Life, Plot, Story

A story is more than stuff that happens to a person. And yet, if a friend were to tell you something that happened to them at work or at school or wherever, you wouldn’t be uninterested.

In fact, if it was something amusing or surprising or touching in some way, it might even be quite compelling. This incident might involve coincidence, luck, randomness and have no real conclusion, but that won’t necessarily stop you hanging on every word.

However, put that same story down in print, and it doesn’t have quite the same effect. Now it’s contrived and pointless and banal.

Why? What makes fiction—whether it be a short story or a novel—different from real life? And how can we use this difference to help create more engaging and entertaining stories?

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The Escalation of Complications

The worst thing a story can be is boring. A dull tale, whatever the genre, whatever the length, will be a hard sell no matter how well written.

The most common advice for making a story more interesting is to increase the conflict.

More problems, sharper tension, higher stakes. The harder you make life for you main character, the greater the interest in how they’re going to reach their goal.

This isn’t particularly revolutionary information. Both as readers and as people we know that the most interesting stories are the ones where people face the greatest adversities, so it stands to reason that the tougher you make things the better.

However, while it’s pretty clear more conflict is a good idea, it isn’t always obvious how you go about this. If you just throw everything you can think of at the protagonist it can feel unrealistic and melodramatic. Random events overwhelming a character can also overwhelm the story and shift the tone in a direction you might not have intended. So how do you make life worse for your protagonist in an organic manner?

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All Character, No Plot

Occasionally I will get questions from new writers and by far the most common concern plot. The aspiring novelist will have a very strong grasp of who they want to write about and where proceedings will be set, but actually coming up with a plot seems daunting.

For some people the events that take place are the first things they come up with, but if that isn’t how it works for you then having an intimate knowledge of your main character is still an excellent route to working out what the story will be about.

Bear in mind that even the most inexperienced of writers is still a hugely experienced reader. We have all been reading, hearing and watching stories for many years. But while everyone feels confident in their ability to judge whether those stories are good, bad or indifferent, when it comes to our own writing it becomes much more tricky to gauge.

If you have a strong sense of how a story will go that’s all well and good, but if you don’t then here are three steps that will help demystify the process.

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What A Character Wants Is Only Step One

First you need a character who wants something, even if (as Kurt Vonnegut said) it’s only a glass of water.

This simple dynamic is at the heart of ever plot. If you find plots difficult to write, this is where to start. Whether it’s wanting to stop the alien invasion or wanting the dog next door to shut up, as soon as a goal is identified you can start building a narrative.

You build this narrative by deciding what the character is going to do. You know what they want, so how are they going to get it?

The journey from not having what they want to having it, whether in a scene or a chapter or over the course of a novel will be what the reader follows and hopefully they’ll get into the momentum and flow of it.

But as well as providing a narrative, what the character does in pursuit of his goal also serves two very important additional roles.

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A Plot Problem Is A Character Problem

If a story seems a little dull, if the plot doesn’t seem to be very engaging, you could deal with it by having more stuff happen, more people running around, new characters, additional subplots and so forth.

Usually, though, the problem is not in what’s happening, the problem is who’s doing it.

If the character hasn’t been created with enough depth, what they get up to will feel arbitrary and unsatisfying. If the plot isn’t holding people’s attention, the first place you should look is character.

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Contrivances Aplenty

All stories are contrived. A story is carefully set up so the pieces  fall when they’re supposed to. In real life it doesn’t work like that. Murder’s go unsolved. Bank robbers get away. Bankers get even bigger bonuses. But we don’t read stories so we can see the world in its unfathomable weirdness that makes little sense (that’s what we have windows for).

The value ascribed to real life events are not the same when they are used by writers. In real life, winning the lottery is hugely unlikely. In a story it is very easy to arrange. That ability of the writer’s to make things happen any way he wants, can often derail a story if it is too obvious.

Any time you write down a story the reader is aware that there is a guiding hand behind the events, even if it’s only subconsciously. And knowing that is what enables you to keep the mechanics of what you’re doing hidden. Like in a magic trick, it isn’t stopping them seeing, it’s controlling where they look.

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Make the most of it

If what appears to be happening in a scene is exactly what is happening in a scene, it can read as plodding and obvious. Direct, on-the-nose, mono-layered, mono-tone storytelling has a tendency to read as juvenile. That’s not to say the writing can’t be simple, but simple isn’t the same as simplistic.

One way to add depth to a scene is to take into account where the scene is set, and use the setting to create sophisticated storytelling. It should be noted that as simple doesn’t mean simplistic, so sophisticated shouldn’t mean convoluted.

Here are eight ways to achieve a greater level of depth without being too obvious (or too waffly) about it:

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Story vs Plot

Aren't these just two ways to say the same thing? Does it really matter if you don't know the difference?

On a very basic level STORY is what happens and PLOT is how it happens. There are various simplified explanations of this, the most famous probably being E.M. Forster’s:

The King died and then the Queen died – is a story.

The King died and then the Queen died from grief – is a plot.

The suggestion being that plot provides a deliberate causal relationship between events that tells the reader the reasons for what happened, and what it means in a wider context. This is all very well but how does it help you to be a better storyteller?

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T is for Toil and Trouble

Looking for trouble? You better be, because story is all about conflict and tension. Trouble needs to be in the rear view mirror or on the horizon or next to you in the passenger seat, or all three. If it's happening right now then you should have the reader gripped. Of course, you don't always want to be in the middle of it. But even when you're in between moments of high drama there should still be a sense of it around.

If trouble is approaching then it needs to be foreshadowed. A man sunbathing on the beach feeling relaxed and happy is not very interesting. Even if it is intended as the lull before the storm and a few paragraphs later an aeroplane falls out of the sky into the ocean in front of him, that section of him catching rays needs to have something about it that suggests the approaching catastrophe. 

You can do that in many ways (and I will go into that little later) but if you don't, if you decide you want the contrast of a relaxed easygoing moment before things go haywire, the problem is people will skim it and there's nothing you can do to stop that if you don't add some kind of tension.

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I is for Inciting Interest

At some point in the first chapter the main character will have to deal with something. Some issue will arise, a problem will present itself, a revelation will be made, a decision will be considered. This inciting incident will set the story into motion, and tell the reader the sort of thing they can expect. The tone, the theme, the level of realism. Sometimes it occurs on the first page, maybe even in the first line. Or it can take a while for it to emerge, allowing us to get to know the characters and the setting.

The inciting incident doesn't necessarily have to be a problem the main character will be dealing with throughout the whole story. It can be one of a series of events that lead into whatever the story is about. But it has to capture the reader’s interest as it is the first point of entry into the story proper.

Big or small, of domestic or global importance, two things need to be considered. Firstly how are you going to present whatever it is? And secondly what are the consequences?

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Book Autopsy 2: A Love Story

In my last post I analysed the first chapter of Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, but to be honest this was something of a soft target. As a thriller it naturally follows most of the 'rules' of contemporary literature popular with creative writing teachers and how-to books. Starting off with a hook, keeping pace high, using action to move the plot, these are all fairly standard for the genre.

My dissection of the first chapter still revealed some interesting things, but I think it would be even more intriguing to take the same approach with a book from a completely different genre: Romance.

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Chapter One Analysis

I'm going to take the first chapter of a successful novel and break it down to see how the author hooks the reader, what information he feels is necessary at this point of the story, how he approaches things like POV, character and voice.

The book I've chosen is A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives). A 237 page, tightly written suspense thriller, it is a commercial novel but with many unconventional touches, extremely well plotted with some very clever twists and turns. It was his first novel, which is also one of the reasons I chose it. Chapter One is just over four pages long.

There will be the spoilers. 

Chapter 1 starts with these lines:

His plans had been running so beautifully, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all. Hate erupted and flooded through him, gripping his face with jaw-aching pressure. That was all right though; the lights were out.

On the surface this gives a very clear indication of his mood.  In fact it tells the reader directly that 'he' is angry and blames 'she'. The writing is visual and the last line gives a nice sense that he's hiding his feelings, but in many ways this would seem to be a overly 'telling' start. But as we'll see, it isn't. 

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Go with the flow

Apart from what a story is about, there is also the matter of how it is written. Once the reader is caught up in the story they can find themselves being drawn irresistibly through the exciting parts but just as irresistibly through slower sections. To some degree this is to do with being engaged with the story overall and the characters, but it is also to do with the way it is written. The way the words are put together, the construction of the narrative, the syntax used to create a rhythm.

Some people are obviously just gifted in this regard. They naturally put words together in an attractive way. But that doesn't mean it can't be learnt. On the most basic level there is spelling and grammar and typos. Just being able to read the text will make the flow better. But assuming those things are at a competent level, there is  another level of sophistication beyond that, which will make the narrative flow.

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Seeing is believing

The problem with most obvious and familiar emotions is that a word like ‘angry’ gives us an instant idea of what angry means, but not a picture. But when you refer to a specific time when a specific character got angry, what does that really mean? What does it look like? All you really convey is a general, clichéd concept of the kind of mood that person was in. You don’t put the reader in the scene, seeing it.

There are two ways to overcome this.

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Build a story, leave the door open

A story is more than a series of events that happen. Scenes have to be interesting, they have to build and they have to play a role in communicating the overall narrative. But how do you know if the scene you have written is helping to tell the story or distracting from it? One way to decide is to look at the scene and ask yourself what is its significance? Not to the character, or even to the writer, but to the story.

Most things that happen in a story can be said to have some sort of influence on the greater scheme of things if you really push it. A girl walking down the street on the way to school who notices a red sports car, which is then never mentioned again, could be said to have some symbolic or metaphorical resonance with the themes of the story. That's fine, but once you know that, you are then able to decide whether that's the best way to achieve that effect (which it may well be). Problem is most people don't do that and leave it hanging as a thing that happened in the story just because. And that's what it will read like.

If a woman is getting ready to go for a job interview and the phone rings and it’s some guy trying to convince her to switch phone plans, and once she gets rid of him she goes off to her a job interview, what’s the significance to her story? If it makes her late and she misses the bus, then that could have a very strong impact. If the guy tells her that she'd be stupid to pass up this limited special offer and she gets very irate, calling him a cocksucker who should stick his head up his own ass so he has somewhere quiet to eat his bag of dicks, and then puts the phone down and goes back to being very normal and getting ready (pink shirt or white shirt?) that tells us something about her but it has a particular significance since she's going for a job interview where that aspect of her personality may prove to be a liability (although personally I'd hire her on the spot).

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Flat Narratives

The writer is a time traveller. He can see the whole of existence at once. He knows the end as well as the start. When someone says something that doesn’t make sense now, but will have an impact many pages from now, the writer smiles knowingly. All information is available to him. The problem is the rest of us are mere mortals who can only start at the beginning and work our way from one moment to the next, and when someone says something seemingly meaningless, that's all it is.

Leading the reader from A to B is not something where you can just set off and be confident you’re going to be followed. There’s no point relying on stuff that happens later to satisfy the reader if the reader never gets that far. The idea that ‘It will all make sense if you keep reading...’ is not taking into account how readers read. We keep reading because we like what we’ve read so far and want more. We don’t think ‘This isn’t working, I should keep reading and maybe it will...’

Each scene or chapter has to be engaging in its own right. Even if certain information needs to be conveyed, you can do that while other stuff is happening. Jack can tell Dave about an old school teacher who will turn up later in the story. But he can tell him that anecdote while they are in the middle of robbing a bank. Obviously it doesn’t need to be quite that extreme, but it shouldn’t be just them hanging out or driving in a car. It should tells us something about these specific characters.

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Character is Plot

There are many ways to structure a plot, but all plots have the same basic purpose: to reveal something about the character.

What people do tells us who they are.

And actions speak louder than words.

(The word ‘action’ does not mean car chases and explosions, it means any physical movement from turning on the tv to taking a shit to blowing up the Statue of liberty and everything in between)

The specific goal of the plot isn't important, it could be finding the lost Ark of the Covenant, or climbing a ladder to wash a window, the important thing is:
1. What does it tell the reader about the character?
2. Does this play a part in the rest of the story?
3.Is it interesting?

Taking these points one at a time:

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