Moving Stories
With Sebastien de Castell, Kirstin Chen, J.E. Forman, Amy Hatvany, Nancy Lee, Claire Letemendia, Jennifer McMahon, Peter Norman, Padma Viswanathan and M.D. Waters.
This month on Fiction Craft we asked a group of writers: How do you keep a plot moving forward?
There’s lots of great advice below on how to keep a plot moving forward. I know of one very useful tool, which can be summed up as follows: Out of the frying pan into the fire. That is, make the resolution of one problem the creation of the next. This generates what’s called narrative drive. Give your protagonist a main goal, and then set up a series of obstacles along the journey toward that goal. Every time your protagonist overcomes one of the obstacles, the actual solution to that obstacle creates the next obstacle. This is what generates the “I just can’t stop reading” effect in an enjoyable story.
If we can switch media for a moment, Hollywood excels at exploiting this technique. Take an example from a scene in the movie World War Z. Brad Pitt is being chased by a hoard of zombies across an airfield. How is he going to escape? Simple: flag down a passenger airplane taxiing for takeoff and climb on board. Problem solved. Brad has escaped to a safe, confined place where the zombies can’t get him. Once airborne, however, it becomes apparent that one of the zombies also somehow got on board. The confined sanctuary of the airplane, which was the solution to the previous problem, has now itself become the problem. The zombie, of course, is biting passengers, creating more zombies. They are multiplying exponentially, threatening to quickly overwhelm the entire airplane. How does Brad defeat them? Simple: throw a hand grenade. This blows a big hole in the side of the airplane that sucks out all the zombies. Problem solved. But whoops! The airplane now has a huge hole in it and is going to crash. The solution to the zombie problem, the grenade, has created a crashing airplane problem.
I realize this is action thriller melodrama, but it illustrates a useful tool, which does not actually require zombies (or Brad Pitt) to employ effectively. Next time you are reading a book and you hit the end of a chapter and you just can’t stop reading -- that’s not coincidence, that's well structured narrative drive.
Now let’s see how some other writers keep things moving.
Sebastien de Castell is the author of the novels Traitor’s Blade and Spellsinger. He lives in Vancouver, BC.
This question tends to hit writers in the second act of their novels. The challenge isn’t so much about adding events to the story as it is about creating a sense of forward momentum and increasing urgency. With each plot thread the reader needs to feel that they are moving inexorably towards an end that will answer the questions posed by the book’s first act.
In my own writing this happens through two concurrent forces: the protagonist’s gradual loss of control over their world and the reader’s increasing understanding of it.
In the second act of Traitor’s Blade, Falcio struggles harder and harder to find a way to stop the conspirators who are destroying his country, but his efforts only seem to push victory farther and farther away. This isn’t just about ratcheting up the action or throwing more bodies (figuratively or literally) on the ground - it’s about slowly breaking down Falcio’s sense that he can ever win. At the same time, the reader is coming to understand why things are the way they are; why the conspirators are succeeding.
Plotting this way allows the two forces to work together until it finally becomes apparent to the reader that your protagonist’s goal - whether victory, or love, or even survival - is forever beyond their grasp. For me, as a writer, that's the end of the second act.
The third act is about a fundamental change in the main characters - they become aware of what the reader has already figured out - and they find it within themselves to make the sacrifice that will heal the world around them, even if it means their own physical or emotional destruction. The climax of the story may be happy or sad, redeeming or damning, but however it ends, the book answers those questions that made you want to write the book in the first place.
Kirstin Chen is the author of the novel Soy Sauce for Beginners. She lives in San Francisco, CA.
I think often about how to keep a plot moving forward, especially when I’m in the thick of drafting a novel, as I am now.
A little of bit of context: I’m one of those writers who doesn’t begin with an outline. Instead, I usually bungle my way through a first draft. Once I’ve written a good chunk of pages, say 30 or 40, I open a new word document and write one sentence about each character's deepest desire. That's it. Only later, after I’ve completed that first draft, do I go back to create an outline that will help guide me through subsequent drafts.
All of this is just to say that when I’m drafting, I often reach points in the story when I simply don't know what will happen next. Times like these, I find it helpful to go back and remind myself of each character’s deepest desire. In order to keep the story going, I know I need only to create a new obstacle—something that stands in the way of the character achieving the one thing he or she needs. For instance, in my current project, one main character is a mother who is forced to leave her daughter behind in their homeland so she can squire the rest of the family to safety in a new country. She desires nothing more than to be reunited with her daughter, but a whole host of obstacles stand in her way: the totalitarian government that refuses to grant the girl a visa to leave her homeland and join her family; the family's financial difficulties, which prevent the mother from paying to have her daughter smuggled out; the son she must care for through this trying time. Each of these obstacles increases tension and keeps the story unfolding in a way that I hope will capture a reader's imagination.
J.E. Forman is the author of the novel Really Dead: A Ria Butler Mystery. She lives in Toronto, ON.
By going backwards.
Before I start writing I know who’s been killed, whodunit and why, and I try to jot down a very rough outline of the story in point form, a bare minimum listing of key actions and reactions. With that basic knowledge I go for broke when I write my first draft — writing every scene and conversation that comes to mind. Sometimes it feels as if I’m just taking dictation, transcribing the conversations that my characters are having in my head as they tell their story. As a result, the plotline bounces around all over the place. Those characters just love to talk and talk and talk. I don’t move their story forward; they take me along for the ride. I’d love to say that I deliberately and skillfully keep the plot moving forward ... but that would be pure fiction. The truth is that I have to arm myself with a red marker and go back over the first draft, moving some scenes to a more logical or impactful place in the story and cutting out anything and everything that isn’t essential to the story.
While a scene about two characters frantically trying to get a backstroking raccoon out of a swimming pool may be comically entertaining, it gets the big red X if it’s only an amusing sidebar. However, if raccoon hairs are found on my murder victim and his clothes are soaked in chlorinated water from a pool ... well, that raccoon scene stays in. The characters’ back-stories flesh them out as multi-dimensional people but, again, if those back-stories don’t help propel the story forward they get chopped. Uncle Basil’s penchant for purple might stay in, though, if the killer is a Donny Osmond wannabe who wore purple socks when he did the evil deed.
I find that what slows things down are the detours away from a story, or scenes that circle the plotline like a roundabout. They take the reader’s eyes off the prize — The End.
Amy Hatvany is the author of the novels Safe with Me, Best Kept Secret, Outside the Lines, The Language of Sisters, and Heart Like Mine. She lives in Seattle, WA.
I’m not one to prepare a detailed outline of a book, but trial and error has taught me that before I begin writing, I absolutely must have a compelling overall question I am attempting to answer or I will waste countless hours meandering down plot-paths to nowhere. The question is what drives the plot; it is what propels the protagonist(s) to action in every scene.
In my latest novel, Safe With Me, which explores the dynamics within families on each side of an organ transplant, the ultimate question I kept trying to answer was: “Will Hannah reveal to Olivia who they are in relation to each other?” And a sub-question: “Will Olivia and Maddie escape the dangerous confines of James’s abuse?” Other, smaller questions sprouted from these: “How will the three main characters finally meet?” “What happens when they do?” What are their reactions?” As long as I focus on answering these kinds of questions, paying attention to the new ones that arise as I resolve each on the page, the plot seems to gather its own energy and move forward.
Before I begin, it also helps me to sketch out a basic, three-act structure of the story. I identify the turning points at the end of Acts I and II ahead of time so I have pin-pointed destinations for my characters to reach. In Safe With Me, the first turning point is when Olivia and Maddie enter Hannah’s salon and the three characters meet for the first time, only one of them suspecting who the other two might be. That encounter spins the plot onward, it gave Hannah something to do, an action to take–discovering whether or not Maddie was the recipient of Hannah’s daughter’s liver. It created tension–leaving the reader wondering if and when Hannah will reveal who she is. The second turning point my characters needed to reach came at the end of Act II, and propelled the story into its resolution phase, and ultimately, the final scene.
I wasn’t taught this way of writing; I more stumbled into it after too many false starts and frustrating plot lines that flailed in the wind instead of being firmly anchored to a fixed point. It’s not a science; it’s more of a feeling-my-way-through, which for me is the fun of what I do. Armed only with a question and a compulsively curious nature, knowing a just few points on the map of a story, I take a deep breath and trust that my invisible writer’s compass will guide me along the way.
Nancy Lee is the author of the novel The Age and the story collection Dead Girls. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
In a nutshell: make your characters suffer. My earliest stalled plots were the result of protagonists getting too easy a ride, drifting through interesting events, but never facing genuine threats. Now, before I begin writing, I work out the three levels of antagonism my protagonist will confront. Internal: how is my protagonist their own worst enemy? Interpersonal: which characters in the story have yearnings in opposition to my protagonist’s, and why? And societal: how is my protagonist at odds with societal norms, their social milieu, their place in history? From the very first page, these antagonisms bear down on my protagonist, providing the fuel of forward momentum, conflict. David Vann (Legend of a Suicide) once offered this great advice on beginnings: start when it’s already too late for the character; begin beyond the point of easy hope. To that I’ll add: then, make it worse.
A story is also a journey through relationships. Every relationship my protagonist is part of must shift, change, swing through extremes of positive and negative. The events of my story, if meaningful enough and carrying high enough emotional stakes, will create significant relationship fall-out for my protagonist to navigate. These complications help raise the tension through the middle stretch of the narrative.
I try to avoid the trap of backstory. So many writers use backstory to explain a character or situation, or cram in unnecessary information. I limit myself to a paragraph here and there, a carefully chosen memory or reflection grounded in sensory detail. A character’s past is usually more interesting to the writer than the reader. The reader is invested in a character’s present, their future.
Most importantly, though, my protagonist needs to act. They can’t just glide through the story, passively observing. The protagonist must be the agent of change; they must make choices and decisions based on what they yearn for, and these choices and decisions must have repercussions. When a scene starts to wane or lose momentum, it’s usually because my protagonist has ceased to be active. I’ll rework passive scenes by crafting crucial moments of choice for my character.
Claire Letemendia is the author of the novels The License of War and The Best of Men. She lives in Toronto, ON.
In my case, major aspects of plot are already determined by history: The Best of Men and its sequel The Licence of War plunge the reader into seventeenth century England during a civil war. Political and military events and actual historical figures as much as invented characters play a huge role in both. My greatest challenge is to weave in my fictional plotting as seamlessly as possible while sticking as closely as I can to contemporary record, but I have to beware of losing myself in overly detailed research that slows momentum of the storyline. What most interests me as an author is to capture the complexity of human psychology and experience, so I write from the viewpoint of multiple characters, although I do have a main protagonist. This is an advantage to plotting: as in a film, I can build suspense, letting one person’s situation dangle and switching to another’s predicament. Yet these simultaneous plot threads often make me feel as if I’m herding cats.
My chief practical weapon is basic: to maintain an accurate outline of each scene with precise date and location, and also with a colour code to show which character has point of view. I can check at a glance the balance between my protagonist’s scenes – the central plot – and those of subsidiary players. I try to remember the old cinematic rule: get into a scene late and get out early. Each scene and plot thread should reveal something new and propelling to the action or to the realisation of a character, or else it should be reworked or cut. I always need to ask: I may care what happens next, but why in hell should the reader?
A sense of impending physical danger obviously keeps a plot moving, though if sustained without a break I find it grows tedious, like unremitting scenes of sex and/or violence. Essential to a really gripping plot, in my opinion, is to create fascinating characters confronted by high moral and emotional stakes. Will a tragic flaw, a silly slip, a moment of unforeseen heroism, or the sheer weight of circumstances send them hurtling towards disaster? These people can’t be one-dimensional, or predictable. On the other hand their plot trajectories must relate to a constant, deep inside their natures. Without this kernel of consistency, they can undermine the most ingenious and fast-paced of plots. Think, for example, of the subtle villain who suddenly and uncharacteristically blurts out all his darkest secrets, either at the height of his success or at his nemesis.
While I like the tradition of holding back a crucial plot point to resolve near the story’s end, I don’t want every single thread tied up. That’s not true to life. And by leaving open a measure of uncertainty about the fate of my best-loved fictional characters, there’s a chance they’ll continue to haunt the reader’s imagination.
Jennifer McMahon is the author of numerous novels, including The Winter People, Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell. She lives in Montpelier, VT.
I came to fiction from poetry – stumbled into it accidently one day after studying poetry for four years as an undergrad and a year in an MFA program. When I realized that my prose poem was actually the beginning of a novel, I hit the panic button. What did I know about fiction? Poetry had taught me about language, imagery and metaphor, but nothing about plot. I eventually realized that “plot” is just another word for “things that happen.” If I made things happen, I would have a plot, and hence… a novel.
One of the things I love about writing suspense is that it forces me to keep the plot moving. If I were writing a quiet literary novel, it would be easy to spend ten pages describing a fox in the snow. But if that fox is leading a man up into haunted woods where his daughter is soon to be killed in a terrible accident – then I’ve got something! So I’ve learned to make things happen. I give my character a problem. Then, as she’s trying to solve it, I have her hit one road block after another, and keep heaping the problems on. I give myself permission to be cruel and twisted. To push my poor character to her limits. To give her nightmares. To make her face the thing she’s most afraid of. To tell me her deepest secrets. And as I do this, the plot moves along.
My own personal rule is to make sure I have at least one important plot element happening in each scene. I write out my whole rough draft and it’s always a big, rambling mess of a thing. Then, once I’ve got the entire story down on paper, I go back and lay it out , scene by scene, all over the floor of my house and take a good look. Slowly, as I walk over and around it, I begin to figure out just what the story is (sometimes it doesn’t turn out to be what I think it is, at all; it’s something buried there under the surface). Then, I start to really map out the plot. As I study each scene, I ask myself what’s happening? Does what’s happening in this scene move the story forward? Is it necessary to the overall arc of the story? Does it lead me into my next scene? I take out anything that doesn’t propel the story onward. I add in things to fill in the gaps and rough out missing scenes. I shuffle scenes around, realizing they work better in a different order. It becomes a bit like doing a large collage. And slowly, very slowly, the book begins to really take shape.
Peter Norman is the author of the novel Emberton. He lives in Toronto, ON.
My plots falter when my scenes meander, and that happens when I lose sight of what a scene’s trying to achieve. Its purpose may be functional—maybe in this scene I need character x to become enraged by her boss and finally attack him with a dental drill (this will thwart her goal of getting a promotion and will move us into the next chapter, which takes place in jail). Or the scene might make a deliberate, focused detour: perhaps its purpose is to have character y express his concerns about character x’s teeth, helping drive home the book’s secondary theme, which is the necessity of regular flossing. (Just for the record, I’m talking about a hypothetical novel here. Flossing is more or less irrelevant to the one I’ve actually published.) Detours are risky—if they’re not handled right, the reader may lose interest—but they can also add depth, resonance, breathing space. Even the most relentless white-knuckle thriller needs a bit of that.
I like to give each of my scenes a specific tent pole—a confrontation or action or revelation—that defines its structure and also defines its contribution to the story overall. Specific is an important part of that, and so is contribution to the story. “In this scene, Bill and Cindy hang out and engage in witty repartee—maybe give Cindy the hilarious line about the parakeet!” is not a tent pole. “Cindy’s repartee with Bill relaxes her and she lets slip her true feelings about Mabel” is more like it.
If I’m reading through a draft and come upon a scene that stalls, it probably means I haven’t yet identified a tent pole, or I have too many of them, or the material is not arranged precisely enough around the existing pole. So I try to decide what the pole should be and then eliminate the loose bits of material that flap free, or the surplus canvas that weighs down the structure. (Also when I’m revising I keep an eye out for metaphors that have been stretched too far. On that note, why don’t we just quietly retire this tent analogy.) And if I can’t find any good reason to keep the scene, the whole thing has to go, even if I was particularly fond of that line about the parakeet.
Basically, the scene is a mini-story of its own, and deserves to be plotted just as dutifully. Though the creek may eddy and divert (as in fact any lively, exciting creek will), ultimately it must flow downstream, just as the larger story flows toward its climax.
Padma Viswanathan is the author of the novels The Ever After of Ashwin Rao and Toss of a Lemon. She lives in Fayetteville, AR.
My best and briefest answer to this question is mathematical: plot propulsion is a matter of “if… then…” logic. If you make a fictional proposition then its results form your plot; each result is or can be a fresh ‘if’ proposition. This works best when a. the ‘if’ proposition is interesting and rich, and b. the writer is open to logical consequences that are wildly unexpected.
In “Funes, His Memory,” by Jorge Luis Borges, a young man falls off a horse. In consequence, his powers of observation and recall become perfect. If he reads a text once, he can remember the whole of it; he can recall the forms of clouds on any given day, in all their particulars; every dream, every daydream; nothing vanishes from his mind. It seems to be what any of us would want—to retain all of experience, stop time from slipping away. But this prodigious power is debilitating. Funes has no time to do anything but observe; to recall a day takes an entire day. The narrator speculates that Funes might not even be a very good thinker, because thinking requires abstraction. The chain of fictional propositions, here, opens into speculations on immortality and the dubious value of perfection.
In Shahrnush Parsipur’s novella Women Without Men, a repressed schoolteacher happens on a scene of sexual congress, perhaps forced. The trauma of witnessing this makes her want to withdraw from the world. She decides to become a tree, and plants herself in a corner of her family’s garden. At first, people see her as a young woman kneeling quietly in the dirt, even though they call her a tree. With passing seasons, however, and the attentions of a gifted gardener, she leafs out, blossoms and produces seeds: abundant, generative, utterly alone. The plot’s progress here, as with Funes, is both logical and unpredictable. This is the key not only to plot propulsion but to holding a reader’s attention—the reader senses in each fresh proposition (that is, in each propulsive consequence) multiple possibilities, but can’t foresee what the writer will conjure.
In early drafts, keep in mind that the writer’s main task is to be open, to dream forward. Run after your fictional consequences; see where they take you. You can always erase, back up, and try again, but don’t do this until you have wiggled as far down each rabbit hole as you can. My own latest novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, fictionalizes the fallout of a real-life act of terror, the 1985 Air India bombing. First, I reconstructed the circumstances of the bombing, then I put my characters through it. While much of the early writing was painful, I took pleasure in writing the very different reactions of my characters to similar circumstances. And then, as I worked through and beyond the known historical conditions of this violent incident, surprising logical extensions began presenting themselves. It was delightful--and therapeutic and addictive--but also the mere natural result of the method.”
M.D. Waters is the author of the novel Archetype. She lives in Maryland.
I believe motivation toward a goal is what pushes a plot forward. But not just any motivation. Relatable motivation. If someone asks WHY something happens, and your answer is BECAUSE, then we aren’t relating. We’re experiencing real life, and no fiction reader wants to read that. Getting past the “because, that’s why” was the hardest part for me. I didn’t grasp the power behind a solid motivation for a really long time.
Another thing I had to get over: having an overall story goal and motivation isn’t enough. Every scene needs a goal, and every goal needs a motivation. If your goal is external, internal, or both, points for you. If you shake things up and add a bunch of conflict, you win the entire game. You see, conflict creates motivation to move on to the next goal. Conflict forces your characters to react viscerally (feel), contemplate what just happened (think), and plan for the next step (decide). That next step is your new goal, and it’s motivated by whatever incident just happened. What I’m telling you, in a nutshell, is that Scene & Sequel is your best friend. This particular writing rule is tough to grasp, but once you get it, it becomes automatic.
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SHAUN SMITH is a novelist and award-winning journalist in Toronto, Canada. His young-adult novel Snakes & Ladders was published in 2009 by the Dundurn Group. His book Magical Narcissism: Selected Writings on Books, Writers, Food, and Chefs was published by Tightrope Books in June 2013.
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