Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (10 page)

This brilliant opening now allows the author to drop back in time and spend the rest of the book bringing us back to the point where it begins. We want to read because we have a character who is immediately sympathetic and interesting, tied up in the battle of his life. We were there from the very first sentence.

Here are some other ways to grab readers from the start.

James M. Cain's
The Postman Always Rings Twice
begins: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

We are, as they say,
in medias res
— in the middle of things.

Another form of immediate action is dialogue. If there is an element of conflict in there, so much the better. I chose this for my opening in
Final Witness
:

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Going into your third year?

”“Yes.”

“Second in your class?”

“Temporarily.”

“Isn't it true you have a motive to lie?”

“Excuse me?” Rachel Ybarra felt her face start to burn. That question had come from nowhere, like a slap. She sat up a little straighter in the chair.

This cross-examination style plunges us into instant conflict between two characters.

The Quiet Game
by Greg Iles begins with a father holding his four-year-old daughter in a line at Disney World:

Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.

“Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”

I do not look. I don't ask where. I don't because Annie's mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.

We bond with the Lead through his deep feeling of a universal emotion.

Still another way to capture attention from the start is with the
look-back hook
. Here is how Stephen King does it:

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

—
IT

The two things Sarah remembered about that night later were his run of luck at the Wheel of Fortune and the mask. But as time passed, years of it, it was the mask she thought about — when she could bring herself to think about that horrible night at all.

— The Dead Zone

The idea is to immediately suggest there is a not-to-be-missed story about to unfold.

When using first-person narration, especially in literary fiction, your can capture attention through voice and attitude as J.D. Salinger does here:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

—
The Catcher in the Rye

Grab your readers with judicious use of the methods outlined above. You still have a long way to go to keep readers turning the pages, but at least you'll be off to a good start.

The use of prologues is a venerable one, used by all sorts of writers in many different ways. But the most effective prologues do one simple thing — entice the reader to move to chapter one.

All of the rules we talk about in this chapter apply to prologues as well, with one primary exception: The prologue does not necessarily
have to
introduce your Lead character. It does, however, eventually have to connect to your main plot.

The primary ways prologues are used are as an action hook, as a frame story, and as a teaser.

With the
action prologue
, a staple of suspense fiction, we start off with some sort of big scene, many times involving death. This sets up the tone and stakes right away. Chapter one will begin the main plot, and what has just happened will hover over the entire story.

Sometimes the Lead character is involved in the prologue. In
Final Seconds
, by John Lutz and David August, the prologue involves a bomb scare in a New York public school. Harper, the Lead character, is a grizzled veteran of the New York Police Department's bomb squad. He arrives on the scene with his young partner. Tension builds as Harper tries to defuse the bomb. Finally, left holding a bit of explosive, Harper is almost there when …
boom
. And his hand is mostly blown off.

Chapter one opens two-and-a-half years later, with Harper going to see his partner — who was at fault for the accident. Harper is no longer with the NYPD.

Thus we get a prologue of incredible excitement and suspense, and as chapter one begins, we wonder how Harper has handled life after this traumatic experience.

Another example is Harlan Coben's
Tell No One
. The narrator, David Beck, opens by recounting an anniversary trip with his wife Elizabeth to a romantic lakeside, a place of good memories. Eventually they go swimming in the dark lake, make love, and lounge on a raft.

Then Elizabeth steps onto the dock. Beck stays on the raft. He hears a car door slam, and Elizabeth is gone.

Beck swims to the dock, shouting his wife's name.

He hears her scream. As he gets out of the water, he's struck by something and topples back into the lake. He hears her scream again, “but the sound, all sound, gurgled away as I sank under the water.”

That's the end of the prologue. Chapter one begins
eight years later
.

More common is the prologue involving characters other than the Lead — characters who may or may not show up in the main plot.

In Dean Koontz's
Midnight
, we are introduced to Janice Capshaw, who, as we know from earlier discussions, likes to run at night. As she jogs through the foreboding darkness, Koontz gives us some of her background, building up identification and even sympathy.

Suspense starts to build as Janice gets the feeling that someone — or something — is following her. How right she is. And at the end of the prologue, she is killed by some mysterious, horrible creatures.

The first chapter begins with Sam Booker, the Lead, arriving in the little town where the killing took place.

Which offers up this rule: If you do not introduce your Lead in the prologue, make sure you do it in chapter one! Readers want to know whom they are supposed to follow.

Note: Koontz labeled this prologue chapter “1” and the real opening chapter, chapter “2.” That's a choice you can make if you so desire. What matters is not the tag, but the function.

To use an action prologue, remember:

• Make the action big enough to justify a prologue.
  
• Keep it relatively short.
  
• End with trouble — something bad happens or is about to happen.
  
• Make sure you tie in the prologue with the main plot at some point, or at least explain what happened.
  

A prologue can also give us the view of a character about to look back and tell the story. Why do this? In order to set up a feeling that what is about to unfold has consequences that reach into the present and the future.

Stephen King's novella,
The Body
, begins with the narrator looking back to 1960, a “long time ago,” when he first saw a dead body. But he indicates that the incident was much deeper than a visual image — it was one of those things that “lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried. …”

The Catcher in the Rye
is a frame story, though Salinger does not mark it with
Prologue
or
Epilogue
. That comes out purely in the writing.

The narrator, Holden Caulfield, informs us he is going to tell about “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”

Where is
here
? We don't find out until the last chapter, where we learn Holden is in a sanitarium.

With a frame prologue:

• Establish the kind of feeling and tone you want to hover over the main plot.
  
• Make it good reading in and of itself, not just dry
  telling
  . An interesting voice is essential.
  
• Show us how the events about to unfold are affecting the prologue character
  now
  .
  

Though rarely used, the teaser can work on occasion. Mary Higgins Clark has done it more than once.

In the teaser, you present a scene at the beginning that will happen later on in the book. It's like a preview of a coming attraction.

Why do it this way? Because you grab the reader with action. You don't play the scene to full fruition, leaving a mystery. You leave the reader wondering,
How did this character get herself into this predicament?

When you get to that scene in the novel, you then play it out, and answer the reader's initial question.

Some purists object to the teaser, as it is not adding anything to the plot. It's just using plot material earlier, they say.

To which one answer is, So what? If it functions to grab the reader and create interest, then it is doing its job.

For a teaser, do this:

• Select a highly charged scene from your story.
  
• You may choose to use the exact same wording, or rework it a bit.
  
• Stop short of resolution, so you truly tease your readers to move on.
  

Before I started to sell my fiction, I had a major weakness with characters. I would come up with a plot or situation, but I'd stock it with cardboard story people, characters who seemed to be on the page just because I stuck them there.

Then I happened across Lajos Egri's advice about living, vibrating human beings being the secret of great and enduring writing. Egri suggested that if you truly know yourself, deeply and intimately, you will be able to create great, complex, and interesting characters.

That's because we have all experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, every human emotion. By tapping into our emotional memories, we can create an infinite variety of characters.

This is not a book on character creation though there is overlap. Plot doesn't work without characters; the stronger your characters, the better your plot. For your character work, I recommend reading
Creating Dynamic Characters
or
Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
, both by Nancy Kress. Strong characters draw readers into your plot. This dynamic is called the
bond
.

After conceiving a compelling Lead character, you must go a step further and figure out how to create an emotional bond with the reader. You can accomplish this by mastering four dynamics — identification, sympathy, likability, and inner conflict.

Since the Lead character provides access to a plot, it follows that the more the reader can identify with the Lead, the greater the intensity of the plot experience. With identification, you create the wondrous feeling that the story, in some way, is happening to
me
.

Identification means, simply, that the Lead is like us. We feel that we could, under the right circumstances, find ourselves in the same position in the plot, with similar reactions.

The Lead appears to us to be a real human being.

What are the marks of a real human being? Look inside yourself. Most likely, you are: (1) trying to make it in the world; (2) a little fearful at times; and (3) not perfect.

In
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, Stephen King gives us nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, who is walking in the woods with her mother. The trouble begins when Trisha gets lost, and why does she get lost? Because she petulantly stomps away from her mother to relieve herself. It's such a simple, human response that we easily identify with it. That's how King draws us into his Lead character's immediate crisis.

Trisha's not perfect. She has normal human flaws.

Your key question here is: What does your Lead do and think that makes her just like most people? Find those qualities, and readers will begin to warm to the Lead.

This works even with (perhaps most crucially with) the heroic Lead. Take Indiana Jones. In
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, it would have been tempting to leave him as some sort of superman, overcoming all odds without a hitch. But the filmmakers wisely gave him an understandable human flaw: a fear of snakes. This humanizes Jones and makes him more accessible.

Another word for identification is
empathy
.

In contrast to mere empathy, sympathy intensifies the reader's emotional investment in the Lead. In my view, the best plots have a Lead with whom some sympathy is established. Even if the Lead has negative qualities, like Scarlett in
Gone With the Wind
, you can find ways to generate sympathy nonetheless.

There are four simple ways to establish sympathy. Choose wisely. Don't overload them, as it may make the reader feel manipulated.

[1] Jeopardy.
Put the hero in terrible, imminent trouble and you've got the sympathy factor at work right away. In
Tom Gordon
, Trisha is lost in dangerous woods after she stomps away. That's immediate, physical jeopardy.

Jeopardy can also be
emotional
. Dean Koontz often uses this device. In
Midnight
, FBI agent Sam Booker is close to an emotional abyss. His teenage son hates him, and he is fighting to find reasons to keep on living. He is in emotional jeopardy. Part of the depth of the book comes from his finding reasons to carry on.

[2] Hardship.
If the Lead has to face some misfortune not of her own making, sympathy abounds. In
The Winner
, David Baldacci gives us a poor, southern woman who grew up without love, education, or good hygiene (even her teeth are bad). So when she takes steps to overcome her state of affairs, we are rooting for her.