Kress Notes: Middles
Feb. 17th, 2006 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chochiyo_samaPart 2: Middles
Chapter 4: “The Middle: Staying on Track”
What makes middles so hard?
Sometimes you have so much vital information that you can’t figure out how to include it all. Sometimes you can’t think of enough interesting events to get you plausibly to the ending you’ve already envisioned. The story seems to be self-destructing in your mind.
Developing the Promise
The middle of the story can be defined as everything after the introduction of the main characters/conflict and before the climax.
The middle is an enormously important part of your story. The function of the middle is to develop the implicit promise made by a story’s beginning.
The middle of the story develops the story’s implicit promise by dramatizing incidents that increase conflict, reveal character, and put in place all the various forces that will collide at the story’s climax.
The middle is a bridge. At one end the story’s beginning introduces characters, conflict, and (sometimes) symbols. Then in the middle these characters, conflicts, and (sometimes) symbols move across the bridge, grouping themselves as they go into alliances and oppositions. Some people change during their journey across the bridge. Some don’t. Conflicts deepen. People become more emotional. By the time the characters reach the other end of the bridge, the forces determining their behavior are clear. At the far end of the bridge, these same forces will collide (the story’s climax).
Unity in fiction depends on keeping everybody on the bridge. The forces developed in the middle must emerge naturally out of the characters and situation introduced at the beginning. The ending must make use of those same forces and conflicts, with nothing important left out and nothing new suddenly appearing at the last minute.
Which specific incidents you dramatize depends on the story you want to tell.
Start by asking yourself three questions important to keeping the story on track.
What Is the Track? Three Vital Decisions
The overall direction of your story is determined by three crucial questions:
• Whose story is this?
• Who is the point-of-view character?
• What is the throughline?
The answers help you define which scenes you need to write, in what order, and to what end.
Whose Story Is This?
In most stories, one character commands the most attention. This is the character we automatically think of when we recall the book, the character whose eventual fate defines the book’s plot and its meaning.
Whose story are you writing?
The answer will guide your plot, because whoever’s story it is will determine your throughline.
Who Is the Point-of-View Character?
You can have more than one point-of-view character, as long as you stick to one point of view per scene. Or you can write the whole novel from just one point of view.
The choice of a point-of-view character is crucial to how you tell your story. It determines which scenes you can include.
The first drafts of the first few scenes are experimental, letting the writer play with his idea, allowing for discovery through the act of putting words on paper. The story takes shape in your mind through the act of writing itself. Additional possibilities occur to you. Other slants present themselves at the edges of your consciousness. Let them come. Let the story shift in your mind.
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” (E.M. Forster)
The point-of-view character is often the person whose story you are telling. But sometimes you gain depth of viewpoint by separating the protagonist and point-of-view character.
Several circumstances prompt the choice of someone other than the protagonist as the point-of-view character.
• If the protagonist dies during the story
• If the protagonist is insane
• If the protagonist knows information you don’t want the reader to learn until the end, you need to choose a point-of-view character who doesn’t know it.
• If the protagonist is not going to change in any significant way, you may want a point-of-view character who can change.
What Is the Throughline?
Throughline is a term borrowed from films. It means the main plotline of your story, the one that answers the question, “What happens to the protagonist?” Many, many things happen to her and everybody else in the book, but the most significant line of action is the throughline. It’s what keeps your reader reading.
Getting a clear handle on your throughline can make the middle of your book easier to write. It helps you to determine which scenes to emphasize. You can include a subplot or two, but the throughline is the most important.
NOTE: Some writers write the throughline on a 3x5 card, compressing it to one or two sentences to make sure it’s clear in their minds. Others even tack it above their desks.
One way to determine the throughline is to ask yourself, “What will be different at the end of this story from the beginning?”
• Maybe your character will learn something she didn’t know.
• Maybe your character will watch someone else’s life self-destruct and make a decision to change something about his own.
• Maybe your character will solve some problem you present at the beginning of the story.
Whatever your throughline, knowing it in advance can help you keep your story on track. You may not know the which scenes you will write, but at least you know the end you’re writing toward.
It is possible to write a story without determining your throughline. Many writers start a story because the character or setting or situation intrigues them, and then they just write along, interested in seeing what occurs to them along the way. If you write this way, everything said about determining the throughline still applies, but not until the second draft.
The first draft you write unfettered. The second draft you determine your throughline and decide which material is still usable. Typically, you’ll be able to keep more of the later scenes, after you’ve decided on an ending. The whole first half of the story may have to be thrown out and replaced with scenes that actually fit with your later decisions about character, plot, and ending.
It really doesn’t matter when you do it, as long as you determine your throughline at some point.
Moving Along the Track: Thinking in Scenes
Once you know your protagonist, your point of view character, and your throughline, you can decide which scenes to write.
Plot is usually described in terms of “things that happen.” The problem with this is that things that happen can in turn be described in exposition. A plot summary tells what happened in a story.
You are not writing a plot summary.
You are writing fiction, and fiction occurs in scenes. For that reason, it’s helpful to think about structuring the middle of your book in terms of scenes, not events. An event may take more than one scene, may take one scene exactly, half a scene, or no scene at all.
You can make these decisions before you begin the middle of your story. Start by listing the events that happen to the characters from the beginning until the end. (If you don’t yet have a throughline, list events as far into the story as you can; you can always repeat this part after the throughline becomes clearer to you.) If events are going on simultaneously in different places, list them in arbitrary sequence and bracket them. At this stage throw in every event you can think of that’s interesting and relevant.
Now go through and cross out those that aren’t happening in the presence of your point-of-view characters. You must find another way to let us know about these. Add any scenes necessary to this discovery.
Take time to think about each of these events. Is it important enough to dramatize in a full scene? Might it need two scenes? Would it be better to just summarize it in exposition?
The scenes you spend the most time on should e those that relate directly to your throughline. The scenes you dramatize most fully will inevitably be a function of what you find most interesting.
Your choices become one component of your individual style, which emerges partly from what you choose to say and partly from how you say it. Don’t try to direct this process too much. If a scene interests you, write it. If it does seem mostly irrelevant, you can always cut it in the second draft.
If you have only a partial list, write the scenes, then make a second list of subsequent events and scenes. Maybe by that time you’ll know what your throughline is.
You can dramatically improve a short story idea by trying for the fewest possible scenes that will still tell the story. Study your scene list. Eliminate or combine scenes.
Some writers need space in their first drafts. They have a broad idea of the plot of a book but don’t really know what they’re going to say until they say it. For these, the structure only emerges as they create, which means two things:
• Their first drafts are a mess
• Only in the second draft do they think about design and pattern
Other writers love outlines. They like to have the shape of a book firmly in mind before they start. They make notes, chapter by chapter. They work out all variations of point of view. They detail the narrative design.
Planning for the Climax: Novels Versus Short Stories
You must dramatize one scene in your novel: the climax. A climax that occurs off-stage is frustrating and disappointing to novel readers. Nor should the climax speed by in a few paragraphs. This is the point you’ve been building toward for three hundred pages. The reader wants to witness the pay-off in person and sufficiently satisfying length.
The climax is the culmination of your throughline, the event that brings into collision all the forces you’ve set up. The climax is the point where something has to give—and does.
It’s important to identify the moment when all the forces in your story come together to produce emotional and thematic fireworks. Although that moment comes near the end of the story, you plan for it in the middle. After mentally identifying those forces, you can work backward, choosing scenes for the middle that will dramatize the inexorable build of conflicting elements.
Then the loose ends are tidied up. This is the denouement.
Making Sure the Reader Stays on Track: Formal Structural Designs
In a short story, there are only a handful of events, usually narrated in chronological order. There aren’t more than three or four important characters to keep track of. As long as you provide sufficient transition phrases, nobody gets lost.
A novel is different. Some require the reader to keep straight dozens of characters, multiple flashbacks, shifts in location, and changes in point of view.
Formal structural designs are one way to prevent that. Formal structural design is an overall plan for presenting scenes throughout an entire novel. It doesn’t dictate the content of these scenes, but it does provide a pattern for presenting them. It helps the reader anticipate the ebb and flow of narrative.
It also helps the writer to decide which scene goes where.
Four common structural designs:
• Straight chronological
• Regularly recurring viewpoints
• Multiviewpoint chronological sections
• Parallel running scenes
A straight chronological structure is the easiest to follow (and the easiest to write). You start at the beginning of the story and show us each major event in the order either that it happened to your protagonist or that your protagonist learned about it. There may or may not be brief flashbacks, but they don’t last long enough to distract the reader from the main plot. When you get to the last important event, you stop writing.
The advantages of straight chronological structure are clarity and consistency.
The limitations of a straight chronological structure are point of view and range. Since this structure works best with a single point of view, whenever the point-of-view character isn’t present, you can’t show us what’s happening to anybody else. Since you’ve led a reader to expect that he’s seeing events in the order they happened, your emotional range is limited to what you can wring out of that order. You can’t leave out an emotionally tense scene and include it later, out of chronological sequence, just because it has more impact later.
You can have two or more point-of-view characters. One way is to set up a pattern of regularly recurring viewpoints so that the reader expects to hear from each character in the same order.
A disadvantage of regularly recurring viewpoints is that they may seem too mechanical. You may have to struggle with your plot to make it fit the point-of-view pattern. Minor variations are possible, but if you find yourself inventing peripheral events for your characters just because “it’s their turn,” this design is not good for your novel.
Multiviewpoint chronological section means breaking the novel into clearly labeled parts. Each part covers a set period of time, and everything that happens in that period is in that section, no matter whom it happens to or whose eyes we view it through. Within each section, put several chapters of varying length. Each chapter contains one and only one point of view. The reader quickly picks up the signal that every time a new chapter starts, the point of view changes; every time a new part of the novel starts, the story finishes the previous time or place and everybody gets to start fresh. This is complicated, but it gives t he reader a chance of knowing where he is, when, and with whom.
Multiviewpoint chronological sections offer the advantage of greater flexibility within each section. Scenes can be ordered to build tension, withhold information from the reader, or contrast behaviors.
However, because the structure resides in the divisions rather than in the content, this design is inherently weaker than the others and does not provide the reader with much sense of rhythm, anticipation, or inevitability. The sections may not all be the same length; the same poihnt-of-view characters may not turn up in each section. There aren’t patterns to count on.
Maximum rhythm and anticipation are achieved by using parallel running scenes. In this structure, two stories are going on simultaneously, alternating with each other chapter by chapter, until they come together at the end. This can be done with stories running in the past and current time or in two different settings. This technique can seem fragmented or it can build anticipation and inevitability.
Choosing a Structural Design
You have two choices:
• You can plan the whole book ahead of time to fit a chosen design
• You can write it however it occurs to you, read your first draft, choose the design that best shapes t he existing material, and rewrite as necessary.
Both methods can work. The point is that the final design should not be haphazard. Your best design is one that will keep your reader on track—and also make it easier for you to write the middle part of your book.
Chapter 5: “Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory”
To make character changes convincing, four things must happen:
• The reader must understand your character’s initial personality; and especially her motivation: why she is behaving the way she is.
• The reader must see that your character is capable of change. (Not everyone is)
• The reader must see dramatized a pattern of experiences that might reasonably be expected to affect someone.
• The reader must see a plausible new motivation replace the old one.
Stories grow out of what characters do, and, in turn, what characters do grows out of what they want.
Two kinds of motivation:
• Motives that are easily understandable to the reader because she would feel the same in a similar situation.
• Motives that are counter to our expectations of the world. The less common the character’s motive and the more it violates our stereotypes, the more background information you’ll have to supply to make the reader understand why this person is doing what he is doing.
Showing that characters are capable of change:
• Show the character is capable of other changes
• Show the values he hold that make changing his mind possible.
Why the character actually changes
The key word is pattern. Character changes should be the result of repeated, convincing experiences the character is forced to live through.
The guideline is to ask yourself, “Am I presenting the kind of experiences that make the reader think, ‘Well, yes, if this event happened to that person, he probably would behave like that. I might not, but he would.’”
Replacing an Old Motivation with a New One
It can be helpful to write the motivational switches on a piece of paper.
• What did each character want in the beginning of the book?
• What does he want now?
• Is it still the same desire?
• Do you know? If you don’t give it serious thought.
Special Case of Motivation: Villains
• The villain will be much more successful if he is self-justified.
• Villains need to act out of motives that make sense to themselves.
• Show the reader your villain’s self-justification—his motives, beliefs, rationalizations—and he will become much more plausible than the stock “bad guy.”
• Show us how the villain regards his villainies.
• Think about why the villain is causing everyone else so much trouble.
• Think about the villain’s psychology and motivation.
Encouraging Words about Middles
• The function of the middle of the story is to set up the ending.
• The middle clearly dramatizes those forces that will collide at the climax, including any potential character changes.
Chapter 6: “Help for Middles: Getting Unstuck”
Many writers get stuck in the middle. There are different kinds of “stuck” though they all feel the same (frustrating). There are also ways (that work) of getting “unstuck.”
Common reasons for getting stuck are
• Fear of failure
• Fear of success
• Literary fogginess
• Wrong direction
Many novelists get stuck if they become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of writing a novel—the page count, the time investment, and the stamina required.
Fear of Failure: The Tolstoy Syndrome
Novice writers get discouraged because they write the first half, read it over, and are immediately discouraged because it’s not as good as the professional stories they read every day. They suffer from the Tolstoy Syndrome, which affects only intelligent and self-aware people—and that includes most people who want to write. Their standards are high.
Getting stuck because nothing you write measures up to your own high standards is silly. You will only get better if you practice your craft, but you don’t practice your craft because you’re not already better at it. It is a vicious circle.
Robert Sheckley told himself that he wasn’t writing real stories—he was writing “simulations” of stories. This eliminated the pressure for him, and he was able to write.
If you can manipulate your attitude into reducing the internal pressure you put on yourself, maybe you can get unstuck and finish your story.
Fear of Success: The Never-Ending Story
This anxiety involves knowing you need to start another story when the current one is finished and you don’t have another idea to write about. So, you don’t finish. You spend your time polishing what’s already there, or planning various endings, or rewriting the opening, even though everyone who reads it likes it.
Another form of this fear is not mailing it out to publishers.
If such fears keep you stuck, you need to give yourself artificial deadlines. Set a date that the manuscript must be mailed by. Ask people who support you to ask you whether it’s been mailed yet.
Mail it.
Then—this is important—begin another story immediately. Forget about the one in the mail. The one that counts is the one you’re writing right now.
Literary Fogginess: What’s Supposed to Happen Next?
Sometimes you don’t work on a manuscript because you don’t know what’s supposed to happen next in the story.
• Either you started the work hoping inspiration would appear along the way and it hasn’t
• Or, you’ve written yourself into a corner.
This kind of block is a positive thing (though it will not feel like it). Your block is telling you that you’re not ready to be doing so much. You need to stop, go back to the beginning of the work, and take some time to plan.
Invest some thinking time in your characters and plot. Scribble notes.
• Do you understand what your characters want?
• Could they maybe want something else you’ve overlooked?
• What’s at stake in their story?
• Can you raise the stakes?
• Has the plot come to a standstill?
• What are some other directions it might take—even seemingly wild directions?
• Does anything about these scribbled notes excite you?
• Does that excitement suggest something you might want to write?
When you hit on something interesting, write it, even if it wasn’t the direction you’d originally envisioned.
Wrong Direction: I Left My Heart in Chapter Three
The above advice also works in this case.
In this version, you know where you are going. You’ve worked out the story in your mind or outlined it on paper, but things are not going well.
• You hate sitting down to write.
• The characters are behaving oddly.
• They are overreacting emotionally to simple occurrences.
• They are saying or doing things that strike you as out of character, but they must for your plot to work.
• They’re making long speeches to other characters about why they are doing what they are doing because without them, the reader won’t understand their actions.
All of these are symptoms of a wrong turn in the story.
• Characters who overreact indicate that the situation itself isn’t interesting enough.
• Out-of-character actions indicate either that your plot is wrong for these people or these people are the wrong ones to be inhabiting your plot.
• Long speeches indicate a gap in characterization.
In each of these cases, the solution is the same. Abandon the outline. It doesn’t work. You have two choices:
• If your characters are taking off in directions you didn’t anticipate, rejoice and go with them. Even if your plot is dead, your characters are still alive. Follow their lead and see if a new plot emerges from the unplanned actions you now prefer to write.
• Read over your story. Where was the last place you were genuinely interested? Wherever that point occurred, discard everything after it. Then sit down and build a new plot on what’s left.
Cut your losses. Keep what you can, and treat the story as a brand new project.
Techniques to Keep You Writing
Various writers have devised techniques to break their personal writer’s blocks.
Gene Wolfe refuses to allow himself to consume any words until he starts writing again. No books, magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, or unnecessary conversation. Eventually he gets so bored with this verbal Sahara that he returns to his typewriter.
Some morning writers set a minimum number of pages they must write every day before they allow themselves to take up the other parts of their lives. Frederik Pohl turns out four pages a day, seven days a week. Sometimes this takes forty-five minutes, sometimes it takes eighteen hours, but it gets done.
Other writers frame their commitment to writing in time, not page count. Flannery O’Connor wrote that she would sit at her desk from 9:00 a.m. until noon every day. During that time, no writing might get done, but nothing else was allowed to get done either. And if an idea did present itself, she was ready for it.
Many writers use “triggers” to get themselves primed to write when the pump has gone dry. Raing good fiction triggers in some the desire to write their own stories. Valerie Sherwood does the opposite. She triggers herself with “ludicrously awful” novels, so badly written that they instantly inspired confidence that she could write a better one.
Others use specific music to undam the creative flow.
Still others keep two projects going at all times, and, when one goes stale, switch to the other until their unconscious solves whatever narrative problem was blocking progress on the other.
There are writers who rely on physical activity. John Kessel jogged on the same days he wrote.
Some writers like Jack Dann treats “slow periods” as the way his unconscious lets him know it wants more material. He uses the time to research, read “anything that interests” him, and he trusts his creative mind to ferment until it’s ready to go again.
Some writers use rewards to entice themselves through difficult writing times. Finish three pages, and you can have a beer or see a movie.
Techniques That Won’t Get You Unstuck
Unless your external circumstances are very unusual, changing them won’t cure writer’s block. The way to get unstuck is not to shed your spouse, career, national citizenship, or material possessions. Whatever mires you in the middle of your story comes from inside, not outside, and that’s where you will have to deal with it.
Novels: Settling in for the Long Haul
Sometimes you get stuck not because of the content of your story, but because of its size. A novel can seem an overwhelming undertaking. Seen from the middle, a novel can seem like an endless task, but there are ways to make it more manageable.
The basic principle is to break everything down into smaller pieces, chapters, time, page count. Specifically:
• Don’t tell yourself, Now I’m sitting down to write a novel. Tell yourself, Now I’m sitting down to start the scene where Martha sneaks onto a Greyhound bus bound for Memphis. Concentrate on just that scene, giving it everything you’ve got. Put the rest of the task out of your mind while you write. Don’t hold back. There is no later. Write your best now.
• Track something. Keep records of the number of pages you write every week, or the percentage of chapters completed or points of view used in various scenes. Tape this growing record on the wall over your desk. If you use a computer, print out completed pages daily or weekly or as you finish an electronic file. The point is to have something tangible that grows over time, concrete proof of progress.
• Create deadlines for yourself, maintaining a little flexibility. There is a purposeful effect in saying, “I’m going to finish Chapter Five in two weeks.”
Writing a novel takes as long as it takes.
You may be a fast writer or a slow one. You may have several other commitments that limit your writing time, or you may be able to spend several hours every day at the keyboard. You may have a clear idea of your novel before you begin or you may have to spend some time and pages discovering what you want to say. There are so many variables that measuring yourself against some other writer’s timetable isn’t useful.
What is useful is devising some system—self imposed deadlines, writing appointments, schedules—to keep at the novel steadily. Try to build up a habit of steady writing that you can trust to hold over time.
Chapter 4: “The Middle: Staying on Track”
What makes middles so hard?
Sometimes you have so much vital information that you can’t figure out how to include it all. Sometimes you can’t think of enough interesting events to get you plausibly to the ending you’ve already envisioned. The story seems to be self-destructing in your mind.
Developing the Promise
The middle of the story can be defined as everything after the introduction of the main characters/conflict and before the climax.
The middle is an enormously important part of your story. The function of the middle is to develop the implicit promise made by a story’s beginning.
The middle of the story develops the story’s implicit promise by dramatizing incidents that increase conflict, reveal character, and put in place all the various forces that will collide at the story’s climax.
The middle is a bridge. At one end the story’s beginning introduces characters, conflict, and (sometimes) symbols. Then in the middle these characters, conflicts, and (sometimes) symbols move across the bridge, grouping themselves as they go into alliances and oppositions. Some people change during their journey across the bridge. Some don’t. Conflicts deepen. People become more emotional. By the time the characters reach the other end of the bridge, the forces determining their behavior are clear. At the far end of the bridge, these same forces will collide (the story’s climax).
Unity in fiction depends on keeping everybody on the bridge. The forces developed in the middle must emerge naturally out of the characters and situation introduced at the beginning. The ending must make use of those same forces and conflicts, with nothing important left out and nothing new suddenly appearing at the last minute.
Which specific incidents you dramatize depends on the story you want to tell.
Start by asking yourself three questions important to keeping the story on track.
What Is the Track? Three Vital Decisions
The overall direction of your story is determined by three crucial questions:
• Whose story is this?
• Who is the point-of-view character?
• What is the throughline?
The answers help you define which scenes you need to write, in what order, and to what end.
Whose Story Is This?
In most stories, one character commands the most attention. This is the character we automatically think of when we recall the book, the character whose eventual fate defines the book’s plot and its meaning.
Whose story are you writing?
The answer will guide your plot, because whoever’s story it is will determine your throughline.
Who Is the Point-of-View Character?
You can have more than one point-of-view character, as long as you stick to one point of view per scene. Or you can write the whole novel from just one point of view.
The choice of a point-of-view character is crucial to how you tell your story. It determines which scenes you can include.
The first drafts of the first few scenes are experimental, letting the writer play with his idea, allowing for discovery through the act of putting words on paper. The story takes shape in your mind through the act of writing itself. Additional possibilities occur to you. Other slants present themselves at the edges of your consciousness. Let them come. Let the story shift in your mind.
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” (E.M. Forster)
The point-of-view character is often the person whose story you are telling. But sometimes you gain depth of viewpoint by separating the protagonist and point-of-view character.
Several circumstances prompt the choice of someone other than the protagonist as the point-of-view character.
• If the protagonist dies during the story
• If the protagonist is insane
• If the protagonist knows information you don’t want the reader to learn until the end, you need to choose a point-of-view character who doesn’t know it.
• If the protagonist is not going to change in any significant way, you may want a point-of-view character who can change.
What Is the Throughline?
Throughline is a term borrowed from films. It means the main plotline of your story, the one that answers the question, “What happens to the protagonist?” Many, many things happen to her and everybody else in the book, but the most significant line of action is the throughline. It’s what keeps your reader reading.
Getting a clear handle on your throughline can make the middle of your book easier to write. It helps you to determine which scenes to emphasize. You can include a subplot or two, but the throughline is the most important.
NOTE: Some writers write the throughline on a 3x5 card, compressing it to one or two sentences to make sure it’s clear in their minds. Others even tack it above their desks.
One way to determine the throughline is to ask yourself, “What will be different at the end of this story from the beginning?”
• Maybe your character will learn something she didn’t know.
• Maybe your character will watch someone else’s life self-destruct and make a decision to change something about his own.
• Maybe your character will solve some problem you present at the beginning of the story.
Whatever your throughline, knowing it in advance can help you keep your story on track. You may not know the which scenes you will write, but at least you know the end you’re writing toward.
It is possible to write a story without determining your throughline. Many writers start a story because the character or setting or situation intrigues them, and then they just write along, interested in seeing what occurs to them along the way. If you write this way, everything said about determining the throughline still applies, but not until the second draft.
The first draft you write unfettered. The second draft you determine your throughline and decide which material is still usable. Typically, you’ll be able to keep more of the later scenes, after you’ve decided on an ending. The whole first half of the story may have to be thrown out and replaced with scenes that actually fit with your later decisions about character, plot, and ending.
It really doesn’t matter when you do it, as long as you determine your throughline at some point.
Moving Along the Track: Thinking in Scenes
Once you know your protagonist, your point of view character, and your throughline, you can decide which scenes to write.
Plot is usually described in terms of “things that happen.” The problem with this is that things that happen can in turn be described in exposition. A plot summary tells what happened in a story.
You are not writing a plot summary.
You are writing fiction, and fiction occurs in scenes. For that reason, it’s helpful to think about structuring the middle of your book in terms of scenes, not events. An event may take more than one scene, may take one scene exactly, half a scene, or no scene at all.
You can make these decisions before you begin the middle of your story. Start by listing the events that happen to the characters from the beginning until the end. (If you don’t yet have a throughline, list events as far into the story as you can; you can always repeat this part after the throughline becomes clearer to you.) If events are going on simultaneously in different places, list them in arbitrary sequence and bracket them. At this stage throw in every event you can think of that’s interesting and relevant.
Now go through and cross out those that aren’t happening in the presence of your point-of-view characters. You must find another way to let us know about these. Add any scenes necessary to this discovery.
Take time to think about each of these events. Is it important enough to dramatize in a full scene? Might it need two scenes? Would it be better to just summarize it in exposition?
The scenes you spend the most time on should e those that relate directly to your throughline. The scenes you dramatize most fully will inevitably be a function of what you find most interesting.
Your choices become one component of your individual style, which emerges partly from what you choose to say and partly from how you say it. Don’t try to direct this process too much. If a scene interests you, write it. If it does seem mostly irrelevant, you can always cut it in the second draft.
If you have only a partial list, write the scenes, then make a second list of subsequent events and scenes. Maybe by that time you’ll know what your throughline is.
You can dramatically improve a short story idea by trying for the fewest possible scenes that will still tell the story. Study your scene list. Eliminate or combine scenes.
Some writers need space in their first drafts. They have a broad idea of the plot of a book but don’t really know what they’re going to say until they say it. For these, the structure only emerges as they create, which means two things:
• Their first drafts are a mess
• Only in the second draft do they think about design and pattern
Other writers love outlines. They like to have the shape of a book firmly in mind before they start. They make notes, chapter by chapter. They work out all variations of point of view. They detail the narrative design.
Planning for the Climax: Novels Versus Short Stories
You must dramatize one scene in your novel: the climax. A climax that occurs off-stage is frustrating and disappointing to novel readers. Nor should the climax speed by in a few paragraphs. This is the point you’ve been building toward for three hundred pages. The reader wants to witness the pay-off in person and sufficiently satisfying length.
The climax is the culmination of your throughline, the event that brings into collision all the forces you’ve set up. The climax is the point where something has to give—and does.
It’s important to identify the moment when all the forces in your story come together to produce emotional and thematic fireworks. Although that moment comes near the end of the story, you plan for it in the middle. After mentally identifying those forces, you can work backward, choosing scenes for the middle that will dramatize the inexorable build of conflicting elements.
Then the loose ends are tidied up. This is the denouement.
Making Sure the Reader Stays on Track: Formal Structural Designs
In a short story, there are only a handful of events, usually narrated in chronological order. There aren’t more than three or four important characters to keep track of. As long as you provide sufficient transition phrases, nobody gets lost.
A novel is different. Some require the reader to keep straight dozens of characters, multiple flashbacks, shifts in location, and changes in point of view.
Formal structural designs are one way to prevent that. Formal structural design is an overall plan for presenting scenes throughout an entire novel. It doesn’t dictate the content of these scenes, but it does provide a pattern for presenting them. It helps the reader anticipate the ebb and flow of narrative.
It also helps the writer to decide which scene goes where.
Four common structural designs:
• Straight chronological
• Regularly recurring viewpoints
• Multiviewpoint chronological sections
• Parallel running scenes
A straight chronological structure is the easiest to follow (and the easiest to write). You start at the beginning of the story and show us each major event in the order either that it happened to your protagonist or that your protagonist learned about it. There may or may not be brief flashbacks, but they don’t last long enough to distract the reader from the main plot. When you get to the last important event, you stop writing.
The advantages of straight chronological structure are clarity and consistency.
The limitations of a straight chronological structure are point of view and range. Since this structure works best with a single point of view, whenever the point-of-view character isn’t present, you can’t show us what’s happening to anybody else. Since you’ve led a reader to expect that he’s seeing events in the order they happened, your emotional range is limited to what you can wring out of that order. You can’t leave out an emotionally tense scene and include it later, out of chronological sequence, just because it has more impact later.
You can have two or more point-of-view characters. One way is to set up a pattern of regularly recurring viewpoints so that the reader expects to hear from each character in the same order.
A disadvantage of regularly recurring viewpoints is that they may seem too mechanical. You may have to struggle with your plot to make it fit the point-of-view pattern. Minor variations are possible, but if you find yourself inventing peripheral events for your characters just because “it’s their turn,” this design is not good for your novel.
Multiviewpoint chronological section means breaking the novel into clearly labeled parts. Each part covers a set period of time, and everything that happens in that period is in that section, no matter whom it happens to or whose eyes we view it through. Within each section, put several chapters of varying length. Each chapter contains one and only one point of view. The reader quickly picks up the signal that every time a new chapter starts, the point of view changes; every time a new part of the novel starts, the story finishes the previous time or place and everybody gets to start fresh. This is complicated, but it gives t he reader a chance of knowing where he is, when, and with whom.
Multiviewpoint chronological sections offer the advantage of greater flexibility within each section. Scenes can be ordered to build tension, withhold information from the reader, or contrast behaviors.
However, because the structure resides in the divisions rather than in the content, this design is inherently weaker than the others and does not provide the reader with much sense of rhythm, anticipation, or inevitability. The sections may not all be the same length; the same poihnt-of-view characters may not turn up in each section. There aren’t patterns to count on.
Maximum rhythm and anticipation are achieved by using parallel running scenes. In this structure, two stories are going on simultaneously, alternating with each other chapter by chapter, until they come together at the end. This can be done with stories running in the past and current time or in two different settings. This technique can seem fragmented or it can build anticipation and inevitability.
Choosing a Structural Design
You have two choices:
• You can plan the whole book ahead of time to fit a chosen design
• You can write it however it occurs to you, read your first draft, choose the design that best shapes t he existing material, and rewrite as necessary.
Both methods can work. The point is that the final design should not be haphazard. Your best design is one that will keep your reader on track—and also make it easier for you to write the middle part of your book.
Chapter 5: “Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory”
To make character changes convincing, four things must happen:
• The reader must understand your character’s initial personality; and especially her motivation: why she is behaving the way she is.
• The reader must see that your character is capable of change. (Not everyone is)
• The reader must see dramatized a pattern of experiences that might reasonably be expected to affect someone.
• The reader must see a plausible new motivation replace the old one.
Stories grow out of what characters do, and, in turn, what characters do grows out of what they want.
Two kinds of motivation:
• Motives that are easily understandable to the reader because she would feel the same in a similar situation.
• Motives that are counter to our expectations of the world. The less common the character’s motive and the more it violates our stereotypes, the more background information you’ll have to supply to make the reader understand why this person is doing what he is doing.
Showing that characters are capable of change:
• Show the character is capable of other changes
• Show the values he hold that make changing his mind possible.
Why the character actually changes
The key word is pattern. Character changes should be the result of repeated, convincing experiences the character is forced to live through.
The guideline is to ask yourself, “Am I presenting the kind of experiences that make the reader think, ‘Well, yes, if this event happened to that person, he probably would behave like that. I might not, but he would.’”
Replacing an Old Motivation with a New One
It can be helpful to write the motivational switches on a piece of paper.
• What did each character want in the beginning of the book?
• What does he want now?
• Is it still the same desire?
• Do you know? If you don’t give it serious thought.
Special Case of Motivation: Villains
• The villain will be much more successful if he is self-justified.
• Villains need to act out of motives that make sense to themselves.
• Show the reader your villain’s self-justification—his motives, beliefs, rationalizations—and he will become much more plausible than the stock “bad guy.”
• Show us how the villain regards his villainies.
• Think about why the villain is causing everyone else so much trouble.
• Think about the villain’s psychology and motivation.
Encouraging Words about Middles
• The function of the middle of the story is to set up the ending.
• The middle clearly dramatizes those forces that will collide at the climax, including any potential character changes.
Chapter 6: “Help for Middles: Getting Unstuck”
Many writers get stuck in the middle. There are different kinds of “stuck” though they all feel the same (frustrating). There are also ways (that work) of getting “unstuck.”
Common reasons for getting stuck are
• Fear of failure
• Fear of success
• Literary fogginess
• Wrong direction
Many novelists get stuck if they become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of writing a novel—the page count, the time investment, and the stamina required.
Fear of Failure: The Tolstoy Syndrome
Novice writers get discouraged because they write the first half, read it over, and are immediately discouraged because it’s not as good as the professional stories they read every day. They suffer from the Tolstoy Syndrome, which affects only intelligent and self-aware people—and that includes most people who want to write. Their standards are high.
Getting stuck because nothing you write measures up to your own high standards is silly. You will only get better if you practice your craft, but you don’t practice your craft because you’re not already better at it. It is a vicious circle.
Robert Sheckley told himself that he wasn’t writing real stories—he was writing “simulations” of stories. This eliminated the pressure for him, and he was able to write.
If you can manipulate your attitude into reducing the internal pressure you put on yourself, maybe you can get unstuck and finish your story.
Fear of Success: The Never-Ending Story
This anxiety involves knowing you need to start another story when the current one is finished and you don’t have another idea to write about. So, you don’t finish. You spend your time polishing what’s already there, or planning various endings, or rewriting the opening, even though everyone who reads it likes it.
Another form of this fear is not mailing it out to publishers.
If such fears keep you stuck, you need to give yourself artificial deadlines. Set a date that the manuscript must be mailed by. Ask people who support you to ask you whether it’s been mailed yet.
Mail it.
Then—this is important—begin another story immediately. Forget about the one in the mail. The one that counts is the one you’re writing right now.
Literary Fogginess: What’s Supposed to Happen Next?
Sometimes you don’t work on a manuscript because you don’t know what’s supposed to happen next in the story.
• Either you started the work hoping inspiration would appear along the way and it hasn’t
• Or, you’ve written yourself into a corner.
This kind of block is a positive thing (though it will not feel like it). Your block is telling you that you’re not ready to be doing so much. You need to stop, go back to the beginning of the work, and take some time to plan.
Invest some thinking time in your characters and plot. Scribble notes.
• Do you understand what your characters want?
• Could they maybe want something else you’ve overlooked?
• What’s at stake in their story?
• Can you raise the stakes?
• Has the plot come to a standstill?
• What are some other directions it might take—even seemingly wild directions?
• Does anything about these scribbled notes excite you?
• Does that excitement suggest something you might want to write?
When you hit on something interesting, write it, even if it wasn’t the direction you’d originally envisioned.
Wrong Direction: I Left My Heart in Chapter Three
The above advice also works in this case.
In this version, you know where you are going. You’ve worked out the story in your mind or outlined it on paper, but things are not going well.
• You hate sitting down to write.
• The characters are behaving oddly.
• They are overreacting emotionally to simple occurrences.
• They are saying or doing things that strike you as out of character, but they must for your plot to work.
• They’re making long speeches to other characters about why they are doing what they are doing because without them, the reader won’t understand their actions.
All of these are symptoms of a wrong turn in the story.
• Characters who overreact indicate that the situation itself isn’t interesting enough.
• Out-of-character actions indicate either that your plot is wrong for these people or these people are the wrong ones to be inhabiting your plot.
• Long speeches indicate a gap in characterization.
In each of these cases, the solution is the same. Abandon the outline. It doesn’t work. You have two choices:
• If your characters are taking off in directions you didn’t anticipate, rejoice and go with them. Even if your plot is dead, your characters are still alive. Follow their lead and see if a new plot emerges from the unplanned actions you now prefer to write.
• Read over your story. Where was the last place you were genuinely interested? Wherever that point occurred, discard everything after it. Then sit down and build a new plot on what’s left.
Cut your losses. Keep what you can, and treat the story as a brand new project.
Techniques to Keep You Writing
Various writers have devised techniques to break their personal writer’s blocks.
Gene Wolfe refuses to allow himself to consume any words until he starts writing again. No books, magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, or unnecessary conversation. Eventually he gets so bored with this verbal Sahara that he returns to his typewriter.
Some morning writers set a minimum number of pages they must write every day before they allow themselves to take up the other parts of their lives. Frederik Pohl turns out four pages a day, seven days a week. Sometimes this takes forty-five minutes, sometimes it takes eighteen hours, but it gets done.
Other writers frame their commitment to writing in time, not page count. Flannery O’Connor wrote that she would sit at her desk from 9:00 a.m. until noon every day. During that time, no writing might get done, but nothing else was allowed to get done either. And if an idea did present itself, she was ready for it.
Many writers use “triggers” to get themselves primed to write when the pump has gone dry. Raing good fiction triggers in some the desire to write their own stories. Valerie Sherwood does the opposite. She triggers herself with “ludicrously awful” novels, so badly written that they instantly inspired confidence that she could write a better one.
Others use specific music to undam the creative flow.
Still others keep two projects going at all times, and, when one goes stale, switch to the other until their unconscious solves whatever narrative problem was blocking progress on the other.
There are writers who rely on physical activity. John Kessel jogged on the same days he wrote.
Some writers like Jack Dann treats “slow periods” as the way his unconscious lets him know it wants more material. He uses the time to research, read “anything that interests” him, and he trusts his creative mind to ferment until it’s ready to go again.
Some writers use rewards to entice themselves through difficult writing times. Finish three pages, and you can have a beer or see a movie.
Techniques That Won’t Get You Unstuck
Unless your external circumstances are very unusual, changing them won’t cure writer’s block. The way to get unstuck is not to shed your spouse, career, national citizenship, or material possessions. Whatever mires you in the middle of your story comes from inside, not outside, and that’s where you will have to deal with it.
Novels: Settling in for the Long Haul
Sometimes you get stuck not because of the content of your story, but because of its size. A novel can seem an overwhelming undertaking. Seen from the middle, a novel can seem like an endless task, but there are ways to make it more manageable.
The basic principle is to break everything down into smaller pieces, chapters, time, page count. Specifically:
• Don’t tell yourself, Now I’m sitting down to write a novel. Tell yourself, Now I’m sitting down to start the scene where Martha sneaks onto a Greyhound bus bound for Memphis. Concentrate on just that scene, giving it everything you’ve got. Put the rest of the task out of your mind while you write. Don’t hold back. There is no later. Write your best now.
• Track something. Keep records of the number of pages you write every week, or the percentage of chapters completed or points of view used in various scenes. Tape this growing record on the wall over your desk. If you use a computer, print out completed pages daily or weekly or as you finish an electronic file. The point is to have something tangible that grows over time, concrete proof of progress.
• Create deadlines for yourself, maintaining a little flexibility. There is a purposeful effect in saying, “I’m going to finish Chapter Five in two weeks.”
Writing a novel takes as long as it takes.
You may be a fast writer or a slow one. You may have several other commitments that limit your writing time, or you may be able to spend several hours every day at the keyboard. You may have a clear idea of your novel before you begin or you may have to spend some time and pages discovering what you want to say. There are so many variables that measuring yourself against some other writer’s timetable isn’t useful.
What is useful is devising some system—self imposed deadlines, writing appointments, schedules—to keep at the novel steadily. Try to build up a habit of steady writing that you can trust to hold over time.
