resonant | Plot Considerations, part 3 (Reply)

This weekend I slurped up three more books from the Writer's Digest Elements of Fiction Writing series. I will continue to digest the digests, for those of you who share my plot perplexity.

First let me tell you that William Noble's Conflict, Action, and Suspense is worthless -- a pity, since some actual useful advice on conflict, action, and suspense would have been very helpful. His approach is to fling out a random subject, and then say something like this: Pacing is very important, and many beginners approach it wrong. Here are four or five examples of ways it can go wrong. So pay attention to your pacing. Now, on to the subject of suspense ... Pay attention to it. OK, thanks, Bill, that's so very helpful.

Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure is very technical, and I'm still digesting it to see how useful it is. He divides every story into scene (i.e. action) and sequel (i.e. reaction), and then he subdivides scene into goal, conflict, and disaster, and sequel into emotion, though, decision, and action.

So far, I've found it utterly stultifying and paralyzing to think of a story in those terms while I'm writing it, but I've had some success in using them to figure out what's wrong with a story that's already written, and I suspect that they might be helpful in the plotting stage.

The most useful insight I got out of Bickham was on the subject of pacing. Weirdly enough, I had my eureka moment while reading a section on how to slow down the pace, which is odd, since a too-fast pace is not a problem I ever have.

Bickham says that scene/action reads as fast, sequel/reaction as slow. So to slow a story down, you (1) extend the sequel portion; (2) make your actions less active by having them end in near-disaster rather than full-on disaster; or (3) move some of your action into the reaction section by having your character not discover that she's experienced a disaster until she's halfway through the sequel. ("Wait a minute, if X, Y, and Z, then I can't do Q after all! I'm screwed!")

Now, extending the sequel/reaction portion -- spending more time in the character's head than out in the real world where things can happen -- is something that I typically do when I don't really know my character very well. (Maybe this is why writing action gets easier for me the longer I spend in a particular fandom: I no longer need five pages of Fraser musing to figure out what Fraser would think.)

But the other two -- pulling back from full disaster, or writing it so that disaster isn't immediately apparent -- those, once again, are typical of a conflict-avoidant personality. I try to weasel out of all confrontations, even fictional ones!

Orson Scott Card's Character and Viewpoint was very entertaining to read, but didn't really address any of my particular weak points (or, at least, any that I'm aware of). A lot of his warnings are ones that fandom excels at teaching: POV shifts, Mary Sue-ism, epithets, etc.

I did want to share one tip, though, for those like me who have continuity problems in long stories or series: Card recommends keeping a separate file open to record all the decisions you make about a character -- she's an only child, she hates coffee, she was born in April, etc. (It will tell you something about our respective characters that I call this a stylebook and Card calls it a Bible.)

To maintain it, he recommends starting each day by going through the previous day's writing and using it to update your stylebook, which I think is a great idea.

I'm sure all of you understand that in no way am I reading plot books to avoid actually writing anything. I would never do that.