By: Victoria Mixon
PLOT
Plots are myriad, but plot structure is simple: hook, development (with backstory interwoven), climax.
Shakespeare’s five-act play, Syd Field’s three-act story, Freytag’s triangle (although Freytag called complications climax and climax resolution—causing untold confusion): like a holograph, hook-development-climax works on all levels, from the big picture down through chapters, sequences, scenes, to actual lines of dialog.
“What the hell is this?” Kerouac calls out to Slim in On the Road.
“This is the beginning of the rangelands, boy. Hand me another drink.”
Hook your reader (make them curious), tell your story, throw them off a metaphorical cliff when you’re done.
The five biggest mistakes in plotting:
1) Starting with backstory. I know, chronology works in life, but not so well in fiction. Chronology did work back when Moll Flanders wanted to tell us all about where she came from before she told us where she was. But that was then. This is now. Hook your reader first. You’ve got to make them curious before they’ll listen.
2) Letting the complications sag. The middle of a book is common bogland, and that’s why you hear so many people say, “I started that book, but never finished it.” Fitzgerald spent a lot of energy (and his publisher’s patience) on the galleys because The Great Gatsby sagged mid-way. It’s the writer’s job to keep upping the ante on the complications, starting a bigger problem the minute the last one’s resolved, keeping the reader turning those pages.
3) Dragging your denouement out. If at all possible, end at the instant of climax, like Henry James in The Turn of the Screw: “His little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” You may grieve to let your characters go, but your reader just wants to find out what happened. And if you’re so brilliant they can’t let go–wow! Even more reason to quit while you’re ahead. The best compliment a writer can get is, “I didn’t want that book to end.” Hello, Constant Reader.
4) Putting the climax too far from the end. That’s what your reader is reading for, and when they’ve found it–they stop. It’s true, some brilliant works have been written where the catastrophe is the hook and the rest of the story is exploration of that catastrophe, but that’s sleight-of-hand. The climax is still the point where the writer confronts the reader with the pivotal event. The end.
5) Using a trick ending. Never conceal information from the reader so you can whack them over the head with it on the last page. Even mysteries, which appear to be all about trick endings, give the reader the clues to see through the trick before they get to it. John Gardner was adamant: if you set the reader up to resent you–they will. Good-bye, Constant Reader.
SCENES
Character
It might be your hook that catches the reader’s attention, but it’s the characters who drag them in and hang onto them for life. Know thy characters. They must be real people, not two-dimensional cartoons, with real bodies, real mannerisms and tics, real foibles, dreams, insights, and idiodicies to be ashamed of. Know them backward and forward. Then don’t tell it all. Hemingway said, “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.”
Dialog
Leave out most of the words. No kidding. Leave out oh, well, yes, no, um, uh (definitely these last two). Leave out names except for extreme emphasis. Leave out first articles and even subjects of sentences wherever possible. Do you answer a question with, “It’s on the table,” or with, “On the table”? Try it and see how much snappier your dialog becomes. For heaven’s sake, leave out ellipses. Be like Emily Bronte and use em-dashes instead. Leave off dialog tags. Replace them with brief significant actions or, if you can get away with it, nothing at all. A book filled with characters talking the way we really talk, with tags, goes on forever and bores even the writer to tears.
Unless absolutely necessary, make characters talk at cross-purposes. How many of us actually listen to other people? We don’t. We’re always thinking about what to say next, when they shut up.
Description
Keep it brief and significant. Raymond Chandler used to be able to burn up the whole first chapter describing a house. You can’t do that anymore. Everyone knows what a house looks like. Find those details that make a person, place, or thing important or unique, mention them, and get back to your characters.
Action
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Action is character.” No matter what complications you throw at your characters, no matter what climax you have in store, each character must act in the only way they know how. If you’ve got characters who can react in various ways, you don’t know your characters well enough. Go back and learn them. They have reasons for only being able to respond under pressure one way. And the different ways different characters deal with trouble is where the tension lies, so it’s best to have characters with very different personalities going through this hell together.
Donald Maass also makes the point that action is not necessarily external. Action is very often internal. Conflict is very often internal. Total climactic catastrophe—as we all know—is only too often internal. “Tension on every page,” Maass says, and this is about as good as advice gets.
EXPOSITION
Exposition seeks not to just inform but to enlighten. Don’t waste your reader’s time with explanations. They’ve got brains. Let them use them. Leave out every explanation that can be inferred from the context. When you must cast light upon a scene, do it in context. Either you need to give the reader a breather between bouts of excitement or the tension can be heightened by knowing a little more about what’s going on. Take advantage of pacing to interweave backstory and exposition, but always keep up with your characters.
Go for it.
This is great!
Been reading this blog for a while. Registered just now to simply say this post is amazing. Succinct, enormously helpful, and engaging. Thank you.
Scott,
Good question! Yes. Ellipses indicate a pause, generally over making a decision. Em-dashes indicate a leap in logic (either to set off a phrase more strongly than with just commas, or to get to the next point).
The truth is that ellipses sound indecisive. They also drag a bit. Aspiring writers often use ellipses because they're having trouble either finding the right words or having confidence in the words they've chosen.
Readers don't like either indecision or drag, and they want to feel the writer's confidence oozing out of the work. They're such sensitive little critters.
Emily Bronte taught me how powerful em-dashes are in dialog, making her characters leap from point to point without finishing their sentences. They're not stopping to mull it over–they're just blurting things out. This is an active, possibly half-cocked character operating under high stress, and these are qualities readers like in their fiction.
Read the deathbed scene between Cathy and Heathcliff, when she really lays into him. Talk about powerful dialog!
Victoria
P.S. Phil, I didn't mean to miss your question about em-dashes. I explain them, along with a bunch of other punctuation marks, on my blog under Punctuation.
Wow, thanks, Kirk! Words to warm a writer's heart.
Victoria
Ink,
Like the pirate's code, I'd say they're more like guidelines, and everyone knows a good pirate sometimes make their own rules and breaks them.
Thanks for addressing my question, Victoria. Especially since I failed to make it an actual question. 🙂
I'll have a look at the passage you suggested. I rarely use either device except if it fits the rhythm perfectly. In fact, em-dashes always looked a little noisy to me in dialog (I love them a little too much in description and internal monologue, maybe) so I should really explore how they're used effectively.
Ok- on ellipses-(good point Scott) What if the character is indecisive or choosing his words carefully? Its suppose to make the reader wonder what this guy is keeping back? That's why I use ellipses.
But, I've read twice this week tweets of editors who hate them.
And had a manuscript contest judge who hated them too. I chalked it off to opinion but now I wonder.
This is the most practical and complete, yet suscint, advice on creative writing I've seen so far. Thank you so much for taking time to share this with us!
And again, thank you Nathan for the great choice. Can't wait for the next.
brill-i-ant. thank you!
SusieJ,
What's happening with the ellipses thing is that readers like TENSION. They like active characters barging off in wrong directions, blurting things out without thinking, getting themselves into hot water. They like stuff going wrong.
An indecisive character is less likely to hold your readers' attention. A character who's hiding something is exciting, but your readers want them to be hiding it in a forceful rather than cautious way. Let them hide it with incomplete answers or by interrupting themselves (when you can use an em-dash).
Amthor in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (chapter 21) is oily-smooth and deceitful. He doesn't need either ellipses or em-dashes to hide what he hides. He's just himself!
Victoria
Good stuff here. Thank you.
Well explained, Victoria. I am definitely going to check out the em-dash more closely if readers are digging the forceful, quick-change pace of them. It mirrors what we see in pop culture today, after all. In fact, maybe reader culture is predicating the downfall of a literary convention? Wouldn't be the first time.
On another point in Victoria's excellent post where she says, "readers want to know what happens next"––that's so telling of our info overload and reality-based media culture. The plethora of in-depth and baldfaced reporting of real life phenomena is something every writer really has to compete with. Drama is everywhere, these days, so why read fiction that barely measures up?
I don't want to predict the extinction of book readers, but I can see how the current economic climate has forced writers to find a great hook and to punch harder. It happened to film with the advent of TV. Why should we be spared?
This is an excellent article. I'm printing it out right now, and following your blog. Thank you Victoria!
Two modern masters of lush description:
Sasha Troyan told me years ago that excessive description "is always a mistake." I told her she was nuts. She's only written two Booksense Selections (Angels in the Morning and The Forgotten Island). What the heck does she know about fiction?
If you've ever read her stuff, you know her descriptive powers are mesmerizing–
https://sashatroyan.com/
On the same note, Lucia Orth once got a standing ovation from a workshop at Squaw Valley Writers' Conference (I was there) with her description of Ferdinand Marcos' self-glorifying inauguration. Her gorgeous novel Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was nominated last year for the Pulitzer Prize. Another writer with an extraordinary understanding of description–
https://luciaorth.com/
Victoria
Thanks Victoria. I especially liked the advice about dialog and characters. Excellent post. 🙂
I really like the advice that a character must only be able to react one way. Readers should get the sense that, "of course that's what s/he would do!" Or, if they don't, they should be curious as to why the character acted that way – and not be disappointed, as when the answer turns out to be, "for the sake of the plot."
I suggest that Laura Martone check out Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a recent bestseller (and awesome book!) that broke a lot of "rules."
anicalewis- I totally loved Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel! I hear its going to be made into a movie.
Victoria, thanks again. Good points. Still wondering though as my character is hiding things but not oily, at all. Doesn't really want to be hiding things. Still, I'm going to go over his dialogue- be sure it doesn't drag.
Remembering to keep one's POV grounded in the reality of the character is such sound and important advice.
🙂
Strange Fiction,
You asked a great question, and I missed it my morning fog. Sorry about that!
Who do you write for: yourself or the market?
You can write ANY BOOK YOU WANT. I love that about words. They're free! And yours! Nobody can take them away from you. It was either Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevski, I think, who was rumored to have memorized his poems while in Siberian prison camp because he had no way to write them down.
I can tell you I spent 20 years writing my novels in stubborn resistance of the market (ergo my response to Sasha). I love those novels. They're happy in their little drawer.
I now write fiction I know is more likely to sell. Why? Because I want to make a living as a writer, not a short-order cook. I used to be able to depend on technical writing for my paycheck, but economic conditions have changed, and I've learned so much about fiction it seems a shame not to use it.
Toni Morrison has said, "Write the book you want to read."
If it turns out to be a book nobody else wants to read–well, you got to do what you love.
But if you lavish all your skill and education and dedication and responsibility upon it, learn how to write clearly and concretely according to the standards of your time, and act like a professional in seeking publication–you'll probably make it.
I like to picture John Gardner arriving in an editor's office in his motorcycle leather, with his helmet under one arm and a paper bag full of manuscripts under the other, and the editor saying, when Gardner didn't leave, "Well, I'm not going to read them while you WATCH."
Victoria
Laura: I can relate to your “Dickens” style comparison because my son told me (after reading only a short portion of my original book) that he did not like to read “Shakespeare.”
For curiosity’s sake, I went back to the original and read the first page again. At first, I loved it. Then I read my “final” rewrite again and ended up reading several pages before realizing I was reading. The rewrite “hooked” me to read more, but the original “dramatic” version moved me more. I am thinking about converting it to prose somehow, someday.
I also wrote, or I should say, “created,” and then went in search of learning to refine the craft to make my creation marketable. The transformation of my book is amazing; the education is priceless and thanks to Victoria, (via this fabulous blog) it continues to be refined.
Thank you, Victoria, for a wonderful and concise lesson. Your points have shown me that my years of rewriting, refining, and reading the advice of professional writers has not been in vain. Most of your points hit home with me, but in retrospect, many of them have already been hunted down and eliminated. (except in bogsville which is where I am currently working on rewriting – even I am bored with it) Thank you for a great and concise “rule-of-thumb” for writing. I am saving it for later reference.
And….thanks to everyone giving more to Victoria’s advice here. I loved reading them all.
Oooo, another cool discussion – writing for money or for art?
Have I mentioned how much I love debate, btw? Hee. Thanks, Victoria!
I used to be really down on people who wrote to make money, (how could they!) but I've come to understand that is a worthy goal. If someone wants to make writing their livelihood – that's great. What a wonderful way to make a living. These are also good people for agents to represent; they're bread and butter.
For me, though, writing…well, I decided that I had to separate out the money all together. Because if you write for money, then they can tell you what to write. They can say: write this because it sells. Or: write this because I'll buy it.
And you'll write it or go hungry.
Writing for me is deeper self-expression and communication. Get money and survival concerns out of the picture, please.
I wouldn't mind making money at it, though, if it happens. Don't get me wrong. But that's not my motivation.
So, I think you have to decide. Are you writing for money or not? Can you do both….I think that is very difficult to do. Maybe some people can wear both hats. I know I'd have trouble doing it. That would actually interest me – can you wear both hats?
Kristi
I am not sure how to answer you on saving your blog responses, but I have been putting the emails from Nathan's blog into a folder in Yahoo. When I want to read them again, they are there intact with links. So far, none have been eliminated from the Nathan's site. Hope this is helpful.
If what you want is a permanent copy of your responses, you may want to highlight, copy, and paste to Word in a file on your computer. (then back up your computer)
Lucinda
Very informative post. Great future reference material. I especially appreciate the advice on dialogue and ending the story at the climax.
Will take to heart as I conclude my novel.
Love this!
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Excellent. Taping it by the computer now.
Mira,
Flannery O'Connor said, "Nobody was hotter after the dollar than Henry James." So, yes, you can wear both hats.
However, some of the most cutting-edge fiction was dismissed during the lifetimes of its authors. Emily Bronte. Jean Rhys. Jane Bowles. The list goes on and on. Perhaps we should say, "You certainly can write for both art and money, but don't expect to be the one in your family who gets the money."
Victoria
Victoria – Lol.
I didn't know that about Henry James. Interesting.
This was all a wonderful discussion, and great post. I'll read it more than once.
Nathan chose well.
Thanks.
Anica – Thanks for the tip about JONATHAN STRANGE… I will definitely check it out!
Lucinda – Thanks for your comment about Shakespeare. I feel less alone now. Yahoo! 🙂
Mira – I fully believe that you can balance money and art. Michael Chabon and Toni Morrison seem to do okay. So can we!
Mira,
Money. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, because I know it isn't the "right" answer. But it's the truth.
Victoria,
Thanks for sharing your vast knowledge. You said you're in the business — do you mind if I ask what you do (besides write)?
Thanks Lucinda 🙂
Cheers Victoria.
Reading this late in the day and I am blown away. Incredibly good post!
Fantastic advice, Victoria. This is one to print out and check myself by.
Victoria,
Thanks for sharing your vast knowledge. You said you're in the business — do you mind if I ask what you do (besides write)?
Not at all. I'm a fiction editor. I edit people's novels for them!
I also maintain a blog on the craft of fiction, so if you can't afford me, you can still learn what I know about the art. It's pretty much this post, exponentially.
Thanks for asking!
Victoria
Wow, Victoria, you rock. Nicely done.
I loved this post. Thanks Victoria and keep up the good work! I'll definitely be checking out your own blog regularly now.
Some great advice, but disagree violently with ' Leave out oh, well, yes, no, um, uh' You can do a great deal with these little words. For a teenager one 'um' is sometimes worth fifty words. It's all in how you use them.
All "Grey Gardens" (documentary) fans, please check out my blog. I have an interview with (the real) Jerry, the Marble Faun.
Like everything else — these are NOT absolutes. They are ingredients for creating cookie cutter stories, so you should use them… up to a point.
For example:
[i]"Tension on every page," Maass says, and this is about as good as advice gets.[/]
This isn't the great advice you think it is. Tension on every page exhausts the reader like too much adrenaline. If there's tension on every page, then there's never a resolution.
Well, if these blog posts are an example of the readers of Nathan's blog,I have only one word to say:
WOW!!!!!!
This stuff is rich, rich!
What great company we keep here!
Thank you, Guest Bloggers!
(Nathan, consider doing this more often, for for the weekends, please!)
You hooked me with enlightened and straightforward advice, then went all Michael Bay on me.
Anon 7:48 p.m.
No, no, I didn't mean to make anyone feel badly. Writing for money as a livelihood is honorable! My opinion anyway.
But it's not the only reason to write. And if you have a different reason, money can confuse the matter. That's all I'm saying.
Links are okay, right?
Nathan said writing a sports story is hard. And since we're never ones to overlook a challenge, at CIC, we're writing a group one.
Anyone can join in to create a masterpiece of sports literature!
p.s. It's just for fun.
Group Sports Story
Joseph L. Selby,
Sorry, I had no idea who Michael Bay was. I had to look him up.
I think you may be mistaking tension for violence.
I wrote about why people like to read stories where things go wrong on my blog, under Theory.
Victoria
Oh, so excellently done! Grrrr. Make that: So excellently done!
Currently working on revising my ms. Will need to check backwards for compliance with much of your advice. Thanks.
Laura M., I like your "revision-shock". Being a person who goes into shock every time I start revising–or think about revising–my writing.
I like this a lot. I'm probably going to have to go back through my entire story and rebuild it, but I don't mind because this piece is really helpful in making everything I write 10 times better, and 20 time more likely to get a literary agent once I finish everything.
So Nathan — Yoohoo!?
Will you be posting any quick links to other nonwinning posts? Like a "best of the rest" list?
Although, probably not everyone has a link. Mainly just entries. Maybe that wouldn't work then. Darn.
Another super posting filled with pragmatic advice Nathan, thank you.
Taking a step back, would you say that everything you list serves to elicit emotional response? (I've always regarded that as our top priority.)