What I Write

If you look through my stories, you’ll see there are certain things I try to provide. Here are seven of them.

“What do you want?”

–That’s such a marvelous question. It can be the seed to a beautiful memory, or the offer that calms a terrorist. It can delight, seduce, or reassure… and of course it can map out which of thousands of genres and styles each of us want to spend our nights curled up reading.

It’s also the defining question for a story itself. A quest, a mystery, or even a slice of life are all brought together by the struggle for some goal the characters want. (When someone writes a slice of life story, or just anything with a slow start, that’s the time to check Kurt Vonnegut’s blessed rule “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”) So saving a kingdom is not the same as unmasking one killer, or trying to make the person in the next cubicle laugh before the workday begins.

And when I start defining one of my character’s goals, I like to cut the ground a bit further out from under him:

In Shadowed, Paul was searching for the answer to his own mysterious power, and the hole in his memory that had him give up his ordinary life to live in secret.
In the Spellkeeper Flight books, Mark wanted to save the people he loved from enemy magic—but he’d also lived his life in the shadow of his best friend (she’s so much more capable than he is), his older cousin, and his criminal father. Not someone who’d see himself as a hero, even before the story took a few hard twists.

When my heroes want something, I try not to make it simple.

Struggling on All Sides

The one piece of writing advice that’s stuck with me more than anything is: a strong story leaves the character no choice except what he has to do.

(And that last choice is still the hardest he has to make.)

After all, the basic question of how we all get through our days is “What do I do next?” It unfolds into the step-by-step journey that makes a character unique, AND builds a plot that’s specific and convincing. What are the options, the allies, the limitations that someone’s world is made up of? How do they see its shortcuts, and what blind spots do they miss?

If my hero doesn’t try bargaining with the opposition, or avoiding them, or asking for help… then I want to think I’ve shown solid reasons why they wouldn’t. Which ways are closed off really can be what defines a strong story concept: the increasingly implacable enemy, the inescapable problem, or the isolation that forces a hero to struggle alone. And those blind spots of the answers that another person could have used, and this one took too long to see.

Or just in a single scene, how many arguments, ideas, or maneuvers can there really be, and how does the chess match play out? Including, how many moves does the other side have planned? A battle like the ones the Spellkeepers have (“this city’s not big enough for the four of them”) ought to be worth losing ourselves in the whirl of action, that always leads to the conclusion it needs to.

For Joy

Mark can fly. He only needs a moment to fling himself up past the rooftops, and every time he looks at his city from above, he sees something new. Even if it’s another pattern about where his enemies might be hiding.

Paul’s story is more earthbound, and Shadowed was mostly about looking into the darker corners of his world. But the core idea of that world is that power and hope can make a difference in people’s lives—even when there isn’t a conspiracy to fight. “A nice place to visit, and maybe I would want to live there.”

Paul has a long way to go before he understands that. (Though my followup short story for him “Passengers” is one moment of him getting closer.)

But whatever stage one of my stories is at, I try to look for moments of peace or pleasure. If I can’t immerse myself and the reader in how those moments keep a character going, the road ahead would look pretty dark.

Suspense

It’s in my motto: “Whispered spells for breathless suspense.” My favorite scenes are usually the ones where every twist and every image pull me deeper into the moment, until I’m screaming inside to know what comes next. I want that when I write, every time.

Some scenes are playful or restful, but I still want them to find something to tease the reader with, and make each moment flow into the next. The further I look into what makes suspense work, the more I see that the same twists work for any moment and any style.

And sometimes I have a man with a flying belt being forced down into sewers and grabbing one last desperate look at what ought to be familiar surroundings above ground. By the time Mark erupts back into the open air, we should all be soaring with him—and his night’s still just getting started.

What’s love got to do with it?

Many writers treat “paranormal” as one half of “paranormal romance.” But a writer I know once asked who preferred their love stories hot and who wanted a slow burn, and my answer was that I best remember the ones that take their time. Better yet, the stories that genuinely play their relationships against everything else at stake, and make us wonder which should be more important.

A mystery fan could “cherchez la femme” in my books, and find women and men at the root of some of the most powerful drives each other has. I hope you’ll like who the story ends up putting with who. But that doesn’t mean you’ll know how it’ll get there.

Mark would be the first to admit that knowing Angie has shaped half of his life. Paul and Sarah and Lorraine and Greg… it’s been complicated.

Nothing will be the same

More and more, I like a story to put some weight into the steps it goes through. True, I’ve written searches, chases, and confrontations that only reinforced what the story had already shown was going to be the challenge… but more and more, I like the moments that change that up.

Truths are turned upside down. Loyalties break. New strengths unlock. People die, sometimes.

So often, those are the moments we remember in a story. Again and again, I find writing comes down to building a tale around pieces that could truly tear something loose if they changed, plus the journey that makes them important. Then, being willing to push the detonator.

Is this the scene where things just got real? How many more of those can a story take?

I always want to find out.

To the Truth

Purposes and possibilities, joy and fierceness and heart and heartbreak… But like the philosopher cowboy on City Slickers said, all that really matters is “one thing,” meaning it’s all a journey to find what that thing is.

All my stories come down to some final truth, that I’ve been working toward from the beginning. It might be who can be trusted and why, or it might be what a character can trust in themselves. Everything else is exploring why that has to be the answer.

I like to think that makes the twists along the way more than tools for suspense. That the glimpses into the reasons why someone can’t take an offer, or how they look at someone they’ve never understood, might stick with a reader after the last page is turned.

If those are the stories you want to read, I hope you’ll click here and take a look.

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That Ultimate Buffy Scene – Willow’s Long Walk

What does storytelling mean to me?

Sometimes, I have to look back at the tales that make me glad to play in the writers’ sandbox. The moments, and the craft behind them, that have burned themselves into my brain as the best ever.

And there’s nothing like Buffy… and the longest, darkest school hallway walk in history.

“Things are about to get very interesting”

–That was a dialogue quote that played in the ads for the sweeps story of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

–Yes, that season. The big one.

I would put a massive SPOILER ALERT here, but… well, I can’t imagine a dark fantasy reader on this blog who doesn’t know the turning point of that show-defining two-parter called “Surprise!” and “Innocence.”

But if you still don’t, readers all, you’ve had your warning. After all, omens are in the spirit of that storyline.

And second chances are not. So:

First glimpse is our heroine watching a dream of Angel, the world’s only vampire with a soul, being murdered… and fearing it’s one of the rare prophetic dreams that being the Slayer sends her. This is called establishing the, um, stake.

Especially since she’s in love with him. And how, in spite of having saved the world once already, Buffy Summers is very much a girl turning seventeen.

(Note, this was years before those books. The one word that can be spoken against Buffy is that it inspired Twilight as a pallid, pull-all-the-punches imitation of one piece of it.)

But the story isn’t only about her boyfriend. It’s got a few other threads too.

Willow, Buffy’s shy little friend, daring to ask an offbeat musician on a date, to their surprise party for Buffy. Sweet.
Xander, the long-suffering and all-too-human boy at their heels trying to get the snooty Head Cheerleader to admit how they’ve been sort of dating, between fights. Sweet and sour.
Computer teacher and ally Jenny Calendar getting a secret message revealing to us that she’s only been in town for one reason: to guarantee that Angel suffers. Especially by her removing Buffy.
And of course, the crazy-deadly (and simply crazy) vampire Drusilla receiving her own presents for her own party (why yes, it’s a theme). Namely, the severed pieces of an immortal demon called the Judge that can destroy anything remotely human with a touch, or build up his power to cleanse the planet. Dru’s first act when he reassembles is to let him vaporize one of her own vampires who almost one of his arms, and immediately squeal “Do it again!”

So all while our heroes are trying to slow down the assembly of the Judge, we can see Jenny picking some very clever moments to lead Buffy into a trap, or send Angel away on a solo mission (who else can hide the last piece of the Judge on the far side of the planet, and of course that means months away on a cargo ship…). And Buffy’s telling herself what many fans had been screaming from day one, that she should just take Angel to bed.

One narrow escape from the Judge later, she does.

And that’s what destroys Angel, and what Jenny had actually been sent to prevent: a hidden clause in The Curse that had been keeping Angel human, so that if his eternity of guilt was ever interrupted by one moment of real happiness, the soul the gypsies had forced back on him would slip away. Unleashing what an ancient vampire had once called “the most vicious creature I ever met.”

Why It Works

Meticulous buildup.

And, keeping so many threads fighting for our attention at once: we never did find out where Jenny would have taken Buffy if they hadn’t spotted those vamps.

All on top of the ultimate wish-fullfillment for the fans, turned inside out into the ultimate cautionary tale for any girl. (When Joss Whedon throws you a bone, it’s usually a grinning skull. One that bites.)

And then the second half of the two-parter.

All the right pressure points are hit: the first thing the restored Angelus does is to rip out a woman’s throat. The second is to join up with Drusilla, his creation, and letting the Judge find he doesn’t have one scrap of humanity to be burned with. (One guess why the Judge wasn’t written with simple weapons like poison or a thousand knives.) The third is to go back to the just-waking Buffy and rip out her heart… by keeping his secret and triggering every one of her teenage insecurities, finishing with “I’ll call you.”

So we know the world-burning demon is the minor threat now. Angelus is just getting started.

But all Buffy knows is she’s a total wreak.

Meanwhile her friends are scrabbling through the usual books, reciting more and more often how unstoppable the enemy they know about is: “no weapon forged can harm” and “it took an army.” But the guilt-stricken Jenny is nowhere to be seen. At least Xander and Willow are trying…

And Willow catches Xander making out with Cordelia, the Queen of Mean. “You’d rather be with someone you hate than be with me.”

But…

Just then, when pretty much the entire cast has been given a custom-built trauma, Willow is able to pull herself up and tell Xander they still have a world to save. And then Xander—hapless, helpless, all-heart Xander who’s always failed—Xander says “I’m getting a thought.”

And THAT’S WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT.

There’s Angelus, standing in the shadows at the far end of the hallway, casually calling Willow to him. She walks trustingly toward him… and when the episode premiered it felt like it took a full minute for her to cross that hall, and that was still too fast.

Because of every twist that Joss took to tighten the screws, again and again.

Because there had never once been only one plotline in play that would let us catch our breath.

Because every one of them was aimed where they’d hurt the most.

Because by now everything and everyone our heroes relied on has been stripped away… and just now teased with that one glimmer of hope, except that Willow’s walking into the grasp of the hidden monster….

And we know that with every step she takes, no matter what comes next, nothing in this story can ever be the same again.

Nobody writes quite like Joss Whedon.

But God knows we have to try.

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Photo by dbnunley

The Plot-Device Machine – Knowledge

“You can run but you can’t hide.” It’s simple truth, that getting distance from a problem may be no match for how “Knowledge is power.” And that’s only one side to how “who knows what” defines the story; my first Plot Device post showed how you might move your characters around to control how the plot unfolds, but knowledge almost is the plot.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Think about this:

[bctt tweet=”Knowledge is the only side of the story that matches how the reader’s experiencing it. #secrets #writing”]

Unless you’re writing a travel guide, they aren’t following those movements; unless it’s a how-to they won’t be assembling the strengths the characters gain.

But knowledge means something, if the story can make us wonder “what’s really going on there” and let us share in the answer… because that answer or how to search for it always says at least a bit about our own lives. It could be

Specific: Bilbo solving each of Gollum’s riddles. Each time we figure one out ourselves, we cheer; each time we don’t, we sweat just a little for him.
Game-changing: the Green Goblin learning Spider-Man’s identity. (It’s not just what the hero knows!)
Layered: how much of a romance comes down to pacing what moments the couple are “getting to know” the chemistry they have, matched against thos False Impressions?
Or, bedrock: under all their twisting clues, mysteries can get their ultimate power from revealing just how vicious a killer was right next to us all along.

So the more of your story is tied to the revelations in it, the harder it can hit.

Knowing when to Know

It may be because information’s about blind spots, but I’ve seen (and written, sigh) so many moments where a plot misses one side of holding its mysteries together. A story can’t lose track of:

What’s someone know, right now? And so, what does that make him think he needs to look into next—or not care about at all, so far?
1. And, how do his assumptions play into it? There’s no better tool for a character arc than to find the facts he just won’t accept, then show how wrong he is.
Then, how many ways could he follow that up? Talk to people, bring up Google, or track down a Dusty Tome? Run a test in a lab?
1. One trick is to consider all five senses (or more, if you’ve got a cast like mine!) for what signs each fact might leave, including from looking back at its history. Detectives look for everything from footprints to strange sounds to glimpses in ATM cameras, and all the associates and back-story a suspect has. Can someone really run away from an enemy without coming back all sweaty? When you know what to look for, you know what ways someone might look for it.
Also, which of those signs can he use best, to follow up? A hacker might dig through a dozen servers before he knocks on a witness’s door, but Sherlock Holmes will spot everything from calloused fingers to unscrupulous accounting at a glance—and he’ll know what the combination means, and how to shift to using a disguise to get the next piece.
Check what all characters know, not just the main ones. Look at each step your central characters take (in investigating and everything else), and then ask who else is going to get a hint of what happened and start nosing around themselves—or just jump in and act. There’s just no comparison between Lois Lane being fooled by Clark Kent’s glasses and the thrill of Indy hauling up the Ark only to discover that the Nazis were watching him digging…
1. Then ask what that tells the hero to look into, and keep things escalating!
And, what are all those players doing for “information control”? Can they keep from leaving those traces (tiptoe past those guards), or erase them later or explain them away?
1. Better yet, who can trick who with all of that? There’s the “moment of distraction” someone could use to tweak any moment in the story… and then there’s Holmes’s defining trick of pretending to set fire to a house, to make the blackmailer herself reveal her hiding place.
2. On top of THAT, some of the best plot twists come when the villain (or hero) realize they’ve been tricked, and the tables start turning!

You can lay most parts of the story out in terms of how each scrap of knowledge lets the hero—and everyone else—move the plot forward, or else move off-track with your red herrings.

In fact, speaking of moving, it’s often literal! In many styles of writing, most of the pages are simply the combination of searching and moving. Whether it’s a grand investigation, sneaking past an enemy, or just describing scenery (whether or not real clues are hidden in it), they form the same pattern:

[bctt tweet=”Basic scene: everyone moves toward the expected next clue, sees what’s there, rinse & repeat. http://bit.ly/DevicesKnow”]

Think about it: how many ways are there that really vary from that? Yes, there’s when someone settles in to search in one place (through a process like reading or talking), or into a flat-out race or chase where speed matters more than scenery (but even then, things can come up in the environment to help them maneuver). There are Strength moments, from fights to change-the-tires scenes, that I’ll get to in the next Plot Device post. And you have other conversations, that can be their own mix of Knowledge and Motive, and maybe some Movement (or Strength) too. But mixing Movement and Knowledge might be the bread and butter of getting most sequences written.

In fact, part of the balance is how much you’ll let Knowledge obsolete Movement. Do characters need to go out to look at a site, or can they just run tests in their lab—or even skip gathering the lab samples if they can just talk to someone who’s seen it happen? (“Where’s my flying car? It’s called the Internet.”) Which means you can choose what clues call for legwork after all, and which dead ends the map won’t warn them about, to pick which discoveries get more emphasis… or just get more chances for complications.

And of course, the more amazing a character’s control of knowledge is, the more it reshapes the whole story from the start. (If you’ve ever played a video game with a secondary “radar display” to keep track of your enemies, you know how different it feels to see a bit further!) Many a story’s been built just around why the protagonist knows at least a little that the rest of us don’t: the psychic, the spy, or just the witness nobody believes. Or it could be the same advantage in reverse, being the invisible man or inside source that can hide in plain sight. Then you have the challenge of building the story around just how much more they can find, and what limits they still have.

(No, Superman, the missile control doesn’t have to be inside the lead box, that’s only the first thing where you can’t see what’s inside… oops.)

Knowledge, and Movement, can be the major tools for organizing a story. But then the other two Plot Device tools… Strength and Motive are the story pieces themselves.

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How All Writing is Suspense

Why is my writing all about suspense? I think a better question is, is there any story that isn’t really about building uncertainty, making the reader wonder about what comes next, making them care? Suspense. And understanding that may be the perfect tool for any kind of writing.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

But suspense is only one genre, isn’t it? One Wikipedia page (since it’s probably the quickest source to go check; I’ll wait) lists 22 genres, and umpteen variations within them. I actually class my own writing as fantasy, urban fantasy and paranormal in particular, one of several genres that many people think of for its distinctive character types and weaponry (see also Science Fiction) or conflict (Crime or Mystery).

Except, many of those genres are about choosing tools. When a writer sits down to use them, Tom Clancy doesn’t have the same aims as Ian Fleming, and my battles aren’t trying to imitate Seanan McGuire’s. (Not that anyone could…)

What the idea of suspense can do is bring all genres and styles together—and show how each of us is making our own writing choices, even line by line, but all following the same cycle.

I call it a “suspense” flow, because I think that’s the word that captures the energy we want each part of a story to have—especially how it depends on balancing different parts of the flow to get the pacing right. You might argue for “action,” “mystery,” or other words, but I think “suspense” captures more in one word. And it all builds on what all writers do know is: conflict.

[bctt tweet=”If #conflict is the ‘engine’ of a story, the #suspense flow shows which ‘gear’ the engine’s in.”]

How does that help us writing?

Partly, we can use the suspense model for a larger view of what any part of a story needs, whether it’s a single passage or a five-book plan. Such as checking for:

someone to root for
tone or atmosphere
complications, and a sense that these would be what he has to deal with
choices that are hard enough to reveal the character
pacing, not rushing or bogging down on the way to—
an outcome that means something

All of these are basic elements of writing and conflict, but this fits them all together to see them as part of the same cycle—and to ask whether they’re building the right kind of momentum, involvement, suspense.

“But my writing’s barely about suspense!” –If that’s what you’ve been thinking, consider this: the suspense flow is more than a way to find common needs in the genres and styles. It’s also a way to look at any part of writing, and to pick if you have any particular priorities for it:

If you want sensory mood or detail, you can start painting the picture right from the beginning, even before things happen.
To make your story more about its subject (anything from a neighborhood-specific tale to a political tale to SF and fantasy), you might define more of it by just what complications come out of it. Be sure the reader knows why it’s those problems those people have to face, and what that means.
A sense of mystery can mean playing up the contrast between choices about the subject, and of course stretching out how long it takaes to find that answer. Was it the vampire or the best friend that dunnit? Just why was the ruined city abandoned?
Or, classic suspense in its own right means extending the whole process, whether it’s building up more mood or looking for further complications to keep things up in the air.
Pure “drama” usually is code for making characters more important than what happens—not just important (we all want that), but focused on how they resist or interpret or put their own slant on the facts. Even in a whole sprawling war, nobody’s going to have the same PTSD as this one soldier.
Or an action story needs to do justice to the effect itself, the explosions at the end of the suspense cycle before the cycle starts up again.
(For that matter, comedy has the same need to stop there and enjoy the laughter. That same moment of release might well have explosions too, as long as fewer people are getting hurt.)

Naturally each point on the suspense flow is only as good as how the rest of the flow meshes with it. Only the crudest action story gets careless about why the danger’s there, or the hero’s choices in facing it; sensory description that shuts off once the complications appear would be absurd. And again, “suspense” is a reminder that it only works when the pieces have the right balance for the pacing we want.

Even a sequence that’s all mood or description can look at this pattern. By the time that boy finishes strolling out to the lake, what state of mind should the passage have nudged him to, and the reader with him? Do the bits of detail contrast with each other in ways that stir up preferences in us (looking at the open sky, and the gritty, tiring dust his feet kick up, before he’s finally rounding the corner), or give a sense of one thing disrupting another to demand our attention?

Can you look at these and see which part of the flow you want to give a bit more justification, a few more words, or an extra scene?

It’s all there, by one name or another. And if the combination of your words catches fire, it will do it partly because of what we call suspense.

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Writing for Five Senses – Combining Them All

Can you write a description with just sight and hearing? No, but those two can organize how all five senses fit together.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Last week I wrote about the classic advice to “describe all five senses,” and how much easier keeping track of description is if we focus on alternating the main two. But of course writing isn’t supposed to be easy. Having two primary senses doesn’t excuse us from keeping all five in mind to cover a scene, or help weave them together to build the kind of high-powered suspense (or warmth, or humor, or whatever your own goals are) a story deserves.

Except, they do.

[bctt tweet=”Sight and hearing aren’t just a shortcut, they’re models for writing all five senses. bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

Two Models

Think about it: what’s the basic difference between eyes and ears? Different writers might think of points like:

Sight organizes our surroundings, with sound giving advance signs before something comes into view. (Or as we action writers call them, warnings.)
Sight gives a complete “picture” of surroundings; sound often adds feeling with someone’s tone of voice, or a noisy object’s “personality.” More poetic writers can savor this.
Sight shows everything (in theory); sound picks out which things are moving or active.

All true, and I think they all come back to one rule for organizing descriptions:

[bctt tweet=”#Describing sight is about things’ positions; hearing is about their nature. #writing bit.ly/5SensesBy2″]

When I look out my window right now, I see everything from the parking lot up to the sky—which also means I have to (literally) focus on different parts of the view each moment, and it means that if I don’t see someone walking up to visit me, there’s nobody right there. Hearing is more selective; someone standing beyond my door is hidden until he knocks, and I still won’t know if he’s holding a package or anything else until he (or she) makes another noise with that.

–That position vs nature difference is nothing new to any of us, but how often do we really think about it, as writers? Especially one further effect of it: if there is a sound, my hearing might still pick it up through walls and behind my back, and even when I’m not paying attention. (Say when a car alarm goes off when I’m trying to write…) But sight’s power and limits might lead to me walking over to check what’s off on the side of my window frame.

Of the two, focused sight is the one we keep acting on to get a clearer picture of what we need; sound gets broadcast to us on its own. For a writer looking to follow the moment, that difference is pure gold.

And best of all, the other three senses fit right into these patterns.

Touch is as position- and focused-based as sight, the way we have to reach out to feel anything that hasn’t come to us; it even has the same similarity that we already have a skinload of cold air, tight shoes, and other touches we’re always half-aware of and trying to focus past. And taste only has the range of our tongues, except when memory or “the taste of fear” stir something up.

Meanwhile smell works much like hearing: certain things jump right out at us because they—but only they—give off much scent, and they pour those sensations right into the air.

There may be five senses, but all they follow these two plans… and so does a character using them.

Stepping through the Senses

Since I always look at my writing as a chance to build different kinds of suspense, I think my scenes only work if I can build them in the right order. So if I want to drop a reader deep into one moment, I might describe all five senses at once. But more often, I’ll tie it all to the process of how my character is living through that scene:

Step 1) First outside senses: Is there something he can hear, or smell, before what’s important comes within reach of the focused senses?

A crunch of boots on the snow made him whirl around.

Step 2) Surveying: What can he see, touch, or taste as he first tries to take in what’s there? And, which pieces matter most to him, and what patterns (like barriers or possibilities) do they form in his mind?

One of the thugs staggered from the door, blocking the alley. Dark blood soaked his shirt, but Mark shivered to see the “dead” man’s wild eyes gleam brighter than the knife in his hand.

As part of this, sound/smell components: check which few of those sensations would also create a sound or smell, and how those senses might “demand” a bit of our attention. So instead I could start those lines with:
One of the thugs staggered from the door, scraping dully against the brick wall as he blocked the alley….

Step 3) Act & React (focus+changes): As the scene goes on, keep tracking what the character and everyone else do, the same way as Step 2. That is, use sight, touch, and taste to do their best to follow everything worth noticing, but watch for which things are adding a noise or scent to the mix.

Mark edged back, watching his balance as his heels picked through the treacherous bags of garbage piled behind him. The stink of blood as the killer stumbled closer brought sour vomit to Mark’s mouth.

plus Background: For an extra layer, once and a while is there a sound or smell from outside the immediate area that could filter into the mix?
The police sirens faded in the distance.

—Or if those sirens were to turn around, that “background” sound could restart the cycle as a new Step 1 of the police starting to drive into view. (Even if they don’t, if you know my Lavine series, you know Mark has at least four ways to survive that scene.)

That’s how I build suspense, or poetry or warmth or any other mood, by playing up the differences in the “focused” and “broadcast” senses to work them each in at their own places. Because to me (and I make no apology for saying it)—

Losing that distinction would be… senseless.

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More than a Scene

It’s easy to think of a story’s scene as being about the next struggle or problem, or else touching a different base that hasn’t been mentioned in a while. That sense of “what’s next” may be vital, for the logic that ties the scene to what’s just happened and what’s needed up ahead. But it can also be a trap, to think only of the immediate needs and miss our chance to build larger resonances with the whole story.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Classic example: we all know what a story’s first couple of scenes (or first minutes in one running scene) will probably cover, as far as the hero goes. They’ll include

something to give a sense of the character’s regular life, and
the “establishing incident,” the “call to adventure” that takes it in a different direction.

–Yes there are a lot of variations, like putting the change right in line one and then catching up with “Why shoot at me, I’m just a…”, or someone with a “regular” life that’s already thrilling but still complicated by this new twist. But these are the classic building blocks of a start.

But, how many more layers could you build with them? Everything has a past; there may still be one event that puts things on the story’s course, but how carefully could you set up the road they’d been on until then, so we really feel how sharp (or subtle) the change is?

Consider the start of the manga and anime Monster, by Naoki Urasawa. The story’s tagline is “What if the life you saved became a monster?”–but, the first scenes aren’t simply the good Dr. Tenma performing ordinary surgeries before they wheel in the dying serial killer. Instead, he realizes he’s let his boss keep him away from desperate but poor patients, and so Tenma is actually defying his hospital when he insists on saving that particular fateful life.

Now think about it: how many writers do you know that don’t consider a start or other key moment complete without that kind of ironic spin? Other authors may dislike overt twists like that, but they’ll look around for quieter hints that can make the effect they want. This is hard-hitting, ambitious writing that we can’t do if we think only of the likeliest way to get from A to B. What’s the best way to get there?

And besides the big plot twist itself, when Urasawa chooses an obstacle of human schemes (rather than, say, Tenma being in bad health, or about to go on vacation), he also shows how corrupt the story’s world can be and how Tenma will have to struggle with his naiveté and ideals. Again, it can be too easy to fill a scene with the most obvious form of problem (or solution to it) rather than find the one that adds to the bigger picture.

Think of what could be called the “penultimate, penultimate Harry Potter action scene.” That is, the second-last book’s second-last struggle–a position that of course could make it a key moment for suspense buildup. And even though it’s a movie-trailer favorite as “That Half-Blood Prince moment where a lakeful of zombies get torched,” the real center of the scene is much more specific. Namely, it’s Harry under orders to help his mentor Dumbledore put himself through ultimate agony to complete their mission.

The “fire”fight afterward is a much-appreciated release from that tension, but it only goes so far to relieve our sense of guilt, all amplified by how this is the first time in six books that Dumbledore has openly asked Harry to go into danger. Of all the things J. K. Rawling could have keyed that struggle around (and we know she can think of quite a few), she chose the one that leaves Harry with a deep need to make it up to Dumbledore… and what happens then reminds us the Potter books are so much more than Quidditch chases or good-crushes-evil.

That’s the principle, things resonating from their past or on to the future, and it shows up in many of the more powerful stories and some mediocre ones too. We all know scenes of some hero busy doing one thing while a supporting character shows off his dissent or incompetence; what makes so many of them comic relief is that those conflicts doesn’t go anywhere further, while the other stories actually are laying groundwork for future changes or showing consequences for what’s just happened.

It works for obstacles, and characters, and it works for methods or resources. (In a sense, most of the story is either a method or an obstacle, plus the lessons learned from them; characters are simply the most important things to fit onto those sides.) If the hero has one way of solving a problem, it should be only a matter of time before the story explores how many ways that can go wrong, and how which ways he’s tried build a sense of what he still needs to explore or what he needs to keep his faith in.

One caution: it’s also easy to plan scenes completely from this viewpoint, placing certain things purely as a clue or an echo. This may add a lot to the larger picture, but scenes that also feel like they’re really connected to the story right now come off a lot better than those that whisper “Hold on and take this in, it’ll matter more later.”

All of these are the building blocks of a story. And building anything means being sure one brick fits with the next, but real architecture keeps the whole shape in mind. A scene can be the next thing, but are you choosing it to mesh with what came just before or some larger point?

Why stop at one?

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Options for Suspense – Hitchcock’s bomb

How many ways are there to write suspense into a scene? It’s a major question—especially since really tightening the tension can be some of the heaviest lifting in a story we thought we’d already planned out. And don’t we want every scene to do more to pull the reader in, not just with danger but that any kind of scene builds that “what’s next??” eagerness about whatever’s going on? Still, let’s explore this through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb ticking under the table.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

(No, this is not another discussion about Surprise versus Suspense. It’s less about how to use a given plot thread than about how many things you can twist, so you can apply the Master’s method or his challengers’ to whichever you want.)

So, about that bomb…

What I always ask myself is to take the whole chain of events that are needed for a thing, and ask “What could go wrong?” In this case, that means about keeping the bomb and the people together, and what else could affect them. And for each idea I get, I then ask “What am I assuming?” to look for more variations on where to twist.

Hitchcock talks mostly about the bomb’s targets not knowing what the audience does, and making the audience mentally scream at them to get up from that table and run for their lives. Of course that’s because the obvious thing about a bomb is that it’s not obvious until it blows, that the victims have no idea what’s about to happen. And so their survival probably comes down, not to outfighting or outwitting the problem, but to blind luck about whether they’re in the blast or not. –Which is about as scary as it gets, of course.

So the purest way to write that bomb scene would be to use nothing but the petty details of the moment. How many small, everyday things just might make someone get up and walk away to safety? It might be as simple as them starting a meal and either hating the food or deciding to linger over seconds. Or does someone have to take a phone call—although to really apply Hitchcock’s logic, even the call shouldn’t come out of the blue, it should come from factors we can watch changing before our eyes. (Now if the table discussion is actually whether one guy’s girl is going to call to forgive him for a fight, or if someone says he might get a call but then gets so into the conversation he stops to switch off his cell phone…)

Of course the real roller-coaster of stay/go factors is probably the people’s conversation. So we can work out the excruciating twists and turns of how they’re deciding the fate of the world or planning their futures, or just who walks the dog tomorrow, so the reader follows all this knowing that whether they have a future may depend on how they drag things out or maybe spiral into a fight and storm off to safety. This grounds the thrills because we’re probably all more interested in things depending on people than in if the roast is burned, and a detailed conversation is easier to write twists in anyway. (Then again, really blind luck has its own chills.)

But here’s one assumption within that: thinking of people moved around by conversations or other issues, does it have to be only the people already at the table? You can change the whole scene by calling someone else over into the bomb’s reach—maybe some Much Less Expendable character, or the bomber himself so he’s struggling to find an excuse to get away again.

And there we’re moving into another dimension: characters not just affected by chance but the consequences of those who do know about the bomb. It might still start with the same people and/or luck, maybe the old “drop the fork, what’s that under the table” if you can explore ways to either prolong the scene or have other excitement despite it. (Say, what if the woman who spots the bomb actually wants to STAY near it a bit longer, to test if the man she’s sitting with knew about it…) Or is someone else figuring out the bomb plot meanwhile, or racing across town to warn them? (Okay, racing to escape the villain and grab anyone with a cell phone.) Is the bomber having second thoughts, maybe because the wrong person is too close to the bomb?

Then there are assumptions about the bomb itself. It goes off, but when? Hitchcock’s example tells the audience when and puts a clock in the background so we can take in everything in terms of that image. (Though of course, this is easiest as a visual method; in print we may have to look for reasons for characters, unlike camera angles, to keep noticing the time. Or just write 5:49. John said…) But writers have done more convoluted tricks like “oh, that clock’s five minutes slow—boom!” or made the scheme something like “it blows when the birds fly” so our hearts stop when a flock of pigeons is startled up but then realize that next door the Midtown High Hawks are about to get out of practice. Maybe the subtlest way of all is to never show the time, if you can really manipulate the feeling in a vacuum that it must be about to run out…

Or does the bomb even go off right? One recent story (no, no spoilers which) actually had the much-built-up bomb misfire… of course, the bomber had time to re-rig it so it was just a stall, but this is the kind of thing you can get away with if you think your story’s good enough that readers forgive the obvious manipulation and then love you for showing anything is possible. (One reviewer called it “a magnificent cheat”, which about sums it up.) –Of course, it always helps if it’s being plotted in terms of the bomber using shoddy materials or rushing his work.

Another assumption: must the blast kill everyone, if you can make it convincing that a victim’s standing just at the edge, maybe behind a big shielding truck? Or if your story actually has a character that’s invulnerable, you can do whole different things with the bomb plot, probably about him revealing his power or mourning the people who do die.

There’s one more assumption to vary here: besides what makes someone live or die, we can also plot around how the reader cares about that death. A conversation could build toward a couple baring their souls and getting engaged, or a petty scumball looks like he’s about to reveal who the killer us. –After all, if the readers see us raising or changing the stakes, the very fact that we bother to do it also looks like a sign that we’re about to push the button. Similarly, what if one of the prospective victims is revealed to be a killer himself, and about to go do something villanous, and the reader hopes he stays for the explosion after all? We could even walk the line of making him only unsympathetic but layered, so the reader starts wanting him to die but is aware he’s wishing death on someone just for one fallible sin…

I do love a subtle explosion.