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.
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Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven and Part Twelve of "The Nuts and Bolts."
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1.6 Structure/Working, continued
1.6.4 Chapter Structure
An observant writer makes a good writer. The best novels read as if written by a skillful “Peeping Tom,” a guy or a gal with an uncanny sense of body language, acute ear, roving eyes, and analytical brain.
Imagine jotting down items on a shopping list, ready for the weekly adventure at the supermarket. The list is unlikely to include:
A bottle of Tabasco sauce (red) to spice Buster’s Bloody Mary (as if he needed spicing; at this rate he’ll be the end of me).
A jar of French mustard (but without the stupid little seeds that get stuck between my teeth and defy flossing, so I have to resort to toothpicks and then my gums bleed).
Most likely, the scribbles will read:
Tabasco
Mustard
Florid prose is unnecessary to buy groceries. Buster’s (or Mary’s) commendable interests and hatred of mustard seeds are understood.
Outlining a novel is the process of listing reminders and keeping it as simple as possible. Of course, the writer can add detail to his heart’s content, though it’s a risky proposition at this early stage. Why? Because things will be changed around, bits will added, and sections will be deleted. Having to ditch pages of hard-worked text is more traumatic than deleting a single sentence.
Many writers feel it is harder to write an outline than the novel itself, and they might be right. Outlining has little to do with writing and much to do with an intense mental exercise. Rather than releasing pent up talent on pages of narrative and dialogue, an outline is a sequence of still images; instead of words and sentences the writer must list events.
The good news is once events are listed, fleshing them out is much easier. Freed from having to keep the intricacies of plot at the forefront of her thoughts, the writer can concentrate on writing.
1.6.4.1 Chapter Structure Development
The chapter outline is an intermediate step favored by many writers and eschewed by others — with good reason. Chapters are capital divisions of a fiction work. Their contents, openings, closings, and inner structure are far too important to be determined at this stage.
A chapter structure is little more than a collection of tentative scene ideas, the building blocks which we’ll structure in the next section.
Since the main trait of a good structure is its flexibility, we shouldn’t be overly concerned about the final chapter shape; we can always move scenes about, change contents and eventually shape the chapters to do their job.
The structure of a full-length novel would be cumbersome, therefore we’ve outlined what will be the book’s first part: from the conceptual presentation to the second plot point.
We have chosen to open the novel with a fast sequence of scenes split between three locations: Villain’s study, the jungle, and the explorer’s base camp by the river.
Chapter One: Two years earlier. Introduce Villain at study, Villain’s son in jungle, Henchman by river. Villain at study when link lost. Henchman downriver discovers almost empty pipante.
The first chapter is complex and difficult to write. We want to show Villain in his element, in control and surrounded by his wealth and power, as a contrast to the harrowing progress through virgin jungle. When we plotted the scenes, we realized that Villain would be removed from the action most of the time. This would be unreasonable. Therefore, we summoned another player: The Henchman. This guy, Villain’s trusted retainer, is his link to the action and the keeper of the base camp in this first chapter. Later, he will accompany the explorers and show how nasty he can be. Originally, we brought him in so he could make a discovery at the closing of chapter one: the first plot point that will (hopefully) coerce the reader into the story.
Please, note that Henchman didn’t exist when we first thought of the plot. This point of technique merits further explanation. Rather than starting with a gaggle of people, it’s often more sensible to limit the cast to hero, antagonist and, perhaps, one or two key characters. Instead of building characters—and find something for them to do—this technique follows a contrary approach: The writer creates scenes and plot-points. These, in turn, will demand secondary characters to pull them off. Concisely: the plot dictates the need for additional characters, not the writer.
Since chapter one must be fast, we had no room for much back-story or exposition, besides what little we could weave into the character’s inner dialogue. Therefore, we planned to dose out the exposition over the rest of part one.
Chapter Two: Now, introduce Hero on his way to meet Villain. Flashback conference day before. Villain greets hero and makes its pitch. Enters Henchman. Hero lays down the law to accept. Villain agrees.
Sages threaten fire and brimstone if the protagonist doesn’t open chapter one. This is nonsense. Chapter one opens with a whirlwind of a story, and the protagonist doesn’t belong there. In addition, we’ve shaped the first chapter to bring the reader up to speed with the story, planning to open chapter two in the protagonist’s POV. In “Perfect Circle,” Carlos introduces the protagonist in chapter three.
Had we opened the second chapter at the lecture hall where Hero delivers his talk, we would have succumbed to showiness and plain mind-numbing information about the Mosquitia. This would have been bad technique. Instead, we chose Hero lost in the winding roads of a secluded urbanization, trying to find his bearings and thinking back to the previous day’s events. Later we’ll meet the antagonist and his lackey and close the scene on a troubled Hero’s POV, that of a man who feels he has just sold his soul to the Devil.
Chapter Three: Hero leads in jungle. Henchman reports to Villain. Man disappears.
Here we have the opportunity to describe the jungle along with Hero’s introspection. Characters lose their patina of civilization when things get dicey; man’s basest instincts and flaws surface when the chips are down. We plan to paint the crumbling resolve of men facing the horror of an environment in perpetual darkness and close the chapter when one of the men disappears.
Chapter Four: Hero and Henchman are the only ones left. Flashback to the loss of three more men. Henchman forces Hero to continue. Henchman disappears.
Though it was tempting to continue hacking through jungle and losing people à la Agatha Christie And Then There Was None, we plotted a change of scene where Hero and Henchman are the only two survivors. We can write a few lines of internal dialogue in Hero’s POV to cover how the other men vanished. The idea behind this chapter is to characterize Henchman as a bastard and Hero as a pragmatic man, with knowledge of the environment the other lacks.
When Hero proposes to cut their losses and get the hell out, Henchman will pull a gun on him and force Hero to continue. As conditions worsen, we’ll hike tension to a cliffhanger where Henchman will disappear.
Chapter Five: Frantic Villain tries to make contact with his men. Hero finds Henchman dead. Hero turns around. Dusk. Hero climbs a tree. Cat there first. Hero half-dead.
To close the first part, we open the chapter with Villain at the end of his tether. The explorers have ceased transmission. His base camp keeper can’t do a thing but wait. The Villain faces his second failed attempt and we can characterize him further. To wrap up the first part we have Hero find Henchman murdered in a particularly nasty way. To continue the quest would be lunacy. Hero beats a hasty retreat and removes to a tree to spend the night, in the process disturbing a local cat. We close with a badly mauled Hero plummeting thirty feet to the forest floor.
The snippets above are just reminders, or the gist of what happens in each chapter. There are no details or even names. For that, we need a scene structure.
From a technical standpoint, the plot has dictated the structure development. The core of the story resides on the IT, their nature and the reason they’ve been hiding for centuries in the Mosquitia. To narrate this tale, our problem all along has been to structure a series of events and drive the actors toward our chosen stage: one point in la Mosquitia Forest. This we’ve done in the five-chapter first part; a mini-novel in itself with beginning middle and end.
With the first part, we’ve placed Hero in the exact location we needed him to launch the second part.
But there’s a future problem. Once we have told the IT’s story, and to craft a climactic end to the novel, we need an external agent to intervene. This is the reason we’ve disposed of Henchman, leaving the antagonist primed to do something rash.
1.6.5 Scene Structure
A scene layout is the most comprehensive and detailed form of structure, with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
The advantages of constructing a structure of the project and having the full plot detailed will eliminate becoming stuck, blocked, or just frustrated. Empty areas, lulls, unresolved subplots, and parts requiring more tension will leap out. Many writers, eager to get on with the writing, despair at having to structure a plot. They have an idea for a story and a random assortment of mental images, but how should they arrange these fragments into a coherent plot?
The disadvantages can be condensed in one word: time. A scene-by-scene structure is time consuming or, to be exact, claims the time a writer will spend plotting throughout the novel at the beginning and in one lump sum.
Other technical issues are worth mentioning. In a flexible structure, the writer can switch scenes around, add new ones, fill in the gaps and take out what doesn’t work. We can try new ideas without having to spend hours writing pages of the story. We may discover that to spring a subplot halfway into the novel we need “seeding.” Seeding consists of dropping hints or inserting a line of inner dialogue with the germ of an idea or event in preparation for the subplot.
A novel we recently edited opened in a church service attended by a motley crowd. Much later in the manuscript, the hero discovers he’s being stalked. Though the subplot worked, it didn’t have the potency it deserved. We suggested to the writer mixing another character among the church’s patrons, perhaps a serious man on a rear pew. When the heroine pans over the faces in the hall, she does a double take at the stranger’s face but thinking nothing of it. In the original version, an event causes a commotion in the church and the chapter fizzled to an uneventful end. In the revised work, the heroine glances back to discover the man is no longer there. By peppering two or three similar sightings (real or imagined) through the manuscript, we rattled up the tension. Soon, the silent character on the rear pew became a subliminal menace.
To add the church’s twist in a fully structured project would have taken five minutes, instead of having to rewrite vast tracts of text.
1.6.5.1 Scene Structure Development
We now have our budding plot layout and our alien hermaphrodite waiting in the Mosquito Forest. Now it’s time to rig the décor, bring in the characters, set them on the stage, and get them to play.
Before we start, we need to flesh our characters. Not much, just enough to get going. In section 6.1, the reader will find examples of character files, also available for downloading from www.ofwcompanion.com.
For Chapter One of our novel we’ve picked the intervening actors:
Sandor Gulyás, 79. Millionaire industrialist (abattoirs). Emigrated from Hungary in 1944. Small fry war criminal. Struck a deal with the U.S. State Department. 5’10”, thin, aristocratic, sparse white hair. Cast-iron health. Lifelong fascination with Mesoamerican cultures.
Miska Gulyás, 46 Sandor’s son. Law graduate. Worked on and off at his father’s empire. Sportsman. Ocean racing. Three divorces. Father threatened disinheritance if he didn’t lead the Mosquito party. 6’ athletic build. Port wine mark on cheek. Addicted to cocaine.
Stanley O’Conner, 42. Sandor’s right-hand man. Gay. Dishonorably discharged from British SAS. 5’ 8”, overweight.
Kurt, 45, East German Ex-Stasi, keep-fit fanatic. Gay. Stanley’s companion. Chief of security at Gulyás Enterprises. 6’1” Long ponytail.
Francisco (Bosco), 38, Ex-Marine Corporal. Mexican. Hates any reference to his clown namesake. Security employee Gulyás Enterprises.
Matthew. 32 Ex-Marine. Security employee Gulyás Enterprises.
Henry. Ex-Marine. Security employee Gulyás Enterprises.
A few comments on character description. Sandor’s character file is five pages long. The secondary characters’ (Miska, Stanley and Francisco) occupy less than half a page. Those of Kurt, Matthew and Henry are only a couple of lines long. The level of character detail should be proportional to the character’s importance and exposure. It’s a waste of time to collect details (or even surnames) for characters whose life will be short.
It’s a good idea to open a file for each character in the story, and add detail as needed while writing the rough draft. Later, on rewrite, these files can be vital to check continuity and further characterize the players.
Likewise, scene files are a good format to keep the scene basics and add details, notes, and reminders (like calls for researching a given issue or checking a factual point).
Let’s recap what we have for Chapter One:
Two years earlier. Introduce Villain at study, Villain’s son in jungle, Henchman by river. Villain at study when link lost. Henchman downriver discovers almost empty pipante.
As we’ve mentioned before, this is a complex multimodal chapter with three settings: a room in a mansion, the jungle, and a river hut.
To structure a scene we need to imagine the settings. A room is a room, more or less ornate with antique furniture and modern communications equipment. This leaves the river hut and the jungle.
In the Mosquito, there are navigable rivers and the locals use motorized canoes that go by the name of pipante (a long pirogue with a small outboard motor at one end.) We chose a large river and a small tributary disappearing into thick jungle. Our party would have traveled to the tributary’s mouth where they would set up a base camp in a hut. This is consistent with the local geography and custom. Usually there are huts at the junction between rivers and tributaries. We can think of them as a last chance of contact before proceeding through narrower waterways.
Why a base camp? Communications.
Forests, often misnamed jungles, are the most complex ecosystems on Earth. Imagine a bunch of umbrellas held high. Those would be the tall trees forming the top canopy. They get most of the sunlight and the animals living there seldom venture down.
Since the top canopy is not very thick, some sun passes through. Now imagine another layer of umbrellas farther down. This would be the secondary canopy. Under this layer, let’s place another set of umbrellas farther down, (a tertiary canopy) and so on up to five layers. In many places, no light ever reaches the ground of the forest. Traveling on foot is a nightmare of darkness or, at best, a misty twilight which is soon swallowed by more darkness in conditions of one-hundred percent humidity and stifling heat, like a womb. This is our third setting.
Satellite communication from the heart of a jungle is impossible, but certain low frequencies travel a few miles. Since the tributary mouth is only ten miles away from the party’s destination, it makes sense to have someone there with a low-frequency receiver and a satellite phone to reach the rest of the world. In virgin forest one mile a day is excellent progress.
This level of inquiry precedes writing a scene set in any unusual environment. In Fantasy and Sci-Fi, it’s termed world-building, and the concept is the same whether the novel is set on Mars or in medieval Europe, ancient Greece, or the Kingdom of Never-Never. Unless the setting is right—and the writer feels comfortable in familiar surroundings, however imaginary—the scene will read manufactured or downright false.
In this chapter, we’ll use another advanced technique called “parallel scenes.” It works like this:
We have one man in a room, one man in a hut and a group of men in thick jungle. These are the main scenes. Then, there’s another section when the hut man is outside and by the river.
Our problem is that the three main scenes run concurrently and we may want (we do) to switch between them. Imagine one TV set and three films running on three separate channels. With a flick of the remote, we select them in sequence. Of course, when we return to the first, the time we’ve spent on the other two will have lapsed.
We have the points for chapter one, but we don’t need to respect their order, and we may add, delete, or shift events to other parts of the book. In this instance, we’re sticking to the original point outline, but we’ll reorganize their sequence and open the chapter at the Mosquito.
We are prefacing each scene with the setting and the POV.
Chapter One
Scene 1. Forest. Cinematic. Dawn. Five cocoons hang a few feet from the ground. Darkness. Forest awakening noises. Something moves under the farthest cocoon.
Third person limited. Miska flicks on a light. Almost six. Unzips hammock. Forest normal. Slurping sound. Miska reaches for weapon. He shakes the nearest cocoon. Henry. Slurping ceases. Kurt rouses Francisco and Matthew. They edge the clearing. Movement. Something slithers from under Henry’s hammock. Kurt raises his machete. Miska steadies his hand. Henry’s intestines.
Scene 2. Study. Third person limited. Sandor assesses the situation. Stanley relays Miska’s muddled report. The team has lost a man. No animal. Hammock sliced open. A scalpel-sharp knife. Sandor doesn’t believe it. Six-line back-story. They’re almost there. They must push on.
Scene 3. Hut. Third person limited. Stanley replays Miska’s story. Something wrong. The man is probably as high as a kite. Six-line back-story. He fears for Kurt. Checks clock. Two hours until the next transmission.
Scene 4. Forest. Third person limited. Another night over. Miska has set two-men, four-hour watches. He’s tired. Takes a snort. Francisco awakens the other two. Miska reports to Stanley. No news. They push on. Six-line back-story. Ahead of the line Matthew falls. He sinks to his chest in a narrow hole. Kurt and Francisco reach for his arms. Something tears at Matthew’s legs. A whistle. A screaming Matthew sinks, trailing his dislocated arms behind. Kurt lobs a grenade in the hole. War council. Kurt and Francisco vote to abort and return with more men. Miska reports. Stanley agrees. They set back.
Scene 5. Study. Third person limited. Sandor exhausted. He changes transmissions to every hour. Six-line back-story. Next transmission. Miska and the two survivors race toward the tributary and their canoe. Sandor demands Stanley to round a group of locals and try again as soon as his son returns.
Scene 6. Forest. Third person limited. Miska, Kurt, and Francisco reach sight of the inlet where their canoe awaits. A whistle. Francisco falls over, legs severed above the knee. Miska and Kurt fire their automatic weapons and run. A whistle. Kurt’s head topples over. Miska backpedals toward canoe. Runs out of ammo. Then he sees her. Beautiful.
Scene 7. Hut. Third person limited. Another hour and no report. Six-line back-story. Stanley tries the radio again. Outside, forty locals ready their pipantes. A shaman chants. The gods are angry.
Scene 8. Study. Third person limited. Sandor stares at sat-phone. Equipment faulty. Miska should be close to the river. Six-line back-story. Locals must have set traps to prevent strangers from discovering the treasure, so they are at the right spot. Miska must return at once. Sandor pours a drink, stands, and barefooted dances on the rug. He senses victory. Almost there.
Scene 9. River Cinematic. Noises hushed. Shaman’s lament. Waning light. A canoe inches back down the tributary.
Scene 10. Third person limited. Stanley steps outside. One man maneuvers a long branch to draw an empty pipante closer to the bank. The explorer team’s craft. Silent crowd. Shaman points his stick to a floppy mask on its prow. Stanley draws near. A port wine mark. No mask, but what’s left of Miska’s face. Man reaches for trailing mooring rope to secure craft. Rope heavy. Tied to its end is Kurt’s ponytail and his head, already nibbled at by fish.
We’ve chosen an unusual first chapter to show that, in fiction writing, nothing is set in stone. Our first chapter is long, about five-thousand words and it doesn’t introduce the protagonist.
Each of the scenes we have designed to accomplish a goal, and draw the plot forward.
The scene description is about five-hundred words, or one-tenth of the text. We can’t vouch for others, but for us, writing the chapter from this scene structure would be a breeze, without lulls or writer’s blocks. Furthermore, since we have a clear idea of future events we have added detail as we worked. From the port wine mark to the ponytail in the character’s description to Sandor’s callousness, to the whistling sound, the shaman’s presence, and the emotional relationship between Stanley and Kurt, every detail, however minute, has a purpose.
Drawing from experience, producing a scene structure with this level of detail—for a full-length novel—would entail forty hours, including character files.
Research would consume another forty hours. Two hundred hours would see the first draft complete and half of that again would take care of the rewrite. Total, say four hundred hours; ten weeks at full tilt, twenty at half-time, and forty for a couple of hours a day. Considering that bestselling authors usually produce one book every two years or so, this isn’t bad going.
"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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