writing the heart of your story (18 page)

The Burden of the Beginning

Scene beginnings have a tremendous burden. In every opening paragraph of every scene you present to your reader you are making a promise or offering an invitation. You are promising to deliver—to entertain, impart enthralling information, move them emotionally. They have bought (or free-downloaded or borrowed) your book out of the hundreds of thousands of other novels available and are devoting their precious hours to reading your novel, so they are expecting that commitment on their part to pay off. If you open a scene with a promise to deliver and you fail to deliver, they are not going to be happy.

Avid fans of a particular author may stick with a boring scene, and maybe read even all the way to the end, in hopes the novel will pull through and come out shining. But most readers are not that gracious and forgiving. So you want to make sure you deliver. Here are a few points about scene beginnings:

* They don’t have to start at a “beginning,” such as the start of a day (too many characters waking up when the alarm clock goes off). The beginning can and often should be in the middle of something already happening.

* They need a hook. Not just your opening scene but every scene needs a hook to draw the reader in, chapter after chapter. If you start off with boring narrative, you’re not going to hook them.

* Each scene launch is a reintroduction. Ask—where did I last leave those characters and what were they doing? You need to make the passing of time clear, and if it’s been a few scenes since we’ve seen those characters, you’ll need a bit of a reminder in the beginning of the scene to connect to that last moment.

* Just as with the first scene in your novel, you want to get your POV character into the scene ASAP (and in real time). The points that apply to your book’s opening scene mostly apply to every scene.

* Start an action without explaining anything.

* Give a nod to setting (a nod, not a treatise).

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Going Nowhere Fast

Here’s what literary agent Donald Maass says: “You would be surprised in how many middle scenes in how many manuscripts there seems to be no particular reason for a character to go somewhere, see someone, learn something, or avoid something.” (And at his week-long workshop he really grumbled about the plethora of scenes where two people are sitting around drinking tea.) You don’t want this to happen in your novel.

Muddle the Middle of Your Scenes

Just as middle scenes of a novel can slog along and sag, so too middles of a scene can drag or not go anywhere. Knowing your high moment will really help avoid that. One good way to have compelling middles is to work backward from your high moment. If you know, for example, that Mary thinks George has taken her out to dinner to propose, but the high moment reveals he’s breaking up with her, you can picture that instant of her being stunned and think how she is going to feel right before that. You want your character to change in some small way by the end of the scene, and so think how Mary feels ten, twenty, or thirty minutes before this shocking moment. How is she going to be feeling twenty minutes after? You want to start the scene with her expectations and in the middle of action—either already at the restaurant or pretty close to being there. In your middle, you don’t want to spend a lot of time (or maybe even any time) driving there or getting your character from any one place to another. Don’t drag the middle by stretching time (unless it serves a purpose in the scene to do so).

Complicate, Exacerbate

Middles of novels are where you up the stakes, complicate and confound your character, make things worse. You might add danger or reveal a surprise twist. A middle is the unveiling of the story line. In each scene, as you build to your moment, you want to do the same. Add complications, obstacles, twists. Maybe Mary’s car doesn’t start and she’s late meeting George at the restaurant, which adds to her anxiety. Maybe Mary gets a phone call right before she leaves that complicates the (complementary) subplot regarding her friend who’s going through a divorce. That can enrich the scene as Mary thinks how lucky she is to have George and how he’s going to propose to her in a few minutes.

If you are going to throw a twist into your scene, such as George breaking up with Mary instead of proposing to her, you can use the middle to set up Mary’s expectations of one outcome, only to have a reversal at the high point. Reversals are terrific, and if you put in at least three things leading up to them that indicate the opposite outcome (such as Mary’s expectation that George is going to propose), they will be powerful.

Endings That Spark Beginnings

Finally, let’s look at endings. Just like beginnings, endings carry a special burden. The reader must be left with a feeling, like an aftertaste. You need to stop and think: What feeling do I want the reader to have? Shock, sadness, warmth, confusion, curiosity? You want to keep in mind that the basic storytelling structure for a novel is action—reaction—action—reaction. Too many scenes end with a character experiencing something and then . . . it ends. We need to see how the character reacts to what has just happened. You don’t have to do this every time, and in some genres where plot is king (suspense/thrillers), you might end with the building exploding, and the reader has no idea if your character just died. But as a general rule, you want to be with your character and see their reaction, feeling, or response—even if told in one line—to what has just happened.

Endings Need to Feel Like Endings

A scene ending needs to feel just like that—an ending. There must be a sense of completion, even if the reader is left hanging. Even if the POV character is left confused in the middle of something, the scene itself has to have a feeling of completeness in that the scene wholly accomplished its objective—leading you from one place to another, from one moment to another. The ending must leave the reader with a sense of anticipation and a desire to read on. Each ending, in essence, should spark a new beginning. That’s accomplished by giving the reader a piece of new plot information, presenting another clue, or revealing something moving or fascinating about the character that makes them care what happens next. Again, moments don’t need to be big. They are powerful and impacting if they contain meaning for your character.

Have you ever read a novel late at night, telling yourself you are only going to read to the end of the chapter, but then when you hit the last line, you are so gripped you just have to read one more chapter? You can’t wait to find out what happens next, even though you really need to sleep. There’s nothing more satisfying for a writer than to be told by a reader that she stayed up until five a.m. finishing your novel because the scenes were that riveting.

Two Types of Endings

There are basically two types of endings of scenes—plot endings and character endings. Plot endings might be cliffhangers or contain a new plot twist or reveal a clue. A character ending is more about insight. The reader now knows something more about your character, or you may have the character thinking about what just happened, or you may have some poignant dialog (even one line) or description (motif or metaphor) that your character ponders. Think about zooming in like a camera to your character’s thoughts and feelings. Or maybe zoom out to show a larger understanding your character now has for her life or her world. Moments of insight make for powerful endings.

Think about
. . . choosing a random scene in your WIP (work in progress) and check to see if you have all you need in your opening paragraphs as noted in the above chapters. If you are missing some things, put them in. If you need to rework the entire scene so you can have a terrific beginning, then do that. And don’t forget to keep the “moment” in mind so you will build up to it.

Look at not just your first scene’s middle but those of random scenes in your novel. Find the high points and see if you have developed the middle so that it is leading to that moment and complicating things. See if you can add in expectations that imply the opposite outcome. If your character expects something bad to happen, have three things in the middle that imply her instincts will prove right. Then when that bad thing doesn’t happen, it will pack a punch.

Look at your scene endings and see if they wrap up the scene like the ending of a good book. If they stop abruptly, think how you can create either a plot revelation or a character insight to end smoothly and leave the reader wanting more.

Part Five: Adding a Little More Heart to Your Story

Chapter 26: The Heart of Your Setting

“Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness

in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.”

~Alfred Hitchcock

While delving into the heart of your story, I’ve only touched a little on setting. Setting is so important to your book, and all too often writers practically ignore it in their quest to unveil a great plot or take the reader on a character’s journey.

But stop and think for a moment about yourself and the world you live in. Each moment you’re alive, you are interacting with your setting. At times, where you are is inconsequential and unimportant to what is going on in your life at that moment. You could be in a coffee shop, at the top of a mountain, or waiting at the dentist’s office to get your teeth cleaned and it wouldn’t matter in respect to what you may be going through, feeling, thinking, or desiring at the time. Much of our lives we are in mundane places, doing mundane things. But do readers want to read about that? Do you recall what I said a few chapters ago about books that portray ordinary people? I said ordinary people are boring—and so are mundane, boring settings. No one wants boring.

So, does that mean in every scene in your book you must have a unique and fascinating setting so as to keep the reader from being bored? Of course not. If we did that, the setting would be screaming, and the reader would have trouble hearing what the characters have to say.

If you want to portray a character living a normal kind of life, you are going to have scenes where you show her in fairly ordinary settings—like her kitchen, or at the grocery store, or walking down a sidewalk. There will be times when your setting is just a backdrop to the scene unfolding. You may have an intense confrontational dialog happening at restaurant or on the beach, and you want the focus to be on what’s being said, and how the characters are interacting. That’s all well and good. But when you also weave the setting in with what else is going on in the scene, and choose a setting that will enhance what’s going on with your characters, you will add richness and texture to your novel.

Put Your Characters in a Place on Purpose

I want to urge you to stop and think before you create a scene: Where is the best place I can put my character to have this scene unfold and lead to the important moment revealed in this scene? Rather than pick something off the top of your head, which is what a lot of writers do in their rush to put a scene down, you will find that if you deliberately and judiciously choose a setting that will best serve the interests of your plot and your character’s need for that scene, you will have a much more powerful novel. Once you learn some great tips and techniques about setting, I hope you will see the importance of doing this, and enjoy the challenge as well.

There are so many ways to deal with setting, and so I’m going to take a few pages to go into the exploration of this topic and show you ways you can utilize setting and bring it alive for your characters (or rather, have your characters bring the setting alive).

Setting can be a great tool to reveal a character’s mind-set and mood. You can use setting as a vehicle or trigger to aid your plot. By putting your character in a specific place, you can make certain things happen that will enrich your story—you can go so far as to have the setting a motif or symbol as well. If you have two people sitting around talking while drinking tea (I hear Donald Maass scream, “No, no, no!”), you might think of a better setting in which to put your old ladies so that something can happen or influence their conversation or interfere with them to add complication to the story, or to reveal something important about one character’s personality, needs, fears, or dreams.

Places in Your Past That Evoke Feeling

Think about some places in your past. Maybe a place from childhood that you visit once in a while—a place that stirs memory. Even a similar place can evoke memories, and so settings can evoke emotions and memories in your characters as well. In some novels, setting is almost the star of the show, like Pat Conroy’s
The Prince of Tides
. In books like this, the way the characters interact with their setting is crucial to the story. Many authors are known for their books set in a particular town or locale. But if you are not writing that kind of book, you may think that setting really isn’t important at all. And it may be that the kind of novel you are writing could be set pretty much anywhere, or in any small town or large city.