What is the Worst That Can Happen?

Here is a pearl of wisdom:

What makes a breakout novel memorable are conflicts that are deep, credible, complex and universal enough so a great number of readers can relate.

How is such a conflict constructed? Let us begin with depth, by which I mean pushing your central problem far beyond what any reader might anticipate or imagine. To accomplish that you, the author, must first be willing to push your characters into situations that you would never go near in your own life.

Hey, if you like your characters, you might be a bit wary to put them in harms way, but into the fire they must go if you’re ever going to get a story worth writing out of them. Not only that, but you must enjoy doing it because once you’ve made it as bad as you can you need to make it worse.

Here, Maass breaks down one of my favorite books. No, it isn’t some literary snoozefest like Molloy or Against Nature. It’s Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. Yeah, I know I blasted Crichton about half way into this essay, but I (like millions of people) loved Jurassic Park. I loved the movie too. I can remember the theater I saw it in, which seat I sat in actually, and how I felt tears welling up when the dinos came on stage. Ok, you probably didn’t have that reaction, but when I was a tot I loved dinosaurs and that is a big reason I loved Jurassic Park. But the way Crichton told his story, how he bent the rules of science to suit the needs of the plot, it was all so believable. It felt real.

This is something you can learn from because fiction is not real life and sometime you have to play with the rules in order to turn a dramatic trick, but you have to balance that against the believability of the premise. It’s a fragile thing, but you can do it by driving the reader to want to believe in the story.

I’m not sure Maass does a good job of this (and maybe I’m not either) but I think he is trying to tell us that character interactions can help divert attention from some things that might not be technically feasible in your story. I have no idea how far one can push this premise but it worked for Crichton.

Bridging Conflict

Here is where we get back to that in media res thing.

Keeping your readers constantly on the move, and that is following you not leading, is a critical point in the whole beginning in the middle of things technique. The idea here is that readers will be drawn in to stories where they need to figure out what is going on because they are already missing half the event that occurred before. It’s a good trick, but as Maass points out it will only take you so far. Eventually you must help the reader catch up and then when they are caught up, you bring on the main act again, the primary conflict.

Here in a nutshell is the technique of bridging conflict. Whether short and sweet or drawn out for many pages, it always works the same way: A series of smaller conflicts serves to capture and keep our attention until the main conflict or first event of the story arrives.

Maass walks us through a great example from P.D. James’ A Certain Example. I highly encourage you to read it. I am not going to quote from it, but what I will say is that as you read these passages along with Maass’ explanation pay close attention to how you would write this intricate series of connected plot points. How would you go about creating the structure? And it is a structure. If you don’t see it as such, then you are going to have a dilly of a time writing it because without careful attention to plotting you are going to find yourself deep within the revisions and a very unhappy writer indeed.

The Five Basic Plot Elements

This is not about the Five Act structure. I thought it might be when I was reading the book, but it isn’t. Instead, this section is the basic ingredients you need when constructing a plot that will keep a reader plugged in for hours (if not days).

First, we begin at the beginning. How do you open your novel? Do you begin with a body? Do you begin in media res? What the heck does that mean anyway?

Maass points out that most novice thriller writers will begin with a “grabber” scene. This is exactly what I’m talking about, and it’s a mistake. At best, you will only get a mild reaction from most readers. At worst, they will close the book and move on. Why? Because scenes like this lack sympathy!

Stephen King (and I paraphrase here) said that he usually begins by giving you a puppy to play with. He lets you pet the puppy, play fetch with it, then you feed it and get to love the puppy. When you are fully bonded with the puppy, he kills it.

I have to admit that this seems like a crude way to get sympathy, but it obviously works. In any case, once we have our sympathetic character we must introduce conflict. yes, Virginia, we kill the puppy. But don’t go sharpening your ax just yet. A simple slaying of a weak victim is hardly the stuff of conflict. If the killing is simple, then there isn’t much interest in further pursuit. It needs some complexity in order to gather interest and keep the reader humming.

Maass uses the example of the Columbine school shooting as a model for creating complex conflict. The idea here is that there are many levels to a complex incident. It isn’t just good versus evil. There are extenuating circumstances, issues that play off one another. This is where conflict really gets going and it is what you (and I) need to seek out when developing our stories.

Moving from conflict, the third element of a solid plot is reinforcement of the plot.

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.

This is not one of those rules that you break. No, you really need to develop a conflict that turns in on itself and twists tighter and tighter. This is often accomplished through the introduction of additional characters and twists, expanding the degrees of separation, and while doing so raising the stakes. In Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, the drama went all the way to the top of New York’s elite. As I said, I’m reading Angel of Darkness and it follows the same course.

Here we actually veer off into the realm of the Five Act structure, even though I said it wasn’t really. I guess I just did that as a cheap trick to keep you reading. Sorry about that. In any event, the fourth and fifth elements are climax and resolution. A story must reach a peak and at the same time it must end.

Conflict

I hear the groans out there already. I pretty much threw a fit myself when I got in this far and all the guy had to say was, “The essence of story is conflict.”

Well, everyone knows that, don’t they? Of course, if I really knew what it meant I would have done my homework and put it into my story. I wouldn’t be working a cruddy day job that I hate instead of writing novels and sipping espresso in the cafe. Oh, wait a minute, I do sip espresso in the cafe. Maybe that’s my problem after all: too much sipping and not enough plotting.

So fight on and find out what Maass means by conflict.

Conflict is an easy principle to understand. We all experience it every day. Most of it is quickly forgotten. Conflict that holds our attention for long periods of time is meaningful, immediate, large scale, surprising, not easily resolved and happens to people for whom we feel sympathy.

On the other hand:

Problems that are abstract, remote, trivial, ordinary, easily overcome and/or happening to someone for whom we feel little may be fit for a casual conversation or perhaps the evening news, but they cannot fuel a gripping novel.

Now this is good stuff. If you have been searching for a definition of conflict, conflict in the breakout, popular novel sense, this is about as good a definition as you will find.

My work definitely falls into the second category. I tend to focus on the smaller problems in life and while these things are “nice” they are never going to fuel any lasting interest in my work.

Plot

Ok, this is a 260 page book and there are three chapters on Plot that take up nearly 100 pages. If you don’t think writing a breakout novel is about plot, you’re crazy. Of course, plot is one of my weakest areas. I suppose that’s because plotting is where the real work takes place and I’m just a hobbyist after all, not a professional.

So, you might expect me to go on for another 10,000 words or so about plot since I need the work. Not only are you right, but I’m going to try and live up to work because I don’t want to be a hobbyist anymore. I want to write that breakout novel.

Plot is the organization of a story: its events and their sequence. What events? Which sequence? The choice you will make will mean the difference between a gripping manuscript and a dull pile of paper.

Maass begins, after explaining the stakes, by pointing out that most beginning novelists tell their stories in a linear fashion. In other words, they tell what the see from beginning to end (and all the dull stuff in between) because that is what they see when they close their eyes and follow that very interesting character they created from room to room and place to place. They write everything, including the travel scenes in a car.

I’ve done this. In fact, my first novel starts out in a car. There are plenty of scenes with characters getting from place to place through the rest of the book too. In fact, so little happens, that the book should have been called Places I Went Between Scenes of Action I Was Too Tired to Write. Or something like that.

But there is a cure, folks. One so pure and powerful that once you have learned its ways you will be bound to it because it will keep you from writing scenes where characters stand around with the proverbial thumb up their backside.