Dialogue: Animosity or Virtuosity

Consider Nancy and Kevin. This brother and sister mostly got along, though it’s years since they’ve been close: marriage, kids, careers—they drifted. But neither Kevin nor Nancy predicted that dad’s death would endanger their relationship.

Unless you’re related to Nancy and Kevin, why would you care? Because the demise of Kevin and Nancy illustrates how dialogue works. Or doesn’t.

Kevin’s fury might launch a scene. After all, he maintained Dad’s hardware store, plus keeping his lawn mowed, snow blowed, and roof repaired. Nor was Kevin’s schedule exactly overflowing with spare time for someone else’s life.

“Your life? What about mine?” Nancy wants to know when she adds her lines to the script.  Hardly her fault that Kevin took years getting Dad’s house in shape to sell. Especially since her husband graciously took Dad into their home. Of course Dad didn’t intentionally torment every member of Nancy’s family (even Rover). But his dementia irritated, exhausted, and freaked them all. Every day. For years.

Who’s right? Nancy. And Kevin. Life has enough actual bad guys. Fiction shouldn’t. Readers must believe both stories. That promotes dilemma—the most genuine source of tension. Make dilemma drive the script characters play out when they interact.

Tip: Good dialogue comes from a forceful, credible, well- justified script for each character.

You get there not by replicating reality, but simulating it.

~ Brevity.

In the real world, Kevin and Nancy might shriek, accuse, and bellow. Or bicker twenty-nine separate times over a four-month period.  That won’t propel fiction.  Their conversations need to be short, snappy, and subtle. And two or three times beats twenty-nine.

~ Subtext.

Kevin might actually scream, “If you can’t understand what this cost me, I never want to speak to you again!” Makes sense. A bit tepid, though. Why read on, when we can predict what’s next. Besides, wouldn’t it be more fun (not to mention more accurate) to wonder if Kevin’s rage disguises hurt? There’s greater ambivalence in “I can’t believe you’d say that,” or “I don’t even recognize you.” Cliché, yes, but reflective of complex emotion. That’s how they became cliché.

~ Equality.

In real life, courts determine guilt or innocence. In fiction, everyone’s both. If you despise Nancy or Kevin so piercingly that you can’t design two defensible versions of the so-called facts, you have no business telling their story.

Want virtuoso characterization and dialogue? Handle animosity not as if it were a heat-seeking missile, but a feeling we all experience at least occasionally. Emotion is intricately complex: rage mixed with pain, greed laced with regret, righteousness tempered by anxiety about never speaking to your sibling again. Make sure all your characters can justify themselves. Because each person both believes his or her story—and doesn’t. Unless dialogue reflects that, it won’t infuse the depth, intricacy, and credibility your story deserves. Because your readers do.

Can “ugly” emotions be good?

If even Jimmy Carter admits that “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” how can the rest of us escape not only lust, but wrath, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and gluttony? Regardless of how you view traditional religion, you likely disapprove of them all. Add a bit of psychology, and the list lengthens: manipulation, sadism, passive aggression, lack of empathy. Who wants to be like that? Or know someone like that? Far fewer people than the number who’d love to read about it.

Tip: Ugly emotions keep readers turning pages.

Aside from the popularity of true crime, thrillers, and mystery, everyone enjoys a good bad guy. And most of us equally enjoy a good guy who’s at least a little bad. These characters mirror the sins in our hearts, and because we recognize ourselves in that mirror, the novel’s bad guys inspire us to improve, while the good guys reassure us that nobody’s perfect. Not even in fiction.

Take betrayal. Its underpinning is a smug self-righteousness. How could you do that to me when I was so generous/thoughtful/compassionate/supportive? Like anything about fiction that’s taken too far, betrayal can build such an unpalatable character that readers simply close the book.

Yet in healthy doses, betrayal can drive a novel fast and far enough to become a classic. Javert kills himself because Jean Valjean betrays the officer’s belief in absolute justice. Madame Bovary feels betrayed by the life that first her husband, then her lover promised. Gatsby betrays his moral center for the fool’s gold glitter of Daisy; vengeance drives Ahab to betray his crew’s trust in their captain. In The Art of Fielding, the sport that Henry loves betrays him: when the ball he wields so well injures his friend. Henry, in turn, betrays his skill—by resolutely and suddenly losing it.

Dark thoughts—like betrayal—fertilize both dilemma and causality.

 ~ Causality.

 In the best novels, every event except the last arises from the one preceding and spawns the one following. Pride goeth both before a fall and the next scene; the proud character will make mistakes, possibly horrifying, and definitely instigating whatever happens next.

 ~ Dilemma.

Most of us hope to bury or at least hide our dark thoughts. We know that greed is offensive, that envy is never classy, and so on. We struggle forward. But when a character’s dark thoughts clash with the sense of right and wrong—that’s an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. In other words, it’s fiction.

This doesn’t mean that your protagonist must act on every unpalatable thought. You could leave that to the antagonist. Or not. But while complicating the protagonist with some stifled but evil impulses, don’t neglect to complicate the antagonist. As Robert McKee observed, a worthy antagonist shapes a worthy protagonist.

Worth has much to do with credibility. Do we believe in the protagonist? That external forces pressure her into earning the ending? Credibility also demands exposing the secrets most humans vault away. This exposure is both credible and intriguing. We want to know what’s in the protagonist’s vault just as intensely as we want no one to guess what’s in our own.

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.

Spring Cleaning

It’s a traditional activity for good reason. Over time, things pile up, and the season of renewal gives many of us—writers and otherwise, a chance to refurbish when we have the most energy we ever will.

So get going. Clear up those smudges that block the view. Identify debris; either dispose of it or place it where it belongs instead of piling up wherever you dropped it. Finally, clear out all the stuff that accumulated. How long since you assessed what’s on display for those entering your world?

A significant task, like sprucing up a home, yard, or novel, can feel too big for a single swipe. Instead of getting discouraged, divide the tasks into logical parts. That’s not only manageable. It’s downright inspiring. Start by assessing what you might revise for a sounder foundation.

• Structural clean up

~ Are your characters multi-dimensional?

~ Does a dilemma drive your novel?

~ Do the events of your plot flow causally into each other? Do you ever rely on coincidence?

~ Have you developed your idea into a High Concept, one with universal appeal and emotional

   intensity?

That’s the big picture. But a picture’s only as good as the individual elements composing it.

• Detail clean up

~ Does this description add?

~ Do you position information in the best place?

~ Do you transition between details?

~ Do you ever “tell” and then “show,” or “show” and then “tell”?

~ Does each detail perform more than one function, i.e. speaker attribution plus escalating

   tension?

If specifics are crucial, so is how you convey details to readers.

• Sentence clean up

~ Are any passages wordy?

~ Do you seek active verbs that don’t require prepositions, i.e. illuminate instead of “light up”?

~ Do you emphasize by contrasting long, flowing with short, punchy ones?

~ Do you resort to passive voice when you needn’t? There are (sic) few instances when you

   need it.

~ Are you using “and” too often, and are you not noticing and thus are you also wasting words

   and weakening causality with that habit? Once you notice, it’s not a hard habit to break.

Tip: Let spring infuse new growth into your characters and their world.

The Test of Time

A recent performance of Romeo and Juliet at American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, confirms that Shakespeare remains as alive and well-loved as ever. Even the famous balcony scene, which could well feel like the most painful of clichés, still captures how the world feels when you’re first in love, with the moon too inconstant for a vow, and goodnight evoking a taste of death. All that stands the test of time.

This early play (1595—a decade before King Lear) blends romance, slapstick, violence, and wit. Each lover undergoes a developmental arc during the brief span between love at first sight and untimely death. Their tragedy affects not only friends and family, but all Verona—and everyone who’s encountered not only the play’s beauty, but its meaning.

Romeo and Juliet accomplishes this not just by lacing tragedy with comedy. Or with quicksilver action proving that major events—pressure points—change people so there’s no turning back. The play’s great strength is its capacity to reveal real people with real emotions, who remain utterly relevant even though we no longer brandish swords and have cellphones to get messages safely through. The play’s great strength is its continuing relevance.

In Good Prose, Pulitzer-Prize winner Tracy Kidder observes that “Revelation, someone’s learning something, is what transforms event into story. Without revelation, a story of high excitement leaves us asking, ‘Is that all?’”

No work can stand the test of time if readers wonder whether “That’s all.” Nor is this a genre issue. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an early romance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is science fiction, and Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger is magical realism.

What makes a work stand the test of time? How can your novel have a shot at achieving that?

~ Landscape.

A novel needs characters that inhabit a very particular environment. Readers must be able to enter it, too, and this world must control what characters dream and whether those dreams can come true.

~ Innovation.

Does the novel offer a spin, idea, location, or dilemma distinct from everyone else’s?         Does it possess something only you can offer?

~ Impassioned emotion.

Do the characters evoke at least as much compassion, irritation, or delight as real people? Do readers experience strong feeling about the characters?

~ Texture.

Does the novel have sufficient substance that one could reread it and reach different insights? Will no two readers interpret it identically?

Tip: It’s not a matter of what you write about, but how you write it.

Does Your Novel Behave like a Story or like a Sestina?

Even if you’re unsure what a sestina is, you don’t want your novel resembling one. Novels must thrust forward, rather than circling around plot, theme, or character emotions.

What’s a sestina? A complex 39-line poem dating back to 12^th century France. Since novels can be 390 pages, the two forms illuminate in distinctly different ways.

The sestina takes the last word of the first six lines (123456) and creates this pattern from those six words: 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. The six words reappear one last time in the final three-line verse. By repeating and revisiting, the sestina reveals different conclusions about the same idea, which—ceases to be the same idea.

Though this might seem excessive, each recurrence changes the word’s context, even its meaning. If you’re curious about the sestina, check out what Elizabeth Bishop does with the simple words “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears.”

The technique is not only terrific for poets but an excellent exercise for deepening a novel. You might quite usefully compose a sestina about dilemma, subplot, or backstory. But it’s no way to structure the book itself.

Here’s why. Lauren Groff liked Joshua Ferris’s “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” but said of the protagonist’s arc: “If I never found the novel an ‘opera of bracing suspense,’ it may be because I was so worn down by O’Rourke’s incessant circling around his self-hatred and fear and inability to make a substantive effort, that when change does in fact come to him, it feels a bit limp and clammy.”

Novels generally trace the journey from weakness or difficulty to strength and power. Progress won’t be steady. There’ll be set-backs, wrong turns, resurrection of self-destructive habits, and worship of false truths.

This doesn’t mean you get to repeat as sestinas do. How can you avoid that?

~ A scene goal outline.

Check how often the protagonist progresses or retraces.

~ Physical/emotional balance.

The more characters ruminate, worry, and plan, then the more static your novel will feel.

~ Motivated dialogue.

Do conversations actually advance plot, or exist only to break up the narration?

~ A character arc.

Do events cause the character to grow, or is success sudden and inexplicable?

Tip: Life often seems to go in circles, but readers don’t want novels imitating that.

“Hope is the Thing with Feathers”

Emily Dickinson wasn’t the happiest of individuals: she loathed conformity, suffered various physical difficulties, endured unrequited love, and felt every emotion acutely. Yet if one side of her impassioned reactions was “Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me,” then the other was belief in how high human consciousness could soar.  For humans, even a plane ride is an act of faith, a belief that we can escape our earthbound nature.

Whether you’re passionate about God and identity, as Dickinson was, or about travel, love, or politics, it’s easy to get darkly bitter about what someone isn’t providing, how it isn’t fair, will never improve, and so on. It takes guts and at least a few feathers to make a song when things look hopeless. Yet is there anything better an artist can give?

Pete Seeger died not long ago, and if ever there lived a person who could fly and make everyone else believe they also could, he was such a man. He was also a man who despised injustice and devoted his life (and income) to defeating it. He grinned and joked and stood tall and sang no matter how much indignation he experienced. You can, too. You should, too.

Pete Seeger’s recipe works well for novels: stand up for justice, tell the truth, maintain your sense of humor, and never lose hope. Since its inception, storytelling has used plot to impart moral lessons, bond tribes, dispense culture, and inspire hope. If, arguably, storytelling makes us human, perhaps storytelling matters because it’s our best hope for hope.

Storytelling promises catharsis. Since Aristotle, we’ve become more flexible about lauding royalty and upholding constraints like the plot completing in one place during one twenty-four hour period. Our emotions, though? Those haven’t changed much.

If we’ve been rooting for someone, whether real or fictional, and this individual fails the ultimate test, yet learns from it, well, we learn too. We only suffer vicariously. But what we learn from the suffering that we experienced on the page—that belongs to us as much as the protagonist. 

How do you make that happen?

~ Afflict your protagonist with a universal dilemma—one everyone can relate to.

~ Root the trouble not in fate but in one individual, one individual’s mistakes.

~ Don’t let the angst or gore overshadow the emotions and their “lessons.”

(That keeps us reading/watching “Game of Thrones.”)

~ Provide hope—like the boy who’ll live to tell the story of Camelot.

Tip: Go ahead and be as dark as you like. But offer at least a small ray of light by the end.

Who’s Got the Plot?

Writers often ask what makes a novel “literary.” Emphasis on character? On voice? On improbability of making a sale? Jay Parini called the literary novel one that teaches you how to read it as you go.  Mark Twain hadn’t heard of the literary novel, but he did call a classic “something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read.” That’s about plot, or lack thereof.

Nathan Bransford’s blog on “What Makes Literary Fiction Literary?” observes that “Good literary fiction has a plot.” In fact, if you want people to buy your literary fiction, a plot is just the ticket.

For example, Ian McEwan’s Solar traces the dangerous consequences of the rivalry/incompetence intersection in academia. The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri) illustrates the life-changing consequences of every seemingly trivial decision about love or politics.  Sara Gruen’s Ape House reveals who gets loved or rescued, while Janet Burroway’s Bridge of Sand follows who gets to survive the rotten hands that fate often deals.

Bransford’s blog offers this insightful distinction: “genre novels are really about how a character interacts with the outer world.” In contrast, “literary fiction… requires the reader to infer a great deal of the plot…and thus the climax might be something as small as a decision or a new conviction.”

Let’s unpack that by differentiating not only the subtlety of the plot, but the distinction between plot and tension. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the plot consists of who gets married. The first romance novel! That observation probably outrages some and thrills others. But what differentiates Austen’s romance from others? It’s the source of tension, which comes less from the events that befall characters than the way characters learn and mature because of those events. The theme that “pride” or “prejudice” impede happiness matters at least as much those wedding bells.

What has this to do with your novel, literary or not?

• Every novel needs a plot, preferably one where each event causes the next.
• Every novel needs character decisions that produce clear consequences.
• Every novel needs tension—on every single page.
• Every novel needs characters forced to choose between unacceptable outcomes.
• Every novel needs tension from both what characters do and what they think.
• Every novel needs subplots interwoven with the central plot.
• Every novel needs a plot climaxing in a revelation about human nature.

Tip: The best novels integrate the best attributes of both genre and literary fiction.

The Best Fantasy Describes Reality

Fiction itself is born in fantasy. The millennia-old quarrel between Plato and Aristotle questions the source of “truth.” Plato insisted it resides only in the realm of history and fact. But Aristotle praised a poetic version of reality, one more coherent, credible, and causal than the randomness of whatever really happened.

Fantasy has its roots deep in this dispute. Great fantasy builds a credible world, reveals truths about our own, and gives us a fun read. “Dwarf and Dragon,” the second book of D. L. Burnett’s trilogy “In the Kingdom of Dragons,” does all of this and more.  

At the Chicago Book Expo in 2004, beloved author Ursula K. Le Guin told her audience this: “Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil.”

Burnett’s novel accomplishes this by layering oaths, dilemmas, and inadvertent betrayal throughout. Is your loyalty to your people or to the mentor who helped you become a leader? Do you betray your husband or your moral code? Would you kill a friend who’s gone on a rampage that endangers lives? Can dragons, or dwarfs, or giantesses overcome their basic nature and achieve something gentler, more “human”?

Questions without easy answers generate terrific plotting and gorgeous writing. As the Dwarf army approached, “Their braided beards swung like pendulums across their chests.” They are defiant about reclaiming their homeland; they are unbeatable. Only a coerced marriage can save this people.

But this is a novel about loyalty—and love. The marriage begins with a Dwarf finding his spouse “a worthy diversion.” Sadly, he discovers that “’Human love is mist. What can I or any Dwarf know of it?...I am less welcome in your chamber than a winter wind….We cannot build a union upon a grave.’” But wait. Out of an ephemeral substance called Dripstone, he expresses his love through a sculpture he must carve and carve again. Will it move her? Read the book and find out.

LeGuin’s “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?”reminds us that “The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. …For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true… it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.”

Author Maureen McHugh reminds all novelists to “Follow your weird.” Plato was wrong. Truth doesn’t “lie” in the fantastic. That’s where truth resides.

Tip: Regardless of genre, use your imagination to shape reality. That way you express the themes closest to your heart. 

Where Does Your Novel Start?

The first page of your novel—and even the first sentence and paragraph of that page—matters more than any other part of your book. You not only attract readers (or fail to), but set the tone, elicit sympathy, and clarify what kind of journey your protagonist and thus readers will take. More importantly, you establish whether readers want to invest in that journey. With the stakes this high, you want to—keep the stakes high!

More than anything else, that comes down to where you start. Recently a writer asked if she should begin her novel when Larry’s wife Erica disappears. Or, instead, should the novel open at the moment when lonely Larry determines to begin actively searching?

To decide, consider the difference between these two starting points. One is a feeling of desperate loss, a feeling which introduces questions about what to do, which actions to consider. The other moment—a forceful decision to take action—is an actual plot point. It’s a true inciting incident, because it produces the plot rather than preceding it.

Mark Twain observed that “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.” Isn’t the start of your novel far more significant than word choice? Note the gap between thinking about an action and taking one. Use that distinction to identify your starting point.

For your opening, you need the following components:

~ A moment of action (not a feeling, situation, or problem)

~ A self-explanatory action (not one that requires backstory, context, or elaboration)

~ An action explosive enough to drive an entire novel (not a conflict, but a dilemma)

~ An action with high stakes (not just risk, but a lose-all or win-all gamble)

~ An action that reveals the nature of your protagonist (not soon, but instantly)

~ An action that bonds us with your protagonist (by uniting courage with vulnerability)

As an exercise, a warm-up, an off-stage gathering of insight, it’s terrific for you to develop a full understanding of the events that caused your protagonist to risk the action that sets your novel in motion. But that’s only for you. You needn’t share it with your readers, and you definitely needn’t start out with it.

Tip: Begin your story not with what motivates action, but as close as possible to the point where the action starts.

Revision and Vision

The words feel as if they should go in the opposite order (vision and revision), and not just for rhythm. One instinctively feels that first you have the storyline, which you keep reworking until it’s right. Not exactly. More often, reworking the original plot or theme, approaching it from different angles, choosing the exact words and smoothing the awkward sentences lets you—voila!— exquisitely articulate what you never knew you wanted to say.

Some people eagerly anticipate reworking from a solid base; others dread the anguish of not creating anything brand new. However revision makes you feel, without it, you risk losing the potential nuances and complexity of your vision. Revision lets you  discover what your characters and ideas want to tell you so you can share that.

Tip: Revision that addresses the architecture of your story lets you plumb the meaning of your story.

How do you revise for vision?

·         Watch the words.

It matters whether Penelope snickers, laughs, brays, or giggles. Be precise. Scrupulous wording creates powerful imagery and themes.

·         Ignore the words.

Precision counts. Just not at the expense of deep structure. Tinkering with words can't substitute for developing deep dilemma, genuine character arcs, and happy endings your characters actually earn.

·         Forget about yourself.

            If you put yourself, not to mention your ego, before your words and sentences, you won’t see what

            needs revising. You’ll only see your “self.”

·         Incorporate your “self. “

Your emotions, memories, dreams, and mistakes make great fodder. But to incorporate or dump are separate processes. Infuse the world of your characters with your experience instead of reproducing your experience. Real life needs tweaking to seem credible and dramatic.

·         Use your plot to develop your themes.

Ideally, the bad choices, wrong turns, and learning these generate take your characters on a journey that reveals whatever you want to reveal.

·         Use your plot to discover your themes.

Ideally, living characters subjected to enormous stress will not only surprise themselves. They’ll surprise you, too. That’s the fun and thrill revision can offer.

Readers may not consciously realize it, but they mostly prefer novels that have insight—vision. Revision is the single best strategy for achieving that.

Thematic Plotting/Plot-Driven Theme

You’ve heard it before: Characters acting as mouthpieces for ideas read like stick figures. Yet character and theme interconnect at the deepest root. Use theme to understand characters better and you complicate plot. Use the fate of your characters to illustrate theme and you needn’t state it. You can build story from either direction.

Dilemma. Start with an event that closes off protagonist options and emphasizes theme. In Kim Edwards’ “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” a doctor hopes to protect his wife by institutionalizing their newborn daughter, who isn’t “normal.” This event instigates a journey revealing the themes of love, memory, selfishness, humanity, and forgiveness.

Tip: Your first event should force characters to cope with the difficulty of living out your theme (instead of just idealizing it).

Backstory. “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach is less about baseball than the game of life. Pella plays this game poorly because her closeted dad unwittingly deprived her of the self-reliance a bright, talented, and beautiful teen would otherwise develop. Her bad choices arise from lessons she must unlearn and habits she must break.

Tip: Backstory adds if it clarifies character motivation and advances plot.

Climax. Ideally, the culmination of your plot dramatizes your theme. In Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” the novel’s hero is literature itself, or Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” to be specific. In a clever twist I won’t reveal, poetry rescues a family from theft, rape, and possibly murder. An ironic sort of hope saves or at least elevates everyone, including the “bad guys.”

Tip: Make the resolution of your plot signal your theme. This eliminates the temptation to insert a “And now, dear reader…” passage in your last few pages.

Intertwine plot and theme to build an organic novel: Better plot, deeper characters, more convincing themes. 

Deeply Different, Deeply the Same

Readers know perfectly well that passion and romance intertwine, that selfishness and generosity diverge. If, as E.B. White observed, “Writing is both mask and unveiling,” then fiction must offer something new. Obviously. But as Willa Cather observed over half a century ago, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” What’s the poor novelist to do?

Why “mask and unveil,” of course. The secret is to “unveil” the subtle distinction between ardor and devotion and the subterranean similarity between selfishness and generosity. As your characters travel from tribulation to maturity, their struggle “masks” these truths.

It doesn’t ultimately matter if you use plot to find truths or use truths to instigate plot. But if you want your novel to have layers, texture, richness, originality—all those things we all hope our novel will have—then you need to dig deep.

If you start with your characters and plot, weigh some tough questions about the significance of those.

·         How are your protagonist and antagonist alike?

·         How could the dilemma one protagonist faces represent dilemmas that protagonists have faced independent of time or geography?

·         If the protagonist’s dilemma is personal, how would it play out in the sociopolitical sphere? If it’s sociopolitical, how could it simultaneously be personal?

·         What did your protagonist believe to be true when the journey began that proves false by the journey’s end?

If you start with theme, tackle some tough questions about the beliefs your novel expresses.

·         Develop a convincing argument against the theme you unequivocally believe with all your heart.

·         Explore how the theme would or would not change if you shifted it to another time, country, even planet.

·         Brainstorm until you find a metaphor that captures the truth of your theme.

·         Investigate why you believe this. Culture? Religion? Personal experience? Uncover at least one new reason for your belief.

Tip: Surprise us with what we never knew we knew.

The Timeless Story

Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” and Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto” were originally set in Italy, around the 16^th century. How amazing, then, that you can move either of them four centuries forward, to an iconic location like Las Vegas or New York, and watch the same characters unfold the same story, conveying the same emotions and themes. If the heart of a story is true, it can happen anywhere, any time. It’s eternal.

Baritone Zeljko Lucic admitted that it made no difference to him whether he played Rigoletto as a jester in Mantua or a comedian at a strip club: the character stayed the same. He’s an archetype: a father whose cruelty and vengeance destroys his beloved daughter, just as irrational hatred destroys Romeo and Juliet or Tony and Maria.

How timeless is your story?

Could you move your story to ancient Rome or futuristic Marstopia and reveal identical truths? Wouldn’t it be great if you could?

·         Reduce your story to fundamentals. It doesn’t matter whether the protagonist is a NASA

astronaut or a Greek philosopher. What basic dilemma does she face, and how will the plot

skeleton resolve that? (Incidentally, this is the best approach for a logline, if you’re working on

that.)

·         Free your plot from specific conditions or circumstances. If those disappear, so does your plot. So do your characters. Eternal stories come from the human foibles and passions that endure wherever people are.

·         Unearth the changeless conflicts of your story, like love versus duty, or survival versus freedom.  These may not be obvious. But they’re in there. If they’re really not, discover them. Add them. Build your story around them.

Tip: Dig deep to compose a story that isn’t about this group of people, but all people everywhere.

The truths that unite everyone make novels haunting. Isn’t that what you want for yours?

“Downton Abbey’s” Back

When last Sunday’s episode ended, it seemed that it’d only just begun. How did fifty + minutes fly like that? Again, there’s food for novelist thought here.

·         Rich characters. An impractical earl, a questionably charming new footman, and a morally impeccable convict defy every stereotype. These characters—and all characters—emotionally engage us by transcending type. In this episode, every character, however minor, is both individual and representative, both specific and universal. That’s every storyteller’s goal.

·         Interwoven subplots. Each character’s tribulations must impinge on every other character’s. This weaves not a series of brief, tangentially related stories but one gorgeously unified tapestry with no visible evidence of the separate threads that produced it.

·         Moral dilemma. This has driven story since the origin of the form. The classic conflict is a character passionately loving someone with a different ethical code. Whether the moral center is how to run the estate, maintain honor, or treat the employees, there’s genuine trouble if the beloved does not agree. This is in fact the very worst trouble of all, because how can the protagonist choose between love and morality. What terrible trouble! And trouble drives stories. Otherwise, there’s no point in telling them.

·         Cultural upheaval. Context for individual dilemma not only adds a layer of texture but deepens understanding of the characters inhabiting a world. No one ever lives in a vacuum. Culture impinges on everyone—and always has.

Novelists can find much to gnaw on in the unfolding of this story—not to mention the bliss of following “Downton Abbey’s” characters through the twists and turns of their lives.

Tip: Train yourself to study the machinery of story in everything you watch and read.

Conflict versus Dilemma

The greatest stories—the ones that haunt—present the hero/protagonist with an impossible choice: love versus freedom, honor versus death, duty to country versus protection of loved ones. How is the protagonist supposed to choose between such agonizing options? The point is that one can’t, and the impossible struggle to do so drives the story to its climax with such intensity that readers can barely breathe wondering what happens next.

But whether you call it cynical, realistic, savvy or any combination of those, honor and duty don’t quite compel the way they did in Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. So for the contemporary writer, the problem is escalating plot and characterization to that level of intensity. And no matter what genre you write in, this is a problem. Why? Because you want to keep your readers breathless. You want your characters to seem not ordinary but memorably larger than life. Finally, you want a story that lasts because it touches on the human instincts that remain unchanged across the centuries.

The trick is to uncover the elements of your plot that are universal:

• Nourishment
• Safety
• Love
• Family
• Security
• Duty
• Religion
• Freedom
• Loyalty

More of these exist, of course, but this gives you the idea. 

Then you want to take what might seem like a pedestrian conflict (Will she accept his proposal?) and make it more substantial (Will she accept his proposal even though she loves him but her religion forbids her to marry him?) Raise the stakes not just by cornering your characters, which is a terrific starting point, but cornering them with absolutely impossible choices. That’s the kind of thing that keeps pages turning and therefore attracts agents.

Tip: Don’t settle for conflict. Make your protagonist transcend dilemma.