The Fire in Fiction (10 page)

"And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another," the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. "Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn't that the truth,
badar?"

"Indeed it is," said Babi.

Many writers would let it go at that, but Hosseini knows that travelogue and story are not the same. At Bamiyan, Laila, Tariq, and Babi climb to the top of the statues. The view of the Afghan countryside provokes Babi to reveal to Laila why he married her now-sour mother and how much he misses Laila's two dead brothers. He then shocks her with an admission: "As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it." That adds an element of tension to the day and to the novel, and is the scene's turning point for Laila. Her future now could be extremely different, possibly in a different land.

Hosseini also knows that every outer turning point has an inner counterpart. That occurs at the end of the chapter. Babi's revelation triggers a realization in Laila:

There was something she hadn't told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one important way, she was glad they couldn't go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-faced
earnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning around. But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four weeks without Tariq when he had gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How could she ever cope with his permanent absence?

Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her.

Hosseini thus accomplishes several things at once: He conveys Laila's inner turning point, sets a larger conflict, and connects the violent history of Afghanistan directly to the lives of his characters. Not bad for a scene that began as a sightseeing trip. The scene advances the story but does so not through the mild action ofvisiting an historic site but by using that site as a springboard for twin turning points.

What about your scenes? Does every scene of travel, arrival, aftermath, investigation, meeting—all the business of getting your characters from beginning to end—capture a sharply defined turning point and reveal its inner meaning? Are you sure? What if you were to do a scene draft of your novel? Suppose that you broke down every discrete unit of the story, pinned down its turning point, and measured in words the change it brings to each scene's point-of-view character? Would your story get stronger?

I suspect so. You might even find that a scene you considered cutting is now vital to the progression of the plot.

DIALOGUE

A common downfall of many scenes is dialogue. The characters talk, talk, talk, but scenes spin in circles and don't travel much of anywhere. Plenty of dialogue in manuscripts also is hard to follow. Choked with incidental
action, broken into fragments, and strewn over the length of a page, it can take almost archaeological skill to piece together an exchange.

Dialogue not only needs to do its own work, it also can bring clarity to middle scenes that would otherwise be muddy and inactive. Dialogue is strong (or can be). The process of stripping it down and finding the tension in it can be revealing. It can help define the purpose of a scene.

Brunonia Barry's best-selling debut novel,
The Lace Reader
(2008), spins a story of the present-day denizens of Salem, Massachusetts, in particular the eccentric clan of Whitney women, who have the ability to "read" people by holding pieces of lace in front of their faces. The novel initially is narrated by Towner Whitney, another in the army of unreliable narrators who crowd the pages of contemporary fiction. Towner is called home to Salem when her mother, Eva, an often-arrested rescuer of battered and abused women, goes missing and later is found dead.

Deeper in,
The Lace Reader
switches to other points of view, principally John Rafferty, another in contemporary fiction's army of wounded big city cops who've retreated to small towns. It falls to Rafferty to investigate Eva's death, and thereby dig up Salem's dirt. Salem has a bona fide witch in Ann Chase, a contemporary ofTowner's, to whom Rafferty turns for help. When a teenage runaway named Angela also goes missing, Rafferty asks Ann to do a reading on Angela using Angela's toothbrush as a focal object. Ann won't do the reading but offers to guide Rafferty in doing a reading himself.

Now, how would you handle this middle scene? Would you portray Rafferty's first eerie experience of seeing with second sight? Would you work from Ann's knowing point of view? Barry does neither. She portrays the reading and its aftermath in dialogue:

"When you're ready, open your eyes."

He opened them.

He felt embarrassed, and completely inept. He'd totally failed.

"Describe what you saw," Ann said.

Rafferty didn't speak.

"Go ahead," she said. "You can't make a mistake."

"Well, first of all, I didn't go up, I went down."

"All right, maybe
you
can make a mistake."

"It was a ranch house," he said, trying to explain. He expected her to end the exercise right there. Or tell him to stop wasting her time. Instead she took a breath and continued.

"What did you see when you went down the stairs?"

"I didn't see anything," he said. "Nothing at all."

"What did this nothing at all look like?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"Humor me," she said.

"It was black. No, not black, but blank. Yeah. Dark and blank," Rafferty said.

"What did you hear?"

"What do you mean, what did I hear?"

"Where there any sounds? Or smells?"

"No. ... No sounds. No smells."

He could feel her eyes on him.

"I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything. I kept trying to go back up the stairs. I failed Psychic 101," Raf-ferty said.

"Maybe," Ann said. "Maybe not."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I went into the room with you," Ann said. "At least I thought I did."

"And what did you see?

"Nothing. It was too dark."

"I told you," Rafferty said.

"I heard something, though ... a word."

"What word?"

"Underground."

"Underground as in hiding? Or underground as in dead?"

Ann didn't answer. She had no idea.

Notice that Barry keeps her dialogue short. The exchange is not rat-a-tat, but even so it's quick. There's tension between Rafferty and Ann, however rudimentary it may be. Consider, too, what this snippet of the novel has to accomplish: It has to show that Ann is a true parasensitive, while Rafferty is not, and reveal a morsel of information about the missing Angela.

Dialogue lets Barry accomplish all that with immediacy and tension. We also do not have to believe in second sight. Barry doesn't force us to accept whether it's real or not. By remaining objective, with dialogue, she leaves the choice to us, which in a way preserves the mystery of it. More to the point, a sloggy and potentially off-putting middle scene has become taut and dramatic. Wouldn't you like all of your middle scenes to have that effect?

We can pretty much count on thriller writer Harlan Coben for crackling dialogue. Coben never wastes words and is particularly good at speeding his middles along with tension-filled talk. In
The Woods
(2007), he spins another of his patented stories in which a past secret haunts his protagonist and someone who was presumed dead returns to stir things up.

Paul "Cope" Copeland is a county prosecutor in New Jersey. His past is clouded by a summer camp tragedy in which he and a girlfriend snuck into the woods along with four others, including Paul's sister. While Paul and his girlfriend were fooling around, the four others were slashed to death. Two bodies were found; the two others (including Paul's sister) were not. Guess what happens? Yup, the dead return. Or do they? And why is suspicion now directed at Paul?

Meanwhile, Paul is prosecuting a college frat house rape case. Thrillers (hopefully all fiction) are built on the axiom
make it worse for the protagonist.
This, Coben does. One obstacle he throws in Cope's way is EJ Jenrette, the father of one of the frat boys. He's rich. His friends support a cancer charity that Cope established in memory of his dead wife. Jenrette convinces these friends to back out of their commitments. There are a number of ways in which Coben could have handled this stakes-building step in his story, but he chooses a late-night phone call from Cope's brother-in-law, Bob, who runs the charity:

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Your rape case is costing us big-time. Edward Jen-rette's father has gotten several of his friends to back out of their commitments."

I closed my eyes. "Classy."

"Worse, he's making noises that we've embezzled funds. EJ Jenrette is a well-connected son of a bitch. I'm already getting calls."

"So we open our books," I said. "They won't find anything."

"Don't be naive, Cope. We compete with other charities for the giving dollar. If there is even a whiff of a scandal, we're finished."

"Not much we can do about it, Bob."

"I know. It's just that ... we're doing a lot of good here, Cope."

"I know."

"But funding is always tough."

"So what are you suggesting?"

"Nothing." Bob hesitated and I could tell he had more to say. So I waited. "But come on, Cope, you guys plea-bargain all the time, right?"

"We do."

"You let a lesser injustice slide so you can nail someone for a bigger one."

"When we have to."

"These two boys. I hear they're good kids."

"You hear wrong."

"Look, I'm not saying that they don't deserve to be punished, but sometimes you have to trade. The greater good. JaneCare is making big strides. It might be the greater good. That's all I'm saying."

"Good night, Bob."

"No offense, Cope. I'm just trying to help."

"I know. Good night, Bob."

Dialogue allows Coben to introduce this obstacle with brisk efficiency. In less than a page, and with plenty of tension, he raises Cope's stakes. The passage is easy to read. Bing, bam, boom, it makes its point. No slogging here.

How many of your dragging middle scenes could be tightened and torqued up with dialogue? How tight is your dialogue generally? Is it lean and mean or is it choked up with incidental action and lengthy attributives? Strip it down. Pump it up. Taut dialogue is one of the secrets of making sure that middles scenes are not candidates for cutting.

STRIDING FORWARD, FALLING BACK

Most instruction in writing scenes begins with the sound advice,
send your character into the scene with a goal.
Well, duh. You would be surprised, though, in how many middle scenes in how many manuscripts there seems to be no particular reason for a character to go somewhere, see someone, learn something, or avoid something. What do they
want?

It can be hard to tell. Now, this is not to say that the immediate goal needs to be flatly stated.
If he didn't sell his boss on his idea for marketing organic toothpaste, and right now, then he was finished!
How clunky. Most authors would like their characters' needs to emerge more artfully, to infuse the action of the scene rather than squat atop it like an elephant on an egg. I'm good with that. But this restraint is too often a convenient excuse for not working out what a character wants or needs at this particular moment.

Working that out is essential to shaping a scene in which everything that happens has meaning. At the end of a scene, we want to feel that something important occurred. A change took place. The fortunes of the character and the path of the story have shifted. We won't get that feeling unless we get, in some way, a prior sense of what we're hoping for—a hope that in the scene is either fulfilled or dashed or delayed.

George R.R. Martin is the best-selling author of a massive fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire that began with
A Game of Thrones
(1996) and
A Clash ofKings
(1999). In the third volume,
A Storm of Swords
(2000), Martin advances the epic struggle for the Iron Throne. Summarizing the plot is impossible. There are so many points of view that each volume contains a character guide with hundreds of listings grouped by family and spheres of influence. Suffice it to say that everyone has an agenda and no one is wholly good or bad.

One of the recurring points of view in
A Storm of Swords
is that of Jon Snow, bastard son of the king of the North. Jon is a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, a badly depleted force charged with guarding an immense wall that protects the southern lands from a mysterious race to the north called the Others. Not all humans live south of the wall. North of the wall, deserters and outcasts called wildlings have formed their own quasi-kingdom. Captured, Jon meets the self-appointed King-Beyond-the-Wall, Mance Rayder, who will decide Jon's fate.