Characters Are Like Onions

Mike Reeves-McMillan, an author and editor, has posted an analysis of the different types of characters one finds in a story. Beginner and intermediate writers should check out his essay, "Characters Are Like Onions," to learn more.

\_/
DED

Ellipsis Tirade

el·lip·sis – noun \i-ˈlip-səs, e-\

1. a : the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete;  b : a sudden leap from one topic to another
2. : marks or a mark (as …) indicating an omission (as of words) or a pause

The above definition is taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Since I’ve begun to read indie author works, I’ve noticed that writers seem to be in love with these three little dots. So much so that they misuse them all the time. At first, I thought it was just one book or author but after ten plus books where 75% of them misuse the ellipsis, I feel the need to step in.

The main use of an ellipsis is to shorten a quotation or to show a trailing off in speech. Here is an example of each. For the quotation, let’s take a simple quote from Cicero:

Original – “A friend is, as it were, a second self.”

Ellipsisfied – “A friend is... a second self.”

Notice that is replaces an unnecessary portion of the quote. The addition of the ellipsis does not change the meaning of the quote. Now let’s use it to show a trailing off in speech or thought in dialogue.

“Fiddlesticks! Where did I leave those darn... ?”

But what about using an ellipsis to build tension? Even though it seems to be a widely used (and accepted) practice to use the ellipsis this way, I cannot find any book/site on writing styles that states that it should be used this way. But I’m not going to fight against the stream here. Language and grammar are ever changing creatures.

I tend to agree with the Writing Forward Blog which states:

“We can also use an ellipsis to indicate a pause or unfinished thought. At the end of a sentence, an ellipsis represents trailing off into silence. Using an ellipsis to represent a pause can get a writer into trouble.

We tend to pause a lot in speech. Pauses give us a moment to collect our thoughts or add emphasis to what we’re saying. But in writing, a page peppered with ellipses wreaks havoc on the eyes. The same applies to unfinished thoughts.

A lazy writer might use ellipses to indicate, “and so on,” or “et cetera.” In text messaging and social media, many people use ellipses where they believe the reader will implicitly understand what would be stated next. In professional-grade writing, we finish our thoughts, so ellipses used for this purpose should be rare.

However, when we are writing dialogue, an ellipsis can come in handy, especially if we want to show a character’s speech trailing off. Keep in mind, though, that ellipses, like exclamation points, should be used with caution and only when truly needed for emphasis. As a general rule, don’t use it unless you must.”

PLEASE, AUTHORS!  I BEG OF YOU! When writing your novels, use ellipses sparingly! Also remember that ending a chapter in an ellipsis is redundant. The tension builder is already there. A well written story already has me thinking, “Oh! I so need to read the next chapter to find out what happens to [insert character here]!”

Here are three great resources for using ellipses:

1. Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
2. Capital Community College’s Grammar Page (with handy drop down menu)
3. Writing Forward’s Ellipsis Page

</end rant>

This post originally appeared over at The Bookworm's Fancy.

"The Final Page" Tip of the Week: Think 10 years from now.

"The Final Page" column provides a weekly tip for avoiding common self-publishing mistakes. A professional final product makes the difference between being reviewed on The New Podler, or being one of the millions of books that sink through Amazon's sales rankings to languish below the 4-million mark.

If you want it now, that could be a problem.
This month, my freelance editing business received several requests for a free sample edit. In some of those requests I saw a trend; thanks to the ever-rising profile of self-publishing, many writers are ready to get their novel into print, and want an editor to make it ready for publication in one pass. The catch: What if it's not ready to be line-edited?

I could eat up a lot of space in the column merely listing the reasons why a novel might need heavy structural revisions. But the crux of the problem is simply that it makes little sense to pay an editor to prep, scrub, and polish your novel until you know that its beginning, middle, and end doesn't need rewriting. Otherwise, you and your editor are just writing on water.

Think 10 years from now.
One of reasons writers write is the desire to say something permanent, something that remains true or entertaining over time. Ironically, the easier it is to convert those words into immortal print, the greater the temptation to do it too soon. Ten years from now, that rushed book may not the proud accomplishment you meant it to be.

So, take your time. If the manuscript needs another year, or two, or three, give it time. If your editor advises you to join a good critique group, do it. If, despite your truly accomplished writing or topical plot, the manuscript has an Achilles heel that trips it up at the climax, then back off, cool down, and rewrite those chapters from scratch.

In a world where money will buy authorship immediately, patience is tough. A published book may make you an author, but the bookstore has plenty of books by authors who are experts, celebrities, journalists, and politicians--people who probably wouldn't call themselves writers, per se. If you aren't an expert, celebrity, etc., then you need to be a writer before you're an author. Repeated failure, continuing improvement, and patience are what makes a person a writer. This is probably the hardest lesson I've had to learn, and from what I can see, it's not just a lesson for beginners.

Sarah Cypher is the author of "The Editor's Lexicon: Essential Writing Terms for Novelists" (Glyd-Evans Press, 2010) and runs a two-woman editing and book design shop, The Threepenny Editor.

Who Is My Reader?

Who is my reader? How do I impress him? How do I overcome his skepticism? These are not academic questions, but questions that go to the very heart of deliberate, purposeful writing. Writers are often tempted to write for the"market" or for some other vague, nondescript entity that is hazy in their mind. Such indulgence can be a form of laziness because, in imagining a vague entity, one allows one's writing to be lazy--it's easy, in other words, to impress a vaguely defined reader, for such a reader is as forgiving as the author's ego. But the vague phantoms of the writer's imagination don't read, and they don't buy books--real individuals do, and these real individuals must be impressed, have their skepticism overcome, and have their time respected.

Who do you write for? The genre fanatic? The housewife? The teenage boy? How old is your reader? Why is he reading at all? How do you impress this reader? You do so by taking your reader seriously. Taking someone seriously means respecting his time, money, attention, imagination, and intelligence. In essence, it means being ethical instead of self serving in your desire to simply "get it out there."

Respect his time and money.

Readers are busy people. They are not rich. They are husbands, wives, sons and daughters; they have jobs and worries--they want writing that respects them by being clear, direct, and well executed. Slow openings, bad editing, poor story construction and other symptoms of laziness signal to the reader that the writer is not taking them into account or is doing so only peripherally. Lazy writing makes the reader sorry he spent money on your book. It makes him feel cheated.

Lazy writing does not respect the reader's time. It is vague and requires labor to digest. Why should the reader invest his precious hours in your cryptic ramblings? When you read the work of great writers, or even writer who are merely competent, you notice that their writing is clear, logical, and focused. Such writers don't waste words or space, they don't pad around; the logic of their writing is so easy to follow it almost doesn't require thinking; their focus is so clear, nothing dangles or is left unused in the writer's project of creating meaning. There is a great deal of discipline evident in good, professional writing; and this discipline is evident to readers, and they know that they are being respected.

Make it interesting.

Who is your story supposed to interest? Without a clearly imagined reader, the answer is most likely anyone, which means, in practice, no one. But if you have a clear imagine, a living concept, of a reader in your mind, he becomes a person for you, and you write to interest this person, to engage his imagination, intellect and to entertain him.

Suppose that you're writing a children's story. Do you even know children of the age group you want to write for? Try volunteering at a local elementary school as a story teller and see if you can even engage their interest. It's a lot harder than it seems because children, like all people, are intelligent, not dumb. The same insight applies for any potential reader, whether the mystery buff, the technothriller fan or the literature connoisseur--all want to be wowed. How do you wow them? How do you overcome their resistance?

Logic, focus, clarity.

Good writing has the following hallmarks--logical development, arrangement, and movement in some direction. Good writing has a singular focus and clear destination. It moves to this end with clarity and grace. Bad writing is the opposite-it lacks the logical connections, it has vague focus, and it is often unclear. The writer mocks the reader with bad writing, and who wants to be mocked?

Revision, Motivation And Craft

Writing is hard work, writing is lonely work-motivation, sooner or latter, becomes an issue, especially when what one writes does not seem to amount to very much. How do you stay motivated? Should you?

Motivation is the desire to achieve something that one sees as necessary and worthwhile; it requires a passion to see something happen. For writers, motivation often means the desire to see a book on the library or store bookshelves; or the desire to tell a story that is important to the writer for some reason. The writer believes in the worth of his story. He believes in the necessity of telling it. Trouble begins when the writer becomes tired of the mundane aspects of writing and the motivation to see the project through to successful completion becomes a chore. Here are some thoughts to help dislodge the writer's block.

Is it still necessary?

When you look at your story or book, do you still think it is necessary, and important story worth telling? Or has it become a festering, confusing, headache-inducing mess that is far from your original inspiration? You have to ask yourself the following questions. Why did the story seem necessary in the first place? What was it about and why was this worth writing about? Where did the original spark come from?

The creative spark

Something sets your imagination on fire and makes you want to write. After a few months of work, this fire seems to go out. There are more mundane problems to deal with-scenes, reversals, character development-stuff that's technical and seems to have little to do with being creative. That initial creative burst seems to vanish and the technical aspect of constructing a story leaves you with a headache and a strong desire to do something else, anything else but go back in front of that computer.

The solution is to go back to that initial vision of the story. In the first place, you should have written it as clearly as possible on a sheet of paper so that it can serve as your reminder of what this story is about and why it is important. Another possible way to capture the original vision is to make a poster or a book cover that will inspire you, when you're feeling tired, to keep going. Yet another way is to draw scenes from your story, especially the most important ones. Of course, you need to be able to draw, but that's fun, and it will help you with the writer's block.

Why bother?

But there it is, you mess of a manuscript, a tree hundred plus page monster that's absorbed every bit of your fee time over the past few months, sitting worthlessly on the hard drive. You have your posters and your scene sketches, but this thing is beyond help. Surely, there are other more important things you could be doing with your life. Think about all the things that you're missing out on. Why bother with it? It does not come easy.

Mastery of craft

This is the crux of the problem of the writer's block-the inability to revise. Writing is about revision. Nothing can be written in the first pass, nothing worthwhile that is. The original inspiration is often deceptive because it makes you believe that a story can be merely put down on paper as is and then you will be done. It is, you believe, only a matter of getting to the end. But then, you realize, as you write, that there is no end at all. You get trapped in the desert of revision and the original fire that set you ablaze at the keyboard is like a water, evaporated in the hot sun of the Sahara.

The only way out is mastery of craft. If you get stuck, unsure about where an action should go, only your understanding of how things like plot, theme, tone, voice, character and other elements of the story function can get you out of trouble and back into that sweet spot of creative flow.

Creativity is not magic, it's all in the mastery of the elements of story. Only when you master the elements of story can you truly be creative in you choices. You must know, for instance, how to create a great plot, how to create characters, you must know how character action and plot relate to theme, tone and mood-this an many other things you must know in a practical way, not in the academic way of definitions that are hazy in your mind. When you read a story, when you watch a movie, you should, right away, if you know your stuff, be able to know what the writer is doing, how he is doing it, what the effects are, and whether he's succeeded in his project. You should see the elements of structure and their effects and learn form them. Why is there tension, suspense? What specific actions have caused this to be? You should know how the plot, theme, character all interrelate. All this and more should be clear to you as you read the story. Only then can you reach a point where you can help yourself out of your writer's block because only then do you know the craft, the practice of it, to the point where it can be helpful.

Writing is all about thinking and rethinking, writing and revising whatever you put down on the page. Everything you place on the page has some meaning, some impact and purpose, and you must be aware of that, and be able to use it in your story somehow. Every word is a symbol, so is every action, each consequence of that action has meanings too. Even a simple story such as thriller, where the only question is of the type such as-will the spy reach Germany with the secret of FUSAG, as in Eye of the Needle-is not so simply to construct from scratch unless you have mastered how the concepts of suspense, tension, reversal, surprise, and complication work in practice, not just theory.

So what's the real secret to getting back on the saddle? Dissecting stories for their structure. If you're feeling stuck, outline what you have written. That's right. Do a fresh outline of your story as it is. Then you will see what you have and whether it is working. This outline will help you see what needs to be done in terms of plot, theme, and character development, and other aspects. And you're right when you think that, man, that's the start of a whole new version of the book. It is. That's what revision is all about, the going back to the beginning and starting over for the sake of reaching some end that's part of your creative vision for the story.

Of course, you will, at some point, ask yourself why it is that you should keep doing this work. It is very hard work, and more than likely, you could use your time in a more productive way doing something else-go hiking in the mountains, learn to dance, play soccer, ride a bicycle, learn to be a volunteer fireman… the possibilities for a fulfilling life are endless.

How long does it take?

How long does it take to write a book? The recent interview with Danielle Steele should cast some light--a year on a 80+ page outline, a year on the first draft, two years on revision of that draft. How do you stack up? Have you ever done an 80+ page outline?

In Hollywood, they do what are called treatments, which can vary by length, but most professional writers do create long treatments of their stories, sometimes working on that treatment for more than a year. Why all this work? To create the kind of stories that people want to see on the screen or read. Writing is hard work. Very hard. It takes commitment, discipline, effort, and talent. You can't be depressed or distracted. You have to be smart, alive, plugged in, part of something. You have to be an astute observer of life and people.

Research

Research makes great stories. Research is not merely finding facts but learning about something or someone. It is coming to know something that was unknown before. And knowing lets us write a story that is deeper and richer than it otherwise would have been.

Take, for instance, the spy novel. How would you go about writing such a novel? You think you know how the world of covert action operates, having seen shows like 24 and read a few books in that genre. But, you don’t. Have you, for example, ever talked to a person who has actually been a spy? This is part of research—finding and getting to talk to people who live in the world in which your story takes place. By listening to what these people can tell you, you learn about them and those who live in their world, and you learn what that world is like, how it works, its rules and unwritten laws. You have to get to know how people in this world talk, how they think, and who they are if you hope to fashion realistic characters for your spy story. Unless you are able to do this, or find some other way to get inside that world, your story will be nothing more than a rehash of all the books and TV shows that you have seen. And because you rely on the creations of others, your story, necessarily will not be original or interesting. Besides people, you need to know the locations.

Can you describe, say, Cairo, in a way that reflects what that city is like? Can your description make that place come to life for your reader? What does Cairo smell like? What’s the feel of the weather? Is your Cairo like the real thing or is it some chimera of the cities that you have been to? Can’t go to Cairo? No worries, find an Egyptian who has been there, and get to know him and get him to tell you about Cairo. Ditto for Mexican or Canadian cities. Out of the details and observations arises verisimilitude of a fictional version of some city you wish to use as a setting, and out of the details can arise plot twists that are organic to the location. This is important because if you think that Cairo or Mexico City is like your hometown USA and you use that reference, you will come up with action and plot that cannot happen in the foreign town you want to write about.

Knowing the people and the locations helps you create unique plots that are organically unified with the characters and locales. Suppose that you want to put in a chase into your story. A chase is not a chase, however. It is quite different in Cairo than in New York City. First, how would people react to someone running down a street in Manhattan vs. Bronx? Cities have different districts, and that context makes some actions more possible than others. Whose attention does the chase attract and what are the consequences of that attention on the outcome of that chase? Does the police become involved? What if your protagonist cannot afford to have the police involved? Despite having seen thousands of films with chases in them, consider that no car chase of the Hollywood variety would go unnoticed in any major US city. There would be major consequences and they would derail any further action by the protagonist involved. The media would be having a feeding frenzy, the police, the mayor—all would be involved in what happened. Remember the bus chase from Speed? It could never actually happen in any US city. The entire city and probably nation would nearly come to a standstill. Why was not the president involved in the situation? He certainly would become involved if such a bus incident happened in LA. And what about the elevator thing? How likely is it that the perpetrator would be able to stage another incident? Not very likely, even back in 1995 when the movie came out.

Details are essential to great stories and the more you know about the world in which your story takes place the more realistic and true your story will be, but details, and too much research, can stifle the imagination, as they would in the above criticism of the Speed bus chase if the screenwriter knew too much about the factors that could come into play in that situation and how those factors would make his story impossible. Remember that you are writing a fantasy, and a fantasy, though it relies on facts, uses them in a way that creates a rich illusion. You are not a journalist. This is where you as the writer must be able to free yourself from the restraints that facts and knowledge create and be able to ask-what if? What is likely and possible? How could your plot happen? What do you have to ignore or to bring in from reality to make that plot happen? When you ignore reality, can you really afford to do it or are you merely creating a giant hole in your story’s credibility? Is there, in other words, enough tension, suspense, and anticipation in your story so that the audience will be able to ignore this hole? Consider North by Northwest. In that movie there are a number of plot holes, but the anticipation, suspense and tension blind the viewer to these problem areas. Does your story have enough suspense and anticipation to wither any credibility gaps?

In the end, you must tread carefully—not enough research and you write a thin, unbelievable story; too much and you won’t be able to get out of the straitjacket of facts and reality; too much suspense and anticipation, and the action becomes a comedy for the wrong reasons; not enough suspense and anticipation, and your readers begin to notice things that they otherwise would never bother with.

Shop Talk

What’s better than writing advice from a working writer? Therefore, as an extra special summer feature, we at the PODler present Kristen Tsetsi’s article on writing.



Advice for People Who Take Writing Advice
by Kristen Tsetsi

Books offering writing tips and advice stuff four shelves at my local Barnes and Noble. Magazine articles galore offer very specific, very important rules to follow for people who want to be writers. If you're reading those articles, you might be new to writing—maybe you suddenly developed an interest after years of believing you were meant to be a tax attorney, or maybe you’re young and just discovering your passion. For whatever reason, you’re advice-starved, and “seasoned” writers (myself included) are all too happy to offer nuggets of wisdom.

Here’s the thing about writing advice, though: the tips are as varied and arbitrary as hiccup cures. Remember Jennifer Mee, the poor girl who had the hiccups for five weeks? She tried everything from downing pickle juice to drinking water from the wrong side of the glass to pressing a post-it sized piece of paper to her forehead.

A piece of paper. On her forehead. To stop weeks of hiccups.

Be serious.

(DISCLAIMER: I'M NO DOCTOR-->)My personal theory on hiccup cures and their diverse nature is that, often, hiccup cures are largely psychological and unique to the individual. Your pickle juice might be my paper-on-forehead. Why? Because it’s all dependent upon what each believes will work. While Meggie is being scared out of her wits by a helpful friend sick of listening to her “buggup! buggup!,” what’s the one thing she’s not thinking about?

Hiccups!

When Marc drinks water while holding a pencil in his mouth, he’s so busy trying not to spill that the feeling we all probably get, that nagging little lurch that comes just before the next hiccup, is forgotten. (When you have hiccups, do you ever anticipate that next one so intently that you almost encourage it?)

When I have a case of the hiccups, I avoid thinking about them. I do something else. This gets rid of them, for me. And, like anyone else with sure-fire remedies, my own hiccup “cure” has been given freely and often. “Just stop thinking about them,” I say oh-so-wisely. “They’ll go away.”

And do they?

No. My cure only works on me.

The same can be said for writing advice. Before I get into that, I should make clear that I’m not talking about writing instruction. If you’re reading an instructional book on writing, don’t stop. There is valuable information inside those covers, tools to help you develop your characters, create a setting, weave your setting into your story, weave your characters into your setting and story, and adjust your narrative to match the weaving of your characters and setting and story. All that.

Instruction ranges from basic (Creative Writing: Forms and Techniques, Lavonne Meueller and Jerry D. Reynolds) to more involved (Josip Navakovich’s Fiction Writers Workshop), and much of it is sound information to take with you through the various stages you’ll experience as a writer. Not enough can be said about exercises, either (What If? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painteris a wonderful book of exercises). They not only encourage you to get writing, but they’re often invaluable to the growth of your skill as they force concentration on very specific elements.

For example (if I may sidestep for a moment): One of my favorite exercises in What If? is to write a scene using only one-syllable words. This exercise does a few things:

1. it introduces the notion that a good story relies not on your fabulous knowledge of multi-syllabic words, but on how convincing you can be with a limited vocabulary.

2. it asks you to be very, very disciplined—it ain’t easy sticking to monosyllabic words for a single sentence, never mind a whole scene!

3. it’s fun!

No matter how naturally talented you are, there is always something to be learned. For this reason, instructional books on how to improve your skill are often worth taking into consideration.

But advice? That’s another story.

Hang around writers or dabble in the writing world long enough and you’ll hear it all.

1. When to write. (First thing in the morning. An hour after you wake up. At the same time every day. At a different time every day. When you’re all alone in the house/apartment. When you can hear welcome noises through the door. After dinner. Just before going to sleep. At midnight when your mind is clear of the day’s stresses. At three in the morning when no one in the world except third-shift workers are crazy enough to be awake on purpose.)

2. How often to write. (Once a day. Once every two days. Once a week. Every other Thursday.)

3. How much to write. (One thousand words. Two hundred words. Three single-spaced pages. A sentence.)

4. How often and how much to write. (A thousand words a day. One sentence every day. Two pages every two days, even if one of those days you write nothing…so long as you end up with two pages every other day.)

5. How often, how much, and when to write. (Two pages every second Thursday at seven-thirty in the morning!)

And not to be forgotten are the personal essentials:

1. Where your writing space should be. (In the middle of things. Off somewhere private. Half and half.)

2. What your writing space should be. (Small and cozy to keep your ideas close. Large, open, and airy to let your mind roam free. Neat and organized, as should you be! Cluttered and comfortable—creativity knows no rules!)

3. Final touch-ups. (Books around you. A nice pen. Soft music. No music. Open window. Closed window, shades down. Pickle-juice on your forehead and a post-it in your mouth.)

Here’s my advice:

1. When to write: when you want to.
2. How often to write: as often as you want to.
3. How much to write: until you feel like stopping.
4. How often and how much to write: see #2 and #3.
5. How much, how often, and when to write: see #1 - #4.
6. Where and what your writing space should be: wherever and whatever appeals to you. (I’ll write in one spot at no certain time of day for months, and then I’ll simply have to be in a new room if I’m to feel inspired at all.)

No one knows you the way you do, and you—as a cognizant being—are probably very aware of what makes you comfortable, when you do or don’t feel inspired, and what you like to have around you. What works for one writer will not work for others. Take Hemingway and Fitzgerald, for instance - drinking "worked" for them. J. D. Salinger is a noted recluse, and look what his “method” did for Catcher in the Rye!


The point I’m making, here, is that most successful writers don’t follow the advice of other writers. They do what they do because it comes naturally to them. If they enjoy writing in the morning, they write in the morning. If they need to write a page a day to keep the juices flowing, they write a page a day. It’s not a conscious following of any set rule, more often than not, but is as simple as, “I really like to have a glass of water handy when I’m writing. I think I’ll do that!”

And, in many cases, they come to believe so much in what works for them that they want to share. They genuinely want to help others.

Understandable – we all want to try to help, and the several thousand hiccup cures that came by way of phone calls and emails to help poor Jennifer Mee prove it.

She tried each and every “cure,” she said, but in the end, not one piece of outside advice got rid of her hiccups.

They just stopped naturally.


Kristen Tsetsi has an MFA from Minnesota State University Moorheadand. Her fiction has been published in The Midtown Literary Review, Expository Magazine, Storyglossia, Denver Syntax, Opium Magazine, Red Weather Magazine and They Do Exist: An Anthology of Award Winning Short Stories. She runs a short short fiction venue Tuesday Shorts at http://www.myspace.com/tuesdayshorts. You can learn more about her work at http://kristenjtsetsi.com/

Character Arc

We see the world not as it is but as we are. When we describe something, we describe ourselves, our perceptions, paradigms, fears, dreams, and desires. The problems and obstacles that a character faces are, therefore, the externalizations of who he is, or an externalization of his paradigms and ways of seeing the world. Our paradigms and the way we see things are also responsible for our desires, needs and goals.

Transformation is the result of a change in our paradigms, and this change is caused by a realization which alters how we see the world and ourselves. Often, such a change of perspective enables the character to overcome the problem that he faces. So the action of the story must create a paradigm shift for the character, elicit a realization of something about himself, the world, and other people around him enabling him to see things from a new perspective, and therefore helping him overcome the problem. So the question that you need to ask is—what is the character’s paradigm? How does the inciting incident challenge this paradigm? The challenge to the character’s paradigm creates a story crisis, a moment when the character cannot go on as he had been thus far. He must do something different, and he can only do something different if he lets go of some aspect of himself or learns live in a new way. As you probably guessed, the character refuses to do this, at first. He tries to do things that he knows, and as he does, he finds himself in only greater trouble. Eventually, and as a result of his trouble, he becomes aware of something crucial, and this revelation changes his paradigms of thoughts and his views of himself, others, or the world. As a result of this shift in thinking, he is able to do something that he wasn’t able to do before.

Action and crisis

Every action causes consequences, reactions that create contradictions or challenges to that action. These challenges and contradictions create a crisis in the story line. A crisis situation is a moment when something must change because the action cannot proceed as it had before this moment, because the contradictions of the action work against the goal and the motivation for the action.

For instance, if a character steals a car, this act will have consequences. Someone will start looking for this car. The crisis will take place when the car owner, or the police, find the character who stole the car. This is a decisive moment in the story, it is a moment of confrontation, and the resolution of this moment will have profound effects. In this moment of crisis, the thief must make a choice, which will reflect his character nature. (Of course, the act of stealing the car was, too, a choice, and too, a response to a moment of crisis, lets say, the need to get away) What he cannot do is to proceed as he had before--to keep driving the car with impunity.

Causation and Escalation

Plot is composed of causally related events that escalate toward a climax.

Events are causally related when one action causes another—because A happened, B happens. Take, for instance, the first 4 chapters from Dean Koontz's Sole Survivor. The protagonist, Carpenter, comes to a beach. This is his action. He comes to the beach before heading to the cemetery where he will visit his wife's grave. What happens as a result of going to the beach? Carpenter discovers that someone is watching him, or at least seems to be watching him. If Carpenter has not gone to the beach, he would have not become aware of the surveillance, and the subsequent action in the cemetery would not have been set up or foreshadowed. One action causes (sets the stage for, sets up) other actions. Carpenter, despite the possibility of being watched, (he doesn't care about being watched, and this expresses his depression) proceeds to the cemetery anyway, and this is where a crisis occurs. Because he went to the cemetery, he discovers that nothing about the death of his wife is as it seems, and is plunged into the conflict. If he had not gone to the cemetery, he would not have met the person who claims to be a survivor of the crash, and he would not have found the motivation to discover the truth behind the crash. The protagonist has acted, and because he did, something happened that changed his situation: Carpenter is transformed from apathy and suicidal depression to the rage motivated desire to find out the truth about his wife's death. But events cannot, in a good plot, merely cause one another--events must cause other events that occur on a higher level of escalation.

Events escalate when one action causes another action that is greater in magnitude, impact, intensity, or reaches a new level. Soul Survivor shows escalation at work in the first 4 chapters: Carpenter is, at first, merely watched, which he becomes aware of at the beach. This is the beginning of change of his situation. This situation escalates, evolves, when he comes at the cemetery, where he encounter the survivor—this encounter is the a surprise, one that ups the ante, increases the impact and intensity of events for Carpenter, and for us as readers—he had been mourning the loss of his wife, now it appears that people not only survived the crash, but that some sinister force wants to keep the truth about the crash secret.

Conflict, tension, and suspense

Conflict is composed of an action and reaction struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist, with each action and each reaction taking place on a higher level of intensity, creating escalation. The struggle is also responsible for the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome, and uncertainty creates tension. Because struggle is comprised of reversals, no matter how bad things seem to get for the protagonist, hope remains that he will yet prevail, and the presence of hope maintains the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome. Without the possibility of reversals, once the antagonist would appear to triumph, hope would be lost for the protagonist and the story would be over. As long as the protagonist has a hope of reversing the triumphs of the antagonist, and as long as the antagonist can do the same to the protagonist's victories, there is uncertainty and tension. Uncertainty must be maintained as long as logically possible otherwise there will be no tension and the reader will lose interest. Tension rises as the struggle escalates but the outcome remains uncertain. Conflict is responsible for escalation of the action as well as for uncertainty and tension. Conflict also creates suspense.

Conflict is caused by some event that suggests a possible disaster. In order to avoid the disaster, the protagonist acts, and comes in conflict with forces that wish to make the disaster happen. The ultimate outcome, however, because of the conflict, is uncertain or suspended. As long as the outcome is uncertain, suspense is maintained. As long as the conflict is unresolved, its outcome remains suspended.

The Craft of Writing

This will be a new feature here at the PODler--in posts labeled craft we will examine the various topics related to the craft of writing. The first post will discuss conflict, tension, and suspense. Other posts will examine aspects of character development, plot, and scene writing, theme, and many others.