Compress it! Pace It!

For the fiction writer, repetition is a trap, and a tough one to avoid. Later events must be set up, new characters need to know what readers already do; and sometimes it takes a few mishaps—possibly in the same setting—to get the protagonist properly cornered. Writers often hope that so long as something’s slightly different, such as the same anger for the same reason but more intently, readers will find it new. Sadly, that’s rarely the case.

Nor will scene versus what’s known as summary/sequel/narrative entirely solve the redundancy problem. Summary can magnificently foreshadow or dispense information. But the high stakes that fiction needs frequently originate in scene rather than summary. Or between them.

Tip: Exploit the underused territory between scene and summary.

The mixture of narrative and scene creates the illusion of “live” fictional time, just at a faster pace. 

Because she hadn’t contacted him since returning to New York, Ed reared back when Anna tried to hug him.

That’s a really brief, somewhat oversimplified example of the landscape between a full-blown scene and an entirely collapsed summary. Yet the sentence illustrates a swift summary (the dependent opening clause) preceding the start of a scene (the independent final clause).

Combine scene with summary, and you can accelerate the pace, or speed at which events pass readers. Instead of revisiting what readers have already seen (she hasn’t contacted him since returning to New York), modify something. Did Anna start to call Ed? Did Anna run into her former fiancé? Did Ed’s voice mail quit functioning? Change helps pursue not only the original source of tension and perhaps something else entirely.

That’s because novelty is not only what readers want but what novelists need. Bypass the parallel or similar by shaking things up.  That’s a boundless source of tension, emotion, and originality, not to mention the potential for symbolism, suspense, and complex characterization.

What kinds of questions shake things up so that nothing ever feels exactly the same?

• If the location feels identical, how has the place changed?
• Could an email or phone call let you summarize part of a scene?
• If the character’s emotion is similar, how can you add a contrary nuance or dimension?
• Depending on your novel’s point of view, can you revisit a moment from another perspective?
• Can the scene end very differently this time? 
• Can you add a “ticking clock”?
• Can you develop rather than merely repeat any symbolism?
• What’s the effect of a similar place at a very different time?

These questions suggest ways to manage momentum. And in “5 Ways to Pace Your Story,” K.M. Weiland observes that

Pacing is like a dam. It allows the writer to control just how fast or how slow his plot flows through the riverbed of his story. 

Pace originates not just from syntax and rhythm, but also scene and summary. Explore the fertile territory between those last two.

Fiction as Transportation

This relationship is obvious in science fiction, where improbable vehicles ferry readers to improbable places. But all successful fiction—whatever the genre—always transports, and, ideally, in both senses of the term.

Readers choose fiction for the opportunity to travel somewhere new. Even if the setting is one’s hometown, this fictional world feels as tangible as the “real” one, only far more causal, credible, and compelling. Even better? You get there without the misery of heavy traffic, delayed planes, or cramped seating.

But because readers can suspend disbelief, fiction can even more miraculously transport them to the territory within a novel’s covers. And, if the creator of that world commits no gaffes that fling readers back into daily reality, the magic lingers long after the protagonist’s journey ends. Every time you recall the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”), or wonder if anyone could really be as good as Harper Lee’s Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird, then you’ve confirmed that novels enchant even when you’re no longer reading them.

Tip: The novelist’s hard work makes transportation to a fictional world easy.

Perhaps that’s easier said than done. So what flings readers out of a fictional world?

~ Errors.

Novel readers want to believe in the world they’ve entered. If they didn’t, they’d choose nonfiction. But they can’t ignore the Plaza Hotel standing across the street from Grand Central Station, or female sea horses housing the developing eggs, or “All of it feels badly.” Fiction must be free from mistakes.

~ Motive.

In real life, people frequently behave irrationality. The novel’s job is letting readers escape that. Fiction must imply (though rarely directly explicate) the rationale underlying character decisions.

~ Sentimentality.

Why not leave that to greeting card writers? Fiction must “show” happiness, fear, or anger rather than using abstract generality to label any of these.

~ Conincidence.

Sometimes infants are born on the same day as their grandmothers, and lucky infants have grandmothers who materialize at exactly the right instant. Novels though, ought to avoid the response of “Oh, give me a break,” and accomplish that by setting up and foreshadowing. Fiction pleases most when it links the cause of one event with the subsequent one.

~ Tedium.

To illustrate, try typing up an actual conversation. If you think that’s painful, imagine reading one. Or a detailed description of how the detective arrived at the crime scene. Who cares? Fiction must suggest rather than replicate.

For many readers, a novel that truly transports brings incomparable joy. Don’t you want to write that book?

Verity versus Verisimilitude

Verity, from the Latin veritas, means “true” or “real.” In contrast, verisimilitude comes from the Latin likeness to truth. For fiction writers, the difference couldn’t be more dramatic—because drama originates in imitating rather than replicating reality. That’s the source of fiction’s big questions. As Richard Bradley put it in his review of Ward Just’s The Eastern Shore: “What makes a story true? What means of storytelling best capture reality? Are facts a path to truth or a finely constructed gate?”

“Verisimilitude,” Russell Smith notes, “is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.” Because as Mark Twain and numerous others have observed, fiction, however fantastical, must seem more credible than reality itself.

But that’s only part of what fiction requires. In “Realism and Verisimilitude,” Taylor Stoehr suggests that “Fiction does not imitate life in the way that mirrors do, though we sometimes talk about its ‘mirroring of reality,’ nor does it pretend to be real in the way wax bananas do, or in the way that plastic simulates cowhide.”

Every novel creates a new reality, one true within its own parameters. The argument against Plato that Aristotle mounts in The Poetics insists that the most valuable truths transcend the literal facts. The best fiction, whether drama, epic poem, or novel, shapes a reality more causal and credible than the actual one.

How might you construct such a reality?

~ Propel Momentum.

As Robert McKee asserts in Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen: “Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it. Therefore, even in the most realistic settings and genres, credible dialogue does not imitate actuality.”

~ Manage Pace. 

It literally takes hours to prepare a turkey, drive to grandma’s, build a cabinet, or wash and fold the laundry. But no one wants to read logistics in anything approximating real time.

~ Avoid Coincidence.

Of course you could miss every traffic light, leave your identification at home, and be late for the plane. The one that crashes. But the fact that this could, or even did, actually happen doesn’t make it believable. Use subtle foreshadowing and set up to make your plot credible—particularly at its climax.

~ Justify  Psychological Insight.

Here’s McKee again: “beware characters who know themselves better than you know yourself.” The best novelists have explored every aspect of character psyche. But that’s a task for the novelist, not the character. 

~ Earn the Ending.

From the very start, present a protagonist with enough internal assets, however undeveloped, to save the day, and without the aid of convenient external miracles.

Tip: At its best, fiction feels, but should not literally be, more “true” than reality.

Framing

You needn’t look closely to see that nature slips into compositions all the time. Out the window an oak dramatizes a sliver of moon and a single star. A staghorn fern fans itself across the glitter of mica-encrusted rocks.  Male and female goldfinches feed beside a six-foot-tall pure yellow lily. Nice.

But artifice, not nature, shapes the kinds of frames that novels need—the kind that add coherence and aesthetics to plot and tension.

~ Hooks.

Those of us raised on 19^th century novels associate the hooks with setting, often a long, long, long, LONG description of something. But these days anyone can visit exotic places with a couple of clicks. Though E.M. Forster’s Passage to India is a great novel, today’s readers no longer a need a dozen pages on the Marabar Caves—or anything else.

Instead? Hook with drama, tension, secret, promise. Begin and end every scene that way. Want to integrate conflict with setting? Go for it. Just don’t forget the conflict part. That’s the hook.

~ Sequence.

            “A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means”

(Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes). Her observation suggests how fiction exerts its power. Novelists comment on truth not just through plot and character, but time itself. So many options. Where does the story start? How much backstory would add, and where does it belong? Is the ending foreshadowed? Does the pace let readers savor what’s interesting and speed past what’s not?  The unwinding of time contributes to the frame embellishing the story inside.

~ Scene structure.

           

Whether you make a plan before you write (definitely not a bad idea), or revise what’s already written, every scene should frame a moment in time. Photographers choose what to include, omit, and emphasize; similarly, novelists can use the constraint of each individual scene to make this chunk of plot coherent, dramatic, and causal.

~ Set-off.

            Frames exist to enhance what’s inside. You might think of description, foreshadowing,

            backstory, and the prose itself as the framework supporting the plot. If any of those distract or

            diminish tension, then the frame overwhelms the part that matters.

~ Set-up.

            Reality is random. What’s great about novels? They aren’t. But only if the narrator frames the

            plot.

Tip: Frame your story. Great frames make what’s inside even more compelling.

Deus ex Machina

Picture this. On page 288 of a 289-page book, Cali is besieged. Sharks below. Jellyfish at the surface. Copters armed with assault rifles above. But wait! Look! Out of nowhere, a boat materializes on the horizon. Whew. We’re relieved she’s safe, but—uh, why? What conveniently brought this rescue at exactly the right moment?

A miraculous intervention, that’s what. As Aristotle observed in the Poetics (about 335 BC), the solution must be “necessary or probable” rather than a “contrivance.”

He referred, quite literally, to a device used in ancient drama. A trapdoor opened, releasing a machine of the gods (deus ex machina). It rescued whoever perhaps deserved it—but not due to personal assets or forethought. In other words: an artificial escape from dire straits.

And that’s just the problem. Successful endings build from characteristics, opportunities, and possibilities that the author foreshadowed, preferably in the first chapter. As Robert McKee put it in, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it’s an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

That’s a heavy indictment. Also an entirely true one. Story, whether Greek tragedy or contemporary urban fantasy, is an inherently moral art form. Certainly it’s about entertainment. Fiction we don’t enjoy is only for the classroom (and maybe not even there). The primary purpose of most stories is still a moral one. How can that possibly happen if either the protagonist—or the novelist—relies on a perfectly timed, perfectly improbable miracle?

Yet plenty of worthy writers have resorted to this or something resembling it. There’s Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, John Gay, Moliere, Charles Dickens, William Golding, and J. R. R. Tolkien. That’s not the point. Why use it unless you must? Here’s how you needn’t.

~ Foreshadow.

            At least once, hint at any trait, character, or device you’ll need later on.

~ Supply almost but not quite hidden strengths.

In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus and Boo have qualities they’ll use later on. Because that’s set up in advance, nothing feels like cheating.

~ Use character arc.

What drives fiction? Struggle induces the protagonist to learn and develop. What earns a happy ending? The protagonist deserves it. Isn’t that more fun than the miraculous save?

~ Let the journey resolve the journey.

The ending should come from how each mistake or misstep or act of profound selfishness prepared the protagonist for this moment. What’s moving or memorable about a well-armed boat materializing out of nowhere?

Tip: Give your readers the pleasure of an earned rather than contrived ending.

Cassandra and the Causal Plot

Poor Cassandra was doomed to accurately prophecy but never be believed. This legendary clairvoyant has more to offer the topic of causality than mere alliteration. She raises the question: what makes people believe a prediction? If ancient Greek gods are involved, there’s not much you can do about convincing your audience. But if you’re plotting a novel and want it to seem credible, you need causality—the antithesis of life’s randomness.

In contrast to good or bad luck, causality means that actions have consequences. Foolish or self-centered choices incur costs, while moral behavior eventually bestows a metaphorical pot of gold.

In fiction, causality shows up in two distinct arenas:

~ Foreshadowing.

Cassandra warned the people of Troy neither to welcome gorgeous Helen nor trust the gigantic horse assembled outside the city. The Trojans ignored her—and paid dearly. Novelists, too, must pay for not looking ahead. Unless you sow the seeds for what’s coming, the theme won’t seem any more credible to the audience than Cassandra’s predictions did.

1.      Hint in the very first chapter at the protagonist resources that will produce the ending. Just be sure to hint rather than bludgeon.

2.      Make each scene lead inevitably to the next. Agent/author Don Maass reminds that scenes must be so tightly interwoven that if you remove one, the entire plot unravels. Each scene must cause what follows. No exceptions.

3.      Derive theme from the resolution of the plot. Want your themes to be the icing on the cake? Then directly correlate the protagonist’s choices with what protagonist and reader ultimately discover. Together.

~ Climax.

Whether it’s called “pressure point,” “arc,” “story promise,” or “inciting incident,” the opening impetus needs enough heft to get both characters and readers to the climax.

1. A credible climax develops from the opening launch.
2. An empathetic climax involves human actions and decisions. Avoid your own version of Athena forcing the Trojans to quit ignoring Cassandra.
3. A causal climax reveals how struggle summoned the protagonist’s best. That’s how you earn the ending

Tip: The novel’s opening explosion results in a chain of events that lead the protagonist to the climatic choice, which often resolves the initial dilemma.

You needn’t be Cassandra to know that while readers happily suspend disbelief , they’re terribly unhappy about inconsistency, randomness, or manipulation. Causality helps you view plot as far more fundamentally interconnected than a beginning, middle, and end. Which do you think your readers would prefer?

Mad about Resolution

Audiences go mad for resolution. Because it’s among the main attributes of story. So audiences get mad when deprived of resolution, or when it happens too fast for either fun or credibility. The finale of Mad Men, justifiable winner of numerous awards, is no exception: we want the resolution we’ve waited for.

Sure, pressure exerts terrible pressure. Enough that someone can change years of selfishness quite rapidly. But the audience has a hard time believing change that happens too quickly or out of sight. Set up is needed. Gradual build-up is needed. Even for as superb a writer as Matthew Weiner.

Because, as Mark Twain put it, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” People, whether in fiction or life, tend to go on as they always have. What disrupts the status quo? Screenwriting guru Linda Seger calls these moments “pressure points.” Intervention, divorce, and death leave no one unscathed. Upheaval brings out the best in characters. And fiction has always been about human beings at their worst—and best.

After all, we trace our novelist roots back to moral instruction thinly disguised as plot: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is saved by the wise, upstanding, symbolically named woman he adores: Sophia. The hero earns his beloved—and the novel’s resolution—because morality triumphs in the end.

What about character arc and plot resolution in your own ending? Here are a couple tricks.

~ Seeds.

Plant them in the very first chapter. If you protagonist has moral fiber or quiz show potential or a dynamic pas de deux, introduce that early. Then the final resolution doesn’t feel like an unjustified miracle, or deus ex machina (miracle-making machine).

~ Pressure points.

Space them out. Successful novels usually have an arc of character development from flawed to worthy of happiness. Use five or six weighty events to make that happiness seem justified.

~ Clues.

Make them too obvious, and you’ve fizzled all the fun from your book. But make them too arcane or oblique and readers won’t believe or accept the ending. Every novel is a kind of mystery. Treat yours accordingly.

~ Memories.

Recollection often saves us. We revisit fleeting images from childhood, recall small victories or big leaps into forgiveness or discovery. Changing our thinking about the pattern helps change the pattern. But the key word here is “fleeting.” You don’t need a whole flashback—just a moment, maybe just part of one sentence. Anything longer is usually a waste of the reader’s precious time.

~ Doors.

Leave them open. Dickens is a great, great writer. But it’s too late to imitate him.

Tip: Set up the ending right from the start, so readers can enjoy a credible, causal climax.

A Rose in a Cornfield Is a…

…weed. Misplaced, the most exquisite, evocative addition feels like…a mistake.

We’ve all experienced it:  “What a sentence! I love it! I can’t even believe I wrote it! Must’ve come directly from the Muse.” And yet, if you can’t find the right location for that fantastic sentence, you must let it go.

It helps to view your novel as a limited area of ground. You want to make the most of every inch, not let things that don’t belong there insidiously sneak in.

Don’t

…realize that readers need to know something and leave it wherever you happened to think of it.

…interrupt the action with distracting backstory or description. Note that distraction differs from

slowing down—teasing out suspense. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate.

…weigh down your story with detail that feels as relevant as Aunt Agatha’s best friend’s grandma’s traditional recipe for last-till-spring Christmas Fruitcake.

…add a brief passage about the Galapagos Islands because you did lots of research on it and long to share your discoveries about marine iguanas and Blue-Footed Boobies.

Do

…add “set up” just prior to “pay off,” so readers never wonder why they heard about this.

…limit details to those which enhance plot, deepen characterization, or foreshadow themes.

…make details “double-duty”: they advance plot while setting scene, or they add scenery while suggesting atmosphere, contribute irony to the plot, and so on.

…use transitions so readers can grasp the connections between details that might be linked only in the author’s mind.

…use stage business, or character gesture or behavior, to support the dialogue.

…remember that flowers set seeds. In fiction or soil, they grow wherever they happen to fall.

It’s easy to delete clumsy sentences, boring references, and paragraphs that go nowhere. Far harder is realizing that you’ve written something really good and have nowhere to put it. But whatever doesn’t add subtracts. Aren’t you willing to make hard sacrifices for your readers?

Tip: A great sentence or detail in the wrong place is a…rose in a cornfield.

Ready, Set, Scene Goal

Whether drafting or revising, writers often imagine what could happen next and start typing immediately. For the lucky few, that’s a great strategy. For everyone else, it’s ignoring an opportunity that may sound like busy work, but in reality is anything but.

Among other things, Jack M. Bickham is known for observing that “Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.” The quote lets us know we can trust him. In Scene & Structure (1993), Bickham differentiates the protagonist’s over-arching goal from the pressing one in the scene at hand. This is what he says about scene goals:

The prototypical scene begins with the most important character—invariably the viewpoint character—walking into a situation with a definite, clear-cut, specific goal which appears to be immediately attainable. This goal represents an important step in the character’s game plan—something to be obtained or achieved which will move him one big step closer to attainment of his major story goal.

In the last two decades, a lot has happened in and about fiction. Today, one might describe the scene goal this way: Whatever a character desperately wants to get or avoid.

The scene goal differs radically from the author’s goal. Successful scenes do more than supply backstory, introduce minor characters, create atmosphere, or break for an info-dump.

Tip: Focus on character desire; this gives scenes energy, focus, and momentum.

Scene goals assist with every stage of the writing process. Here’s what the scene goal can give you:

~ A genuine hook.

Avoid the summary or context that don’t truly entice.

~ Focus.

You detect details that don’t belong in this scene, or possibly not in any scene.

~ Tension.

How will other characters respond to the protagonist's determination?

~ Foreshadowing.

How will the protagonist fail or learn from that failure?

~ Launch pad.

Before the climax, the goal isn’t realized, only appears to be, or results in worse trouble.

Isn’t it worth that little extra effort to build scenes from what characters—not authors—want? After all, that’s what readers want.

Flirting with Boredom

Fiction offers an unspoken contract: Writers try to anticipate what readers want, and generally satisfied readers forgive novelists for not always anticipating correctly. Maybe that seems unrelated to boredom or flirting. But boredom has everything to do with the eye of the reader-beholder, and novelists who refuse to flirt are doomed to boring others. Take no risks, and you’ll never say anything new or exciting.

Certain things are boring about 98% of the time:

~ Repeating. Once is great, twice not at all.

            Angry to the point of fury, she raised her clenched fist at him.

~ “Doubling.” Don’t clarify unnecessarily.

            Ann had made a decision, and she turned to go.

~ “Showing” and then “telling” (or the reverse). Pick one or the other.

            His deep sadness caused tears to fall from his eyes.

~ Judging. Save the editorials for your friends—or, better yet, your journal.

A person who wanted tropical sun and humidity, even in winter, was clearly nuts.

~ Lecturing. Save the info-dump for your nonfiction book, your friends—or your journal.

Aristotle, master of science, philosophy, poetry, and human nature, continues to affect us millennia after his death.

After you’ve eliminated boring habits, start flirting. Be playful. Inject sexual innuendo, and invite rather than fulfill. Fiction readers adore humor, sensuality, and the chance to reach their own conclusions. Of course novels flirt a bit differently than people do.

• Ground the story.

Setting for its own sake can bore, but setting that gives the characters a home intensifies the plot and highlights the themes.

• Tease.

Leave scenes incomplete. Sustain problems, mysteries, obstacles, and secrets till the last possible moment. Answers can bore. Questions rarely do.

• Differentiate essential material from tangential.

Learning about monarch butterflies sounds educational, except in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, where understanding them clarifies their symbolism, beauty, and value. Nothing boring there.

• Set up.

Maybe preparing readers for the climax feels meticulous or over-zealous. But the opposite feels like a miraculous rescue, i.e. no fun at all. Flirt with foreshadowing.

Tip: Seduce us by making us wonder what you’ll do with the details. After all, that’s where the devil resides.

Time, Tides—and Writers

Waves and tides ebb and flow, occasionally punctuated by unpredictable upheavals, as anyone knows from standing in the surf or gliding across it.

Tip: Pleasure comes from both patterns and unexpected disruption of them.

Most writers discover the rhythms of language one at a time. The most obvious one escalates from conflict to climax. But like those varieties of ocean waves, novels offer many interacting rhythms.

~ The protagonist’s journey

Christopher Vogler famously argued that the rhythm of all fiction, from screenplay to novel, comes from a hero reluctantly agreeing to confront a troubled world and change it. Ideally, this rhythm climaxes with self-knowledge for the hero and justice for the world.

~ An arc for each sub-plot.

The best novels intersect several interconnected journeys. For each of these, relief disappears over and over until the final pages offer resolution—or failure.

~ Scene versus sequel or summary.

Regardless of what you call whatever’s out of scene, every novel has a basic rhythm of drama, condensation, drama, condensation. The trick is creating seamless flow.

~ Rhythm within the sentence, paragraph, scene.

Humans appreciate three-part structure: issue, development, resolution. Happily, you can employ this to revise fiction at every level.

That’s lots of patterns. Now what?

·         * Notice. Just considering the relationships between patterns helps you see your manuscript more clearly, so you can revise it more effectively.

·         * Vary. You want tension on every page, yes. But do you want all tension all the time? No.

·        *  Accentuate. The fun of patterns is enjoying relief until—whoosh—a monster wave changes the landscape. That gets everyone’s attention. Use emphasis to reveal significance.

·         * Surprise. The reader didn’t see that breaker coming any more than the character did. Astonishment is among fiction’s greatest joys. But not by cheating. Every gigantic groundswell must feel probable. In fiction that means you provided a clear yet subtle hint a while back.

Pattern-recognition originally helped the earliest humans distinguish tall grass from predator, something to eat from something to avoid. In fiction, pattern and disruption control everything from aesthetics to momentum, tension, and empathy. Use the rhythms of your fiction to make waves.

Characters Are People, and People Are…

…not always appealing or intriguing. Perhaps your neighbor is intelligent, financially comfortable, and in good health, yet constantly disappointed. The weather’s always wrong. Taxes are high, jokes dumb, spirituality hollow, and politics? Don’t even start.

If Eileen’s your neighbor, what can you do? Have something on the stove? But if Eileen’s a character, you might not buy or finish the book she’s in. Eileen may be realistic, but real-life versions of her are annoying enough. Who wants to follow a character like that?

You might argue that everyone knows Eileen. Besides, by the end of the novel she grows up—quits being so disappointed and hard on herself and everyone else. Still, realistic isn’t necessarily appealing. More seriously, people change because circumstances bring out their best. But people can change only so much, just like a zebra can’t grow a giraffe’s neck just because drought destroys all the foliage below the canopy.

Tip: The potential for growth must exist in your protagonist right from the start.

That serves two purposes. First off, even in your opening lines, readers will know that Eileen whines a lot, but there’s more to her. That rouses curiosity. What will she learn—and how? Secondly, when Eileen finally performs some heroic act at your novel’s end, no one will say, “She’d never do that. I don’t believe it for a second.”

How can you make your protagonist more appealing while plotting your plot?

• Identify your protagonist’s hidden strength. Right on the first page, find a way to make this strength visible but never obvious.
• Decide how your protagonist’s hidden strength will assist or save at least two people.
• Give your protagonist a flaw or weakness that will undermine the hidden strength.
• Foreshadow a fear that will obstruct your protagonist’s progress toward morality, maturity, or both.
• Shape circumstances so the hidden strength can triumph over weakness and fear.
• Determine the climax for your protagonist’s arc. What’s the high point of whatever will change about your protagonist, and how does that hidden strength produce victory?
• List at least five life-changing events that thrust the protagonist toward the climax. The last one of these must force to protagonist to conquer that weakness and fear—magnificently.

But take any irritating version of the real “Eileen” out of your novel, unless she’s there for gentle comic relief. And give the real Eileen a cup of coffee. Maybe she has a hidden strength after all. Even if finding it won’t help your novel (and it might), it could certainly help her.

Private Jokes Are No Joking Matter

Did you hear the one about the hen at the hectic intersection? Yawn. The only thing funny about a well-worn comic moment is someone thinking it’s funny. But genuinely “funny”? That matters. It doesn’t just give novels depth and texture beyond basic plot and theme. Humor makes novels better simply because everybody likes to laugh. And private jokes are the best of all.

So. Take a second to picture yourself with a spouse, partner, or dear friend roaring with laughter over—something hilarious only to the two of you. This is a special kind of funny. Whether slapstick, witty, subtle, or all of the above, it feels personal. No one else quite gets it. That’s the point.

Personal humor (or anything else for that matter) is special. It feels slightly illicit, which most of us find sensual. A private joke involves a clique, if only of two, so it’s exclusive. In-group humor depends on insider information and is thus a commodity. All great, but can you do that in your novel? Of course.

~ Set the scene.

Bad jokes inundate with context. Decent jokes offer almost enough. Great jokes hint what the audience needs to know, preferably in advance and just clearly enough to command attention without being obvious.

~ Plant seeds.

Good jokes, in fiction and everywhere else, build slowly, often in three’s: A vague reference, a slightly more pointed one, then—whomp!—the punchline.

~ Use slightly esoteric references.

If you never ask readers to stretch for dim recollections about Paul Bunyan, Walter Cronkite, the Uncertainty Principle, or Teddy Roosevelt, then no private joke is possible. Private jokes depend on a somewhat arcane reference clicking into place.

~ Suggest rather than state character behavior.

Forget those tedious assumptions about prom queens or neurosurgeons. Instead, give your astronaut or whatever traits that plot forces to the surface. Humor flourishes with the surprise of foiled expectations.

~ Use the five senses.

A good joke is not just something you hear or read, but one you can at least visualize, and, ideally, connect with viscerally.

~ Mix and match.

Blend graphics, word play, irony, and burlesque. Besiege us in more than one way and—we’ll love your book all the more for the fun we’re having.

Tip: Charm your readers not just with public jokes but private ones.

The Novelty of the Novel

Does the contemporary novel require a facelift ? Major surgery?  Kenneth Goldsmith, who teaches Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the Museum of Modern Art’s first Poet Laureate, asserts that the novel is no longer original enough:

Creativity is about the most worn-out, abused concept that used to mean something remarkable, something that differentiated someone, something that made them special...What was once creative is now uncreative.

Rather than coming up with his own analysis of why the Man Booker Prize is unoriginal, Kenneth Goldsmith quotes Craig Dworkin:

we don’t think of the Booker Prize Finalists as unoriginal, or uncreative, or plagiarized, despite the fact that they have close precedents and that we can imagine confusing them with another work.  Take ‘a story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality’: a quick Google search (conducted last fall prior to the announcement of the winner) reveals that these are the exact words used to describe Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”; Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club”; James Joyce’s “Araby” (and that’s just the first page of results).

     Nor do we think of these works as unoriginal, or uncreative, or plagiarized, despite the fact that just from the one paragraph synopses on the Man Booker Website we learn that 4 of the 6 shortlisted novels advertise themselves as featuring immigrants negotiating the difficulties of a strange land; 5 of the 6 hinge on the dramatic turn of a murder; 4 of the 6 reveal secrets from the past that come unexpectedly to light (half of them through the surprise arrival of a letter)…

…and so on. If the point is that all prizes are unsurprisingly and unappetizingly unoriginal, well, this isn’t news. What might be news is Goldsmith’s remedy:

Calling a practice uncreative is to reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of creativity as we know it.

Hmm. Fortunately we have writers like Tracy Chevalier, Chad Harbach, Alice Hoffman, Ian McEwan, and Barbara Kingsolver—to name a handful—unconcerned about their “uncreativity.”

Like a rose or a football or the aurora borealis, a novel has certain characteristics that—happily!—make it a novel. How much can you change while retaining something with fragrance (rose), star power (football), and plot (novel)? If you add pictures, then you’ve changed what words contribute. Is that good? If you keep typing yesterday’s Times (as Goldsmith has proudly done) instead of engineering a solid storyline, is that good? If you shrug off the essence of creativity because we live in internet age, is that best of all?

You can’t tell a brand-new story. Too late. But you can craft the characters, interweave the symbols, shape the arcs, foreshadow the ending, build the backdrop—choose the words—so that ever could or will do it this way. Original. Creative. Meaningful. Yours.

The novel thrives. People read them; people write them. Many, many people. Today’s best novels are as good as any novels ever, maybe better. Yes, today’s stories recapitulate Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Kate Chopin. Of course they do. After all, how many human stories are there? That there’s a finite number doesn’t mean it’s time for “plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition.” It means that today’s novelists have the honor—and the obligation—to reinvent the novel more and better without making it a comic book, a tone poem, or a psychological experiment.

Tip: The novel has been good enough since its inception. Still is.

The Novelist’s Neglected Child

The middle child syndrome is prevalent enough to earn entry in the Urban Dictionary.  Dr. Touraj Shafai defines this as a child “not getting enough attention and love because the parents are busy and providing more attention and care to the oldest and the youngest children.”

Does this reflect how novelists sometimes view their work? “I’m busily revising my opening till it’s practically perfect,” one writer tells another. “The end is what turns me on” is the reply. “Fireworks! Transformed characters! Completed arcs!” Many novelists revel in either the inciting incident or the climax, neglecting the middle brainchild.

It could be that the middle drags along, lacking direction, constantly rambling about the past, and describing everything while doing very little. Your listless one can evoke exhausted listlessness in its originator. Yes, the middle is the difficult position, and difficult is usually the least loved.  The middle offspring faces:

·         Sluggishness.

·         Redundancy.

·         Arrested development.

·         Obsession with the past.

·         Stagnation.

·         Precocious urge to figure out and solve everything—instantly.

No wonder the novelist wants to concentrate on the thrilling potential of the youngster or urbane sophistication of the one beautifully grown.  But like a good parent, a good novelist loves all three offspring, and as equally as possible.

There’s hope—plenty of it, actually, for the middle, the one raising those offspring, and those encountering them in a book that works from start to finish.

Tip: The middle is where all the fun happens.

You can bring out the best in your under-appreciated middle with:

v  Defeat.

Are you coddling the middle of your novel like a sensitive child? If so, stop.  Make trouble. Trap. Corner. Ravage your characters. They might object, but your readers never will.

v  Motivation.

Which events and pressures cause the protagonist to change and grow?

v  Foreshadowing.

How can you hint—neither invisibly nor obviously—what’s ahead?

v  Surprise.

Is the middle one a little obstreperous? If not, time to encourage that. After all, psychologists are divided over whether it’s a desirable or difficult position to hold. Go for desirable.

v  Resonance.

How can the middle integrate what precedes with what follows? Echoes are great fun. Let readers enjoy them.

v  Insight.

Isn’t the fun of the novel the journey rather than the arrival? That’s where this child really shines. Take advantage.

Love the beginning, middle, and end equally—and your readers will, too.