Writing Tools (20 page)

2. Pay attention to the narrative structure of television dramas. Writers of these shows often place dramatic elements just before the commercial breaks. Look for examples that work and for ones that fail to keep you intrigued.

3. If you write for a publication, consider what it would take to put a mini-cliffhanger near the end of a section, especially when the reader is asked to turn inside to another page.

4. If you write for a blog or Web site, consider what it would take to place a mini-cliffhanger at the end of the first screenful of text online so that readers could not resist a click or scroll.

Who done it? Guilty or not guilty? Who will win the race? Which man will she marry? Will the hero escape or die trying? Will the body be found? Good questions drive good stories.

This narrative strategy is so powerful that it needs a name, and Tom French gave it to me: he calls it the "engine" of the story. He defines the engine as the question the story answers for the reader. If the internal cliffhanger drives the reader from one section to the next, the engine moves the reader across the arc from beginning to end.

In the book
Driving Mr. Albert,
Michael Paterniti narrates a bizarre cross-country adventure, no ordinary road trip. His driving companion? The old medical examiner who dissected the corpse of Albert Einstein and kept the great man's brain in a jar for forty years. The three of them — writer, doctor, gray matter in the trunk — head west to meet Einstein's daughter.
Will the quirky old doctor finally give up the brain, which is his talisman and life's work?
That sentence never appears in the story but keeps the reader focused on the destination through the curious side trips along the way.

As I thought about this tool, I came across a story in my local newspaper about a man hired as a greeter at a new Wal-Mart:

Charles Burns has been waiting for weeks to say three words: "Welcome to Wal-Mart!"

When the doors open this morning at St. Petersburg's first Wal-Mart Supercenter, Burns' face will be one of the first that shoppers see.

He is the greeter.

Because this amiable feature is written the day before the opening, we never see Charles Burns in action. He never greets anybody. As a result, there is no engine, not even a simple
How did his first day of greeting go?
or
What was the response from the first customer?
or
How did the experience match the expectation?

In the same edition, I read a much more serious story about tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka:

In the pediatric ward of the town hospital here, Sri Lanka's most celebrated tsunami orphan dozes, drools and, when he is in a foul mood, wails at the many visitors who crowd around his crib.

His identity is unknown. His age, according to hospital staff, is between 4 and 5 months. He is simply and famously known as Baby No. 81, the 81st admission to the ward this year.

Baby No. 81 's awful burden is not in being unwanted, but in being wanted too much.

So far, nine couples have claimed him as their own son.

This story, which first appeared in the
New York Times,
has a supercharged engine. If you are like me, the engine took the form of questions such as these: What will happen to Baby No. 81? Will we ever learn his name and identity? Who will wind up with

Baby No. 81, and why? How will they determine the true parents among conflicting claims?

To its credit, the story raises questions of its own, not just about what might happen next, but also about the story's higher meaning:

Could it possibly be that nine couples honestly believe Baby No. 81 to be their flesh and blood? Could it be that childless parents are looking for a boon amid the disaster? Could it be that a photogenic baby boy has inspired a craving that a girl would not have? All these theories circulate on the streets of Kalmunai.

A story, especially one with subplots, can have mini-engines. In the movie
The Full Monty,
unemployed factory workers try to make money as male strippers. The engine is something like, will these odd-shaped men go all the way — and how will it bring them love and money? But here's what makes the story work: each man has something important at stake and is motivated by his own particular engine. Will the overweight guy restore the spark to his marriage? Will the skinny guy lose custody of his son? Will the old guy find a way to pay his debts?

When Jan Winburn served as editor at the
Baltimore Sun,
she helped her writers create a cast of characters for their stories by asking the question
Who has something at stake here?
The answer can lead to the creation of a story engine: Will the loser of the contest still get her wish?

I think of the story engine as a distant cousin of what Lajos Egri calls the "premise" of a story. "Everything has a purpose, or premise," he writes. For
Romeo and Juliet
, it is "Great love defies even death." For
Macbeth,
it is "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction." For
Othello,
it is "Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love." The premise takes the question of the engine and turns it into a thematic statement. It can easily be converted back: Will Othello's jealousy destroy him and the woman he loves?

Tom French makes a distinction between the engine of the story and its theme:

To me, the engine is this raw visceral power that drives the story and keeps the reader engaged. How the writer uses that engine — the ideas that we explore along the way, and the deeper themes we're hoping to illuminate — is a matter of choice. A good example:
Citizen Kane.
Its opening scene sets up one of the most famous story engines of all time, what is Rosebud? Yet the movie isn't about the sled, or even particularly about Kane's childhood. Still, the reporter's quest to unlock the riddle of the dying man's last word drives the story forward and keeps us watching as Orson Welles explores deeper themes of politics, democracy, America. The mystery of Rosebud drives us through what's essentially a civics lesson on the real nature of power.

Finally, we should note that some stories are driven not by
what
questions, but by
how.
We know before the opening credits that James Bond will conquer the villains and get the girl, but we are driven to know how. We imagine that the affable Ferris Bueller will not be punished for his truancy, but we delight in knowing how he will escape detection.

Good writers anticipate the reader's questions and answer them. Editors will keep lookout for holes in the story where key questions are left unanswered. Storytellers take these questions to a narrative level, creating in the reader a curiosity that can only be quenched by reaching the end.

WORKSHOP

1. Review a collection of your recent work. See if you can find story engines, or at least potential story engines.

2. Look for stories that capture your attention. Does the story have an engine? If so, what is the question that the story answers for you?

3. Look for engines in films and television narratives. Does an episode of
I Love Lucy
have an engine? How about an episode of
Seinfeld,
which is supposed to be about "nothing"? How about one of the many police procedure dramas?

4. As you read newspaper reports, look for underdeveloped stories that might benefit from the energy of an engine.

How do you keep a reader moving through your story? We have described three techniques that do the trick: foreshadowing, cliffhangers, and story engines. Don Fry suggests yet another with this parable: Imagine you are walking on a narrow path through a deep forest. You stroll a mile, and there at your feet you find a gold coin. You pick it up and put it in your pocket. You walk another mile, and, sure enough, you see another gold coin. What will you do next? You walk another mile in search of another coin, of course.

Like our walker in the forest, the reader makes predictions about what lies down the road. When readers encounter boring and technical information, especially at the beginning, they will expect more boring matter below. When readers read chronological narratives, they wonder what will happen next.

Think of a gold coin as any bit that rewards the reader. A good start is its own reward, and crafty writers know enough to put something shiny at the end, a final reward, an invitation for readers to return to their work. But what about the territory between beginning and end? With no gold coins for motivation, the reader may drift out of the forest. Yet I've never met a writer, even a great one, who was praised for a brilliant middle — which is why the middle receives so little attention.

"The easiest thing for a reader to do," argued famed editor Barney Kilgore, "is to quit reading."

A gold coin can appear as a small scene or anecdote: "A big buck antelope squirms under a fence and sprints over the plain, hoofs drumming powerfully. 'Now that's one fine sight,' murmurs a cowboy."

It might appear as a startling fact: "Lightning ... is much feared by any mounted man caught on the open plain, and many cowboys have been killed by it."

It can appear as a telling quote:" 'Most of the real cowboys I know,' says Mr. Miller, 'have been dead for a while.' "

These three gold coins appeared in a prize-winning story on the dying culture of the cowboy, written by Bill Blundell for the
Wall Street Journal,
a newspaper that takes the act of rewarding the reader seriously — and sometimes humorously.

A commonplace of Shakespeare studies is the importance of act 3. The first two acts build toward a moment of powerful insight or action; the last two resolve the tension that forms midway through the play. In other words, the Bard places a huge gold coin right in the middle of his plays. I tested this idea against Shakespeare's greatest tragedies and found the pattern fulfilled. In act 3 of
Hamlet,
the young prince crafts a play within a play that reveals the treachery of the king; in
Othello,
the title character is persuaded by the treacherous Iago that his bride has been unfaithful; in
King Lear,
the great ancient monarch is stripped to his bare essence and left howling in a hurricane.

Armed with evidence that there's gold in the middle, I undertook a literary experiment. I walked over to my bookshelf and picked out the first great work of literature that caught my eye,
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain. My Riverside edition has forty-two chapters, so I thumbed to the middle — chapter XXI — to see if the author had buried some gold. I was not disappointed. Huck narrates the hilarious story of two phony Shakespearean actors who take their act around the territory, butchering the

Bard with outrageous misrenderings. So Hamlet's most famous soliloquy turns out to be a mishmash of familiar phrases: "To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin." I wonder if it's more than coincidence that Twain uses these corny players (in the middle of the novel) to parody
Hamlet's
central scene.