Million Dollar Outlines, page 14
So as a writer, you would look at that character and write about the third alternative—the hell of living in the middle. And it is hell. Back when I worked in the prison I knew two men who had killed would-be lovers that mocked them for being too masculine.
So now we get to Lisa, the young lady who falls in love with Kevin. She imagines that being married to him would bring her happiness, and perhaps it will. But lots of things happen in a marriage. Kevin might turn out to be a cheat, someone who comes home smelling of other women’s perfume. Or perhaps he’s from a wealthy family, and Lisa finds that she can never fit in. Or maybe to win him, she has to become a person that she detests. Or what if a week into the marriage, he shows himself to be controlling and abusive? Or what if it turns out that he’s not the man that she thought he was—all of his apparent affluence comes from his mob connections?
You get the idea. There may be dozens, or even hundreds of “third alternatives” in the marriage scenario, and it’s not until you decide on one that your story will take off.
Now, here is the beauty of using the third alternative technique: when we talked about what a plot is, and how an inciting incident leads a character on a journey to attain some kind of goal, but along the way the protagonist must go through several try/fail cycles? Well, if you sit down and consider your third alternative, you can have your character set off on that quest, and the first try/fail cycle pretty much writes itself.
For example, in Bob’s story, he snaps on page one and plans a heist. By page 20 he has a dead guard lying in the seat of his armored car as he makes his getaway, only to realize that even though he has $2.3 million in the back of the truck, he hasn’t found the freedom that he’d hope for. Now he’s looking in the rear-view mirror, and his ears are straining at the sound of distant police sirens. In fact, in trying to gain financial freedom he has started down a long road to federal prison, and chances are excellent that he will someday look back at his life before the murder and wish to hell that he could go back in time and start over.
With Brett, we can show him realizing from the age of six that he wants to be Miss America. He can start walking like a girl, affecting their movements and batting his eyes, and all it does is creep out his dad and lose him friends. He might realize at the age of ten or 11 that he’s turning into a boy, and he must figure out some way to get the process stopped. Maybe he’s so driven, that he gets rid of his own manhood in a bathroom, using a kitchen knife. But it isn’t enough. He’s soon caught in that hell in the middle, trying to figure out how to get his parents to lend him the money to get the hormones necessary to feminize him. Yet even with a set of boobs, he looks in the mirror and everything is all wrong. He finds that he isn’t pretty and feminine at all—he’s a freak, and even the children on the street see him for what he is.
And of course with Lisa, we can dramatize what she does to land Kevin—the way that she changes her opinions to reflect his, the way that she affects a different kind of upbringing and tries to hide her own family from him until after the wedding. It’s not until after the seemingly successful marriage that she begins to find out what kind of a hell she has damned herself to as she learns better who she is, and whom she has married.
So as you plot your story, consider your character’s motivations well, and consider how the third alternative might help you generate the opening to a story while at the same time giving it greater depth.
The Rule of Threes
You’ll notice the number three appearing everywhere in writing. It has to do with the way we learn.
Budrys points out that “That which you tell your audience three times, they will believe.” So, for example, when describing a storm, you need to describe it three times. You might describe the sound of the wind howling outside and rain splattering on a window (aural description).You might then follow it with a physical description, the feel of rain spattering your protagonist’s face as he opens the door, the taste of the storm on his tongue. You then follow it by him seeing the sheets of rain falling by the porch light, just as a tongue of forked lightning strikes out on the hill. Do you see what I’ve done? I created an image using three senses, but describing the storm each time.
In the same way, in attempting to resolve a problem, a character must make three attempts. This is called the Rule of Three, and the reason you must have three attempts is obvious, if you think about it.
Imagine that you are going to the subway, and while on the platform, a man bumps into you hard enough so that you wonder if he’s trying to push you onto the tracks.
He apologizes to you profusely, explaining that he stumbled. You file it in your mind as a fluke—an accident, a one-time happening.
Now, imagine that tomorrow you are waiting for the subway, and the same man stumbles into a woman, nearly pushing her onto the tracks.
Is it a fluke? You don’t think so.
You accost him, and he apologizes more profusely; he grovels even. He explains that, yes, he did bump you yesterday, and he bumped the woman this morning, but it was a mere coincidence. He’s been working 20-hour days, and he has muscle control problem—that’s why he can’t drive, and has to take the subway.
What do you do? Do you let him off the hook, or do you trash him? You let him off the hook, unless you’re a cynic. After all, we’ve all had bad days.
But you’re much more suspicious, so suspicious that you can’t sleep well that night. So the next day, you hide in the subway, in the shadows, and you watch for the man. Sure enough, he enters the subway and looks around furtively.
Or is it furtively? Are you just imagining it?
He steps toward the platform as a train comes hurtling through the tunnel. He stumbles, and knocks a child in front of the train!
Among the screeching breaks and the wail of the child’s mother, you hear the horrifying death shriek.
Was it a fluke? Was it a coincidence?
No, it was a pattern!
And heroes must break patterns.
If you have a sense of justice, you will of course go out and make sure that this fellow is prosecuted.
Indeed, if you’ve also got a good sense of timing, you might even manage to break the pattern once you recognize the villain’s intent.
But as Budrys points out: if the hero does not have to make three attempts to resolve a problem, then the problem was not difficult enough in the first place. And any villain who does not at least try to victimize people more than twice isn’t really a quite villain—yet.
The Hourglass of Evil
In many tales, in the beginning evil is seen to be “distant” from the protagonists. The orcs are rampaging in far lands in The Lord of the Rings, while in The Christmas Carol, Scrooge is asked to donate money to orphans in a distant county.
But as the tale progresses, the evil draws closer to the protagonist. Black Riders enter the Shire, poverty strikes in the homes of Scrooges’ employees.
Eventually, at the end of the tale, evil is seen in the hearts of the protagonists. Frodo discovers that he cannot give up the ring at the Crack of Doom, while Scrooge learns that his own selfishness lies at the heart of the troubles around him.
Thus, there must come a turning point where your character sees the evil in himself and resolves to either change, or is destroyed. It is only when evil is subdued in the hero’s heart, that changes can be made abroad, and good can sweep over the earth.
Because of this, as you plot, you need to consider carefully how to work toward the turning points for each of your characters—whether they seize the opportunity to change or not.
Spectacle
Some sights are so riveting, so compelling, that you cannot take your eyes off of them. Remember when the twin towers collapsed? The eyes of the entire nation were on it.
Similarly, as you write a book or screenplay, there may be moments when a spectacle appears, to you, an image that you just feel that you have to capture perfectly.
When that happens, take time to stop and create that image fully. You may write it out of context completely—as a set piece that you will insert into the story when you come to the proper location.
Add a Thematic Line
As you begin to plot, you may discover that your story has a theme that you wish to elaborate on. For example, I realized in a recent novel that I was dealing with a theme of “becoming one in heart.” So I had to stop and wonder, how well does my current story handle that theme? Do I need to add more scenes, or perhaps embellish a dialog here and there?
Look for scenes that might be interspersed throughout the story where you may elaborate upon the theme. Consider how the theme might interlace with the action so that the story changes or grows in new directions.
Put Your World in Jeopardy
It isn’t just characters that can change or grow or face jeopardy during the course of a story. Sometimes the world can change in alarming ways, or in beautiful ways.
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the jeopardy broadens. Frodo goes on his journey to save the Shire, but discovers that the danger threatens Rivendell, Lothlorien, and distant lands beyond his imagination. In short, the whole world is in danger.
Similarly, in a good thriller, we may start off with a tiny army clerk who finds herself targeted by an assassin, but as the story grows we learn that others are also slaughtered, and that an entire nation will crumble if an evil plot isn’t thwarted.
Is this kind of change a possibility in your story? If so, you need to decide how to dramatize your changing milieu.
Create an Epic
An “epic” story is one that creates a sense that the reader has experienced much of the world, or caught a snapshot of life. An epic feel in a story can be created a number of ways.
—You may create an epic feel by having a wide variety of characters from different classes—the upper classes, working classes, and so on. These may span women and men, old and young. In short, we get to see the world from the viewpoints of dozens of people, and hearing them speak in their own unique voices.
—You can create an epic feel by following characters over the course of a lifetime. For example, you might start a tale with a young man and woman who fall in love as children, grow into adults, marry, become parents and grandparents, and then add in the story lines of some of their offspring, creating a multi-generational saga.
—You can create an epic feel by visiting different parts of your world, different climes, so that you set parts of your story upon the water, other parts in mountains, etc., so that the story seems to span the world.
—You can create an epic feel by making sure that your tale spans the seasons of the year as well as the seasons of life.
Section 3: The Plotting Process
Promising Starts to a Novel
We’ve been talking about brainstorming your novel and outlining it. I’ve also talked about how as a writer I often sit down before composing and set certain goals for myself on what I’d like to accomplish as I write. Given this, I’ve determined that there are several things that I want to do in my opening chapters.
When I talk about writing an opening, what I’m really talking about is the portion of a novel that typically occurs before my protagonist discovers that he has a “major, life-altering problem on his hands.” This might actually be more than a chapter. It might be four chapters, or five. In Hollywood there is a rule of thumb that says that your opening is usually about 1/10th of a movie. That rule of thumb often turns out to be remarkably accurate. It’s almost as if we have some internal clock that drives us, telling us how much time we should take at the start of a book.
Of course if you look at a book or movie, you’ll find that this portion of a story is often easy to delineate. I’d say, for example, that in The Wizard of Oz, our “first chapter” is the part of the story that occurs just before Dorothy’s house falls on the witch. In Star Wars Episode IV, the opening chapter would include everything up to the point where Luke Skywalker realizes that he will have to go help save Princess Leia. In my own novel The Runelords, the opening includes everything up to the point where Gaborn Val Orden discovers that the kingdom of Heredon is about to come under attack. In The Lord of the Rings, the opening is probably everything that happens up to the time when Frodo discovers that he will have to leave the shire.
So if we look at a book that is 500 pages long, we might say that the opening of the novel is the first 50 pages.
Now, I’m not going to tell you what to write or how to start your book. As you consider possible scenes, you will find your own way of doing it. You might want to start your novel at rest—your heroine at home in the evening doing her wash, talking to a neighbor over the fence as she hangs out her clothes. You might want to go in with some significant conflict—perhaps the president of the United States calling Boris Yeltsin and offering to “duke it out” in a nuclear war. Maybe you’ll want to let us know the nature of your major conflict first, and so you’ll write a prologue where a deranged killer snatches a child off the streets of Anytown, USA.
But if you look closely at openings, I’ve discovered over the years that no matter how you start, there are some things that you should consider.
Sol Stein, a famous editor, once made an informal study with several other editors who lurked in bookstores in New York, watching potential customers pick up books.
Customers, as you know, will typically be interested in a book based on the cover and title.
They might flip to the back of a book to see what kinds of blurbs other authors or critics might have given the book—but probably not. The cover and title are what they focus on. In fact, once I was selling a children’s book called Rindin the Puffer at some Christmas festivals. I’m very proud of the cover quotes on our book, but I found that of over 500 sales, only two consumers bothered to read them!
After glancing at the cover, the readers then open the book and read a bit. Stein says that his editors found that in every single case, the customer made a choice to buy the book that they browsed through based upon the first three pages. In fact, he found that some 90 percent of the buyers read only the first page.
So, as an author it’s important for you to make a good impression right at the start. Here is my first piece of advice: Every story should start with promises made—promises that you must keep.
It may be that you’re writing a story about a fascinating person, in which case your opening should tease us with a scene or narrative about that person.“John loved women with pale throats—when he saw one, he could not help but follow her home, and then stare into her window night after night.”
It may be that you’re writing a story that deals with a fantastic setting. In which case you might open with that setting. “John gazed down over the Opal Valley at Ralta, where the sun shimmered on the mists rising from the thermal pools, creating a dazzling opalescent light show above turquoise pools and ground streaked salt-white and the saffron color of sulfur.”
If you are showcasing your talents as an author, then perhaps a display of your talent is called for. William Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer opened with a line something like, “The color of the sky was the dirty blue of a television set tuned to a dead channel.” The metaphor was wonderful, for it demonstrated that his viewpoint characters were so distanced from nature that they had to turn to metaphors from technology in order to describe it.
If you are more interested in telling a story, you might tease the audience by promising a story. Here are a couple of my opening sentences. “Tana Rosen met Karl William Ungritch three times in her life—twice before the end of the world and once long after.” Or “Kaitlyn promised to love me forever, and whether that was ten thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand, or more, I didn’t know.”
In both of those openings, I promise to tell a story.
So, I suggest that the opening to your story show promise to a reader. Look objectively at your story and consider which elements most fascinate you about it, and which are most likely to draw the reader. Then devise an opening that highlights those facets to your story. And you don’t have to show just one promise—you can make dozens of promises You can hint at thrilling conflicts, show two or three fascinating characters, give us an interesting sentence, and write it all beautifully—in a single page!
But remember, your opening page or three is an advertisement for your book. If you make promises, you must keep them. If you hook your readers with fascinating characters, and then become lazy and have those characters fall into stereotypes by page 25, your readers will notice. They might not consciously recognize what is wrong, but at some level they will discover that this book isn’t exactly what they’d hoped for, and they’ll put it down. I can’t tell you how many times that happened to me back when I worked as the first reader for the Writers of the Future Contest.
Only make promises that you can to keep. If your opening page promises a five-star book, but you only deliver a three-star book, your fans and critics alike will feel cheated, and instead of praising your strengths, will merely cry “Fake!”
Now, as most of you know, many a writing instructor will talk about how you should create “hooks” for your reader. A hook is a metaphor. Just as a fisherman hooks his fish and drags it into land, a writer supposedly does the same with his reader. A “strong hook” is a line or two that will supposedly thrill a reader into pressing forward.
It’s not an apt metaphor. The promises a writer makes to his reader are often subtle and many, and every sentence that you pile onto your tale should have barbs that bite into your readers’ consciousness. In short, you can’t rely upon a good line or two to hook your reader into a book. You should have dozens of hooks. But here are the things that your opening lines, paragraph, and chapters should typically do:
