Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (32 page)

This kind of subplot can be resolved whenever the author wants. In a series, they may never be resolved, especially if the readers like them. Or they can be resolved within a chapter or two.

Whatever subplots you create, they should receive the same care and feeding as your main plot. You're not allowed to shortchange a subplot just because it's not the main story! They have the same rising action/climax/falling action structure as a main plot, complete with a complication or two along the way. They're just smaller in scope than the main plot.

Although subplots can exist separate from the main plot, you get bonus points from the reader if your subplots somehow connect to the main plot. When plot and subplot are woven together into a tight tapestry, the story becomes more compelling — it's essentially become a single story with multiple layers instead of several fragmented story lines connected by a single character. The reader isn't continually flipped from plot to subplot and back again because all the plots relate to each other, and that makes for tighter, easier reading.

In a paranormal novel, any real-world subplot should reach into the supernatural main plot and have an impact on it — and vice versa. A fine example of this is
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
. In a real-world subplot, Harry starts dating Ginny, the younger sister of his best friend Ron. Ron discovers the romance and becomes angry with both Harry and Ginny. Hermione, Harry's other best friend, tries to patch things up, but Harry and Ron continue to fight, and she eventually storms off, disgusted with both of them. As a result of all this, Harry spends a chunk of the book without his friends' help. This severely hinders his attempts to resolve his supernatural main goals for the book: shut the evil Lord Voldemort out of his mind and find a way to get at the magical memories stored in another wizard's head. It isn't until Harry has patched things up with Ron and Hermione that he's able to move ahead with his main goals. The subplots have a big impact on the main plot, which makes the book tighter. Whenever possible, your book should do the same.

I
was in trouble. My current book was going to run long by 30 or 40,000 words. I phoned up my editor, and she said not to sweat it. “Finish the book and we'll worry about length later,” she said. So I finished the book and sent it to her. A couple weeks later, she e-mailed back with, “It's too long. You need to cut 30 or 40,000 words.”

After I got over my urge to strangle her, I continued reading. “Every scene needs to count,” she wrote. “You have several scenes in which nothing really happens, and you can safely cut them.” Then she proceeded to list each, with depressing exactness. I sighed and called up my word processing program.

Two weeks later, I had a cleaner, tighter read that clocked in at 120,000 words — much closer to my contracted length. The pacing had also picked up considerably. I probably learned more about pacing from that book than I had in the previous two I'd written, and we'll take a look at those issues here.

Pace is how quickly or slowly your story moves from one event to the next. Action-packed stories that fling the reader from conflict to conflict have a fast (or even breakneck) pace, while novels layered with a great deal of description, character rumination, and careful conversation have a slow pace.

Pace is, frankly, subjective. One reader's snappy pace is another one's breakneck. One author's leisurely pace is another's dragfoot. General tastes in pace also change. Nineteenth-century readers allowed a much slower pace in their fiction, and authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Victor Hugo thought nothing of stopping the plot dead to explain how to build a log cabin or to deliver a little lecture on the history of the Paris sewers. As society sped up, however, the demand for a faster pace in fiction grew and these little side jaunts became unfashionable. You'll need to decide what kind of pace you want for your book while keeping several factors in mind.

Many paranormal novels are flat-out adventure novels, and most of the remaining ones usually have at least a hint of adventure to them. Adventure lends itself to a faster pace, with the characters rushing headlong from one conflict to the next, with only brief pauses here and there to catch their collective breath. Young adult paranormal fiction also tends to move quickly, the theory being that younger readers will lose patience with a slow book and set it down.

On the other hand, paranormal books that focus more on characters or relationships will oft en have a slower pace. The author takes the time to explore emotional reactions, internal thought processes, and the characters' relationships, which slows down the overall plot. This is fine, as long as your audience is expecting character and relationship instead of adventure. So the pace will depend on what you're writing.

There are trade-offs among types of pace. Faster-paced books tend to give the reader quite a lot of action, since they concentrate more on plot. Even character development scenes tend to be conflict-driven, and a sense of urgency drives the book continually forward.

Slower-paced books tend to give the reader more language play. When less is happening, the author needs to keep the reader's interest in other ways, and one method is to use more figurative language and other stylistic tricks to pull the reader along. Faster-paced books oft en lack the lovely language not because the author necessarily lacks the skill, but because there isn't room — extra similes and metaphors and other careful descriptions eat up words that the author wants to use for action.

Note that this is a
tendency
, not a hard rule. We all know authors who are stylistic geniuses and who can keep a story moving. Shakespeare is the most shining example. Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
is a stylish supernatural character story with a fairly fast pace, especially considering he wrote it in the Victorian era, a time when novels moved slower.

No matter what pace you settle on, however, your opening hook should be quick and snappy. As I said in chapter nine, you want to grab the reader right away, and a fast pace is the best way to do it. Once you've hooked the reader, you can slow down, if that's your intent.

Neil Gaiman's
Neverwhere
, for example, has an overall leisurely pace, but it begins quickly, with a paragraph about a girl fleeing from danger. Then it presents a creepy two-page conversation between two odd men named Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar. After that, things slow down considerably. Gaiman gives us a careful description of London along with a bit of the city's history, and then he slips into a long explanation of two characters named Richard and Jessica's relationship. Not much happens for several pages. The quick opening hook is meant to grab the readers so they'll stick around once Gaiman drops into the slower pace.

Naomi Novik does the same thing in
His Majesty's Dragon
. Temeraire, the dragon, doesn't hatch until page 17, and the preceding sixteen pages are filled with descriptions, character bits, and exposition. It's all exceedingly well written (which is partly how Novik gets away with it), but ultimately very little happens in those initial pages. The rest of the book has what I would call a slow-to-medium pace, until the climax, when she speeds up considerably. But Novik
starts
this slow-to-medium paced book with, “The deck of the French ship was slippery with blood,” and the rest of the paragraph shows us how the battle ends. Because her book has a slower pace, she makes sure to start with a fast opening hook.

Paranormal (and high fantasy) novels sometimes start with a prologue, a sort of chapter zero. I mention them here as a point of pacing. Authors, editors, and readers continue to debate them and their effectiveness. The first question is, what are they used for?

Some authors use prologues as opening hooks. They start with an action-heavy scene that usually ends badly for the main character, then they abruptly flash back to the past, where the events leading up to this scene begin. The theory is that the reader will be hooked by the action and then stick around to find out how we got there.

Prologues are also used to hand background information to the reader. See, paranormal novels oft en have a lot to explain. There's a magic system, secret history, cultural information, or any number of things that the reader might have to know in order to follow the main story, and a prologue can get that information to the reader quickly and efficiently, which makes them very useful. However, there are some problems inherent in prologues, too. Let's take a look.

Prologues help authors and readers in a number of ways. If you're writing in a complicated or strange setting, the prologue can clue the reader in very nicely. A prologue can give a character's backstory or history by showing events from years before the main story opens. A prologue can also show us events from another character's point of view so when the main character arrives at these events, we're already armed with a certain perspective.

Terry Pratchett opens several (though not all) of his books with a prologue that describes the Discworld. In
The Fifth Elephant
, he opens with:

After this, Pratchett shifts to the main characters. Later in the book, the existence of the crash-landed fifth elephant becomes extremely important, and the prologue helps the reader — weirdly — believe it a little more easily.

Prologues come with certain baggage. Some readers (and editors) flatly dislike them, no matter how necessary or well written they are. They also jerk the reader around by starting the story in one place and then suddenly popping through time or space to another. The reader has to start over, reorient in a new setting or with new characters just after settling in with the old ones. (This is why some readers hate prologues.) Finally, prologues are extra work for the author. You have to hook the reader twice — once for the prologue, and once for chapter one.

In the end, use prologues with caution. A prologue will automatically alienate some readers, but opening with chapter one alienates no one. If you're thinking of using a prologue, keep in mind a few tips:

First, keep it short. Say what you need to say, and get on to the first chapter. Terry Pratchett's prologue above isn't even 200 words long, and in the book it covers barely a third of a page.

Second, keep it extra-entertaining. You're starting with a potential strike against your book, so you'll need to give your reader a reward for putting up with it. It's oft en death to start with high-sounding language that sounds like it came out of a college textbook. Pratchett uses readergrabbing humor in his, which has the additional advantage of letting the reader know that the rest of the book will be funny, too.

Before you start with a prologue, ask yourself if there's any way to avoid it. Can your reader follow what's going on if you just start with your story? Couldn't you fill in the information a little later with some well-placed exposition? If the answer to either of these is
yes
, don't use a prologue.

Another possibility to consider is renaming the prologue. Is your prologue really just chapter one in disguise? If you can call it chapter one and move on, do so. J.K. Rowling starts
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
with the story of how Dumbledore brings the infant Harry to his awful aunt and uncle's house, and it's written in a fly-on-the-wall point of view. At the beginning of chapter two, we've jumped ahead ten years, and the story is suddenly told from Harry's point of view. We stay with Harry's point of view for the rest of the book, and we have no more giant leaps ahead in time. Rowling's opener, in fact, reads very much like a prologue, but it's titled chapter one. Hmmmm …