Look ahead.

Be willing to discard your homework. Why does the protagonist hold grudges, despise autumn, or refuse to own a poodle? It’s great for the writer to know all of this backstory —and more. Just so the reader needn’t endure what amounts to someone else’s notes.

~ Explore plot templates.

The web offers numerous reminders of what the mid-section must accomplish. Among the best choices? Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey or Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method.  Pick a recipe that suits you, and use it flexibly rather than dogmatically.  

~ Streamline.

At the first sign of a sagging middle, the average novelist rushes to fill the gap, usually by reaching wide instead of deep. Rather than adding new subplots or minor characters, focus on what’s already there. Intensify and intertwine. Too many ingredients spoil the soup.

~ Fall in love with how your protagonist earns the ending.

If you’ve done your job right, your main character worked as hard as a team of dogs to enjoy that happiness, victory, or moral triumph. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, “It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

Tip: The development of the opening sets up the finale. Revere your novel’s start, middle, and end.

Avoid Accidents!

Accidents can work wonders. People meet and fall in love, and perhaps if no asteroid hit the earth about 65 million years ago, no one could write or read this blog. But accidents and fiction are badly matched.

Plenty of accidents annoy or destroy. We leave the bread in the oven too long, saw lumber a quarter inch too short, delete favorite photos while making space in the Cloud, blurt painful things that never entirely disappear. Only the last one drives fiction. The others are entirely realistic and could deepen plot. Yet something’s missing.

Try this. “Prudence was minding her own business, when suddenly she decided to visit her mother’s grave, quit her job, end her marriage. Or she didn’t decide a thing, yet suddenly got struck by lightning, or a teen toying with his new handgun, or a car careening onto the sidewalk.”

Poor Prudence. Poor reader of a novel about Prudence. Suddenly? That enhances fiction about as much as “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

Fiction traces motive. Why suddenly end her marriage, and why’s she ruminating during the storm, especially when a random car veers onto the sidewalk? Why watch her ruminate at all?

Active choices have driven fiction for centuries. Even a novel as blatantly moralistic as Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” (1740, subtitled “Virtue Rewarded “) examines motive. Squire B doesn’t make his move until his mom dies, and Pamela mistrusts her supposed benefactor. After probing human behavior and its result, the novel concludes both happily and morally.

Today’s readers might not call this book “licentious,” balk at class difference, or applaud Pamela’s obsession with chastity. But they might all agree that the book’s core is what the character must learn, just as Darcy and Elizabeth must unlearn pride and prejudice in the novel of that title. Some things never change.

How much can characters learn from random events, however tragic? Such events reveal heroism and weakness. Sometimes they reveal whom we really love or what really matters. Yet fiction’s most intriguing messages involve dilemmas, human choices, and their resolutions. So you might try the following:

~ Watch for the word “suddenly.” Is it an easy solution to a fictional issue you’d be better off solving?

~ Beware external events as plot pivots. Yes, war, tornadoes, and forest fires change lives. But can they contribute as much as revealing human psychology through—human psychology?

~ Trace the consequences of decisions. In real life ambivalence determines lots of outcomes; we simply refuse to decide—and something results because of that. But how powerful is inaction in fiction? How powerful are outcomes based on external forces rather than personal choices?

The greatest stories trace not battles, but character response to them; not famine, but character response to it, not poverty, but character response to it. Does your novel rely on unfortunate or tragic happenstance, or on the outcome characters earn or fail to? We look to fiction for what life doesn’t provide.

Tip: Accidents are part of life but serve minimal purpose in fiction.

Character and Coincidence

Heraclitus said that “Character is fate”; who you are determines what happens to you. If only it were so! The people who fill collection boxes or steal the bills in them would each get what’s coming to them. They don’t. But your characters should.

Tip: A huge part of fiction is good guys finishing first. And bad guys finishing punished.

Yet it’s tricky to make character drive character. How do you reveal that decisions and actions at least influence fate, if not overtly causing it?

Questions drive actions, and questions can drive character motive and behavior.

~ Does luck play a role in character victory or failure?

Randomness is the state of the world, but people can read newspapers or history books for that. Novel readers enjoy reaching the end and being able to trace exactly what determined that ending.

~ Do you subject your characters to dilemma?

There’s no better way to discover what a woman’s made of than asking her to choose between her art and the woman, man, or child she loves. Her decision says everything about who she is. Don’t baby your characters! Make them suffer.

~ Are your characters ironically consistent and inconsistent?

People settle into certain habits— exercising daily or never; working constantly or studying TV like an art form; hating cats or orchids or letting them take over. Yet smokers suddenly quit. Family suddenly replaces frenzied job commitment. In real life, the motive might seem inexplicable. Don’t let that happen in your novel.

~ Are your characters resolute?

At least on paper, the people we admire desire passionately, risk impulsively, and enjoy or despise intensely. That’s another way of saying that they love life and we love watching them love life. Create characters who put everything on the line. They know they might lose, but they’ll never lose for lack of trying.

~ Are your characters flexible?

Heroes adapt. They don’t just keep doing what they did yesterday and a thousand yesterdays before. They don’t just cross their fingers or wish on stars. They use their brains, muscles, and courage to affect the outcome. And how we love them for that.

The world’s certainly unjust enough, and coincidence isn’t particularly interesting. Readers expect novels to supply the causality and credibility that insures a just ending. Why not show how characters achieve the sadness or triumph they deserve.