Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (7 page)

Make up a cool title, and then write a book to go with it.

Sound wacky? It isn't. A title can set your imagination zooming, looking for a story.

Titles can come from a variety of sources like poetry, quotations, and the Bible. Go through a book of quotations, like
Bartlett's
and jot down interesting phrases. Make a list of several words randomly drawn from the dictionary and combine them. Story ideas will begin bubbling up around you.

Take first lines from novels and make up a title. Dean Koontz's
Midnight
begins, “Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.”What might you do with that?

Perhaps something like these:
She Runs by Night. The Night Runner. Runner of Darkness. Night Run
.

Now all you have to do is choose one and write a novel to go with it. It's easy.

Early in his career, Ray Bradbury made a list of nouns that flew out of his subconscious. These became fodder for his stories.

Start your own list. Let your mind comb through the mental pictures of your past and quickly write one- or two-word reminders. I did this once, and my own list of more than one hundred items includes:

• The drapes (a memory about a pet puppy who tore my mom's new drapes, so she gave him away the next day. I climbed a tree in protest and refused to come down).
  
• The hill (that I once accidentally set fire to).
  
• The fireplace (in front of which we had many a family gathering).
  
• Cigar smoke (my dad, who loved his stogies).
  

Each of these is the germ of a possible story or novel. They resonate from my past. I can take one of these items and brainstorm a whole host of possibilities that come straight from the heart. You can do the same.

What issues push your buttons? Robert Ludlum once said, “I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage.” Outrage is a great emotion for a writer. So start an issues list. You might include:

• abortion
  
• environment
  
• gun control
  
• presidential politics
  
• talk shows
  
• people who yak on cell phones while driving
  

The late Edward Abbey based his novels on issues he cared about. For him, writing was a calling as well as a craft, which is one reason his books inspired a wide readership. The writer, Abbey believed, must be a moral voice. “Since we cannot expect truth from our institutions,” he wrote, “we must expect it from our writers!”

So one way to write who you are is to find the issues that press your hot buttons, then press them!

If you embody your moral viewpoint in a three-dimensional character who takes vigorous action to vindicate his cause, you'll virtually guarantee a story packed with emotion and dramatic possibilities. Want that in your fiction? Then do this:

• Find an issue that makes your cheeks red. It can be global, like military strategy, or local, like school board policy. It must, however, be something likely to make people mad.
  
• Choose up sides. What is your moral viewpoint about the issue? Come up with a good argument defending your position.
  
• Next,
  and most important
  , come up with a good argument for the other side! Few things are black and white in this world, and even those on the dark side feel justified in what they are doing. Your job as a writer is to see the whole picture, and that means treating your characters — all of them — fairly.
  
• Now ask yourself, “What kind of person would care
  most
  about each side of this issue?” Come up with several possibilities for each. Later you can choose the best.
  

Remember, however, that fiction is not a sermon. Your job is to deliver a gripping story, not a windy lecture.

Let your imagination play you a movie:

Sit down first thing in the morning and ask yourself, “What do I
really
want to write about at this moment in time?” List the first three things that come to your mind. This may take the form of issues (crime in the streets, euthanasia, lawyers, religion) or characters (a character who shows guts in the face of danger) or situations (what if somebody got stuck in a blimp over Iraq?). Pick the one that gets your juices flowing the most.

Close your eyes and start the movie. Just sit back and “watch.”What do you see? If something is interesting, don't try to control it. Give it a nudge if you want to, but try as much as possible to let the pictures do their own thing. Do this for as long as you want.

Then start writing, with no thought about plot construction, and keep writing for twenty minutes. Write about whatever you remember from the “movie.” You can make notes about character, plot ideas, themes, whatever. Just write. Do this every day for five days, adding to your written material each day.

Take a day off, then print a hard copy of your movie journal. Look it over and highlight the parts that turn you on. Go through the nurturing process now and apply the freshness test.

Music is a shortcut to the heart. Listen to music that moves you. Choose from different styles — classical, movie scores, rock, jazz, whatever lights your fuse — and as you listen, close your eyes and see what pictures, scenes or characters develop.

When you do find something worth writing about (and you will), you can use that piece of music to put you in the mood every time you sit down to write.

Perhaps the best and fastest way to get a story idea is through a character. The process is simple: develop a dynamic character, and see where he leads.

There are a variety of ways to come up with an original character. Here are a few:

• Visualizing.
  Close your eyes and “see” the first person who pops into your mind. Describe this person. Plop him down in a setting, any setting, and see what develops. Later ask yourself, “Why is this character acting this way? What pattern of character is developing here?”
  
• Re-Creating Who You Know.
  Take a fascinating character from your past. Don't try to copy him. “Re-create” him. Give him a different occupation. Even better, change his sex.
  He
  becomes
  her
  .What would your crazy uncle be like if he were really a woman?
  
• Obituaries.
  Every day the newspapers run obituaries. These are character biographies there for the taking! Adapt them. Take the interesting parts and apply them to a character of your own choosing. You can alter the age and the sex of the character and see how things play. Let loose.
  
• The worst thing.
  Once you have your character, ask this question: What is the worst thing that could happen to this person? Your answer may very well be the start of a novel of suspense, a novel the reader just can't put down.
  

If Shakespeare could do it, you can too. Steal your plots. Yes, the Bard of Avon rarely came up with an original story. He took old plots and weaved his own particular magic with them.

Admittedly, that's harder to do today. You can't lift plot and characters wholesale and pretend it's an original story. But you can take the germ of another plot and weave
your
particular magic with it. You can switch key characters and conventions (see “Flipping a Genre” listed next). You can follow the same story movements even as you add your own original developments.

“Originality,” says William Noble in
Steal This Plot!
, “is the key to plagiarism.” What he means is you cannot lift the exact plot, with the same characters intact. But you may take a pattern (and plot is nothing more than a story's pattern) and use it.

All genres have long-standing conventions. We expect certain beats and movements in genre stories. Why not take those expectations and turn them upside down?

It's very easy to take a Western tale, for example, and set it in outer space.
Star Wars
had many Western themes (remember the bar scene?). Likewise, the Sean Connery movie
Outland
is like
High Noon
set on a Jupiter moon. The feel of Dashiell Hammett's
The Thin Man
characters transferred well into the future in Robert A. Heinlein's
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
.

Even the classic television series
The Wild, Wild West
was simply James Bond in the Old West. A brilliant flipping of a genre that has become part of popular culture.

So play with genres, conventions, expectations. Mix them up. There is an idea there somewhere.

Novels can be “hot” because of the subject matter alone. If you are able to catch a topical wave before it breaks, you may have a winner.

The trick, of course, is in predicting what will occupy the popular mind. How can you do it?

The best source is specialty magazines. Often you'll get a window into the immediate and long-term future areas of interest to people.

This doesn't need to take a lot of time, either. Go to a newsstand and irritate the manager by scanning magazines like
Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Wired
,
Time
,
Newsweek
, and
U.S. News & World Report
. In addition,
USA Today
often has stories about cutting-edge technologies and issues. Jump on something interesting and ask:

• Who would care about this?
  
• What would that person do about it next year? In ten years?
  
• What would happen if all of society embraced this?
  
• What would happen if all of society rejected this?
  
• Who would it hurt the most?
  

Read newspapers. Scan all the sections. Have your homing device set for sparks that get your mind zooming in original directions.

Read
USA Today
. The paper is written in “arrested attention span” style — lots of little snippets you can scan quickly. One edition will yield at least a dozen possible ideas. Take an item and ask a series of what-if questions to expand on what you find. If an item itself has information you might want later, snip it and toss it in a box.

James A. Michener began “writing” a book four or five years in advance. When he “felt something coming on,” he would start reading, as many as 150 to 200 books on a subject. He browsed, read, and checked things. He kept it all in his head and then, finally, he began to write. All that material gave him plenty of ideas to draw upon.

Today, the Internet makes research easier than ever. But don't ignore the classic routes. Books are still here, and you can always find people with specialized knowledge to interview. And if the pocketbook permits, travel to a location and drink it in. Rich veins of material abound.

Don't forget experts, either. Find and interview people who lead in their fields. Go to ordinary folks who lived through certain periods or in certain places to get rich detail and factual accuracy.

Here's a quick way to get ideas from research:

• Choose a nonfiction book on some subject you always wanted to know about.
  
• Skim the book for an overview.
  
• Jot down plot ideas that come to you.
  
• Read the book in greater detail.
  
• Spot more ideas, and flesh out those you already have.
  

Do this, and soon your heart will connect with some bit of data that fires you up.

Try this exercise first thing in the morning. Your subconscious has been dreamily percolating through the night. It has things to tell you. So grab your cup of Joe and get to a paper or computer screen. Start with, “What I really want to write about is …”

Then write for ten minutes without stopping. Follow the thoughts that come to you, expanding them, going on to others, floating on the streams of your consciousness.

This is not only good for ideas, but also to loosen up your writing muscles. You can use this as a warm-up to your writing day.

By its nature, an obsession controls the deepest emotions of a character. It pushes the character and prompts her to action. As such, it is a great springboard for ideas.

What sorts of things obsess people? Ego? Looks? Lust? Careers? Enemies? Success?

What is Javert's obsession in
Les Miserables
? Duty. It drives him to fanaticism and finally death.

What is Ahab's obsession? A big, white whale. Without that obsession, we'd have no
Moby Dick
.

Dorian Gray is obsessed with youth.

All of the characters in
The Maltese Falcon
are obsessed with the black bird.

In
Gone With the Wind
, Rhett is obsessed with Scarlett. Scarlett is obsessed with Ashley. Therein lies the tale.

Create a character. Give her an obsession. Watch where she runs.

Dean Koontz wrote
The Voice of the Night
based on an opening line he wrote while just “playing around”: “You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.

Only after the line was written did Koontz decide Roy would be a boy of fourteen. He then went on to write two pages of dialogue that opened the book. But it all started with one line that reached out and grabbed him by the throat.

Joseph Heller was famous for using first lines to suggest novels. In desperation one day, needing to start a novel but having no ideas, these opening lines came to Heller: “In the office in which I work, there are four people of whom I am afraid. Each of these four people is afraid of five people.”

These two lines immediately suggested what Heller calls “a whole explosion of possibilities and choices.” The result was his novel
Something Happened
.

Likewise, Heller's classic
Catch-22
got started when he wrote these lines:“It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain,
Someone
fell madly in love with him.” Only later did Heller replace
Someone
with the character's name, Yossarian, and decide that the chaplain was an army chaplain, as opposed to a prison chaplain. The lines conceived the story.