Plot-What’s the Problem?

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Plot doesn’t pick up where characterization ends: the two are inextricable. It’s all very well to create a vibrant protagonist whom readers can relate to, but then you have to get that character into some kind of trouble. The engine that drives a short story’s plot is its protagonist’s wants and needs. Knowing your characters’ deepest desires–and why these desires motivate them–is critical.

Sparks begin to fly in fiction when characters come together–when we see them conflict, fall in love, betray each other, form alliances, and just plainly perform on the stage you’ve created for them. This can be accomplished in as little as a single scene between two characters. Most stories, though, move their conflict through a series of scenes whose tension increases incrementally until the conflict reaches its crisis and boils over.

Though an SF story’s element of the impossible certainly gives an author unique options for plot complications–few mainstream stories see a character blown out of a spaceship airlock, or trampled by a centaur–the mechanics of plotting are less affected by genre considerations than other story components like setting and character. At the heart of every story, fantastic or not, is a character with a problem: one that, for whatever reason, isn’t easily solved.

There are as many approaches to plotting a story as there are writers, but for those struggling to tighten a piece, a look at standard plot formulas can sometimes be helpful. Author Wendy Webb, for example, suggests that stories be structured using seven steps:

Hook (open with a high-impact phrase that engages reader interest)
Problem (clue readers in as to what the protagonist wants… and why s/he cannot have it)
Backfill (now that the audience is engaged, provide whatever context is required)
Complications (the protagonist encounters obstacles in his first attempts to achieve the goal.)
Action (more attempts, more failures)
Dark Moment (the goal seems out of reach… but is it?)
Resolution (The protagonist succeeds or fails, and we see the final result of his struggle.)

An alternative structure used by other writers is even simpler:

Intro (similar to hook, above)
Complication One
Resolution: Things Get Worse
Complication Two
Resolution: Things Get Still Worse
Complication Three
Resolution: Where Character Either Triumphs or Dies

Some writers find these plot bones useful in initially planning their stories. Others prefer to veer off-road, blazing their own trail through the plot jungle. Where these structures often come in useful is after you have a first draft. At that point, compare your piece with the structures provided above. Analyzing an existing draft with an eye to clarifying and strengthening the conflict will always make it stronger, and plot formulas like the ones above are useful tools in forming this analysis.

Remember, though, that the true key to plotting lies not in following a formula, but in establishing a conflict that readers can clearly identify (and identify with), bringing it to a crisis, and then resolving that crisis in an emotionally satisfying fashion. If you can pull this off, your story will be a successful work of fiction.

Questions to ask when plotting a story:

Think through your unwritten story on a scene by scene basis:

  • Does each scene advance the plot?
  • Does the conflict come into play within each scene?
  • Is it possible to increase the tension of some or all of your scenes?

Are all the elements of plot present in your draft?

  • When can the reader say, positively, that they know what forces are in conflict in your story?
  • Can they identify the moment of crisis and its resolution?
  • Are the protagonist’s actions in pursuit of her goal logical?

What emotions do your characters experience as the story progresses?

  • Is your protagonist happy, sad, anxious, or in some other emotional state when the story begins?
  • How far from this starting point is the story going to move them? (Remember that a character who is already in crisis on page one of a piece has nowhere to go but up, whereas one who is happy–or only moderately distressed–can be set up more easily for a big plunge.)

How suspenseful is your story?

  • What is it that your reader wants to know or experience?
  • Do you have a plan for balancing the need to surprise readers against the need to make your characters’ actions believable?
  • Do your characters’ actions make sense?
  • Is what is happening clear at every stage of the story?

Shaping dreams

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First: Clarion Write-a-Thon Word Count: 1,417 out of 20,000. (More info here).

“And I do not play this instrument as well as I should like, but I have always thought that to be my fault, because I would not take the time to practice…” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Some of my students have accused me, obliquely, of being too picky. “I see lots of books where writers do this,” they say, when they get an MS back from me and in addition to the structural critique I’ve marked twenty eye bookisms, a bunch of passive verb constructions and noted that one of their perfectly good phrases has been around since Shakespeare, and that while it does the job maybe there’s a way that suits their characters better…

They’re right, to some extent. Part of what I do as a teacher is point out the strengths and the flaws in a person’s writing… even when that writing starts to be of publishable quality. I know new writers want to learn what it takes to sell their fiction, of course, but I hope they also want to just plain be better. There’s a lot of room between just barely salable and outstanding. I have yet to stop finding fault, even with my best students, even as I praise ’em to the skies.

Storytelling is engaging readers in a dream. You are taking them from the here and now and enveloping them in another world. The novel as a work of art offers its audiences the chance to be at once themselves and another person, just as dreams do, as fantasies do.

The thing about dreams is that some are shallow. Think of a night when your sleep was easily broken, by the slightest noise. The dreams of light sleep are the ones that most fleeting, that they’re the ones that vanish like vapor when your eyes open.

Such dreams are just fine. You might say they’re just barely publishable. But I think what most of us want, as writers, is to create deep absorption–compelling, vivid, engaging on a visceral, emotional level, and impossible to forget. It’s a lofty goal, but what I hope people are going for in this racket… not immediately, but eventually, if they’re very good and very hardworking and very lucky, is to be life-altering.

There are a couple ways to instill deep dreaming. One is to have a story so suspenseful that the reader simply can’t put it down–we’ve all devoured books whose line-by-line writing is shaky, because we got hooked; we had to know. Stieg Larsen’s The Girl Who books were like this, for me. This cartoon, My Lost Weekend in the Meyer, says the same about the Twilight saga.

So: be suspenseful. Check! The other way to deepen the dream of a given narrative, once the basic story’s working, is to up the quality of the prose. To have undertow within the words themselves, to be compelling, seductive, to beguile and even drown. We each have our own way of pulling this off, and when it happens, it’s a powerful thing. Heck, there are stories where it’s a superpower in its own right: seizing or changing someone’s sleeping world.

So yes, I’m picky… because I think it’s a skill worth developing.

A Question of Character

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There are readers out there who will happily ride an action-adventure story to its exciting climax even if its characters are cardboard cutouts. Sometimes I’m even one of them. If you want to appeal to a wider audience, however, it helps immensely to populate your stories with sympathetic and complex human (and inhuman) beings, bringing them to life on the page and in the imagination of your audience.
In a short work of fiction you won’t have the luxury of spending pages or even whole chapters on your characters’ births, backgrounds, educations, and formative childhood experiences. Giving a sense of who they are in just a few paragraphs–and then building on that strong first impression–is a must.
Readers learn about character through:

• what they say about themselves
• what other characters say about them
• what the author tells us directly
• most importantly, what they do

All these sources of information combine to create a portrait of a person.
When introducing a character in a short story, consider what aspect of that character’s personality is most important. What actions might convey that? Suppose your protagonist is kindhearted. You could, of course, just say so:

“Frances was kindhearted.”

But can you find an action that expresses the same idea without telling?

Frances fished out his last coin without hesitating, giving it to the beggar.

Once you have presented an action, look again at the sentence. Are there any other bits of information about the character that can be slid gracefully into the same scenelet?

Brother Frances fished with his robotic left hand for his last coin; without hesitating, he gave it to the beggar.

Now your reader knows that Frances is a member of a religious order, a cyborg or robot, and generous.
Remember, whenever possible in a short story, make every sentence multitask. You can’t always deliver information, evoke the senses, deepen character and move forward the plot all in one sentence… but the more you gracefully pack into each sentence, the more a reader will get out of it. In the case of an all-important character-introduction, punch up the verbs, see if you can broaden the impact of the character-trait-revealing action, and look for ways to slip in a sensory detail or two:

Brother Frances’s metal fingers snagged the rough fabric of his robe as he fished in his pocket for a coin. His gaze never left the tattered beggar hovering on the edges of the food line as, with a clink of metal on metal, he found it. One sovereign, his last. He caught the girl’s eye and crooked a silver finger; when she wisped over, eyes wary, he pressed it into her scabbed and dirty palm. “Take my place in line, Child,” he whispered, and then, belly rumbling, he walked away.

    Reader Sympathy

If your protagonist is a kind-hearted robomonk who feeds the poor, chances are your readers are going to be prepared to like him, but not everyone is a saint. Few of us would enjoy reading about a cast of wholly unredeemable characters (unless the point of the story is seeing rotten humans pay for their crimes, as often happens in a certain type of horror story). Readers generally need someone to like in every piece. If your character is a flawed person who does both good and bad things, a few ways to get readers on their side might include:

• making a good first impression, as discussed above, before revealing their personal flaws
• a saving grace–your character is something of a bastard, but is kind to horses, never shoots anyone in the back, she banks to support her virtuoso sister at school
• your character is the victim of an undeserved misfortune
• your character is funny–readers love to hate an ironic and witty anti-hero

Questions to ask when thinking about characterization in SF:

  • Examine how the story’s element of the impossible has touched the character: Do they have more-than-human abilities? Is their appearance unusual? How does society view this person’s uniqueness?
  • What is the person like physically? Don’t merely focus on skin, eye or hair color here. Consider also dress, manner of speech, gait, scent, and anything that is specific to the character’s physical being.
  • Consider your character’s personality: What is her cultural background? Her emotional strengths and weaknesses? What are her fears, and what makes her angry? Stories are full of conflict, remember: how does she react to stress? What is she like in a verbal fight? What about a physical conflict? What emotional state is the character in when the story begins… and how will it have changed by the ending?
  • What is your character’s life like? It usually isn’t necessary, in a short story, to work out a detailed biography of the character’s whole life, but you should know the basics: is he rich or poor? Educated or not? What are his skills? Does he have a job, a partner, a family?
  • How are your protagonist’s needs going to affect the plot of the story? What is your main character’s goal in a given story? Is it believable? Can readers relate to it on a basic level? How far will the character go to achieve the goal? What about the characters standing in your protagonist’s way? Are their reasons for obstructing the protagonist clear? Do they need to be portrayed more sympathetically, or unsympathetically?

    • Setting the Stage

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    No matter where you place your story on the Science-Magic continuum, you have a choice: do some research, or invent a lot of internally-consistent rules for your setting. (Sometimes, of course, you do both!) Understanding where a story lies on the continuum can can inform both your writing and later your marketing choices, but for the moment let’s focus on the primary use of the above: telling your readers what kind of story they are reading by establishing its vivid and unique setting.
    Obviously a key difference between speculative and realistic fiction is that speculative fiction takes place in a universe different from our own… and understanding that difference, whether it is subtle or major, is going to be critical to a reader’s enjoyment of the story.
    Needless to say, some settings are more easily established than others. In “To Cuddle Amy” Nancy Kress is giving us a world much like our own; by showing us a normal couple engaged in a dispute over their child, she anchors us in that reality… and then she deftly slips us information on the few critical differences between her universe and the real world. In Kress’s case, the setting elements are key to the story’s ‘surprise’. Meanwhile, Joan Slonczewski tells us what to expect of her story with her title, “Tuberculosis Bacteria join U.N.”
    Establishing an SF setting should be fun. You have created an entire universe, and are sharing your vision with readers. Go for it!
    When looking at setting, whether during the draft or revision process, consider first and foremost what the reader needs to know, what they must understand to ‘get’ your story. Plan to put this info in the story in as clear and understandable a fashion as possible. Readers want to feel smart; they want to get it, and it is not your job to make it harder.
    Consider “To Cuddle Amy”. Kress puts the photo of sixteen-year-old Amy into her scene… then shows us the fourteen-year-old version. At this point we may not know what’s going on, but the clue, the indication that something is not-of-this-world, is unmistakeable. More importantly, when she does reveal that her beleaguered parents can in fact get their sweet young baby Amy back, Kress doesn’t force us to play a guessing game. We hear about the embryos; she tells us explicitly that we’re in a world where medical science can produce exact clones of a child.
    Giving a quick clue as to what kind of story you’ve written doesn’t have to involve pages of explanation. If you open with your Heroine on her horse, sword drawn, charging at the enemy, readers will assume they’re in a heroic fantasy or historical drama… at least until you hand them the next clue. If her boots ring hollowly on the deck plating of a Starship while a lowly ensign salutes nervously, we’ll go with military SF. One or two key details should be all you need to firmly establish your setting and your genre in the minds of your reader.

    Questions to ask when thinking about setting:

    • Start with what is different, what is impossible: How does it work? What effect does the difference have on the people within that environment?
    • What is the place actually like? What are its ambient smells, sounds, and colors? What is the quality of the light like? Are the surfaces hard, soft, or a mixture? What does a footstep sound like? Do voices echo? Is it hot or cold?
    • How does the place affect its people? Who are the wealthy and poor of this world, the weak and powerful? What special abilities does its technology or magic convey? Who controls those special abilities, and how are they viewed? What is an ordinary person’s life like in this milieu?
    • How do you want to place your reader in your setting?

    Addressing the above points should give you plenty of material for meeting the demands of that old writing adage, “show, don’t tell.” You should be armed with a handful of vivid sensory details: now, instead of saying “It was hot,” show your characters sweating miserably and fainting from heatstroke. If it stinks, have them gag, complain, run in the other direction, or, eyes watering, reach for a gas mask.

    Remember, in a short story every word counts! If you can learn to quickly evoke the heart of your setting with a few intensely sensory paragraphs, preferably filtering the sensations through a point of view character you’re developing at the same time, you’re already on your way to writing an unforgettable SF story.

    Exquisite Words

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    What I like most about this is I feel the imagery sets a very particular, chilly and winter-hued tone:

    He knew it was regarded as one of the loveliest Tudor manor houses in England and now it was before him in its perfection of form, its confident reconciliation of grace and strength; a house built for certainties, for birth, death and rites of passage, by men who knew what they believed and what they were doing. A house grounded in history, enduring. There was no grass or garden and no statuary in front of the Manor. It presented itself unadorned, its dignity needing no embellishment. He was seeing it at its best. The white morning glare of wintry sunlight had softened, burnishing the trunks of the beech trees and bathhing the stones of the manor in a silvery glow, so that for a moment in the stillness it seemed to quiver and become as insubstantial as a vision. The daylight would soon fade; it was the month of the winter solstice.

    THE PRIVATE PATIENT, by P.D. James