Make A Scene (11 page)

CHARACTER AND PLOT

Hopefully the illustration above made it clear that plot and character are married to one another. Your protagonist ought to be indelibly caught up in the plot situation and information of every scene, and should bear or participate in the consequences that follow. Similarly, your plot should not be able to advance or get more complicated without the active participation of your protagonist.

With that in mind, when developing your characters you should always be thinking about how the plot situation of a given scene will affect the character, and what it will cause him to do, think, or feel.

In every scene you should ask: What is plot-relevant? What is character-relevant? How are the two related? Your plot should be unable to carry on without your protagonist.

A Note on Character Behavior

If you've ever turned up in the aftermath of an exciting incident like a fight or a police chase, you will probably agree that a bystander's account is never as dramatic as witnessing it for yourself. The same is true of character behavior in scenes; inevitably you'll take shortcuts, hoping the reader will take your word for it that "Charles didn't want to live any longer," or "Frederika had a magnetic personality." Well, okay, both details might be true, but unless the reader gets to witness the plot situation of Charles standing at the edge of the bridge ready to leap off, or, through character interactions, sees multiple characters fall in love with Frederika, the reader has no proof of what you tried to quickly summarize.

If you follow the formula for developing characters set forth in this chapter, your characters will have no choice but to become complex, plot-relevant people who feel vivid and real to the reader.

Without the human mind and consciousness to give significance to the events that happen to us, life is just a series of events unfolding over time to people everywhere. This randomness is one of the reasons that many people turn to literature—inside the pages of a book you trust that you will be led on a meaningful journey revealing insights and giving your spirits and emotions a jolt. In fiction, this is called a plot.

Some people confuse plot for story and think it is enough to have a sequence of events lined up one after the other. A story is just a string of information about a cast of characters in a given time and place. Boy meets girl. Stranger comes to town. The doctor is found dead.

A plot is the method by which that story takes on tension, energy, and momentum, and urges a reader to keep turning pages. Plot transforms "boy meets girl" into
Romeo and Juliet
—with secret love, wild fighting, and tragic conflicts along the way.

In short, plot is the related string of consequences that follow from the significant situation (often referred to as inciting incident, but I prefer my term because many narratives begin less with one single incident and more with a type of situation) in your narrative, which darn well better get addressed, complicated, and resolved through engaging, well-crafted scenes by the end. Some people refer to this relationship of events as causality, but that's a sterile-sounding word. Here we'll just call them consequences.

In chapter two we discussed how any narrative is a series of scenes strung together like beads on a wire. This chapter will look at what element inside each scene is essential to plot. The simplest answer is information.

Plot is constructed out of crucial bits of information—the consequences of, and explanations for, the significant situation and the characters who must deal with it. Plot is best delivered teasingly to the reader in small bites to keep them hungry for more. In a well-written plot, the reader gets just a little bit smarter, a little bit more clued in, as he reads. Each scene should provide one more clue to the puzzle of your plot.

PLOT INFORMATION BASICS

Most writers are as fond of a beautiful sentence as they are a good plot element. It's fun to write lyrical passages, to wax philosophical, and to create images of beauty. Surely there's no harm if a scene digresses from the plot to meander and muse, right?

Nope!

Sorry to be the plot police, but here's the cold truth: Every scene in your narrative must pertain to your plot. Every single one. Even if a character muses or meanders, that activity must be plot-related. A character under suspicion of murder may drift off into thought, but those thoughts had better be about why he's been wrongfully accused, how he's going to prove his innocence, or who the true murderer is, not random memories of whale-watching or hiking.

Scenes exist in order to make the events in your fictional world real to the reader. You want the reader to be knee-deep in your action and emotional drama, to feel for your characters, to hope and dream and want for them.

Each scene, then, must deliver, at minimum, one piece of new information that speaks to one of the following questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Every scene.

You must be thinking, how can I possibly do that? Simple—don't end a scene and begin another one until new information has been provided. Providing information is one of the most important functions of a scene and is the foundation of a plot.

New information has three main responsibilities:

1. It must fill in another piece of the puzzle, so that both the character and the reader get a little bit smarter.

2. It must change the course of your main character's thoughts, feelings, or actions.

3. It must lead to new consequences, actions, or behaviors that carry your plot forward.

Every scene must reveal some piece of new information that enlightens the reader just a little bit more. Here we'll look at the different types of plot information more closely.

Who

Much scene time is devoted to characters, since they are generally the most important element of any fictional narrative. You'll want to include a bit of general character information in your narrative—what kind of work your protagonist does, his religion or lack of one, his habits. Does he, for instance, go to AA meetings twice a week, or sing in a gospel choir? These details tell us who your character is in general, not necessarily who he is in relationship to your plot. Character-related plot information, on the other hand, tends to come up over the course of a narrative, often having to do with identity or hidden origins being revealed; someone's past catching up with him; a dark secret being brought to light; or a surprising change of heart. Here's an example of plot-related character information from Ann Patchett's novel
The Magician's Assistant,
in which the protagonist, Sabine, learns after her husband and partner's death, from his lawyer, that he was not who she thought.

"Parsifal's name wasn't Petrie. It was Guy Fetters. Guy Fetters has a mother

and two sisters in Nebraska. As far as I can tell the father is out of the picture—either dead or gone ..."

"That isn't possible," she said.

"I'm afraid it is."

When it comes to characters and plot, think about how your characters can surprise each other, and the readers, by revealing new information about themselves (and not necessarily after death), about things they have hidden or covered up, or about something that is being denied or protected. Most importantly, when you reveal this character information, you should do it directly, through speech or dialogue if possible. Or, if the person has died, either in the form of correspondence he left behind, or through the mouth of another person. Try to rely as little as possible on the thought bubble—in which a character
thinks
a revelation.

What

What
is perhaps the widest possible category of all plot information. It is, in essence, what is often described as your hook—the storyline or angle that makes your narrative unique and from which all other plot events will flow.

In
The Magician's Assistant,
for instance, Parsifal's death is the significant situation of the novel—the first big piece of
what
information—that launches the book. The necessity of sharing the information about Parsifal's death with his family sets the next plot events in motion, and leads to great insight and change in Sabine and the other characters. These two main pieces of information drive the entire plot, and each has its own string of consequences that each scene deals with in one way or another.

In every scene you should ask yourself, literally: What is next? What piece of important information do I need my characters to learn, and my readers to become aware of? Remember that every scene needs a new piece of information, or else there's no point to writing it.

Where

Where
is one of those lucky bits of information that does light duty in terms of plot most of the time. Occasionally setting is crucial to your plot, especially if one must trace the steps of a murderer, or revisit a place in order to learn something new, or if your narrative is specific to a geographical location. Most of the time, place serves as a backdrop for the other bits of information. In Sabine's case, she has to travel from Los Angeles to Nebraska, two vastly different worlds. Sabine meets with cultural challenges due to the differences between Nebraska and California ways of life, but the plot does not depend upon much information being imparted about place in every scene.

On the level of the scene, when place does come into play it may serve more as a spoken reference—the maid was found dead in the drawing room; Jacques had last been seen in Cancun before he disappeared; my father had a second family in a small town in Florida.

If place does turn out to be crucial to your plot, remember these points:

•
 New details must be revealed in any scene to make it play into your plot.
For instance, a mansion might turn out to be haunted, or a beautiful countryside might also be a Native-American burial ground.

•
 The new information about the place must have an effect on your character.
His thoughts, feelings or actions in the scene should all reflect the information given. For instance, say Jack and Jill planned to honeymoon in the mansion. Once Jack learns the mansion is haunted, he refuses to stay, causing a fight with Jill.

•
 The actions generated by the new information must lead to other plot-related consequences.
For instance, Jill decides she will stay in the mansion by herself, and he can stay in a motel, causing conflict, and building tension.

When

When,
in relation to your plot, is the time at which some important action in your narrative takes place: either time in history, or time of day.
When
tends to be important in mystery plots, to determine when a murder or a crime was committed, to employ alibis, and to figure out how long a victim has been dead. Time as a form of information often comes into play in reference to when a crucial plot action takes place. For instance, a man may learn that his wife got pregnant during a time when he was in the army, and therefore, the baby can't be his. Or a mother may learn that her missing child was actually being held hostage in the neighborhood in the days after she thought he was gone. Or a character's innocence may be called into question when it turns out he does not have an alibi.