Plots, Subplots and Nonplots

Davin's post of yesterday, about tying up all the subplots in a longer work, got me thinking about the novel I'm currently writing. Tara Maya has thoughtfully supplied the term philosophical detective story to partially describe what I'm doing, and I'm going to use it from now on, any time I talk about the book. Anyway, I'm writing a philosophical detective story that has some odd things going on in the way of structure. I've created a little diagram for you:



The big arrow pointing from left-to-right is the main plot, the through-action of the detective story and that's all very straightforward (as detective stories go). It serves as the 12-chapter, three-act framework onto which I'm hanging all my literary experiments. This plot provides the primary forward motion of the novel, the story question ("who killed George Pullman?") and the overall dramatic arc. There is also a fairly normal sort of subplot involving the emotional life of the detective that will be resolved in a fairly normal sort of manner. All of that's represented by the black arrow in the diagram.

You've noticed by now that there are also 10 colored dots through which the plot arrow passes on its way from page Start to page Finish. These represent individual characters in the novel. Every one of the characters has his/her own story that is separate from the mystery plot. But these characters' stories are not subplots, because they do not develop over time and are not resolved within the confines of this novel. They are more like lengthy character sketches through which the detective story passes while the detective investigates the crime. Since they are, plotwise, fairly static, I have decided to call them Nonplots, which sounds a bit derogatory so I'm open to a better name.

The inspiration for this Nonplot substructure of the book comes from, first of all, Agatha Christie. Last year I was reading her Poirot mystery Halloween Party and I was struck by the long digression Christie took in the middle of the novel to talk about landscaping and gardening. It's some of Christie's most beautiful writing and had nothing really to do with the story going on around it. I thought it would be cool to do something digressive like this in a detective story. I also have been inspired by Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, which is a long historical novel containing a bunch of character arcs that intersect but don't necessarily tie together in a direct way. Finally there's the work of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, who wrote brilliant stream of consciousness novels where the internal action is very dramatic and compelling while the external action is fairly simple.

My Nonplots, then, are explorations of the characters in my novel, places where the plot slows down and the characters are expanded through internal monologues and suchlike stuff. The drama of these sections comes about through the use of conflict. The book is charactered with a bunch of couples of different ages in different stages of couplehood, and each Nonplot is a rumination by one half of the couple about the relationship. So you get both halves of the couples eventually (in my diagram A and F, for example, could be one couple while B and J are another), and each member of the couple will have their own point of view regarding their marriage/relationship. So I'm examining pairbonding, but not really telling full stories for each couple.

What this means is that the Nonplots overlap and connect and form little miniature arcs in the narrative, but there is no resolution, no thing that happens with these characters. Of course things happen to some of the characters related to the primary murder mystery, and there are of course connections between those events and the internal monologues in the Nonplots, but the connections for most of the characters are pretty tenuous. In a lot of ways, I have just realized, the book is like eating with a bunch of strangers in a resort dining room, where you chat at breakfast and maybe again at dinner with the charming couple from Nantucket and you never do learn how things will work out for their nephew in medical school or whatever. But deeper and more immediate than that. Maybe it's more like walking through the National Gallery and looking long at each painting and then moving on. Not sure, frankly, nor am I entirely certain how this structure will play out when the book is finished. I'm excited about it, though. It could be really cool if it works. And none of this stuff I've talked about today is the "philosophical" part of the philosophical detective story. That's an extra layer of ubercoolness atop all of the aforementioned coolness.

Have you ever...

...liked a book with a bad plot?

...liked a book with boring characters?

...liked a book with mediocre prose?

My answer is yes to all three questions. Kazuo Ishiguro's book Never Let Me Go, although it had a great premise, didn't have an interesting plot to me. One of my favorite writers, Jhumpa Lahiri, hardly ever has a character that interests me. And, I enjoyed Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, although I didn't much care for the prose.

For me, this is a reminder that my job as a writer isn't necessarily to get everything right. Rather, my job is to create a work that has something that excites readers and engages them.

We all have our strengths, and so often I am reminded that writing something successful means showcasing those strengths rather than working to improve our weaknesses.

As we ring in the new year, what are your strengths as a writer?

In Praise of Ambiguity

One of the things I have come to believe is that stories which can't easily be summed up, whose themes are complicated or ambiguous, whose characters are neither good nor bad nor indifferent, are the stories that stay with us the longest and have the most power with readers. Stories that reduce life to simple, easily-digested and easily-described forces tend to be forgettable and aren't the stories that readers come back to or put into the hands of other readers. But stories that mirror the real complexity of the world sometimes take on lives of their own and work their way into the fabric of our culture. Myths do this, and if you look at myths you will see that they are generally messy and morally indeterminate. The plays (especially the tragedies) of Shakespeare do this, with their unexplained bursts of violence and their protagonists who are both hero and devil.

Where, you might ask, is all of this coming from? Well, I am writing a synopsis of my novel Cocke & Bull. I've never had the scintillating pleasure of crafting a synopsis before, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. After all, I know the story pretty well and I have my outline so how difficult can it be to flesh out my notes into a one-page narrative of the narrative?

It turned out to be harder than it looked, because while the story is fairly straightforward and the character arcs are easy enough to describe, the meaning of the dramatic action is ambiguous. Why do my characters do the things they do? Well, it's complicated. How do my characters feel about each other and themselves? Well, it's not really clear and it depends, you know, it really depends. The more I narrow the focus of the discussion about the story, the less powerful the story seems.

You know how, when you're in grammar school English classes (and sometimes when you're in university-level English courses), the teacher tries to get you to come up with a one-sentence statement of a story's themes? I don't care what your one sentence is; any decent story is going to be poorly-described by it. With a good teacher, those "theme sentences" might lead to a smart discussion of the story, but the discussion of stories shouldn't lead to those reductionist one-sentence statements. Because a good story is rich and has multiple layers that cannot easily be described. A good writer examines her topics from many angles and shows those angles to the reader but never sums up or chooses which angle is best, especially which ethical or moral angle. A good writer sympathizes with his characters but doesn't shy away from showing when those characters do unsympathetic things.

A good story is not simple.

When I revise, there is a temptation to cut out anything that adds ambiguity to the story. There is a temptation to eliminate multiple meanings, to narrow, to remove vagueness, to cast everything as either/or and to make the actions, characters and themes easy to grasp. This is a temptation that I must resist, because if I give in to that temptation, the story will be emptied out, and much smaller than life. I don't mind writing a story that can't really be figured out once and for all. The truth, at least as I see it, is that life is difficult and messy and not readily summed up. I want my fiction to be the same way.

Which means that my synopsis will of necessity be a sort of one-dimensional discussion of my novel, but that's okay as long as I don't start thinking that the book should be as easy to grasp as the synopsis.

Do You Write Big or Small?

Lately I've been looking at my work and wondering why it feels so boring when I prop it up next to other stories. I finally realized it's because I've been comparing it to other stories that aren't even in the same realm. You know, that apples to oranges thing. Here's the thing: I write small.

I was having dinner with a friend last night and we touched on the subject of ideas. She told me her latest idea and my mouth dropped open. It was so...sparkly. I was a bit dazzled and then I thought about my own ideas and they just looked seriously lame.

You see, big is not better than small. Apples are not better than oranges. Sparkly ideas are not better than matte ideas. It pretty much means we are all different and like different things. I like intimate settings, small groups of characters, stories about small changes. The sparkly ideas seem to work on grander scale settings and deal with larger groups of characters (or at least characters interacting with larger groups) who bring about big changes either in their world or themselves.

I don't mean to say every story can be categorized as big or small. Some of the best stories incorporate elements of both. On the whole, however, I do think most writers tend to lean more toward one or the other. Which one do you lean toward?

Tell Yourself a Story

Over on my own blog, I wrote this post about the way I outlined the book I'm now writing. I didn't quite get at the real root of what I wanted to say about the process, so I'm going to try again here and hope I'll do a better job of it.

I know that a lot of you don't outline before you write your first drafts, and that's okay. A first draft is a wild and wooly creature, and any way you can get one is valid, I think. Even though I outline, my first drafts are still mostly improvised. But at some point you're probably going to revise/edit/rewrite your first draft into something more polished and presentable, and at that point you should take a good hard look at the mechanics of your story if you haven't done so already. I pause to say that I really think this is most helpful if you do it before your first draft, but you have to do something like this at some point.

One of the most important things you have to know about your story is what your story is. By that I mean, you as the author have to be able to stand back and see how the main storyline works, what the important events (or "plot points," if you will) are, what the character arcs are and how they begin, develop and resolve, and how your plotlines all work together. Yes, you do have to know this. Why? Because those are the moving parts of your story.

The way I come up with these moving parts, and the way they are organized into the shape of my story, is to simply sit down and try to tell myself the story in the order it will take place. For example, I might have an idea for a story about, I donno, a woman who falls in love and rises from a lowly estate to become happy ever after. I know, it sounds sort of old-fashioned, but it's a popular formula and I'm using it. I'll call the woman "Ella."

So I try to tell myself Ella's story:

Ella is the maid of a nasty family with three daughters. A handsome door-to-door salesman visits the house, he and Ella fall in love and he spirits her away.

Okay, I say. Not much there. How about a complication? And some motivation for Ella?

Ella is the maid of a nasty family with three nasty daughters who are less nice and attractive than Ella, but are all constantly besought by the best men of the town because they have money. Ella is from a family that was once powerful but is now in disgrace and poverty and she longs for the good old days she never saw but vividly imagines. A handsome door-to-door saleman--

Waitaminute. A door-to-door salesman? That worked for a second, but now I don't think so. And do I want a riches-to-rags-to-middle-class story? Maybe. Is this about escape, or about comeuppance for the nasty family? Is the nasty family the antagonist? Or one of the daughters? Or someone else, back when Ella's family fortune was lost? Will Ella work to restore that fortune, and the stranger who visits the house will be the key to that?

And so on. I basically sit down and tell myself the story over and over and over again, from start to finish, until there is something there that makes sense and is compelling. I try to keep it short, like 200 words or fewer though that's less important than knowing the core of the story. Sometimes I make lists of characters:

Ella
Ella's father?
Ella's aunt/cousin/distant relative?

Nasty Family:
Mrs. Nasty
Mr. Nasty
Sis Nasty 1
Sis Nasty 2
Sis Nasty 3
Butler/driver/gardener?

Handsome stranger

Magistrate
Townsfolk
Prince
Soldiers

And then I'll take the rough skeleton of the story, when I have one, and try fitting these characters into it in different places to see how they might influence the action or the backstory or the outcome. It is a lot like collage, the way I do it, or like trying on every piece of clothing in my closet in every imaginable combination until I say, "Hey, that looks goooood." The thing is to come up with a story arc for the protagonist that works. And then (or while creating the protagonist's story arc), you need to figure out the story arcs for the other characters including the antagonist (because he's not a prop, he's a character). Thanks to Lois Moss for pointing that out with such clarity.

Anyway, this is pretty much how I turn my vague ideas into actual stories. It's an iterative process of refining and changing and molding and it's a process that's been pretty good to me. Does this look like it could be a useful technique? If not, tell me a better one: I'm all ears, metaphorically speaking.

Also, I have been pretty slackerly in my posts lately and I thought I'd try practical advice again, even though it's Friday and traditionally Fridays are for filler.

Moving Blindly Forward

I decided to write this post because of what Scott wrote yesterday about his narrative proofs, which I found quite fascinating. His strategy (and the other writers who also mentioned working the same way) seems totally logical to me, and at the same time it's so completely counterintuitive from what I do. So, as a fun contrast, I thought I'd describe how I go about developing my stories.

I start with a premise. I'll use the example Scott used:

Red is walking to her grandmother's.

At this point, I actually try very hard NOT to think about how I want the story to end. For me, knowing where I want the story to go makes me suddenly manipulate my characters in unnatural ways. If I decide I want Red to end up with a woodsman, I'll suddenly have her stumble upon the National Woodsmen Convention, where she's ushered into the main hall and forced to listen to some boring lecture by her soon-to-be lover. For me, that won't work.

Instead, I look at what I have started with, and try to carefully take the next step forward. Who is Red? Why is she walking to her grandmother's? These are clues for how the story should move forward. I inch my way forward, collecting data, not knowing where it will go. I try to take logical and interesting steps based on what I have before.

Red is walking to her grandmother's. She gets there and knocks on the door, and her hairy, long-fanged grandmother invites her in.

If I were writing this story, the woodsman probably wouldn't occur to me until very near the end, if at all.

I actually think of this approach as sort of setting up some game pieces that will eventually control themselves based on the rules of the game. What I can manipulate is the beginning, and what I try not to manipulate is the end. So, I guess for me, it's that middle section that is the most important and the most fun. I'm past the hard work of set up, and now I just get to sit back and watch. (The scene where Red is asking the wolf all of her questions is the most memorable scene for me.)

Along with this, I've found that when I love a book, I don't want it to end. And, the way I interpreted that was that the ending shouldn't be the best part. For me, this approach was the most true to my own life experiences. Living in the present always felt like being in the middle of the book, and it was always this middle that felt the most important.

As a result of this approach, I think my stories usually have vague or open endings. Again, for me, this is acceptable because it feels true to life--not that all stories must be true to life. I hope that it's the middle of the stories that people enjoy.

So, there you have it. The panster's approach.

Do you all think it matters how a writer approaches their story? What other effects can approach have on the final product?

Narrative Proofs

I have been working on a new story idea lately, and as I push concepts around to see if I can actually make a story out of my idea, I have come to the somewhat startling realization that what I'm essentially doing, when I put together the barest of bare-bones original outline for novels, is creating a sort of mathematical proof of the story.

For those of you who slept through maths in school, a proof is a demonstration that a statement is true, using deductive reasoning. Sort of like a syllogism, you know. You essentially create a list, or a chain, of statements, each statement building off the preceding ones. Oh, go look it up. This isn't a math class.

Anyway, one of the very first things I do when I have an idea is begin attempting to build a story, creating a "proof" of the story. Me, I like to imagine the outcome of my premise as soon as possible, because my essential definition of a story is "a narrative describing how some state of affairs came to be." That means that I am telling my reader how we got to the end of the book, and that ending is the most important thing about the story. So I am working my way to that end, step by step, in my "proof."

For example:

I have this idea about innocence, and I get the concept Red is walking to her grandmother's. For whatever reason, I decide that I want Red to end up with a strong character. A woodsman, say. So my premise is "Red is walking to her grandmother's" and my endpoint, the theorem I wish to prove, is "Red ends up with the Woodsman." How do I get from my premise to my theorem?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red ends up with Woodsman

I could have Red meet the Woodsman, they fall in love and run away together. Say, that's...dull. No conflict, no drama. I could have them meet and hate each other, and for some reason they get thrown together and have to solve a problem and see that they are indeed not only compatible, but they are attracted to each other. So that's more interesting. So I need a problem.

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red and Woodsman solve problem
6. Red ends up with Woodsman

So good so far, as Richard Butler used to say. So what's the problem they're going to solve? Maybe there's an evil creature in the forest. Like, I don't know, a wolf?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red encounters Wolf, who is Very Bad
6. Wolf does Very Bad things
7. Red and Woodsman give Wolf his comeuppance
8. Red ends up with Woodsman

And so on and so forth. The original outline, the first "proof" of my WIP "Cocke & Bull" looks like this:



As you can see, it's just a list of chapter titles, but the titles all meant something to me and I could follow the narrative down the list and see that it all made sense and led from the premise to the theorem (the ending I envisioned). So I have, at least at the very basic compositional level, a fairly rigorous method to establish the character arc and the plot arc (the plot arc is a function of the character arc in the way I write), and I need to have this in place before I can start to write. There's loads of room to improvise, and sometimes the "proof" changes drastically as the ending changes. I am currently working on a change in the novel that's in my agent's hands, and for the last week or so I've been knocking myself out trying to create a workable "proof" for that novel that allows the story to work if I make the change I have in mind. It's been a job of work, getting that "proof" to function all the way from start to finish. I've wasted lots of paper making up versions of the story that don't work at all, but thankfully I have stumbled upon the Big Idea that will let my new idea play out correctly.

Anyway, as you can see these attempts to create informal proofs of the narrative are really just a form of brain-storming that result in lists. I'm a big fan of lists, though sometimes I make charts instead. Look back at the hand-written list of chapter titles for my WIP. As I begin to write each chapter, usually I don't just jump immediately into the prose, but instead spend an hour or so making one of my informal "proofs" of the chapter, so I know what I'm doing. These are looser in structure than what I've got above, and are combinations of lists and chunks of dialog, mostly. I have several notebooks lying around the house just for working out these sorts of proofs.

So my point, if I have any today, is mostly just to say that I realized at about 3:00 yesterday afternoon that what I was doing when working out my original story ideas was to create these informal mathematical proofs, and I think that's sort of interesting. To me, anyway. Does anyone else work in a method similar to this? I know that we have here our share of "seat of the pants" writers, so likely this post has been a long yawn-fest for you. But I'd be very interested to see examples of other people's outlines, if possible. Or descriptions of outlining processes, especially in the initial stages of pulling a novel together.

Plot and Premise Are Not Story

First, here's a story for you.

"The Red King and the Mountain of Black Glass"

Two great armies were contesting a region of Asia around a solitary mountain where a highly-prized black glass could be found. The glass was sacred to the gods worshipped by the kings of both armies. The war went on for years and many brave soldiers met their deaths on the field, but neither army could defeat the other. Finally it was decided that the warrior-kings would battle face-to-face, one man against the other, for dominion over the mountain of black glass and the surrounding territory.

The kings met on the appointed day in the appointed spot and at the appointed hour they drew their swords and fell to battle. They fought recklessly, with joy and fearless violence and were evenly matched but at last the Red King wounded the White King, who called for mercy and withdrew his claim on the mountain of black glass. The Red King let the White King escape with his forces and then he took possession of the lands. His first task was to set up a great throne at the summit of the mountain of black glass, so that he might survey his conquered territory and all who looked at the mountain would see that it was his.

The Red King himself would drive the first iron piling into the head of the mountain; it was to be one of many long pins that would form the foundation of his great marble-and-gold throne. The king's best general held the piling and the Red King hefted a massive iron maul and brought it down upon the long iron pin, driving it into the top of the mountain.

Where the piling bit into the rock and split it, hot gasses vented out and the king and his generals stepped back. The ground began to shake and the rock of the mountain split wider and molten lava poured fourth. The king, who stood closest to the wound in the mountain's summit, was swallowed up by a fountain of lava and burned alive instantly. The whole of the Red King's army scattered and never returned, and the White King marched back and took possession of the sacred mountain, which soon quieted and returned to sleep.

I am prepared to say that the above narrative tells a story. I wrote it on Wednesday afternoon, and it's based on this Aesop's fable:

"The Fighting Cocks and the Eagle"

Two game cocks were fiercely fighting for the mastery of the farmyard. One at last put the other to flight. The vanquished Cock skulked away and hid himself in a quiet corner, while the conqueror, flying up to a high wall, flapped his wings and crowed exultingly with all his might. An Eagle sailing through the air pounced upon him and carried him off in his talons. The vanquished Cock immediately came out of his corner, and ruled henceforth with undisputed mastery.

My version is certainly longer than Aesop's, but I claim that both narratives relate practically the same story. You will notice that the plots--the events that transpire--are similar but not the same. You will notice that the characters and the settings are not the same. It also looks like my version of the story is not an allegory, but it's very clear that Aesop's story is nothing if not allegory. Both versions have at their core the idea that pride goes before a fall, that braggarts will have their comeuppance.

So what parts of these stories are, in fact, the stories?

"Pride goes before a fall" is not a story. It's a moral.

"What if there was a war to claim a volcano?" is not a story. It's a premise.

"What if two roosters fought to see who was alpha male of a farmyard?" is not a story. Is also a premise.

"Two cocks fight in a farmyard; one chases the other off; the winning bird jumps onto a wall; an eagle swoops down and grabs him; the losing bird takes over the farmyard" is also not a story. It's a plot.

"Two kings fight over a volcano; one king withdraws; the winning king opens a volcanic vent while digging the foundation for a throne; the volcano briefly erupts, killing the king; the dead king's army flees; the other king moves in and takes over" is also not a story. It's a plot.

So the plot is not the story. The premise is not the story. The moral, if you go in for those sorts of things, is not the story. The prose style is not the story. What then, is the story?

On Wednesday, Big D talked about the necessity of writers having a good idea in order for a story to be good. What is the main idea driving the above stories? Yesterday, in the comments to Michelle's post, I harangued Andrew about what parts of a narrative (though I had at that point not cleverly differentiated between "narrative" and "story"*) could be changed while retaining the same story.

Possibly, and I throw this out because it's the first thing that occurs to me, the image of the moment where the prideful character falls is the big idea in the above stories. The Red King with the great iron hammer splitting the stone of the mountain and the lava spewing out; the cock on the wall crowing and suddenly snatched up in the talons of a diving eagle. Is that the big idea? Because I was already writing my version before I had that "iron pin and hammer" image to write about. But then again, I already knew it ended with the Red King dead and the White King taking over, because I'd read the Aesop.

What do we mean by the central idea of a story, anyway? Do we mean theme? Do we mean the idea that sparks us and urges us on to write it, or do we mean the idea that the reader will take away from the reading experience? Are these the same ideas, even? I don't know, but I might doubt it. Antonia Byatt, in the second novel of the "Babel Tower" quartet, says that she wrote that book because she had an image in her imagination of a woman in a flower garden standing up and stretching her back. Everything flowed from that. Is that the central idea of the book, then? One doubts.

Anyone want to take a stab at any of these questions? There are no wrong answers, just individual experiences of writing, I think. Anyone?

I think that while the central idea is different in each story, the type of idea, the class of idea if you will, is the same. The function of the idea that makes it a story is the same across stories, because stories are, I think, types of things that are similar to one another in some ways. I am looking for the Platonic Story, the archetype of stories, the ur-story.

Why does this matter? I'm not sure. For several years after finishing my first (awful) novel, I thrashed around writing short stories, convinced that I didn't even know what a story was. It was a frightening place to be, actually, filled with cognitive dissonance and headaches. Now I don't think so much about what a story is; I just manage to write them and I think about the idea of storytelling rather than story. But still I wonder.

And, you know, likely all of this was covered in yesterday's comments, and nobody wants to rehash all of it. It's just that I have this intuition that, back of premise, setting, character and plot, there is an invisible thing that is the story itself, and I want to get at that thing. I become increasingly convinced that the way we discuss story is both complicatedly misguided (or misguidedly complicated) and an oversimplification. My headache, she returns.

*"Story" is the idea to be conveyed, which includes character, motivation, and the causality of the universe. Maybe. We still don't have a definition of "story." And "narrative" is the artwork which conveys the story. For example, "Lord of the Rings" is a narrative that tells the story of Frodo Baggins and the One Ring. "Camelot" is a narrative that tells the story of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. "The Once and Future King" is another narrative telling the same story, but without the songs.

Classic Plot Structure (3-Act Structure)

One of the cool things about the software we use to track visitor statistics for the Literary Lab is the ability to see what search terms were used to lead visitors here. A lot of people find us by entering "classic plot structure" into Google or whatever search engine. While Davin has written a post about the classic plot structure that you should by all means go read, it's more a commentary than a definition, so I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about the basics of the classic plot structure, which I'll henceforth refer to as the Three-Act Structure.

In brief, the Three-Act Structure is a framework to arrange story elements into a narrative, with pacing and major plot points as goals, a template into which you can pour your characters and events to give it shape. Narratives are constructed in three consecutive sections, or acts. The author has a distinct job to do in each of the three acts. The basic formula is:

Act One
Exposition, set-up, inciting incident. Hero is given a goal.

Act Two
The middle. The hero tries and fails to achieve goal.

Act Three
The climax and resolution. Hero makes last attempt to achieve goal and succeeds at last or fails forever.

(These are really sweeping generalizations, I know. But I didn't invent the classic plot structure, I just report on it.)

More detail:

In Act One, we see the hero (a word I use because it's shorter than "protagonist" and I'm less likely to misspell it) in his daily life, whatever and wherever that is. The hero has some internal need, usually, that can't be met in his daily life. Then, something happens to knock the hero off the rails of his daily life. He's been given a problem or a quest. Act One ends when the hero decides to solve the problem or take up the quest. The author's job in Act One is to establish the crisis in the hero's life that the hero must solve. There are lots of tasks involved in doing this job.

In Act Two, the hero struggles to solve the problem or complete the quest. He appears to be having success, though it doesn't come easy. The antagonist/villain fights against him indirectly. At the end of Act Two, the hero, who has been successful all this time, suffers a major defeat at the hands of the antagonist. Usually this defeat is caused by the hero's internal need which he has yet to deal with. This is the hero's lowest point, morally/physically/spiritually. All seems lost.

Lots of times, Act Two actually consists of the hero solving the problem that came up at the end of Act One, only to discover that it wasn't his real problem at all, and that he's got bigger fish to fry, which frying takes place in Act Three at the climax. The author's job in Act Two is to keep the action and the conflict rising toward the climax, and to show the hero attempting to re-establish equilibrium in his world (that is, achieve his goal). Lots of tasks involved in this job, too.

In Act Three, the hero bucks up and decides that he can go on, usually with greater resolve because yes, he's solved his inner problem that was holding him back. Or, he's realized he has this inner problem and is going to confront that. Either way, off he goes to fight the big fight at the Climax, after which there is a short denoument. The fight, of course, can be internal or metaphorical. Or fought with laser cannons; it's up to you. Your job, as author, is to resolve the crisis one way or another (or show how it cannot be resolved) in a manner that is believable within the rules of the story. The climax must seem both surprising and inevitable (except for those stories where you see it coming the whole time and hope the hero will avoid it). Again, lots of tasks are necessary to do this job.

So you have rising action, rising conflict, the possibility of total defeat and then even more action and conflict and then climax. Sometimes the hero dies or is otherwise defeated at the climax. Anyway, that's your classic Three-Act Structure in a nutshell. It gets more complicated as you layer on subplots and themes and other story elements, but you get the idea.

Another way of thinking about the Three-Act Structure is in terms of Action/Reaction/Results. Or perhaps as Problem/False Solution/True Solution. Or Crisis/Loss of Identity/Rebirth. Or At Home/This Is Not My Beautiful House/This Is My New House. Really, the different stories you can tell in this three-part structure are endless.

Now, is the Three-Act Structure of any use to a writer? I think very loosely in these terms when I do my outlining before I've begun actually writing. I also have begun lately thinking in terms of the Action/Reaction/Results 3-part structure when writing chapters and scenes, which gives a nice feeling of controlled flow to the writing. But I do think it's easy to fall into the trap of writing to a formula, which generally results in stories that are predictable, melodramatic, and otherwise suck.

The idea of the Three-Act Structure grew out of Aristotle's basic structure (which interested parties can read about in his Poetics):

Beginning, Middle, End

But Greek plays had only one act and don't divide nicely into the Three-Act template. Roman plays had five acts (as did the plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans), but that was to allow for intermissions and snack breaks. Ancient plays were longer than our two-hour movies so there were practical matters to which playwrights and theaters had to attend.

What I think is as useful for a story template as the Three-Act Structure is to divide the story into two types of action: the action that creates the problem, and the action that resolves the problem. This is how real conflict works in real life. You might try writing down the action that creates the problem and then the action that resolves it, and then break those actions down into scenes and see what you've got.

So while the Three-Act Structure might be a helpful organizing tool, I caution anyone against tying themselves too tightly to it. Stories are about who we are and how we solve problems, and I suggest we think in those terms and not so much in terms of "I haven't raised the stakes for my protagonist" or "I need to use my antagonist's minions in this act."

Beginning, middle and end. Start with the end, if you know enough about your story to know who your characters are. Who is he at the end of the story? Then tell us how and why he got there. That is what you are telling us. That is a story.

There Is No Backstory

This is my somewhat anticipated post about eliminating backstory in novels. I must rush to the airport soon to fetch the Poetess of Boise, so I'll be brief. Hopefully there will be time to read your comments later. No promises.

Suppose your novel begins with a big chunk (a chapter or two) of backstory. Or, suppose you have big chunks of backstory in other parts of your novel. In either of these cases, you may have decided that you don't want the backstory coming at the reader in big blocks that slow down the narrative, but you don't know what to do about it. How do you get rid of these big blocks of backstory? I have a couple of suggested techniques for this, which I call Cut and Move and There Is Only Now.

Cut and Move is pretty simple, because it's just what it sounds like. You cut out the whole block of backstory, removing it entirely, and stitch together as necessary the bits of story that surrounded the backstory, so that it flows together over what was for a moment a huge gaping hole in the narrative. You've deleted your infodump for all time and patched over the seam. Next, you read through your manuscript and see what parts of the story no longer make sense to the reader without the missing backstory, and mark for inclusion only those bits of deleted backstory absolutely necessary for the story to remain intelligible. I think you will find that most of the backstory you cut out is unnecessary to the story. Keep in mind that just because your prose is important to you, that does not make it important to your reader.

Where do you put this recycled backstory? Only where it has to be. If something is necessary for the reader to know, you tell them when they must know it, at the last possible moment and in the least obtrusive manner as possible. I recommend using the plainest prose you've got when writing about this stuff.

Cut and Move works best for historical or setting details, when talking about a place or an object. If, however, you are writng about characters and are establishing motivations and behaviors, Cut and Move doesn't work so well as does a technique I call There Is Only Now.

There Is Only Now is based on the idea that your reader doesn't care as much about the past as she does about the present in your story. In other words, we don't want to know what happened, we want to know what is happening. Don't tell me where your protagonist has been, tell me where he is right now, and where he's going.

Which is to say, whatever character traits you want to show, you can show them in the story present. Take your backstory telling about the traumatic events in your MC's past that result in his being afraid of fire or whatever, and rewrite it so that the events (or something similar) happen in the story present. Show us how your character is Now. There is only now.

Is there a ghost who's angry about a past lover's betrayal? Show the ghost Now, acting out that anger. Do not give us a prologue or a flashback. We don't know about the past lover and why the ghost is angry? That's good; it adds a mystery for the protagonist to solve, and that adds action to the story and action is good.

In my book, I had a scene where my protagonist's father was begging for a favor from a powerful man. I rewrote it so that it takes place years later, in the story present, and the protagonist is begging a favor from the powerful man. It's much more dramatic and compelling. We see the protagonist acting in the Now.

The biggest problem with backstory is that is tends to show characters as people things happen to instead of people who do things. If you take the same events from the story past and make them into events in the story present, you get to see the characters acting (which is always more interesting), the details and character traits become more compelling and memorable, and the story itself has forward momentum. Things are happening Now.

An observation about complex backstory: If your backstory is so complex that you simply cannot use the suggestions above, I might be inclined to think that either a) your story is too complicated to be intelligible to most readers, or b) your backstory might be the real story you want to write and you should think about that.

A final caveat: It's not necessary that you take any of these suggestions, nor is it necessary that you write books that don't have big chunks of backstory.

Holding Onto Your Idea

So you have an idea. Let's start at the beginning. I was in high school. I was a loner, bored, constantly looking for something to hide behind. I found reading the best place to go. Then I realized there was a book missing on my shelf. My book. All I could think about was a teenage girl waking up in the backseat of a car trying to remember how she got there, and wondering if it was for the best. Shiny idea!

So I wrote the book. Then I wrote it again. And again. And again. Then I left it alone for about 12 years, and wrote it again last year - twice. It still needs some major overhauling, but it's on its way to being query-able, or at least somewhere that I'm happy with it. Amazingly enough, through all of these years and drafts, the idea has stayed the same. No, the teenage girl never wakes up in the backseat of a car, but the idea that she's taken against her will, and then decides it's a great thing - that stayed.

Scott's post on Tuesday about Overwritten Prose, and then Davin's post yesterday about Story, got me thinking about initial ideas. Every book starts with one. My idea is usually a setting or an image, and I build a story around it, a huge complicated messy puzzle. I know some writers who begin with a theme or a character. Whatever comes to you, I want to urge you to hold onto it. Davin says:

When I think about what inspires me, most of the time it is a character, or a situation, or some small detail or phrase that I fall in love with. I get that bit of inspiration down on the page, and then I face the problem of shaping it into a story.

Then Scott says:

So my advice is simple: write directly, and just tell the story. Don't be fooled into thinking that you have to put onto paper something that looks like literature, or that you have to reach for grandiloquence with every sentence. You don't. Elegance is eloquence. Strive for clarity and know what you're writing about.

Great thoughts from great minds! First of all, with Davin's comment, we see that there's usually an idea that inspires us to start a story. Then we run into a problem of how to shape that story. His post asks the question of whether or not traditional plot structures and stories are really the way to go, or if we should stick to what we want to tell, no matter how it comes out. I think the problem I've run into with figuring out how to shape a story is keeping my idea interesting for the length of the novel. Easy to do with lots of devices, but oftentimes hard to keep it clear.

Scott hit a chord with me when he said to strive for clarity. I've heard this over and over, but I never thought of it in terms of my initial idea. Covering up my idea in fancy writing, no matter how beautiful or poetic, has never worked for me. I tried to do it twice with my first novel, which is why I ended up rewriting it over and over. I lost sight of my initial idea, lost in the forest of complicated plot structure, fancy time changes and flashbacks, pretty prose, secondary character plots, and on and on and on. What a mess. Where was my idea?

I firmly believe that when an idea comes to me, it generates from my subconscious, gathering bits and pieces of me one strand at a time until it emerges as something shiny and worthy of pursuit. Of course, there are ways to figure out if one should actually pursue these ideas (check out Scott's post, A Good Idea Is Hard to Find), but if I decide it's worth chasing, I write that initial idea down and tape it to my computer desk, or put it at the top of my manuscript so that I can see it every time I sit down to work on that story.

It's about clarity. Focus. This is why I map things out, as I talked about in my three-part post (Don't Dis the Map) on my personal writing blog. Mapping helps me flesh out my idea and keep it in line with everything else that's fighting to come to the stage. It's not so I can stick to a traditional plot and make my work formulaic. If anything, staying focused on my original idea keeps me creative as I strive to help it grow. Sometimes other ideas sprout off my initial idea, but I've found over and over that they are like a mirage, shimmering in the distance. It's best to stick to my compass.

I want to stress that every writer is unique, of course. We all work differently. So you tell me, do you keep track of your initial idea? Is it something you feel can add clarity to your work if you don't lose sight of it? Or is it just a springboard and nothing more?


~MDA (aka Glam)

Down With Story

For today's post, let me start off by saying that I don't necessarily agree 100% with it. This is more of an experiment that I am kicking around, and I hope you can approach it with an open mind.

Lately, I've been feeling like the idea of having a story in our stories is problematic. Plot, character arc, rising action to a climax--is all this necessary? We're told that it is, but is it really?

When I think about what inspires me, most of the time it is a character, or a situation, or some small detail or phrase that I fall in love with. I get that bit of inspiration down on the page, and then I face the problem of shaping it into a story. And, really, that shaping step is sort of insincere. I've already recorded what I want to record, and the rest of it sometimes only manages to contort the original inspiration into something unnatural and unimpressive. Then, not only have I not created a moving story, but I've also buried that one small thing that I fell in love with in the beginning.

Usual when I write, I have a DVD playing off to the side, something that keeps me in a constant mood. "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Gosford Park" are a couple of my favorites, and I realize that the reason I like them is because the majority of these movies is all plotless. Really, nothing much happens until twenty minutes before the end, when some conflict finally emerges and the story suddenly races up that notorious plot chart. And, when these movies reach that big conflict, that's usually when I reach over and send the movie back to the beginning. I enjoy just having intimate stories moving along, and the big conflict pulls me out of that comfort zone.

So, since it's what I love, could I get away with writing a story that doesn't bother having that big conflict? Can I write a still life? Would people give it a chance?

In the end, and I truly believe this, writing is about entertainment. Whether it be on a deeply emotional level, or more of a light-hearted level, I enjoy books because they entertain me. So, if I can feel fully satisfied from watching only 70% of "Gosford Park", (more satisfied, in fact, than when I watch the whole thing) maybe it makes sense to stop writing a story when I have captured what I want to capture, rather than kneading it until it looks the way I'm told it's supposed to look.

Just then, the protagonist tripped...

I had a fascinating but lengthy prologue to this article which I've just cut because, you know, it was just me prolixing on about how cool I am. So let's just get to the goods instead.

Sometimes writers get stuck in the middle of their narratives. The story develops too quickly, for example, and your protagonist's journey from inciting incident to climax is over before you know it and your book is only 50,000 words long. Or, you simply don't know what to do with your characters on the way through Act Two (if you think in terms of a three-act structure). Anyway, there are three basic things you can do to make your plot more interesting during the middle of the story (and, incidentally, up your word count).*

The basic idea is to interrupt your protagonist's journey toward the climax. I will, alas, use examples from "Star Wars" because I doubt most of us share the same reading habits and references. Also, I get to be a geeky SW fan. Live with it.

Complications: These are things, people, or events that slow the protagonist's movement toward their goal. Luke being told by his uncle that he has to wait another year before applying to the Academy and leaving Tatooine is a complication.

Roadblocks: These are things, people, or events that stop the protagonist in his tracks. The Millenium Falcon being snagged by the Death Star is a roadblock.

Reversals: These are things, people, or events that turn the story on its head; the protagonist changes his worldview, his direction and often his goal. Luke's family being killed by the Imperial forces is a reversal.

All of these things are essentially problems the protagonist must solve. You can simply make them things that have happened to the protagonist, but that would be wrong. Why? Because a passive character to whom things happen but who does not himself act is boring. Rule Number One is that you do not bore your reader.

So, if your story is lagging, you give your protagonist problems to solve. Beginning writers tend to just throw these things at their characters in a long episodic middle stretch, and none of the problems are connected to the story as a whole. That's bad. All of your plot complications, roadblocks and reversals should grow out of things, persons or events that have appeared earlier in the story. Minor conflicts from Act One can loop back around and reappear as major conflicts in Act Two. This will give your story balance and shape and internal consistency.

Also, you might consider giving complications to your antagonist. How your villain (to sort of continue Michelle's post of yesterday about complex antagonists) deals with adversity might give us clues about his motivations and weaknesses, possibly foreshadowing the climax. Foreshadowing is teh roxor. Don't forget to use it. See above comments about events/items/people looping back around into the story.

So that's my advice today: if you find your story lagging or rambling in the middle, try to focus on the protagonist's goals. Point him at his goals and them have him trip, fall into a hole, come against a wall, or realize his basic assumptions are all wrong. Even if none of these ideas make it into your story, they could be useful brainstorming prompts that end up giving you ideas better than anything I could possibly offer.

*Does that all sound too formulaic and calculating and anti-art? I try to give pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts technical advice here. I don't know about art.

Classic Plot Structure

The traditional structure of a story begins with an introduction, an inciting event where the protagonist encounters a conflict, followed by the rising action where the conflict builds. This rise leads to the climax of the story and ends with a short denouement and resolution. Sounds easy enough, right? In fact, for experienced writers, it probably sounds so easy that it seems boring and something that should be avoided. After all, modern literature pushes the boundaries of storytelling. Writers jump through time and space. They layer stories over stories. The highest forms of literature are character driven, forcing plot to the backseat. While I agree with all that, I have come to firmly believe that the classic plot structure is something that is ultimately the most engaging form for the reader.

Think about anytime a person tells you a story about anything. Think about what you expect from them in that story. At least for me, I want to be set up. I want to know the situation and the stakes. I want to know how significant the event was. And, I want to be told the best part last, because after I know that, I'll be ready to move on.

My car recently caught on fire. A thirty-two-year-old gangster, who was thankfully arrested, started it by throwing a lit match into the gas tank. It happened on Tuesday around 4 pm. I had just parked in front of a Ralph's grocery store. My refrigerator was empty so I needed some vegetables and salad dressing to make lunch for myself.

Do those last details just sort of fade out into the abyss of insignificance? Or, if you're looking really hard to admire it, maybe it just drips with irony that the beginning of the adventure was so boring, barely even worth mentioning. Either way, there is a feeling that this story has been told in the wrong way.We don't want to be let down at the end.

I should say that the climax of the story doesn't have to be the point when the most dramatic action has to take place. But, it has to be the most moving part of the story, whether that part is grounded in action, insight, or emotion. The story above could still be saved as long as, say, something even more powerful is found at the end. Maybe a line like, "It was the best day of my life." Suddenly, we have the feeling that the teller knows how to tell the story. He has put something interesting at the end for us. He has given us insight into the character, into the (emotional) conflict and into the character's unconscious desire.

I recently taught a short writing class with students who were all very experienced. In my first class, I discussed the classic plot structure and I gave them an assignment that I thought would be simple. Come up with twenty stories in a week. Don't worry about developing characters. Don't worry about details or voice or language or even grammar. Just write twenty stories that follow this classical structure. My goal was to have the students internalize the form. I figured if this way of thinking could be at the forefront of a writer's mind, then and only then will they be successful in using that structure to make something more complex. The results the following week were that almost everyone was mad at me for assigning something so difficult. Only two or three students finished it. But, they all thanked me and said it was a lesson worth learning, something they thought they understood but didn't.

See also this post.