Chapter Six

The Construction of Story

“Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth.”
—Mary Catherine Bateson

Ideas for stories are everywhere: a scrap of overheard conversation here, an unexpected encounter there. Maybe it’s a dream or a memory or a vision that speaks to you. Or maybe you are driven by a need for justice or revenge or your own happy ending.

You may start with a character, a question, or a place. Best-selling author Dean Koontz, who’s sold some 450 million copies of his many novels worldwide, says that the idea for his popular Odd Thomas series occurred to him while he was writing another book: “Into my head came the line, ‘My name is Odd Thomas. I lead an unusual life.’” Koontz listened and followed the short-order cook who sees dead people through six novels and a few prequels as well. Twenty million copies later, Odd Thomas remains one of Koontz’s most-beloved characters.

For John Green, the best-selling author of such young adult classics as The Fault in Our Stars and An Abundance of Katherines, a philosophical question sometimes leads him into a story. In Looking for Alaska, Green was exploring the nature of suffering, which began, he says, in “thinking about whether there was meaning to suffering and how one can reconcile one’s self to a world where suffering is so unjustly distributed.” I won’t even try to expand on that statement; you’ll have to read the book to see how he pulls it off. There’s a reason this novel—his first—established Green as a unique voice, inviting comparisons to J.D. Salinger.

Alice Hoffman, whose novels are usually inspired by fairy tales, had no plans to write a historical novel when she went to Israel and visited Masada, the ancient fortress that sits high on a plateau at the far eastern end of the desert in Judea, overlooking the Dead Sea. But she knew as soon as she stepped inside she must write a story set in Masada during the Roman siege of the fortification in 73 C.E., in which hundreds of Jewish rebels hiding out there committed suicide rather than surrender. “At Masada,” said Hoffman, “I felt the nearness of the past and felt as though I could hear the voices of the women who had lived there so long ago.” The result: The Dovekeepers, Hoffman’s deeply researched story of four women struggling for survival during the siege, her most ambitious and acclaimed work to date.

Dreaming the Architecture

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.”
—Eudora Welty

So you’ve gotten an idea for a story. An image or a voice haunts you, or a place or a person whose story you need to tell. Now you just have to figure out how to tell it.

You start by capturing on paper whatever impulse is driving you to the page. Then, like a child building a sandcastle on the beach, you play with it. You use your tools—sand, water, spade, pail, rake, seashells—to construct a chateau room by room, adding towers and moats and ramparts as you go. You know what a castle looks like, and odds are, this isn’t your first beach rodeo.

But when you court an idea with the intention of transforming it into a story, you may not be so sure what a story looks like—and it may very well be your first story rodeo. And even if this isn’t your first story, it’s the first time you’re telling this particular tale. Most writers take on more challenging material with each book—and you are probably no exception. Don’t be surprised if what worked for the last novel doesn’t work for the next one.

As an agent, I see project after project fail to sell because the structure of the story doesn’t work.

The right framework for your story—that is, the structure that will best support your idea—is critical to its success. And without it, your chances of selling your work are slim, no matter how accomplished the writing or how unique the idea. Even projects that do sell must undergo editing during the publishing process, and that editing is often related to structure. (I could write an entire book on the topic of structure alone—and I did. Plot Perfect is available wherever you buy your books.)

Getting structure right is as simple—and as difficult—as finding the right way to tell your story. Here are some tools to play around with the structure of your story.

What If?

“I love the dreaming phase, thinking up the story and playing around with ideas and characters. I love the ‘what ifs …’ What if this happened? What if that happened? One idea sparks off another, and very soon the basis of a story is flying around in my head.”
—Gill Lewis

The “what if?” exercise can prove one of the most painless and productive means of brainstorming ways of structuring your story. The trick is to let your imagination run wild. The wilder your “what ifs?” the better. Let your inner creator drive the process—and kick your inner editor to the curb.

What if:

• fossilized DNA could be used to re-create dinosaurs? (Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton)
• an English nurse was transported back in time to Scotland? (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon)
• a doctor could talk to animals? (Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting)
• a boy and a girl from feuding families fell in love? (Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare)
• a Soviet submarine commander decided to defect? (The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy)
• an old fisherman took on a giant marlin? (The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway)

You might try playing the “what if?” game with a friend or a fellow writer. When it comes to brainstorming, two heads are often better than one. Just be sure that you choose someone you trust completely, someone who is supportive of your work, understands the nature of brainstorming (there are no stupid ideas), and can be relied on to be discreet (you can’t copyright ideas, and you don’t want yours blabbed all over the blogosphere).

Voice and Place

“But once the voice comes, the ‘here’ comes next, and then the ‘something happened’—what we call plot—follows from it. … If you are lucky enough to find voice and place, there are real consequences to those choices. Together, they limit the possibilities of what can possibly come next—and they help point the way forward.”
—Linn Ullmann

If a character is speaking to you, just as the voices spoke to Alice Hoffman at Masada, you’ve found the voice of your novel. And just as those voices could only have come from Masada, the voice you hear comes from somewhere, too. You know who and where. Now all you need to do is figure out what happens when you put that character in that place.

What happens when …

• Dorothy isn’t in Kansas anymore? (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum)
• defense attorney Perry Mason practices law in Los Angeles? (The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner)
• Jane Eyre accepts a position at Thornfield? (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë)
• a group of British schoolboys crash on an island? (Lord of the Flies by William Golding)
• Emma Bovary marries a country doctor? (Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert)
• Sheriff Longmire enforces the law in Wyoming? (The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson)

What happens to your characters when you put them in their place? What happens next? And then what happens?

I have a client from New England who’s been vacationing on St. John for years. After writing a couple of crime novels that went nowhere, she gave her Bostonian heroine a troubled past, ran her out of town, and plopped her on St. John, where she runs an inn and stumbles across dead bodies. Voice and character plus place equals plot—and now my client has a multi-book deal for her traditional mystery series. (Look for No Virgin Island by C. Michele Dorsey wherever you buy your books.)

Beg, Borrow, Steal

“I think that that idea of reinvention [for Blue Diary] originally sprang from the fairy tale of Bluebeard and the idea of someone reinventing themselves or turning out to be not what you think they are. I was reading different versions of that fairy tale and talking about it with other women, feeling that it was a really resonant fairy tale for a lot of people. The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her—she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.”
—Alice Hoffman

If you’re having trouble coming up with a plot, consider pinching one. You can beg, borrow, or outright steal from a storyline from a classic that’s stood the test of time—and is now in the public domain. Myths and legends, Shakespearean plays, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and nineteenth-century novels are all potential sources for cool stories. As an agent who pitches novels for a living, I can tell you that two of every acquisitions editor’s favorite words are “modern retelling.”

Consider a modern retelling of:

• Greek mythology (The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan).
• Romeo and Juliet (Julie and Romeo by Jeanne Ray).
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dorian, an Imitation by Will Self).
• King Lear (A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley).
• Wuthering Heights (Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman).
• the Tristan and Isolde legend (Brazil by John Updike).

Some authors, not content to merely retell these stories, reinvent them. Gregory Maguire, author of the bestseller Wicked, rewrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s point of view. David Wroblewski penned The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, best described as Hamlet—with dogs. Seth Grahame-Smith added zombies to Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, creating a whole new mash-up subgenre in the process.

Apparently, Pride and Prejudice is a gold mine for today’s novelists. Goodreads features a list of 238 books inspired by Pride and Prejudice, from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary to Linda Berdoll’s Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife. If you think you can write no. 239, more power to you!

Framing the Building

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we shape our stories, and afterwards our stories shape us. Finding the right structure for your story can not only help you tell the story, it will affect how you tell it, and the very story you tell.

Some of you are plotters by nature. Your story ideas are plot ideas rather than ideas borne of character or voice or place. You may have other obstacles to overcome—creating well-rounded characters, weaving in theme, etc.—which we’ll address later on, but structure isn’t one of them. Lucky you.

But those of you who work from character, voice, and/or place may find plotting a challenge. You may find yourself writing slice-of-life stories, in which very little actually happens. This is fine if you’ll be satisfied publishing your work in literary journals or self-publishing. (And there’s nothing wrong with either of those options.) But if you want to publish commercial fiction with a traditional publisher, you’ll need a compelling storyline with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Together these three parts—beginning, middle, end—make up the classic three-act structure. We tell stories with this structure intuitively; we begin with “once upon a time” and end with “and they lived happily ever after.” Don’t overthink this formula; it’s as easy as “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.”

Before you get too caught up in the three-act structure of your story, think about the time frame in which the story occurs: Where and when will you choose to enter the story, and where and when will you choose to leave it? What events will you dramatize in between the entrance and the exit?

Setting the time parameters of your story can help you devise a strong storyline. Aristotle believed that the most compelling stories took place within a single twenty-four-hour period, and, generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the better. But you can make any time frame work, as the authors of the following stories have done successfully:

• The Hours by Michael Cunningham
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
• The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson
• Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
• The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
• The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel
• Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
• My Losing Season by Pat Conroy
• The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Choosing a time frame for your story—again, the shorter, the better—can help you focus your work on the most critical events of the story. Every book is a journey—and if you prolong the journey with asides and flashbacks and detours, you risk alienating your readers, who want you to get on with the story. Readers know when you’re off track, when you’re dawdling by the side of the road, and when you’ve lost your way. Deciding on a tight time frame—and sticking to it—streamlines your story and keeps your reader turning the pages.

One of my clients, Kate Defrise, wrote a charming novel about a Belgian-American family of grown siblings who’ve moved away and grown apart after their mother died. Their father went through several wives afterward. Her original draft takes place over the course of a year and culminates in a tense Christmas dinner at the patriarch’s house, at which emotions run high, secrets are revealed, and the fate of the familial bond hangs in the balance. An editor expressed interest but was reluctant to commit to buying the project because of structural issues. She asked if the author would rework the structure, shrinking the time frame to just a couple of months before Christmas. The author, as advised by moi, agreed.

Cutting the time frame focused the story, sharpened the pacing, and intensified the emotional impact on the reader. The restructured story was also now more commercial. Whenever you build a story around a major holiday—Christmas, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July, even Father’s Day—you gain promotional opportunities at booksellers and elsewhere that would otherwise be unavailable to you, opportunities that can help establish your name. I resubmitted the story to that same editor—and got a two-book deal for my client. (Look for Christmas Chocolat by Kate Defrise wherever you buy your books.)

Gilding the Genre

“What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.”
—Billy Marshall

The best advice I can give you on story structure: Know your genre. I’ll repeat that, not just because I always repeat my best advice but because I am always astounded by the number of writers who do not know their genre. Or if they do know it, they do not use that knowledge when they plot their own stories.

Know your own genre.

No worries, you say. That’s not me: I write mysteries, and I know my genre. I’ve been reading Agatha Christie since I was twelve years old.

Swell—but how many of today’s new, best-selling mystery writers have you read? I’m talking about writers who are (1) still alive and (2) have published either their debut novels or their breakout novels within the past five years to great success. These are the stories you should pay attention to—not just reading them, but studying them.

I’ve been an agent for a couple of years now. When I first started shopping crime fiction, all I heard from editors was: I’m looking for the next Tana French. A year later: I’m looking for the next Gone Girl. Or the next Defending Jacob. Something with “an edge.”

The same holds true for other genres as well: I’m looking for the next Celeste Ng (literary fiction) or Erika Johansen (fantasy) or Emily St. John Mandel (science fiction) or Paula Hawkins (thriller).

The debut writers in your genre are the writers you are competing against. The Sue Graftons and Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings of the world broke out and found their audiences years ago in a marketplace far different than the one all wannabe best-selling authors face today. They’re not your competition; they’re way beyond that.

You are seeking to break out in today’s landscape, so you need to understand who is breaking out now—and how they are doing it. This is your competition. These are the writers whose stories you need to study. Figure out what made the difference in their stories. Which plot conventions of their genres did they follow? Which did they ignore, twist, tweak, or stand on their respective heads?

Take three of the best-selling debut or breakout novels published in your genre in the past three years. Outline their storylines scene by scene. Now compare and contrast. What have you learned that you can apply to your own storyline? Which conventions can you follow? Which can you ignore, twist, tweak, or stand on their respective heads?

Note: I know you don’t want to do this. Nobody ever does. But if you do, you’ll understand structure in a much deeper and more comprehensive way. If you want to cheat, then watch three films based on bestsellers in your genre. Make scene lists as you watch. Be sure to select movies that closely follow the plotlines of the novels on which they are based.

Do your homework, and you’ll be prepared to structure your story. And when you do, you’ll know enough to make yours different enough to stand apart—and find an audience.

“I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.”
—Peter Temple