Thriller Writing Tip: 8 Things Every Thriller Should Include

Thriller Writing Tip: 8 Things Every Thriller Should Include
 

The essential plot elements of a thriller are:

1. The element of suspense: Writing suspense is a matter of controlling information—how much you reveal, and when and how you reveal it. While every thriller novel will have a central, overarching storyline that seeks to answer a sole dramatic question, that question is built on smaller moments that carry the reader through and sustain their interest along the way.
2. A hero: The main character the reader is rooting for. Despite the term “hero,” they don’t have to be a perfect specimen of bravery or strength; great heroes emerge from the trials they encounter.
3. A sidekick: A secondary character that helps the reader understand the hero’s strengths and motivations. Usually a mentor, friend, helper, or romantic interest, they assist the hero with an alternate skill set, act as a sounding board, provide emotional support, get themselves into trouble so the hero must rescue them, and provide comic relief.
4. A villain: The defining force that antagonizes your hero. The villain’s motivations create the crisis for the hero. They’re usually introduced with a bang, sending the reader a clear message that they’re malicious. However, they still need to be a thoughtful character with their own sense of morality and believable reasons for being evil.
5. Plot twists: You don’t want to go out of your way to mislead the reader or outright lie to them, but you do want to keep them on their toes. Unexpected plot twists will take them by surprise and reinvigorate their interest in the story.
6. Red herrings: Hint at explanations that may not be true and get the reader to believe a false conclusion about the plot. When done well, they’ll feel surprised by the truth and will enjoy the misdirection, having learned something useful about the setting or the characters along the way.
7. Cliffhangers: Pose a big question at the end of a chapter. Typically, a cliffhanger stops during a climactic event midway through the action instead of its natural conclusion. Take the reader to the moment before fulfillment, stop there, and switch to another scene. They’ll want to know how it plays out.
8. An exciting climax: Thrillers built toward one exciting moment. This is when the hero faces their biggest obstacle and the reader learns all of the remaining information that’s been kept a secret.

 

Also see:

• Books on Writing Thriller Novels and Screenplays

 

Thriller Writing Tip: The Anatomy of a Thriller

Thriller Writing Tip: The Anatomy of a Thriller
 

Every thriller has three C’s: the contract, the clock, and the crucible.

1. The contract: an implied promise you make to the reader about what will be delivered by the end of the book. It’s crucial to keep every single promise you make, no matter how trivial.
2. The clock: the fact that adding time pressure to any character’s struggle will create higher stakes and more interest for the reader. The goal of this element is not to be stunningly original but to add pressure that will prompt conflicts and intense responses from your characters. 
3. The crucible: a box that constrains your characters, offers them no escape, and forces them to act. Your story should present an increasingly difficult series of tasks and situations for the hero that will funnel them into the most severe trial of all. You must make sure that each successive task is harder than the previous one and that, for the hero, there is no escape. If readers begin to sense that the journey is becoming easier, they’ll lose interest.

 

Also see:

• Books on Writing Thriller Novels and Screenplays

 

Thriller Writing Tip: You Must Create Thrills Consistently Throughout Your Novel

Thriller Writing Tip: You Must Create Thrills Consistently Throughout Your Novel
 

Remember, this is a thriller, so the audience needs to be thrilled. That means you need to keep them on the edge of their seat. You want to give them an emotional roller coaster ride that starts on the first page and doesn’t end until the final page of the novel.

 

Also see:

• Books on Writing Thriller Novels and Screenplays

 

Thriller Writing Tip: Play With Trust and Betrayal

 

Thriller Writing Tip: Play With Trust and Betrayal

 

Your Hero is about to be thrust into a world of uncertainty, competing agendas, and downright deception. It will be totally outside of their comfort zone, so they’ll naturally look for someone they can trust.

That creates all kinds of emotional opportunities for you as the writer. Trustable characters may be forced to betray your hero. Devious characters may turn out to be trustable. The person we believe in most may end up being the Villain.

Trust is a wonderful thing in real life, but in a thriller, it is a valuable tool for the writer.

Also see:

• Books on Writing Thriller Novels and Screenplays

 

Thriller Writing Tip: Drag your Hero through Hell

Thriller Writing Tip: Drag your Hero through Hell

 

Your hero is a great person who deserves to have friends and happiness. So I’m sorry to give you this bad news. But your job is to be their worst enemy. Your job is to put them in a bad situation and then keep escalating the pain and conflict until a normal human being couldn’t stand it.

If you are nice to your Hero, it reduces the quality of your story. If you are nice to them, it reduces the quality of the reader’s experience of this novel.

Also see:

• Books on Writing Thriller Novels and Screenplays

 

Recognizing Ideas by Stephen King | Writing Quote

 Recognizing Ideas

by Stephen King

 There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of Idea Buried Bestsellers . . . two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

 

 -- Stephen King

 

 

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", a play on his surname and a reference to his high standing in pop culture, his books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published 64 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. Wikipedia

Stephen King Books at Amazon

A Writer's Job to His Muse by Stephen King | Writing Quote

 A Writer's Job to His Muse 

by Stephen King 

 

Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon or seven ‘til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic. 

 -- Stephen King

 

 

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", a play on his surname and a reference to his high standing in pop culture, his books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published 64 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. Wikipedia

Stephen King Books at Amazon

Your Story Outline: What It's All About by Rekha Ambardar

 Your Story Outline: What It's All About

 

by Rekha Ambardar

Enid Blyton, the phenomenally popular British children's author of the 1950s, produced 200 books. Yet she never worked from an outline. Characters invaded her imagination and she let them lead her in writing her story. Horrormeister Stephen King also kept up his prolific output without the help of an outline.

For most writers, though, outlines are the blueprint from which they write their stories. The practice of outlining a book before trying to write it is especially beneficial to beginning writers. First, it requires thinking the story through while eliminating a lot of wasted time chasing unworkable ideas. Second, it provides a blueprint to which the writer can refer while working on a story over the course of months or even years.

Use of an outline is not a popular practice because it is hard work. It isn't easy thinking a story through from start to finish. But writing 100 pages only to find that they don't lead anywhere and have to be discarded is a lot more discouraging. Moreover, outlining gives a writer a chance to add to the details of the book, and to decide how all those bits and pieces will fit into the big picture of the story.

"Plotting" and "outlining" are terms that are often used interchangeably. For our purposes, an outline is a summary of the basic plot of the novel that you'll write. An outline shouldn't be confused with a synopsis that you'd send to a publisher after finishing the novel.

Here are some outlining methods suggested by successful authors who have offered workshops both online and in the various chapter meetings of the Romance Writers of America (RWA). You can combine a few of these or use one or the other of them. Perhaps, you already have a method that works for you. If so, you could see how some of these compare with the ones you use.

"W" Folder

This is a simple low-tech method. All you need is an ordinary manila file folder, a pen or pencil, and your imagination to create a visual representation of your story.

Open up a file folder and write a large "W" over the entire folder -- one V on each side. Your story starts at the first leg of the "W". Your initial crisis is at the bottom. The top middle indicates the point where problems may be resolved. The bottom of the next V is the blackest moment. The story is completely resolved by the top of the last leg. Scenes and other notes can pencilled in along the legs of the "W". With this method you can insert information that is missing. The folder can then double up to hold your research and other information necessary to your story.

Spreadsheets

You can use your good old Excel program for a simple chart. If nothing else, a spreadsheet can hold vast amounts of information, so it beats pasting things on your wall. For example, columns can be used for each chapter for fifteen or twenty chapters, ad infinitum. Your rows could be your main characters and the minor characters that influence your plot. Or else your columns could be the chapters and the rows could be the pivotal scenes in each chapter. And you could add, delete, and move scenes around. As you start writing you could pinpoint exactly where a particular character appears in a given chapter without thumbing through hard copy to look up something.

Index Cards

Color-coded index cards are helpful in keeping track of whether or not your story has a balanced amount of goal, motivation, and conflict. The cards may be coded as follows:

• Pink= Heroine's POV
• Blue=Hero's POV
• Purple= Goal
• Yellow=Motivation
• Green=Conflict

Put down scenes as they occur -- no details, just enough to know what it's about Write scenes in any order, keep adding cards and scenes till you can't think of anymore ideas. Now organize your cards and keep them in order. The scenes should move n a linear fashion -- Event A should occur before Event B. Decide what scenes are most exciting to the main storyline.

Add details at the back of the cards, such as Location, Time -- what day and time is a given scene taking place? Characters -- list all the characters who will appear in the scene. Main POV -- each scene shoud have only one POV character. Main POV character's goal in the scene -- what is this character trying to achieve?

Post-It Notes

Post-it notes can be smacked on a big chunk of bulletin board paper, and like index cards, post-it notes can be color-coded. Using a yardstick mark off columns on the bulletin board paper -- a column for each chapter. Jot down important scenes on colored post-it notes and move them around as you construct your story. Do you see too much of one color? Separate them and place them such that your story is in balance with the goal, motivation, and conflict of your main characters.

The Three-Act Structure

Writing mainstream fiction is a nebulous process. Although anything can happen in mainstream fiction, most stories and movies follow a three-act structure, and readers and viewers are conditioned to expect it. Genres are devised by customizing the three-act plot points to create a romance, thriller, fantasy, mystery or whatever.

Lisa Wingate, author of Tending Roses (Penguin Putnam NAL), discussed the merits of the three-act structure at a recent workshop. According to Wingate, this type of structure gives the writer a skeleton to hang the story on and to flesh it out.

The component parts of the three-act structure follow below.

Act 1 -- Setup and Explosive Incident

This is the opening scene showing the characters and where they live. In most cases the main character is spiritually bereft since there has been a loss of some kind. The Setup is short, only a few pages. In a movie, it's a few seconds.

The Explosive Incident blasts the plot into motion. In the Hallmark movie The Last Cowboy, Jacqueline "Jake" Cooper comes to her father's ranch to attend her grandfather's funeral after an absence of eight years. She's estranged from her father after her mother's death because he has been unable to get over his private sorrow of losing his wife, and thereby distances himself from his daughter.

Act 2 -- The Journey

This is the longest part of the book or movie. There is the least amount of spiritual work done here, but the story is taking shape. The character begins his journey in which he tries different ways of solving his problem. In The Last Cowboy the ranch is heavily mortgaged and in jeopardy. John tries ways of dealing with it, one of which is using his daughter's savings -- which only causes more problems between them.

The Maze

The character goes through a maze, he tries different passages that look promising but is blocked each time and is forced back to a lower starting point.

Midpoint Solution

Somewhere near the middle the character feels that he can solve his problem by cutting corners, by making spiritual and moral compromises.

Midpoint Crisis

There's a man-eating tiger in the maze. In the movie, lightning strikes the ranch and it catches fire. John decides to sell his cattle.

Culminating Crisis

A huge life or death question occurs here and the character has to confront and overcome his demons. In the movie, Amos, a dear family friend who has been trying to reunite father and daughter, has a heart attack, and John and Jake are set adrift, confused by everything that has happened.

Part 3 -- Highest Point and Resolution

The character and the reader/audience are suddenly lifted out of their hopelessness. There is an epiphany of sorts. The demons are defeated and scattered. Jake in The Last Cowboy has been busy behind the scenes. She has found a different bank which will finance a stable and she will breed racing horses. Her father still has fifty head of cattle and he can start all over again- being a cowboy is the only thing he's ever wanted to do.

This last plotting method helps the writer in thinking the story through by using movies as models -- movies rather than books are easier to analyze in that the main plot points are visual.

These are some solutions to the mystery that is outlining. Once you have the blueprint you can digress to your heart's content, and answer those "what if " questions, knowing that you have your story safely stored in a notebook or your computer, and that you can return to it anytime.

 Copyright © 2006 Rekha Ambardar

 

About the Author 

Rekha Ambardar has been writing and publishing short fiction and nonfiction in print and electronic magazines for the last ten years. Her first novel, His Harbor Girl, was released in 2004 by Whiskey Creek Press, and another short contemporary romance novel, Maid to Order, was released in 2005 by Echelon Press. In February 2006, her short story, "A Lover's Serenade," was published in No Law Against Love, the first anthology in the Charity series from Highland Press. The publisher's proceeds for this release are slated for breast cancer research. Rekha teaches business classes at the International School of Business at Finlandia University in Hancock, MI.

Rekha Ambardar Books at Amazon

Your One-Sentence Summary by Randy Ingermanson

Your One-Sentence Summary

by  Randy Ingermanson

 

My friend Larry Brooks is an extremely well-known writing teacher. Last November, he released his latest book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves. I’ve been reading the book lately, and I’m not quite ready to review it here, but it got me thinking.

Larry is very big on the idea that great stories need a great “premise.” Which sounds obvious, but it’s hard to nail down, because different people mean different things by the word “premise.” Larry spends quite a fair bit of time disentangling the various meanings of the word. He’s also got a lot of practical insight on how you test the premise of your book to make it better.

It’s all good stuff, but “premise” is Larry’s thunder, not mine, so I won’t steal it. If you want to know what he says, you can read his book. I did a lot of highlighting in his book, and I’ll certainly be using his various tests on my current novel to see how well it works.

But all this talk of “premise” got me thinking of a subject that is most definitely part of my thunder—the idea of a one-sentence summary.

What Is a One-Sentence Summary?

A one-sentence summary is a sentence of up to 25 words that enflames the imagination of your Target Audience and repels everyone else.

See what I just did? I wrote a one-sentence summary about one-sentence summaries. That’s kind of meta.

Who would want to write a one-sentence summary? (That is to say, who is the Target Audience for the very notion of writing a one-sentence summary?) Novelists who want to be successful. That would be you.

Novelists who want to be successful know:

• They should market only to their Target Audience.
• Marketing is about exciting emotions.
• Good marketing actually drives away the “wrong sort of reader.”

So my one-sentence summary above is designed for just those people. Here’s what I did in that one-sentence summary:

• I used the phrase “Target Audience.” That phrase gets the attention of any market-savvy novelists.
• I used the phrase “enflames the imagination.” Those are emotive words, aimed at writers who want to attract the right sort of reader.
• I also used the phrase “repels.” Another emotive word, aimed at writers who want to drive away the wrong sort of reader.

How is a One-Sentence Summary Related to “Premise?”

Larry Brooks is big on “premise,” and rightly so, because a great premise is practically an absolute requirement for a great book. I’m big on writing a great one-sentence summary, because it distills a novel’s premise down to one sentence that makes an amazing marketing tool.

You will use your one-sentence summary forever to sell your book to:

• An agent you meet at a conference.
• The editor the agent sends your book proposal to.
• The publishing committee who decides whether to publish your book.
• The publisher’s sales team, if they still have one.
• The bookstore buyers.
• People browsing for books in the store.
• People browsing for books online.
• Anyone those people ever talk to about your book.

You need a one-sentence summary, whether your novel has a great premise or not. In fact, even if your premise isn’t spectacular, you still need a one-sentence summary, for a couple of reasons.

First, it catches people’s attention so you can sell them your book.

Second, it keeps you focused when you’re writing and editing the book.

An Example One-Sentence Summary

Larry’s book spends quite a bit of time analyzing a mega-bestselling novel by Robert Dugoni, My Sister’s Grave.

I had never read this novel, but Larry’s book got me interested, so I bought My Sister’s Grave. I’m in the target audience. It’s a legal thriller and I like legal thrillers.

I read the book and thought it was fantastic.

Here’s my one-sentence summary for My Sister’s Grave:

“A homicide detective learns that her sister’s grave has been found, with conclusive proof that the man convicted of the murder was framed.”

A few comments are in order:

My first cut at this sentence was 27 words. I clipped out a few and got it down to 23.

The Target Audience for this novel is readers who like either police procedurals or legal thrillers. The novel is a bit of both. There is some forensic work and some detective work and a long series of scenes in a courtroom.

Look at the emotive words and phrases in my one-sentence summary:

• homicide detective
• sister
• grave
• convicted
• murder
• framed

With one exception, these words are designed to attract readers specifically in the Target Audience. The exception is the word “sister,” which is an emotive word not normally associated with this kind of book. But the contextual fact that the sister is the murder victim actually heightens the emotive force for the Target Audience and increases the repellant force for people outside the Target Audience.

What Your One-Sentence Summary Won’t Do

Your one-sentence summary is not the whole tuna. You still have to write a good novel, and it needs to fulfill the promise you made in the one-sentence summary.

Your one-sentence summary doesn’t even make a complete “premise.” If you want a complete premise, see Larry’s book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.

Your one-sentence summary won’t sell your book, at least not by itself. All it does is get the attention of the right sort of person (your Target Audience) and scare away everyone else. The thing that sells your book is your first scene, because that proves you can actually write.

Homework:

• Do you know who the Target Audience is for your current work-in-progress?
• Do you know what the “premise” is?
• If the answer to both of the above is yes, can you distill your premise down to one sentence that attracts your Target Audience and repels everyone else?

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

Writing The Perfect Scene by Randy Ingermanson

Writing The Perfect Scene 

by Randy Ingermanson

 

Having trouble making the scenes in your novel work their magic? In this article, I’ll show you how to write the “perfect” scene.

Maybe you think it’s impossible to write the perfect scene. After all, who can choose every word perfectly, every thought, every sentence, every paragraph? What does perfection mean, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t know. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Style is a matter of taste.

But structure is pretty well understood. Maybe you can’t write the perfectly styled scene. But you can write the perfectly structured scene. And that’s a whale of a lot better than writing a badly structured scene.

The Two Levels of Scene Structure

A scene has two levels of structure, and only two. They are:

• The large-scale structure of the scene
• The small-scale structure of the scene

This may seem obvious, but by the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it’s terribly profound. If you then want to fling large quantities of cash at me in gratitude, please don’t. I’d really rather have a check. With plenty of zeroes. I am going to steal insights from Dwight Swain’s book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. This is quite simply the finest book ever written on how to write fiction. If you don’t have this book, you are robbing yourself blind. I will be giving you the high points in this article, but there is really no substitute for reading the book and digesting it.

Before we begin, we need to understand how we keep score. How do we know what perfection is? The answer is based on understanding your reader’s motivation for reading.

Your reader is reading your fiction because you provide him or her with a powerful emotional experience. If you’re writing a romance, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is falling in love herself. If you’re writing a thriller, you must create in your reader the illusion that he is in mortal danger and has only the tiniest chance of saving his life (and all of humanity). If you’re writing a fantasy, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is actually in another world where all is different and wonderful and magical. And so on for all the other genres.

If you fail to create these emotions in your reader, then you have failed. If you create these emotions in your reader, then you have succeeded. The better you create the desired emotional experience in your reader, the better your fiction. Perfection in writing comes when you have created the fullest possible emotional experience for your reader.

Large-Scale Structure of a Scene

The large-scale structure of a scene is extremely simple. Actually, there are two possible choices you can make for your scene structure. Dwight Swain calls these two choices “scenes” and “sequels”. This is horrendously confusing, since both of these are what most ordinary people call scenes. In what follows, I’m going to capitalize these terms, calling them Scenes and Sequels. That is your signal that I’m using Swain’s language. When I use the word “scene” in the ordinary non-Swain sense, I’ll leave it uncapitalized. Since you are exceptionally brilliant and perceptive, you will not find this a problem. Let me give you the high points on Scenes and Sequels right up front.

A Scene has the following three-part pattern:

1. Goal
2. Conflict
3. Disaster

A Sequel has the following three-part pattern:

1. Reaction
2. Dilemma
3. Decision

You may think these patterns are too simple. You may think this is reducing writing to Paint-by-Numbers. Well, no. This is reducing fiction to the two patterns that have been proven by thousands of novelists to actually work. There are plenty of other patterns people use. They typically work less well. It may well be that there are other patterns that work better. If you can find one that works better, please tell me. But for now, let’s pretend that Dwight Swain is right. Let’s pretend these are absolutely the best possible patterns for writing fiction. Let’s pretend these are the keys to writing the perfect scene. Let’s move on and look at each of these in turn.

As we said, the Scene has the three parts Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. Each of these is supremely important. I am going to define each of these pieces and then explain why each is critical to the structure of the Scene. I assume that you have selected one character to be your Point Of View character. In what follows, I’ll refer to this character as your POV character. Your goal is to convincingly show your POV character experiencing the scene. You must do this so powerfully that your reader experiences the scene as if she were the POV character.

1. Goal: A Goal is what your POV character wants at the beginning of the Scene. The Goal must be specific and it must be clearly definable. The reason your POV character must have a Goal is that it makes your character proactive. Your character is not passively waiting for the universe to deal him Great Good. Your character is going after what he wants, just as your reader wishes he could do. It’s a simple fact that any character who wants something desperately is an interesting character. Even if he’s not nice, he’s interesting. And your reader will identify with him. That’s what you want as a writer.
2. Conflict: Conflict is the series of obstacles your POV character faces on the way to reaching his Goal. You must have Conflict in your Scene! If your POV character reaches his Goal with no Conflict, then the reader is bored. Your reader wants to struggle! No victory has any value if it comes too easy. So make your POV character struggle and your reader will live out that struggle too.
3. Disaster: A Disaster is a failure to let your POV character reach his Goal. Don’t give him the Goal! Winning is boring! When a Scene ends in victory, your reader feels no reason to turn the page. If things are going well, your reader might as well go to bed. No! Make something awful happen. Hang your POV character off a cliff and your reader will turn the page to see what happens next.

That’s all! There is literally nothing more you need to know about Scenes. Now let’s look at Sequels . . .

The Sequel has the three parts Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. Again, each of these is critical to a successful Sequel. Remove any of them and the Sequel fails to work. Let me add one important point here. The purpose of a Sequel is to follow after a Scene. A Scene ends on a Disaster, and you can’t immediately follow that up with a new Scene, which begins with a Goal. Why? Because when you’ve just been slugged with a serious setback, you can’t just rush out and try something new. You’ve got to recover. That’s basic psychology.

1. Reaction: A Reaction is the emotional follow-through to a Disaster. When something awful happens, you’re staggering for awhile, off-balance, out of kilter. You can’t help it. So show your POV character reacting viscerally to his Disaster. Show him hurting. Give your reader a chance to hurt with your characters. You may need to show some passage of time. This is not a time for action, it’s a time for re-action. A time to weep. But you can’t stagger around in pain forever. In real life, if people do that they lose their friends. In fiction, if you do it, you lose your readers. Eventually, your POV character needs to get a grip. To take stock. To look for options. And the problem is that there aren’t any . . .
2. Dilemma: A Dilemma is a situation with no good options. If your Disaster was a real Disaster, there aren’t any good choices. Your POV character must have a real dilemma. This gives your reader a chance to worry, which is good. Your reader must be wondering what can possibly happen next. Let your POV character work through the choices. Let him sort things out. Eventually, let him come to the least-bad option . . .
3. Decision: A Decision is the act of making a choice among several options. This is important, because it lets your POV character become proactive again. People who never make decisions are boring people. They wait around for somebody else to decide. And nobody wants to read about somebody like that. So make your character decide, and make it a good decision. Make it one your reader can respect. Make it risky, but make it have a chance of working. Do that, and your reader will have to turn the page, because now your POV character has a new Goal.

And now you’ve come full circle. You’ve gone from Scene to Sequel and back to the Goal for a new Scene. This is why the Scene-Sequel pattern is so powerful. A Scene leads naturally to a Sequel, which leads naturally to a new Scene. And so on forever. At some point, you’ll end the cycle. You’ll give your POV character either Ultimate Victory or Ultimate Defeat and that will be the end of the book. But until you get there, the alternating pattern of Scene and Sequel will carry you through. And your reader will curse you when he discovers that he’s spent the whole doggone night reading your book because he could not put the thing down.

That’s perfection.

However, it’s only half the battle. I’ve told you how to design the Scenes and Sequels in the large scale. But you still need to write them. You need to write paragraph after compelling paragraph, with each one leading your POV character smoothly through from initial Goal to knuckle-whitening Conflict to bone-jarring Disaster, and then through a visceral Reaction to a horrible Dilemma and finally on to a clever Decision.

How do you do that? How do you execute those paragraphs? How do you do it perfectly?

Small-Scale Structure of a Scene

The answer is to use what Dwight Swain calls “Motivation-Reaction Units.” He calls them MRUs for short. This is such an absurdly ridiculous term that I’m going to keep it, just to prove that Mr. Swain was not perfect. Writing MRUs is hard. However, I’ve found that it provides the most bang for the buck in improving your writing. I’ve mentored many writers, and a universal problem for them was the failure to write MRUs correctly. My solution was to make them painfully work through several chapters so that each one was nothing more nor less than a string of perfect MRUs. After a few chapters, the technique gets easier. Then I maliciously require them to rewrite their whole novel this way. This is brutally hard work, but those who have survived it have become much better writers.

Writing MRUs correctly is the magic key to compelling fiction. I don’t care if you believe me or not. Try it and see.

I hope you are salivating to learn this magical tool. You need to first suffer through one full paragraph of theory. I know you will do this because you are intelligent and patient and because I am flattering you quite thickly.

You will write your MRUs by alternating between what your POV character sees (the Motivation) and what he does (the Reaction). This is supremely important. Remember that Swain calls these things “Motivation-Reaction Units”. The Motivation is objective but it is something that your character can see (or hear or smell or taste or feel). You will write this in such a way that your reader also sees it (or hears it or smells it or tastes it or feels it). You will then start a new paragraph in which your POV character does one or more things in Reaction to the Motivation. There is an exact sequence you must follow in writing your Reaction. The sequence is based on what is physiologically possible. Note that the Motivation is external and objective. The Reaction is internal and subjective. If you do this, you create in your reader the powerful illusion that he is experiencing something real. Now let’s break this down into more detail . . .

The Motivation is external and objective, and you present it that way, in objective, external terms. You do this in a single paragraph. It does not need to be complicated.

Here is a simple example:

The tiger dropped out of the tree and sprang toward Jack.

Note the key points here. This is objective. We present the Motivation as it would be shown by a videocamera. Nothing here indicates that we are in Jack’s point of view. That comes next, but in the Motivation we keep it simple and sharp and clean.

The Reaction is internal and subjective, and you present it that way, exactly as your POV character would experience it — from the inside. This is your chance to make your reader be your POV character. To repeat myself, this must happen in its own paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs). If you leave it in the same paragraph as the Motivation, then you risk whip-sawing the reader. Which no reader enjoys.

The Reaction is more complex than the Motivation. The reason is that it is internal, and internal processes happen on different time-scales. When you see a tiger, in the first milliseconds, you only have time for one thing — fear. Within a few tenths of a second, you have time to react on instinct, but that is all it will be — instinct, reflex. But shortly after that first reflexive reaction, you will also have time to react rationally, to act, to think, to speak. You must present the full complex of your character’s reactions in this order, from fastest time-scale to slowest. If you put them out of order, then things just don’t feel right. You destroy the illusion of reality. And your reader won’t keep reading because your writing is “not realistic.” Even if you got all your facts right.

Here is a simple example:

A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins. He jerked his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. “Die, you bastard!”

Now let’s analyze this. Note the three parts of the Reaction:

1. Feeling: “A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins.” You show this first, because it happens almost instantly.
2. Reflex: “He jerked his rifle to his shoulder . . .” You show this second, as a result of the fear. An instinctive result that requires no conscious thought.
3. Rational Action and Speech: “. . . sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. ‘Die, you bastard!'” You put this last, when Jack has had time to think and act in a rational way. He pulls the trigger, a rational response to the danger. He speaks, a rational expression of his intense emotional reaction.

It is legitimate to leave out one or two of these three parts. (You can’t leave out all three or you have no Reaction.) But there is one critical rule to follow in leaving parts out: Whatever parts you keep in must be in the correct order. If there is a Feeling, it must come first. If there is a Reflex, it must never come before a Feeling. If there is some Rational Action, it must always come last. This is simple and obvious and if you follow this rule, your Reactions will be perfectly structured time after time.

And after the Reaction comes . . . another Motivation. This is the key. You can’t afford to write one perfect MRU and then be happy. You’ve got to write another and another and another. The Reaction you just wrote will lead to some new Motivation that is again external and objective and which you will write in its own paragraph. Just to continue the example we’ve created so far:

The bullet grazed the tiger’s left shoulder. Blood squirted out of the jagged wound. The tiger roared and staggered, then leaped in the air straight at Jack’s throat.

Note that the Motivation can be complex or it can be simple. The only requirement is that it be external and objective, something that not only Jack can see and hear and feel but which any other observer could also see and hear and feel, if they were there.

The important thing is to keep the alternating pattern. You write a Motivation and then a Reaction and then another Motivation and then another Reaction. When you run out of Motivations or Reactions, your Scene or Sequel is over. Don’t run out too soon. Don’t drag on too long.

Write each Scene and Sequel as a sequence of MRUs. Any part of yourScene or Sequel which is not an MRU must go. Cut it ruthlessly. Show no mercy. You can not afford charity for a single sentence that is not pulling its weight. And the only parts of your scene that pull their weight are the MRUs. All else is fluff.

About Those Pesky Rules

You may be feeling that it’s impossible to write your scenes following these rules. Doing so causes you to freeze. You stare blindly at the computer screen, afraid to move a muscle for fear of breaking a Rule. Oh dear, you’ve got yourself a case of writer’s block. That’s bad. Now let me tell you the final secret for writing the perfect scene.

Forget all these rules. That’s right, ignore the varmints. Just write your chapter in your usual way, putting down any old words you want, in any old way you feel like. There, that feels better, doesn’t it? You are creating, and that’s good. Creation is constructing a story from nothing. It’s hard work, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s unstructured. It’s imperfect. Do it without regard for the rules.

When you have finished creating, set it aside for awhile. You will later need to edit it, but now is not the time. Do something else. Write another scene. Go bowling. Spend time with those annoying people who live in your house. Remember them? Your family and friends? Do something that is Not Writing.

Later on, when you are ready, come back and read your Great Piece of Writing. It will have many nice points to it, but it will not be perfectly structured. Now you are ready to edit it and impose perfect structure on it. This is a different process than Creation. This is Analysis, and it is the opposite of Creation. Analysis is destruction. You must now take it apart and put it back together.

Analyze the scene you have written. Is it a Scene or a Sequel? Or neither? If it is neither, then you must find a way to make it one or the other or you must throw it away. If it is a Scene, verify that it has a Goal, a Conflict, and a Disaster. Identify them each in a one-sentence summary. Likewise, if it’s a Sequel, verify that it has a Reaction, a Dilemma, and a Decision. Identify each of these in a one-sentence summary. If you can’t put the scene into one of these two structures, then throw the scene away as the worthless piece of drivel that it is. You may someday find a use for it as a sonnet or a limerick or a technical manual, but it is not fiction and there is no way to make it fiction, so get rid of it.

Now that you know what your scene is, either Scene or Sequel, rewrite it MRU by MRU. Make sure every Motivation is separated from every Reaction by a paragraph break. It is okay to have multiple paragraphs for a single Motivation or a single Reaction. It is a capital crime to mix them in a single paragraph. When they are separated correctly, you may find you have extra parts that are neither Motivation nor Reaction. Throw them away, no matter how beautiful or clever they are. They are not fiction and you are writing fiction.

Examine each Motivation and make sure that it is entirely objective and external. Show no mercy. You can not afford mercy on anything that poisons your fiction. Kill it or it will kill you.

Now identify the elements of each Reaction and make sure they are as subjective and internal as possible. Present them as nearly as you can from inside the skin of your POV character. Make sure they are in the correct order, with Feelings first, then Reflexive Actions, and finally Rational Actions and Speech. Again, eliminate everything else, even brilliant insights that would surely get you a Nobel peace prize. Brilliant insights are very fine, but if they aren’t fiction, they don’t belong in your fiction. If you can contrive to rearrange such a thing to be in a correct fictional pattern, then fine. Keep it. Otherwise, slit its vile throat and throw the carcass to the wolves. You are a novelist, and that’s what novelists do.

When you reach the end of the scene, whether it is a Scene or a Sequel, check to make sure that everything is correctly placed in an MRU and all carcasses are thrown out. Feel free to edit the scene for style, clarity, wit, spelling, grammar, and any other thing you know how to do. When you are done, pat yourself on the back.

You have written a perfect scene. All is well in your world. You are done with this scene.

Now go do it again and again until you finish your book.

Best regards,

Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.

 

 Also See:

1. How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method
2.  Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

👉 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel by Randy Ingermanson

 

The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel

by Randy Ingermanson

 

Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. If it were easy, we’d all be writing best-selling, prize-winning fiction.

Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. The best one for you is the one that works for you.

In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. I’ve published six novels and won about a dozen awards for my writing. I teach the craft of writing fiction at writing conferences all the time. One of my most popular lectures is this one: How to write a novel using what I call the “Snowflake Method.”

This page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day. Over the years, this page has been viewed more than six million times. So you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. But you may not, and that’s fine by me. Look it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest! If it makes you dizzy, I won’t be insulted. Different writers are different. If my methods get you rolling, I’ll be happy. I’ll make the best case I can for my way of organizing things, but you are the final judge of what works best for you. Have fun and . . . write your novel!

The Importance of Design

Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I’ve done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result. Design is hard work, so it’s important to find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful metaphor to guide your design.

Our fundamental question is this: How do you design a novel?

For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I write novels the same way I write software, using the “snowflake metaphor”. OK, what’s the snowflake metaphor? Before you go further, take a look at this cool web site.

On the side of the page, you’ll see an animation of a pattern known as a snowflake fractal. Don’t tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object that’s been widely studied. For our purposes, it’s just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page a little, you’ll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right-arrow button repeatedly, you’ll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesn’t look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until it’s done.

The first few steps look like this:

I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel. That’s what I’d like to teach you here.

If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process and every writer does it differently. I’m going to assume that you know how to compost your story ideas and that you have already got a novel well-composted in your mind and that you’re ready to sit down and start writing that novel.

The Ten Steps of Design

But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story — holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn’t kill your desire to actually write the story. Here is my ten-step process for writing a design document. I use this process for writing my novels, and I hope it will help you.

Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Something like this: “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.” (This is the summary for my first novel, Transgression.) The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.

When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. It’s the hook that will sell your book to your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to bookstore owners, and ultimately to readers. So make the best one you can!

Some hints on what makes a good sentence:

• Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.
• No character names, please! Better to say “a handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.
• Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she wants to win.
• Read the one-line blurbs on the New York Times Bestseller list to learn how to do this. Writing a one-sentence description is an art form.

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.

If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.

You can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending. Don’t confuse this paragraph with the back-cover copy for your book. This paragraph summarizes the whole story. Your back-cover copy should summarize only about the first quarter of the story.

Step 3) The above gives you a high-level view of your novel. Now you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. Characters are the most important part of any novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten-fold when you start writing. For each of your major characters, take an hour and write a one-page summary sheet that tells:

• The character’s name
• A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
• The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
• The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
• The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
• The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?
• A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline

An important point: You may find that you need to go back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph summary. Go ahead! This is good–it means your characters are teaching you things about your story. It’s always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, it’s not just okay–it’s inevitable. And it’s good. Any revisions you make now are revisions you won’t need to make later on to a clunky 400 page manuscript.

Another important point: It doesn’t have to be perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! You can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better. You will do this too, unless you’re a lot smarter than I am.

Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a week, but it doesn’t matter. If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft. So now just keep growing the story. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends.

This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a pretty decent one-page skeleton of your novel. It’s okay if you can’t get it all onto one single-spaced page. What matters is that you are growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are expanding the conflict. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals . . .

Step 5) Take a day or two and write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters. I usually enjoy this step the most and lately, I have been putting the resulting “character synopses” into my proposals instead of a plot-based synopsis. Editors love character synopses, because editors love character-based fiction.

Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.

Step 7) Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel? This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a lot about your characters. You will probably go back and revise steps (1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair.

Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.

For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror. Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the most valuable day you ever spent. Do it.

Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.

My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene of the novel. As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.

Step 9) (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.

I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft. All my good ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first. When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now.

Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft.

You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time. Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.

This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in 150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time.

About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay. The design documents are not fixed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become.

Ways To Use The Snowflake

Are you struggling right now with a horrible first draft of your novel that just seems hopeless? Take an hour and summarize your story in one sentence. Does that clarify things? You’ve just completed step (1) of the Snowflake, and it only took an hour. Why not try the next few steps of the Snowflake and see if your story doesn’t suddenly start coming to life? What have you got to lose, except a horrible first draft that you already hate?

Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who finally finished your novel, but now you’re staring at an enormous pile of manuscript that desperately needs rewriting? Take heart! Your novel’s done, isn’t it? You’ve done something many writers only dream about. Now imagine a big-shot editor bumps into you in the elevator and asks what your novel’s about. In fifteen words or less, what would you say? Take your time! This is a thought game. What would you say? If you can come up with an answer in the next hour . . . you’ve just completed Step 1 of the Snowflake! Do you think some of the other steps might help you put some order into that manuscript? Give it a shot. What have you got to lose?

Have you just got a nightmarishly long letter from your editor detailing all the things that are wrong with your novel? Are you wondering how you can possibly make all the changes before your impossible deadline? It’s never too late to do the Snowflake. How about if you take a week and drill through all the steps right now? It’ll clarify things wonderfully, and then you’ll have a plan for executing all those revisions. I bet you’ll get it done in record time. And I bet the book will come out better than you imagined.

If the Snowflake Method works for you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page on my web-site.

Acknowledgments: I thank my many friends on the Chi Libris list and especially Janelle Schneider for a large number of discussions on the Snowflake and much else.

Best regards,

Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.

 

Also See:

1. How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method
2. Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon