In the preface to their recently published writing guide, Writer's Companion, Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller state, “we set out to compile everything a creative writer needs to write well into a single reference volume.” We are posting “The Nuts & Bolts," the first chapter of the guide, in a series of posts on Open Book.
Check out Carlos and Renée's online writing community, On Fiction Writing, a website that is “dedicated to writers who are serious about improving their craft and helping other writers to do the same.”
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Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten of "The Nuts and Bolts."
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1.6 structure / working
The following sections structure a mainstream novel, and the process would have been similar with any fiction genre. Here, the chosen concept is developed from a single word to a synopsis:
A. Concept structure
B. Basic plot structure
C. Section structure
D. Chapter structure
E. Scene structure
F. Synopsis
Writers must determine where to stop. Some will have enough structure with A, while others will carry on to D or even to F. As long as it performs its intended task there’s no right or wrong in terms of detail or length. It can never be said too often:
Time spent on the structure is like putting money in the bank.
1.6.1 Concept Structure
A concept is the most basic stage of an idea, the seed from which a towering tree will grow, or the twinkle in the groom’s eye when roving the future mommy’s blushing face.
A novel is a story, a tale, a play grown from the germ of an idea. Concepts expand into full-fledged sagas, but our present concern is not how to develop a concept, but the nature of the concept itself.
We don’t know the genesis of successful novels, but a few blockbusters come to mind and it’s easy to fantasize about their origins.
Michael, a man of pale skin the insects find irresistible, scratches a lump in his arm where mosquitoes have fed to their proboscis’s content and peers at a piece of amber in a trader’s tray. Inside the amber, there’s a large mosquito. The trader blesses his cousin’s knack with polyester resins, dyes, and insects, while he pitches the tourist.
“The insect, in this rare piece of fossilized genuine amber, flittered about in the epoch of the dinosaurs.”
The man stops scratching. He smiles and walks away from the shop with a concept that will make him a millionaire: Mosquitoes bite. Mosquitoes in the Cretaceous period would bite Cretaceous creatures. In theory, it’s possible to grow an individual from a single strand of DNA. Blood contains DNA.
Mosquitoes suck blood. Dinosaurs had blood: Jurassic Park.
Peter dozes under an umbrella on a crowded beach, while the wife and kids squeeze through the seething mob to reach the sea and wet their feet. Wouldn’t it be nice if the beach was deserted? A joyous giggle and the man opens one eye. A few feet away, a toddler sits on a towel and hammers a mound of sand with a rubber fish. The man closes his eyes, makes a wry movement with his mouth and the toy shark on the toddler’s hand projects against the screen of his closed eyelids. He jerks alert: Jaws.
These are raw concepts, and turning them into full-fledged stories requires vast amounts of work, talent, and ingenuity. However, even the most convoluted ideas have a starting point: a concept.
One of the writers co-authoring this manual has a repository of ideas stored in a database. To produce a novel, this writer browses through the file, selects a notion suitable for a given market and settles down to expand it into a full structure. To illustrate the structure-development process we picked one of these ideas: Hermaphrodite.
After choosing the concept, we set about to develop it on different levels in the following sections.
1.6.1.1 Concept Structure Development
We have the working concept of a hermaphrodite. In biology, a hermaphrodite is an animal or plant that has reproductive organs associated with both male and female sexes.
A number of animals, like snails and slugs, and a few fish are true hermaphrodites.
Why stress true? Well, the idea we want to develop involves mammals like us. In humans, we find the pseudo-hermaphrodite, a person with the physical traits of one sex and the genetic instructions of the other. There are people with both sets of external sexual organs, like vagina and penis, but they cannot impregnate themselves because it’s impossible to have both ovaries and testes. These organs always develop into one or the other. Hence, true hermaphroditic humans do not exist.
Once we have the kernel of our idea, we store it away. If this seems contradictory, consider that although an idea may be the theme of a story, the plot can take any shape and go in any direction. We could fashion a romance, a horror tale, a mystery/thriller, or an adventure. In each instance, we would develop the idea along a different path. Though the concept would be the same, the novel would be different.
Since we are professional writers, our concept must adjust to the first two articles of genre-fiction law:
1. The theme should be original and unique
This is the litmus test of a concept. In genre fiction, most ideas have been exploited to exhaustion. This is the reason agents and editors demand a blurb or mini-synopsis to accompany a query; they want to read about the concept—before rejecting it—because they’ve seen the same plot a zillion times before. Then, unless the writer has a unique voice, the manuscript will be impossible to sell.
Dear agent, my novel is about:
Goblins, unicorns, and sleeping princesses
True love and happily ever after
Confused vampires
Intergalactic empires
A serial killer more beastly than the last one
Templars, Freemasons, and the Holy Grail
The list is endless.
So we examine our ideas with as much objectivity as we can muster. We’ve never heard of stories involving a true hermaphrodite, so the concept looks original and unique.
2. The theme should have mass-market appeal
This means genre. At the time of writing this Companion, fantasy is overcrowded with a million manuscripts seeking a place to roost, and the same is true of romance, vampires, and interstellar conflict. A hermaphrodite serial killer has possibilities, and the same can be said of hermaphrodite Templars, Freemasons, and Ayatollahs. But even before we start, there’s a problem looming on the horizon: true hermaphroditic humans do not exist. We could make an exception and create one, but the biological problems would be enormous.
Why humans? Why not aliens? When we think of aliens, we identify the creature as male or female. Why? What about if the members of a given extraterrestrial species couldn’t comprehend the distinction between male and female? They wouldn’t use gender pronouns and each individual would be a self-contained family nucleus.
Aliens, however, reek of SF and, from what we hear; the genre is chockablock with unsold manuscripts. Mass-market appeal? Fine, let’s make an adventure-thriller-SF-fantasy-romance-historical-horror-novel. A little of each, shake well, and we have a winner with broadest market appeal.
With our concept safely tucked away, we gather cheese, crackers, and a bottle of fermented grape juice. Bottled in 1980 it must be well past its sell-by date. It isn’t.
We have an alien, but interstellar travel is dicey to say the least. Why would an alien choose Earth? He/she/it (this will be difficult, let’s have him masculine) could be here from time immemorial, hiding somewhere. This is good because we could have an adventurer (say John) looking for him. And we have history too. But, why would John try to find an alien? This doesn’t work. John finds the alien when he’s looking for something else. Better. John may fall in love with the alien so we have the romance angle covered. Horror? Imagine John’s face when he unpacks the goodies. Not good, this is weak; John could be bisexual and hit the jackpot. We have everything but the horror and thrilling bits. No problem, we’ll throw in one cliffhanger after another and have John running and escaping by the seat of his pants from horrors galore.
The grape juice a memory, let’s recap.
1. John sets off looking for the treasure (must determine what, where, why him, his reasons, his goal and his back-story).
2. After a harrowing ordeal, John finds whatever, and the alien (must determine the difficulties, ordeals, trials and the nature of the treasure).
Alien guards the treasure from time immemorial and tells John his story (must characterize the alien and determine why him, why on Earth, why is he guarding the treasure).
At this point, we discover a huge flaw in our budding plot. If the alien and John fall in love, they must be friends first (it makes sense). Where’s the antagonist? We need extra grape juice to oil rusty neurons.
4. Someone else is after the treasure. (We need a powerful organization, unethical, prone to botch things up, and ruthless. Easy: any government will do.)
This is stroke of genius and saves the day.
5. The government hits the place where the alien keeps the treasure (must determine how, with what means, why, and their goal).
6. The alien arranges the escape of his paramour and sacrifices himself, taking the antagonist thugs with him (must determine why sacrifice after all this time, what means he has to wipe off the enemy, what happens to John).
To end here is weak, too many loose ends. Above all, why would the alien commit suicide? Love is a powerful reason, but it’s been done far too many times. After a third bottle of grape juice, we find a solution.
7. The alien needed John to alter or add something to him. At the story’s end, he’s not dead, but hidden again. Now that the alien is complete, he can pull off his master plan (must determine what’s happened, what John has given him, and what his master plan is).
Not bad for a single sitting. We have an idea slowly developing into a concept.
The important aspect of this silly scene is to portray the gestation of an idea. So far, we don’t know how to start the novel, or how to end it. We don’t know where to locate the action. We don’t know the goals, plot points, or anything else for that matter. We know one of the characters is an alien hermaphrodite.
In real life, the writer would mull over the seven points we’ve outlined to develop his concept over a period of days or months, jotting down notes or exploring possibilities. He or she may not need anything else in terms of structure to start writing, but for a plot of the complexity we envisage, going on what we have would be dangerous. We would become stuck after only a few pages.
This concept we’ll expand into a basic plot. Later we’ll break it into sections, rustle up a chapter outline, continue with a scene structure and then, write the synopsis.
"The Nuts & Bolts" is an excerpt from Writer's Companion (2011) by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller. Reprinted with permission.
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