Million Dollar Outlines, page 12
So when you begin plotting, when you begin considering what your inciting incident is, you don’t just say to yourself, “What happens next?” You look at your primary emotions that you want to create, and you’ll begin saying, “How can I work toward creating a sense of xxx in my reader?” where the x stands for the controlling emotion.
But a problem often occurs at this point. It’s easy to become so involved in brainstorming how to create a certain emotion that you become too focused on that emotion. When that happens, the story begins to sound like a symphony where everyone is just repeating the same note.
So you have to back up at times, not take yourself so seriously, and consider how to vary your emotion.
By knowing what mix of emotions your audience craves, you can design a bestseller. I’m convinced that a sign of J.K. Rowling’s genius, for example, is in her unerring sense of what an audience wants. She instinctively recognized that her young audience would crave: wonder, adventure, humor, horror, and romance in the appropriate amounts and in the proper order. She was flawless in evoking the proper emotional beats for her tale.
So when you’re writing, keep your mind open. Almost everyone at every age appreciates some humor in their tale. Don’t ever write a book without some. Most people will also appreciate a romantic line, regardless of whatever you might want to add. Adventure and horror are also very strong hooks.
I think of a fine story as an emotional symphony. The emotions that I play are the individual notes. My job as an author is to repeat those emotions in patterns that build and play upon each other, and to vary my themes in a pleasing manner.
Introduce Gads
A “gad” is an old Scottish word for a sharp stick used to prod an animal. In a story, a gad is something that one character doesn’t like about another. For example, let’s say that you have two good friends—cowboys on the range. The protagonist likes to have a varied diet—which includes rattlesnake, woodchuck, and horsemeat. But the sidekick likes to eat beans, lots of beans, and he smells like it. That minor conflict between the two is a gad.
Every character in a story should have something that he doesn’t like about the other character. The heroine might wish her cowboy hero wouldn’t use puns. He might wish that she would stop talking about old boyfriends.
Very often, you’ll find that authors create weak relationships with friends and families just because they don’t take into consideration those minor conflicts.
Braid Your Conflicts
Coupled with the concept of introducing gads is the idea of braiding conflicts. As you are plotting, it might help if you consider ways that each major character in your story has a conflict with every other major character. They don’t have to be major conflicts, just enough to give a sense that these are real people, with genuine and complex relationships.
Another way to think about it is this: Simply ask yourself questions like, “What is my villain’s journey? What was he/she like as a child? What are his hopes, his fears, his loves? How did he sink so low? How much of that journey do I want to show? Do I want to show him making wrong choices when faced with trials?”
Then, once you’ve got a good sense of your villain, you may look more closely at other characters. For example, let’s say that you’ve got a romantic story line. Many men don’t take much time to think about their love interest for a story, but you need to examine her as a character and bring her fully into the story. Where did she come from? Why is she attracted to your protagonist? What’s blocking them from getting together? How will she combat it? Why should we love her and care about her?
Once you’ve answered those questions, consider your protagonist’s friends, his “sidekicks.” What is their history? Why are they friends? What is the sidekick’s personal journey? Does he grow throughout the story?
You should do that with each character. If you have a guide or a contagonist, certainly those are major personalities. Where did your guide come from? What are his successes, his failures? How does your protagonist fit in with his plans?
Even minor characters, such as hecklers can be rounded out this way.
Then, as you write, you look at how each of these characters will interact in their scenes. You weave them together through your story, as if in dance.
Vary Your Conflicts
There are many types of conflicts. Your protagonist should have to face more than one type. For example, let’s say that you write a novel about a boy who survives a crash-landing in Alaska. As he struggles to get home, he might face freezing weather, an attack by a bear, an attack by a caribou, and an attack by wolves, all as he tries to find food on a two-hundred mile walk to safety.
The problem here is that he protagonist is facing the same types of conflicts over and over again. These are all external conflicts, man against nature.
What about internal conflicts? The story becomes more interesting if the protagonist has to face his own inner demons. Perhaps he has never been diligent at studying at school, so he doesn’t know how to resolve his problems.
Then there are stories about man against man. What if the boy finds an empty cabin and takes a gun to protect himself? But when the cabin-owner gets home, say he’s an illegal wolf hunter, the hunter is afraid that the young man will notify the police of his operation. So he goes after the kid, with possible murder on his mind.
Some stories deal with societal conflicts, man versus society. Now let’s imagine that the cabin belongs to an Inuit, and he resents the Caucasian boy and his laws. Perhaps he might want to bring his friends in on the hunt, but a young girl in the family decides to try to save the boy. So this could turn into an internal struggle, a clash of societies.
Other stories may deal with religious issues. Perhaps the young man is a devout Catholic, and he becomes angry with God for putting him into this mess, but later thanks God for the growth that has come through his ordeal.
Look for ways to create interest by using varying the types of conflicts that you create.
Identity Conflicts
The script doctor Michael Hague has said that at the heart of every great character in literature or film, there is a question of identity. He’s right.
First, there is the protagonist. What does he see himself to be? Normally he sees himself as an all-right guy, but at some point he will need to confront an inner demon, a hidden weakness. It might be cowardice, laziness, lack of desire to do right, or any other number of things.
Then there may be a “guide” character, usually an older and wiser character who recognizes the protagonist’s potential for greatness—and failure.
A romantic interest will also see that potential for greatness, even as her parents and friends deny or ridicule her choice. They may point out that the protagonist is from the wrong side of the tracks, has criminal tendencies, and so on.
A villain may actively try to convert the protagonist to his way of thinking, and seek to destroy his reputation if he doesn’t do as told.
Hecklers will of course point out the protagonist’s failures, mock his frailties, even as his friends and sidekicks show their faith in him.
Do you see how this works? Any story that doesn’t have an identity conflict at its heart will pale in comparison when set aside one that does have such a conflict.
So how does your protagonist see himself? How do others see him or her? In certain types of novels, growth stories and romances, the entire tale often centers on this question.
Center Your Tale
In the opening of a tale, your protagonist may have a number of problems: he may be late for work, and he’s lonely. His mother needs him to take her to the doctor, and so on. So we may show him in scenes at work, and with his mother, and perhaps on a date.
But as your protagonist and your antagonist engage in conflict, they’re drawn together. The story naturally should begin to focus on them. Thus, if you’re writing alternating scenes, the structure of the story reaches a point where we get an almost blow-by-blow description of the epic battle—one from the protagonist’s perspective, one from the antagonist’s perspective, and so on.
The minor conflicts should all slough away, so that our focus upon the most compelling conflict in the tale is resolved.
Doubling
Writing a novel is like composing a symphony, as I’ve said—not a symphony of notes, but a symphony of emotion.
I’ve never read a book on how this might be done, but I’m often very conscious of the emotions that I’m trying to arouse. Robert McKee, in his book Story, suggests that we should not compose scenes that strike the same emotional note too often, but he doesn’t carry his advice further. I’d like to suggest that there are times when we absolutely must strike the same note more than once in order to give the emotion greater emphasis.
So, here is another plotting tool, a device for heightening an emotion precisely by playing upon it more than once, but by doing so the second time with unexpected intensity. In music it would be like striking the same key on a piano, but hitting the note with great force on the second hit. I haven’t heard other writers give it a name, though I’m sure that at least a few others know this technique. I call it “Doubling.”
This technique occurs when your viewpoint character anticipates or imagines a certain outcome in a tale and the imagined scene is complete enough so that it alone arouses an emotion.
Here’s how it works: imagine that Mary has been craving John. She wants to have his children, and she wants it badly—even from the first page, when she believes him to be an unworthy scoundrel.
So, late in your story, when the audience already cares about John, your heroine daydreams about kissing him. She imagines how fantastic it would be in several long paragraphs. Indeed, she imagines it so well that the imagined scene itself has an emotional impact on the audience.
Then, suddenly, the moment arrives where Mary and John both confess their love and actually do kiss. Here’s what you do: you make the depiction different from, better, and more profoundly fulfilling than anything she’d ever imagined.
The concept of doubling simply put is this: you arouse an emotional response by writing in detail about your character’s expectations.
This imagined scene arouses the desired response in the reader and sets a bar that you as a writer must jump over. Once you’ve set the bar, your job is to exceed your reader’s expectations brilliantly.
Time and again Dean Koontz uses this technique. In his novel Intensity, for example, his protagonist Chyna has a mother who was a moral monster. She dated serial killers and had them murder people for her entertainment. Brutalized from childhood, Chyna spent her life trying to understand what drives serial killers. She’s received her master’s degree in aberrational psychology.
In the novel, Chyna goes to a friend’s house in a remote region where a serial killer is stalking her and her friend’s family.
It’s gruesome stuff. In one early scene, before Chyna opens a door to the parents’ bathroom, she knows what she will find. She imagines that her friend’s mother and father will be dead, and she even wonders how it will be done. She imagines it vividly enough so that we the audience are mildly horrified. In fact, he gives us so little that we are forced to imagine it in her stead.
Chyna has heard a murderer and scream in the house, and eventually she makes her way to her friends’ parents’ master bedroom. After mentioning that she smelled the scent of gunpowder and blood, here’s all that Koontz says:
“Chyna had heard no shots. The intruder had evidently had a weapon with a sound suppressor.
“Water continued to cascade into the shower beyond the (bathroom) door. That susurrus splash, though soft and soothing under other circumstances, now abraded her nerves as effectively as the whine of a dentist’s drill.
“She was sure that the intruder wasn’t in the bathroom. His work here was done. He was busy elsewhere in the house.
“Right this minute she was not as frightened of the man himself as she was of discovering exactly what he had done. But the choice before her was the essence of the entire human agony: not knowing was ultimately worse than knowing.”
That depiction sets up a scene. In this case, Koontz cleverly sets up the reader. His last two lines lead you to conjure your own death scene in the bathroom, and he teases you into believing that not knowing is worse than knowing. But in a couple of short paragraphs, he then shows us the murder victim, and with a few brief details exceeds the death scene that you envisioned:
“… she had expected more blood.
“Paul Templeton was propped on the toilet in his blue pajamas. Lengths of wide strapping tape across his lap fixed him to the bowl. More tape encircled both his chest and the toilet tank, holding him upright.
“Through the semitransparent bands of tape, three separate bullet wounds were visible in his chest. There might have been more than three. She didn’t care to look for them and had no need to know. He appeared to have died instantly, most likely in his sleep, and to have been dead before he was brought into the bathroom.
“Grief welled in her, black and cold. Survival meant repressing it at all costs, and surviving was the thing that she did best.
“A collar of strapping tape around Paul’s neck became a leash that tethered him to a hand-towel rack on the wall behind the toilet. The purpose was to prevent his head from falling forward onto his chest—and to direct his dead gaze toward the shower. His eyelids were taped open, and in his right eye was a starburst hemorrhage.”
At this moment, Chyna knows that the murderer taped Paul’s eyes open for a reason. She knows that Paul’s wife will be dead in the shower. She knows that it will be gruesome, and that the image will stay with her for life. But she also knows that she has to open the shower door. There’s a small chance that Mrs. Templeton will be alive, that the killer may have wanted to secure the house and then come back to enjoy her later, save her for desert, so to speak. Chyna has to look.
Well, if you want to know what Chyna finds, you’ll have to read the book. Needless to say, once again the writer beats your expectations.
Now, this technique will work for any emotion that you want to hit strongly. To double an emotion, simply create an imagined scene that arouses that emotion, and then show us what happens in such detail that it redoubles the emotional effect.
Haunting
Your character can and should be profoundly moved by events in your book. At times you will need to try to amplify their emotions. One way to do this is by haunting your character, having them recall a moment in time that arouses the desired emotion all over again.
This happens in real life all of the time. For example, if you’ve had a wonderful date, you might choose to rehearse a conversation in your mind over and over for days, trying to glean every nuance from what a lover said.
Often though, we are faced with situations that genuinely haunt us—that come to our minds unbidden and undesired. This is especially true when we are confronted with acts of violence, such as witnessing a crime or participating in a war, or when we are confronted by death.
A few years ago I had to identify the body of my sister-in-law after she committed suicide. She was a handsome woman, and I had known her for years. But she chose as her method of suicide to ingest a poison that would asphyxiate her. And I cannot think about her without seeing her on her hotel bed, clutching a pearl necklace in one hand while every muscle in her was frozen and contorted so grotesquely that it dramatized with perfect eloquence the human body’s need for air. Imagine for a moment that every craving you’ve ever felt in your life, no matter how profound, was suddenly stamped indelibly upon your face, was etched into your clawed hands, branded into a mouth frozen open far wider than a human mouth should be as if in a permanent scream, and perhaps then you could begin to understand what she looked like.
Sometimes, even four or five years later, at unexpected moments, I would see her there on the tangled gray blanket where she spent her last moments thrashing about.
My sister-in-law was a world-class photographer with displays at dozens of galleries. She used to love to photograph my children, and so I’d often get my flashbacks when I saw my children do something that I wished I could take a picture of, or when I saw one of her photos, or when I saw a woman wearing pearls.
In just that way, your characters should be haunted by memories. Your characters should reflect on powerful experiences time and again so that you gain more emotional momentum from them.
It’s not just a matter of arousing emotions, it is in fact a tool for making your characters real. A character whose life feels as if it began when the story started won’t feel real to your reader. Your character needs to be created along with a host of friends, family relationships, and powerful experiences that live outside the frame of the story.
So just as doubling allows you to double the emotional impact of a scene (by having a character imagine what will happen, and then writing the scene so that it surpasses the reader’s expectations), haunting can let you gain a triple impact from the same incident.
However, you should be aware that you can get more than a triple impact. You can haunt a character almost indefinitely. Often, we write stories about characters who circle a problem. They relive an event, or try to relive or re-imagine it over and over, to see how things could have worked out differently.
As the haunted character finally gains enough distance from the event so that he or she can either learn to cope with it or learn the lesson that the experience teaches, or perhaps begin to understand the nuances of what happened, we begin to see some growth. An example of this is in the movie Groundhog Day.
This technique of haunting is your main tool for writing the circling story.
Hence, for certain very powerful key scenes, you may want to consider using all three of these techniques: have your character imagine a scene so that we set the reader’s expectations. Then write the scene in such a manner that you exceed those expectations. Then reflect back on that scene at appropriate moments.
