Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (29 page)

The anti-hero is portrayed in various ways as being apart from the larger community, preferring to live by his own code. For example, Hank Stamper in Ken Kesey's
Sometimes a Great Notion
is not interested in compromise or accommodation.

The quintessential anti-hero in
Casablanca
is Rick. As he says in Act I, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”He is allowed to run his saloon in Casablanca because he is completely neutral on the war. He does have a certain code of decency that surfaces on the sly, such as when a young girl seeks his help because her husband loses their money at the gambling tables.

Act II is about forces coming against the Lead, forcing a confrontation the Lead does not desire. Rick does not want to get between the Nazis and the resistance leader, Viktor Lazlo. But when Lazlo turns up in the saloon with his wife, Ilsa, who happens to be Rick's former lover, he can't avoid the confrontation.

In Act III, either the Lead continues to live apart, reasserting his rights as an anti-hero, or he comes back into the community.

In
Sometimes a Great Notion
, Hank Stamper resists until death and even afterward, when his hand (with upraised middle finger) remains as a sign of his spirit.

Rick, on the other hand, decides to rejoin the war effort. “Welcome back to the fight,” Lazlo tells him. “This time I know our side will win.”

We are fascinated by power. Most of us never wield very much of it. We cannot move world financial markets, like Gordon Gekko in the movie
Wall Street
. And most of us will never oversee a vast criminal empire, like Vito and Michael Corleone in
The Godfather
.

But we love seeing what it would be like.

The power pattern is all about a rise and fall, or a rise with a moral cost. Power is not seen as something a person handles well. The Ring of Power in
The Lord of the Rings
is a dangerous item to the one who possesses it.

• The Lead usually begins in a position of weakness.
  
• Through ambition and the gaining of strength, the Lead rises.
  
• There is a moral cost to gaining power.
  
• The Lead may experience a fall or be willing to sacrifice power to regain morality.
  

The Godfather
is a novel about the rise to power of Michael Corleone (
see notes on the structure of the novel in chapter two
).

Michael's position in Act I is to stay out the family “business.”He is motivated to get involved only after his father, Don Corleone, is nearly assassinated by rivals.

As Michael rises in influence, we begin to see the moral cost he is paying for all the power he gains.

In Act III, we see that Michael lies to his own wife, Kay, about the murder of his sister's husband. He has become corrupt, and the last line has Kay saying “the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.”

This is a special sort of pattern. It can come in many plot forms, but in the end, the pattern is that the characters represent ideas, and the events of the story are meant to show the consequences of those ideas.

George Orwell's
Animal Farm
is an obvious allegory about totalitarianism. C. S. Lewis's
Narnia
novels are about Christianity.

J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
is sometimes read as an allegory about the eternal struggle of good versus evil and the temptation of power. Tolkien claimed he was creating myth, which I see as allegory on steroids.

Moby Dick
is another huge allegorical novel, full of symbolism.

Jack London's
The Call of the Wild
has allegorical significance. It is a dog story on the surface, the story of a domestic dog living the civilized life, forced into survival mode when dognapped and sent to the Klondike. Upon Buck's return to nature, he overcomes great odds to become not only the Lead dog, but the legendary “Ghost Dog.”

Under the surface, however, London's philosophy of the survival of the strong is at play, showing his chief influences of the time — Darwin and Nietzsche.

Notice, however, that all of these novels follow the three-act structure. If you analyze them, you'll see they all do the tasks the three acts demand, and in the proper order. That is why they work.

In
The Call of the Wild
, Act I is in civilization, and Act II is Buck struggling between two worlds. Act III is the slide into the wild for good.

Moby Dick
is three acts as well: Ishmael on land. The pursuit of Moby Dick. The battle with Moby Dick.

Allegory is difficult to do well since it may come off as merely preaching in the guise of an imaginative tale. If you choose this pattern, be sure to work hard on all the elements of plot discussed in this book. Make the characters real and not just stand-ins for your ideas.

Analyze some of your favorite novels. Can you recognize each plot as a familiar pattern or combination of patterns?

Analyze the structure of the novels you selected. Write down what happens in each act.

Choose one of the above patterns and sketch out a fresh plot based on it. Don't worry about making it too original at this point. Just write a two- or three-page narrative, with characters you make up. This will give you a
feel
for structure in pattern.

Do the above, only this time combine two of the patterns.

I told my doctor I couldn't afford the surgery he recommended. So he touched up my X-ray.

— Henny Youngman

The nice thing about being a writer is that we can perform surgery on our work. But to do it right, we need to make the proper diagnosis. Otherwise, our manuscript may die a premature death.

I love that sequence in the movie
The Fugitive
where Dr. Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford) is trying to sneak around Cook County Hospital as a maintenance man. An emergency room nurse tells him to wheel a kid down to surgery. The kid's in pain. Kimball, still the doctor, can't help looking at the kid's X-rays and chart.

He sees that the kid has the wrong diagnosis. So he takes him to the emergency operating room instead, where he can get immediate help.

That's what this chapter is about. The right diagnosis and immediate help. You don't even have to scrub up.

Always make sure scenes have tension in them, either the tension of pure action (something bad is about to happen) or inner tension (the characters worrying about something).

Even when characters are at rest in a relatively quiet scene, there should be an undercurrent signaling that things are not as calm as they seem.

Some scenes can take a long time to “get going,” interrupting the pace. For this scene problem, Raymond Obstfeld, in
Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes
, has a helpful tip about the “hot spot.”

Every scene should have that moment or exchange that is the focal point, the essential part. If your scene doesn't have a hot spot, it should probably be cut.

After you locate the hot spot on paper, Obstfeld counsels that you put a circle around it. Then read the paragraph immediately preceding the hot spot. Is it necessary? Are all the sentences necessary? Underline any that aren't.

Keep going backward until you have eliminated any nonessential fluff that comes before the real heat of the scene.

Sure, you'll want to keep some things in that offer a good lead in. But you'll be surprised at how much you can actually get rid of, and how much better your scenes start to move.

There is an inherent plot problem when you use flashbacks — the forward momentum is stopped for a trip to the past. If not used properly, the reader can get frustrated or impatient (not to mention editors, who tend to distrust flashbacks altogether). Here are some tips about flashbacks so they help, rather than hinder, your plots.

About a flashback scene (we'll get to
back flashes
in a moment), ask first if it is absolutely necessary. Be firm about this. The information we get in the flashback must come that way because that's the best way to present it. (A flashback is almost always used to explain why a character acts a certain way in the story present.)

If such information can be dropped in during a present moment scene, that's always the better choice.

You've decided that a flashback scene is necessary. Then make sure it works
as a scene
— immediate, confrontational. Write it as a unit of dramatic action, not as an information dump. Not:

Jack remembered when he was a child, and he spilled the gasoline on the ground. His father got so angry at him it scared Jack. His father hit him, and yelled at him. It was something Jack would never forget.

Instead:

Jack couldn't help remembering the gas can. He was eight, and all he wanted to do was play with it.

The garage was his theater. No one was home. He held the can aloft, like the hammer of Thor. “I am the king of gas!” he'd said. “I will set you all on fire!”

Jack stared down at the imaginary humans below his feet.

The gas can slipped from his hand.

Unable to catch it, Jack could only watch as the can made a horrible thunking sound. Its contents poured out on the new concrete.

Jack quickly righted the can, but it was too late. A big, smelly puddle was right in the middle of the garage.

Dad is going to kill me!

Desperate, Jack looked around for a rag, anything to clean up the mess.

He heard the garage door open.

Dad was home.

You get the idea. A well-written flashback will not detract from your story if it is essential to the narrative and works as a scene.

How do you get in and out of a flashback, so it flows naturally? Here's one way that works every time.

In the scene you're writing, when you're about to go to flashback, put in a strong, sensory detail that triggers the flashback:

Wendy looked at the wall and saw an ugly, black spider making its way up toward a web where a fly was caught. Legs creeping, moving slowly toward its prey. The way Lester had moved on Wendy all those years ago.

She was sixteen and Lester was the big man on campus. “Hey,” he called to her one day by the lockers. “You want to go see a movie?”

So now we are in the flashback. Write it out. Make it dramatic.

Now how do we get out of it?

By returning to the sensory detail (sight in the case) of the spider. The reader will remember the strong detail, and know that he's out of flashback:

Lester made his move in the back of the car. Wendy was helpless. It was all over in five minutes.

The spider was at the web now. Wendy felt waves of nausea as she watched it. But she could not look away.

Watch out for the word
had
in your flashback scenes. Use one or two to get in, but once in, avoid them. Instead of:

Marvin had been good at basketball. He had tried out for the team, and the coach had said how good he was.

“I think I'll make you my starting point guard,” Coach had told him right after tryouts.

Marvin had been thrilled by that.

Do this:

Marvin had been good at basketball. [
Use one to get us in. Now switch to the scene.
] He tried out for the team, and the coach said how good he was.

“I think I'll make you my starting point guard,” Coach told him right after tryouts.

Marvin was thrilled.

An alternative to the flashback scene (which you may be tempted to turn into an information dump) are
back flashes
.

These are short bursts in which you drop information about the past within a present moment scene. The two primary methods are
dialogue
and
thoughts
.

In the example below, Chester's troubled background comes out in a flash of dialogue:

“Hey, don't I know you?”

“No.”

“Yeah, yeah. You were in the newspapers, what, ten years ago? The kid who killed his parents in that cabin.”

“You're wrong.”

“Chester A. Arthur! You were named after the president. I remember that in the story.”

We are in Chester's head for this one, as he reflects on his past:

“Hey, don't I know you?”

“No.” Did he? Did the guy recognize him? Would everybody in town find out he was Chet Arthur, killer of parents?

“Yeah, yeah. You were in the newspapers, what, ten years ago?”

It was twelve years ago, and this guy had him pegged. Lousy press, saying he killed his parents because he was high on drugs. They didn't care about the abuse, did they? And this guy wouldn't, either.

The skillful handling of flashback material is one mark of a good writer. Using back flashes as an alternative is usually the mark of a wise writer.

You think you have everything under control. You're writing away and the story is flowing out of you like Perrier Jouet champagne. This is a common feeling in the first few chapters. Beginnings are easy.