Holly Bodger

In his book Plot & Structure, James Scott Bell says there are three possible endings to a book:

1. The hero gets what he wants
2. The hero does not get what he wants
3. The hero gets what he wants but with consequences

I will add another one to his list which is this:

4. We have no idea if the hero gets what he wants

Last night, I finished a book by an author I love. As much as I enjoyed the book, I really didn’t like the ending. I thought this was because it was a bit of a cliffhanger, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was not. A cliffhanger is a #3: the hero gets what he wants with a twist. For example:

Bob wants nothing more than to find out who killed his brother. Insert long middle story…yada yada yada… Bob realizes it was Jane. He turns her into the police, but when he gets home,  we see his brother hiding in the closet.

 This is a cliffhanger. Bob gets what he wants with a twist. We don’t know what happens to Bob after this point. Maybe there is a sequel, maybe there is not. But the book I read last night did not have a cliffhanger ending. What it had were loose ends. For example:

Bob wants nothing more than to find out who killed his brother. Insert long middle story…yada yada yada… Bob finds out that the killer has moved to Florida. 

The difference here is that Bob does not find out who killed his brother. Because this was Bob’s goal for the novel, this is considered an unfinished plot or a “loose end”.  I don’t know about you, but these kinds of endings annoy me. I don’t need my stories tied up with a bow on top, but I do need an ending. Otherwise, I feel like I just wasted my time.

Kim Blank’s post on wordiness is an absolute must read! She lists over a hundred expressions that you can delete or replace in your manuscript. I’ve bookmarked it for my next revision.

I wanted to write a post about what Larry Brooks calls the First Plot Point (aka, The First Doorway according to James Scott Bell) but I don’ t think I can do it as well as Larry did in this post. This is an absolute MUST READ.

The other day, my daughter’s teacher told me she was concerned my daughter may be a little bit of a perfectionist. I laughed and said the apple fell an inch from the tree. I am a perfectionist. I know this. I wrote the first sentence of this post seventeen times. Okay, not really. It was sixteen.

When it comes to writing, I typically plan first (plot cards, cork boards, outlines, character sheets…the whole nine yards) and then I write each chapter until it’s perfect. This means it takes a long time to get a first draft, but it also means there isn’t a lot of revising to do at the end. Who am I kidding? As a perfectionist, revision doesn’t end until…well, never.

Then I read James Scott Bell’s book Plot & Structure. He suggests several methods for whipping through a first draft. While they all sound like great ideas, I thought they weren’t for me. After all, I had tried this in the past. I wrote each chapter in expostion only, with the thought that I would go back and add the structure and dialogue later. What I got was something like this:

Mary goes to school. It’s raining and she forgot her umbrella so she’s wet. She meets Mark. He asks her why she is wet. She explains. He offers to drive her home after school. She accepts. When they get to her house, she asks him in for coffee. She thinks she may have finally met Mr. Right. He declines because he needs to get home to his wife.

 I’m yawning already. Why? I’m a dialoguer (apparently, I’m also a make-up-your-own-word-er). I love writing dialogue. It’s the detail and exposition that takes the most effort for me. So writing a whole book without any dialogue is absolutely painful. Realizing this, I decided to turn around JSB’s idea and write a first draft of my latest WIP using dialogue only. What happened? Not only do I love it, I’ve been writing 4000+ words a day.

So what’s the lesson here? Always remember your umbrella. No really. Find the style of writing you love and use that for your first draft. Maybe you’ll be like me and end up with an entire book of dialogue. Maybe you’ll end up with an entire book of exposition. Maybe you’ll end up with an entire book of inner monologue. It doesn’t matter. You’ll still end up with a first draft and that, my friend, is the first step to creating a finished manuscript.

About ten years ago, I picked up a copy of Dr. Phil’s book, Self Matters (stop laughing…I was going on a long flight and bought it from the minuscule candy-slash-souvenir-slash-book store). This book asks you to go through three exercises. One of these is to identify the five pivotal moments in your life. The point of this exercise is to look at the times in your life where you were at a crossroads and made a decision that changed the path of your life forever.

While I’m sure you’re dying to hear about the time I _______, the point of this post is not to discuss my pivotal moments. Besides, I burned all the photos so you’ll never prove a thing! The point, my curious readers, is to discuss your characters’ pivotal moments. Why? Because, when you write a novel, your main character should have one during the climax. Note that this is not to be confused with their inciting moment which is the part that thrusts them into the conflict in the first place. Let’s look at an example:

While driving home from a party, Bill crashes his car and kills his best friend Ted (inciting moment). Bill turns to alcohol to drown his guilt and pain (conflict), but it’s not until he almost dies in a second car accident that Bob decides he must give up alcohol for good (pivotal moment).

As you can see, these moments are similar but they serve two different purposes. One starts the conflict of the novel and the other ends it.

So, what is your character’s pivotal moment?

If you were to search the Internet for rules regarding the use of dialogue tags, you’d find a broad spectrum of opinions. Some people will tell you that you should NEVER use anything other than said. Some will say that you can use the occasional replied, asked, and inquired. And some will even say that you can go hog wild on the quipped, growled, and hissed.

Note: If you ever use hissed for dialogue that isn’t soaking in “s” words, I’m calling your mother.

I fall a bit in the middle I suppose. My first aim is to use no dialogue tags if I can help it. If that is not possible, I use said for a regular sentence or possibly asked/replied when a question is involved. As much as I love the sound of tags like growled, I think there are two main issues with these:

1) Following the rules of show don’t tell, it is better to show a character’s emotion, rather than state it.

2) Any dialogue tag (or description for that matter) that implies a tone or feeling and comes AFTER the dialogue, forces the reader to rethink the sentence.

To illustrate, let’s look at three examples.

a) “I said I would be there later,” growled Robert.

b) Robert growled. “I said I would be there later.”

c) Robert’s eyes narrowed to two tiny slits. “I said I would be there later.'”

In the case of example a, we don’t know that Robert is angry until after we finish the sentence so we almost have to re-read it once we see the growled. This is improved in b, except we still have the problem of telling his anger rather than showing it. In c, we have shown his anger in a descriptive tag and then given the dialogue afterwards. In this case, the reader has a picture of an angry Robert in his or her head BEFORE hearing his words.

In an effort to improve my manuscript (and to give me something to do while it is out with agents) I decided to show it to a few freelancers.  In retrospect, I should have done this BEFORE I queried, but I honestly didn’t even know these people existed until a few weeks ago. Sigh. Anywho…I got one of these freelancer’s reviews back recently. Her letter outlined a list of things she liked as well as a list of questions she felt I left unanswered. At first, I found the list of questions surprising. I mean, I knew the answers to all of them! Ah hem… yeah, that was the problem. When you write a novel, you know the plot and the characters SO well, you don’t notice when you’ve left a hole. Your crit partners might catch some of these things, but the truth is that everyone reads differently. For example, I am a crit partner who is obsessed with detail. While I may not notice whether or not your first plot point comes at the right moment, I will notice if someone’s scarf was purple in the second chapter but green in the fifth. So if you have a problem with keeping your scarf colours straight, give me a call!

Back to my holes. I decided I needed to start my plot from scratch so I could see if there really were holes in it. So this is what I did:

1) My book has several plots and sub-plots, but I decided to concentrate on the two main ones. I drew a line for each and then wrote every point from the plot along the line, in the order in which it occurs. While I was doing this, I made sure to keep asking myself why one plot point led to the next.

For example, A finds out that B lied to her->A confronts B->B knows it’s true but denies it because of a promise she made to C->A stops speaking to B->B blames C

In this example, if you leave out the “because of a promise she made to C”, the final plot point is a leap in reasoning. And I thought first year Philosophy was useless…

For the parts where the freelancer said she didn’t understand why something happened, I took extra care to make sure there were no leaps in plot points. By doing so, I found that I had indeed made some. This prompted me to add some missing plot points and to change some others.

2) When I was done each of the plot lines, I read them through again and made sure they made sense. Then I wrote each point on a little yellow sticky. Using the above example, this means one sticky for “A finds out that B lied to her”, one for “A confronts B” and so on.

Note: These stickies are basically like the plot cards I use to plan my novel. I tried to use my original plot cards for this exercise, but the book has changed so much since I first planned it that they were basically useless.

3) I got a HUGE piece of paper and drew 16 squares on it (1 for each chapter). Without looking at my book, I put the yellow stickies in the blocks they belonged.

4) I scanned my book to see what was missing. There were a few points from subplots that affected the major plots so I added them.

So what did I find? First of all, I found that I need to add/change a few plot points that I discovered in step 1. Second, I discovered that I have an empty square (which means I have an entire chapter where NOTHING MAJOR HAPPENS…Yikes!)

Up next…another round of revision.

I’ve seen this advice in many places: write what you know. This doesn’t mean we should all go out and pen memoirs about our lives, because frankly, most of us are as dull as the notches on Betty White’s bedpost. What it means is that we should use our personal experience to frame our stories.

But here’s the problem: what if your most exciting personal experience was the time your best friend almost sat next to Steven Tyler on a plane? Does this mean you should give up writing and concentrate on macrame instead?

In my opinion, no. Of course, I’m the one whose best friend almost sat next to Steven Tyler on a plane… Back to you. If you think you have no interesting personal experiences, maybe you need to dig a little deeper. For example:

1) Where are you from? What is the most unique thing about this place?
2) What do you do best? What is your greatest talent/skill/interest?
3) What is the most interesting thing about your family?
4) What is the most tragic thing about your family?
5) If you met someone new, what is the first thing you would tell them about yourself? What is the last?

One–if not all–of your answers is interesting. The question now is: do you have the guts to write about it, because maybe what you are thinking is not that you don’t have any interesting personal experiences; it’s that you don’t have any interesting personal experiences that YOU WANT TO SHARE. Is this wrong? Of course not. Is it a crutch? Only you can decide.

Every main character needs to have both outer and inner conflicts. Outer conflicts are the people, places or things that the main character struggles with, while inner conflicts are the personality traits that the main character struggles with. For example, a main character might hate the guy who sits in the next cubicle (outer) and he may also hate that he has never been successful enough to work in a real office (inner).

In his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, Maass has a three step exercise intended to help create stronger inner conflicts. For the first step, he suggests you define your main character’s goal. For example, in one of the Princess Diaries books, Mia wants to go to the prom with her boyfriend Micheal. This is her inner goal for the novel. The second step is to write down the opposite of the goal. In the case above, this is Mia not going to the prom. The third step is to create a scenario where the main character wants both the goal and the opposite of the goal. Using the same example, this means that we need to see Mia both wanting to go to the prom and not wanting to go. Meg Cabot (the awesome writer of this series) accomplishes this by giving Mia a boyfriend who detests the prom. Mia wants her boyfriend to like her so she ends up both wanting to go and wanting to please her boyfriend (which means, not wanting to go).

I’ve simplified this exercise a little, but the point is that, if you make it a struggle for your main character to achieve their goal, they will have more depth and thus be more interesting.