Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (3 page)

• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a girl lost in the woods who desperately wants to get back to civilization.
  
• In
  Jaws
  , Brody desperately wants to
  get
  the shark.
  
• In
  Rose Madder
  , Rose wants to
  get away
  from her psycho husband.
  
• In
  The Firm
  , Mitch McDeere wants to
  get away
  from the Mafia.
  

Solid plots have one and only one dominant objective for the Lead character. This forms the “story question” — will the Lead realize her objective?

You want readers to worry about the story question, so the objective has to be essential to the well-being of the Lead. If the Lead doesn't get it (or get away from it), her life will take a tremendous hit for the worse.

Here are a few hints on making that objective crucial.

If the objective is related to
staying alive
, that always fits the bill. Most suspense novels have the threat of death hanging over the Lead from the start. Death can also hang over others — Clarice Starling in
The Silence of the Lambs
is driven to stop Buffalo Bill before he kills another innocent victim.

Not all objectives have to involve death, however. The essential thing is that it is crucial to
that Lead's
sense of well-being.

Consider Oscar in Neil Simon's play,
The Odd Couple
. He is a very happy slob. Nothing pleases him more than smoky poker games in his apartment, and he not cleaning up afterward. He takes in his suicidal friend, Felix, out of compassion. But Felix is a clean nut. Eventually, this drives Oscar crazy. If he doesn't get rid of Felix, his happy life as a slob will be ruined! The story works because Simon establishes just how important being sloppy is to Oscar's happiness.

Now our human fly is halfway up the Empire State Building. We already know he's interesting because he has an objective, and with a little imagination, you can think up a reason why this is crucial to his well-being.

Is there anything we can do to ratchet up the engrossment level? Yes! New York City cops are trying to stop him. They have plans to nab him around floor 65.Worse yet, a mad sniper across Fifth Avenue has him in his sights. Suddenly, things are a lot more interesting.

The reason is
confrontation
. Opposition from characters and outside forces brings your story fully to life. If your Lead moves toward his objective without anything in his way, we deprive readers of what they secretly want: worry. Readers want to fret about the Lead, keeping an intense emotional involvement all the way through the novel.

Some wise old scribe once put it this way: “Get your protagonist up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Then get him down.”

Throwing rocks means putting obstacles in your Lead's way. Make things tough on him. Never let him off easy.

I once asked an old sports writer why he thought boxing was so popular. He smacked his fist into his hand. “Pow!” he said, letting his arm fall like a sack of potatoes.

People watch boxing for the knockout, he explained. They'll accept a decision, but they prefer to see one fighter kissing the canvas. What they hate is a draw. That doesn't satisfy anyone.

Readers of commercial fiction want to see a knockout at the end. A literary novel can play with a bit more ambiguity. In either case, the ending must have knockout
power
.

A great ending can leave the reader satisfied, even if the rest of the book is somewhat weak (assuming the reader decides to stick around until the end). But a weak ending will leave the reader with a feeling of disappointment, even if the book up to that point is strong.

So take your Lead through the journey toward her objective, and then send the opposition to the mat.

Our human fly can make it to the top victoriously or fall tragically. He can crawl through a window that is a metaphor for a new life. The range of endings is massive.

Personally, I'd like to see him make it and write a best-selling novel about the experience.

While there are a number of plot varieties (
see chapter twelve for a discussion of patterns in plot
), you can boil them all down and fit them into the LOCK system. A Lead with an intense objective, thrust into confrontation, runs through the story until it ends.

Let's see how this stacks up against some popular plots.

How about
Love
? Sure, that's simple. Boy wants girl. Girl denies boy his objective. He battles to win her love. He confronts her resistance by buying her flowers, singing her songs, protecting her from bad guys and all that romantic stuff. He gets her at the end or not. That's one variety of the love plot.

You can substitute the boy's and girl's families as the opposing forces, and you come up with another variety of the love story. See
Romeo and Juliet
.

Take another plot,
Change
. Here, the plot focuses on an inner transformation in the Lead character. The Lead desires to stay as he is. Forces arise that challenge his complacency. He tries to resist the forces. But he is overcome at the end, and he changes. See
A Christmas Carol
.

Objectives can be external or internal. The confrontation can be physical or psychological. But the LOCK system works in all cases.

Your book can be literary or commercial, and you have a huge platter of plot varieties to choose from. But if you keep a compelling Lead battling to achieve his desire, you're going to have a solid story every time. As novelist and writing teacher Barnaby Conrad puts it, “Once you get a character with a problem, a serious problem, ‘plotting' is just a fancy name for how he or she tries to get out of the predicament.”

The difference between a literary and a commercial plot is a matter of feel and emphasis.

A literary plot often is more leisurely in its pace. Literary fiction is usually more about the inner life of a character than it is about the fast-paced action.

A commercial plot, on the other hand, is mostly about action, things happening to the characters from the outside.

A commercial plot often feels like this:

A literary plot often feels like this:

Of course these are overly simplistic diagrams. There can be both literary and commercial elements in a book.

Scott Smith's
A Simple Plan
reads like a literary novel — what happens inside the first-person narrator is primary — while moving ahead like a commercial crime novel.

The strength of Stephen King's commercial plots is in his characterizations. He always seems to be writing about real people, and not merely players for his high-concept concoctions.

Literary fiction is much more comfortable with ambiguities. The endings may be downers or leave the reader wondering. We don't know what's going to happen to Holden at the end of
The Catcher in the Rye
, and that's part of the power of the book.

In commercial fiction, you usually have the good guy winning over the bad guy.

Sometimes literary fiction is called
character driven
, and commercial fiction,
plot driven
. Plot driven usually means heavy on the action and light on character work. Character driven, on the other hand, often implies a slower story with less action and more interior work.

I find this to be an arbitrary and unhelpful distinction.
All
plots are character driven. Without a character facing trouble that is understandable to the reader, you don't have a plot at all. That's why LOCK begins with Lead.

Further, you can have all the action in the world, but if your characters don't ring true, your story will fail.

Instead, I will use the more common markers literary and commercial if only because that's how bookstores and critics and readers often think.

But plots need characters, and characters need plots.

Some writers object to thinking about plot because it may lead to formulaic writing. They miss a critical distinction. Why does something become a formula in the first place?
Because it works!

Here is a formula for an omelet: Crack a couple of eggs. Scramble them. Heat up a skillet. Butter it. Pour in the eggs. Cook them a bit. Add ingredients. Fold the eggs over the ingredients. Serve.

This is a formula that works. But notice the variables.

Depending on the cook and the experience level, the omelet can be delicious, a disaster, or something in between.

And with the addition of certain spices, the flavor can vary.

It's still an omelet, it's still a formula, but it has a whole range of outcomes.

Same with plotting. There are principles that work. But used alone they don't guarantee an original novel. You still have to add your spices, your skills, your talent.

Knowing why plots work is freeing. Master the principles, and you're at liberty to add all of your personal touches.

Good chefs have their secret spices, ingredients they use to give their creations something extra and unique. For writers, the spices you add to make your plot your own include characters, setting, and dialogue.

In his book,
The Art of Creative Writing
, Lajos Egri asserts that the key to originality in fiction comes from characters. “Living, vibrating human beings are still the secret and magic formula of great and enduring writing. Read, or better, study the immortals and you will be forced to conclude that their unusual penetration into human character is what has kept their work fresh and alive through the centuries. …”

Note the word
formula
.

Let's test this.

What is it that sets Dickens apart in our minds? Fagin and Wilkins Micawber; Uriah Heep and Miss Havisham; Peggotty and Barkis. Characters who sparkle in his plots like jewels.

How about a more contemporary example? I mentioned Stephen King. Study his work and you will see that his character development is every bit as original as his plot lines. The two work together. Take a look at the myriad characters in
The Stand
; you will not find a dullard anywhere.

Don't let any of your characters plop into your plot like plain vanilla. Spice them up.

Can you take us to a place we've never been before? That will enliven any plot. And I don't necessarily mean some place far away from home, although that's an option.

It could mean simply setting your scenes in places that are fresh.

How many times do we have conversations between two potential lovers in a restaurant? Back and forth they go, with the only original element being what they are served by the waiter.

Why not put them in a tree house? Or on the subway stuck in a tunnel? Or underneath the boardwalk by the sea?

Setting also includes the details of life surrounding the Lead character. Tom Clancy created a whole new genre called techno-thriller because he put his hero, Jack Ryan, into a world of complex military hardware. That was new.

Readers love to read about the details of other people's working lives.

Do research. Immerse yourself in some occupation, either by training for it or by interviewing an expert about it.

Whatever you do, don't show characters practicing their chosen professions in the same old predictable way. Dig deeper and find original details. You can still write about cops and lawyers and truck drivers, but only if you give them updated challenges and settings. Find out what they are and spice up your writing.