Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 31

Last plot post for a while, I promise

A few more words about plot before I move on to something else for a while:

First off, dozens of people besides Heinlein have come up with different sets of basic plots; he’s not the last word on the subject. Most of them have a lot more than three, which makes them far more difficult to analyze in a brief post; they are also all a lot less basic, as you might expect from the fact that there are ten or twelve or thirty-seven of them.

Second, plots can happen on different levels in any and every story. Some stories are mostly on one level – the James Bond books cited in comments earlier are primarily physical action, i.e. “The Little Tailor,” with no other levels to the plot. Other stories operate on multiple levels at once – Lois Bujold’s Memory is both a “Little Tailor” plot and a “Man Learns Lesson” plot; her A Civil Campaign later in the same series has all three levels of plot for the main storyline, and multiple levels for most of the secondary storylines/subplots as well.

The most common levels for plot to operate on are physical, emotional, and/or intellectual. It’s usually fairly easy to classify a story with a central plot that is all one level. If you want to write a classic sword-and-sorcery Conan the Barbarian type of plot, you don’t have to think very hard to figure out that what you’ve got is Little Tailor action-adventure and not much else. As with the James Bond books, there’s sometimes a bit of romance decorating the main storyline, but it rarely has enough attention paid to it to qualify even as a subplot, and sword-and-sorcery heroes seldom learn anything new about themselves or the world in the course of their adventures (except maybe the location of the nearest bar or brothel).

As soon as you start looking at complex stories with multiple levels, things get harder to classify. What is the central plotline in Bujold’s Memory – the intellectual “whodunnit and how” puzzle, the action/adventure thriller, or the vital lessons the main character has to learn about himself? The three plot levels are so closely entwined that they’re difficult to untangle.

And this is where a lot of folks go heading off in the wrong direction. They have a central plotline that requires some action, so they immediately think in terms of an action plot, when really what they have is an emotional family drama or a romance that involves some action at various points. Or they have a romance but one of the characters ends up dead, so they think it has to be an action plot. (About that – Romeo and Juliet. ‘Nuff said.)

Having mis-identified the type of story they want to write, they proceed to “develop their plot” in that direction, and the more details they make up, the less satisfied they are. Eventually, they abandon the story (sometimes many chapters in, which is exceedingly discouraging).

The thing one has to look at is: what is the bit that, if you took it out or changed it, you wouldn’t still have the story you wanted to write? If you want to write Georgette Heyer’s Frederica, you can do without the hot-air balloon chase (the action part, which would be a shame to lose…but the main storyline would survive), but you cannot do without the relationship between the two main characters and their families, because that’s what the story is about. If you want to write a James Bond book, you can do without the Bond girl-of-the-week, but you can’t do without the car chases, fights, and megalomaniacal villains.

It can be a lot harder to pin down that essential center when all you have is an idea-seed, and not the whole story. A lot of writers do it by feel, meaning that when they start to develop an idea-seed, they let go of the stuff that doesn’t “feel right” as quickly as possible. Sometimes, this means a quick rejection; other times, they try on the not-quite-satisfactory idea for a couple of days or even weeks. This can be extremely frustrating for the friends and family who are trying to be supportive, and who really like the not-quite-right idea that the writer is abandoning.

It is also frustrating for writers who, having started off in the wrong direction (say, trying to think up an action plot for what ought to be a Man Learns Lesson story), keep getting suggestions from their helpful beta readers for the thing they’ve rejected (i.e., more action plot possibilities when they need an emotional plot or a puzzle or a lesson plot). There is not much to be done about this; once you have got people looking in the wrong direction, it is very hard to get them to switch. About all I can think of is to announce that you have to go think for a while and do not want any more suggestions for a couple of months, and then stick to it while you consider alternatives, no matter how much you want to talk about it. Once the wrong-possible-plot-direction has faded a bit from everyone’s memory, you can go back with a new plot-direction and hopefully get some useful suggestions.

When it IS a plot

The reason I started the last post with a bunch of examples of what plot is not was twofold: first, as I said, lots of people’s plot-problems seem to happen because they are starting from something that sort of looks like a plot, but actually isn’t one, and second, because it’s a lot easier to pick out what plot isn’t than to clearly define what it is.

For this post, I wanted to come up with some examples of story-seed-ideas that are plots. It took me a while, because…well, I’m a natural novelist; my idea of explaining the plot tends to run to 80,000 words, rather than to the one-line elevator pitch. What I ended up doing was going back to Heinlein’s three plots: Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and Man Learns Lesson.

As stated, none of those are actually plots, but they aren’t intended as such. Those are the names of plots; the shorthand Heinlein used for the actual plot-patterns he was talking about. “Boy Meets Girl,” for instance, is short for “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” and its many variation. “The Little Tailor” is the title of the fairy tale, in which the tailor sets off into the world, repeatedly gets into more trouble than he ought to be able to handle, and successfully overcomes all obstacles. “Man Learns Lesson” sums up the journey in which somebody believes one thing, seriously examines that belief for some reason, and comes to believe something truer and better.

In short, plots have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the process of getting from start to finish, something changes.

One of the reasons those not-quite-plot story seeds in the last post aren’t plots is that they don’t have that movement. One of the reasons they look as if they do is that human beings are very good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t there, and “beginning, middle, end” is such a common, natural progression that many people automatically assume the missing bits without thinking about it too much…until time comes to turn the idea into a story and they can’t figure out what’s wrong.

Implication is the first dicey part about looking at “not quite plot” things, especially events and incidents. “Perseus rescues Andromeda from a sea monster” is an event, like “bandits attack the caravan” or “George apologizes to Carol.” An event has an implied beginning and an implied end: first the caravan is not being attacked, then bandits attack, then the attack is over and the bandits flee. First Andromeda is tied up to be sacrificed, then Perseus comes in and kills the sea monster, and then Andromeda is free and safe. First George thinks he’s right, then he changes his mind and apologizes, then he and Carol are friends again.

But “Andromeda is free and safe,” “the attack is over,” and “George and Carol are friends again” are none of them actually stated in the not-plot idea. The end of the event could just as easily be “Andromeda is now Perseus’ slave,” “the bandits take everyone hostage,” and “Carol rejects George’s apology.” The initial idea doesn’t actually include the end point, the place the plot would be trying to get to.

It also doesn’t necessarily include the beginning. Andromeda may have chosen to be sacrificed to a sea monster in preference to an unwanted husband, the caravan may be an elaborate decoy, George may have decided to lie and make an insincere apology instead of actually changing his mind. The plot depends on where the characters start and where they end up, physically, emotionally, and mentally, and “Andromeda is being sacrificed, Perseus rescues her, Andromeda is free” is a totally different story from “Andromeda is willing to be eaten rather than marry, Perseus rescues her, Andromeda is now Perseus’ slave.” The plot is different, even though the event is the same.

The above examples presume the event is the middle of the plot, which, again, is common for this kind of not-plot-idea, because it is a lot easier to assume an implicit beginning and ending (which is one step back and one step forward, so to speak) than it is to extend the idea forward or backward two steps in the same direction. But “Perseus rescues Andromeda” could very easily function as a dramatic “Boy meets girl” beginning, leaving “boy loses girl, boy gets girl” to become the rest of the plot. It could be an equally dramatic “boy gets girl” ending. Furthermore, it could be the beginning, middle, or end of a Little Tailor plot or a (Wo)man Learns Lesson plot – it depends on the author’s assumptions and on which direction he/she chooses to develop the story.

If what you have is an actual plot story-seed, it doesn’t need that kind of development. You can’t move it from beginning incident to ending incident or from “boy meets girl” plot to “Woman learns lesson” plot without completely changing the essence of the idea. (Which, of course, is sometimes exactly what you want to do, but if that’s the case, you are not usually fussing over whether it’s a plot – you’re usually fussing about whether it’s the right plot.)

Andromeda Redux: Starting points

One of the things that seems to confuse a lot of people about plot, especially at the start of a story, is that they’re misidentifying what they have to hand, what they want to do, and how to get from one to another. What they have is an idea, a story-seed, not a complete story (much less a complete plot).

“Andromeda is tied to a rock and a sea monster is coming to eat her!”

This is not a plot. It’s a situation. It’s a dramatic situation with lots of possibilities, but it’s still just a situation.

“I want to write a book about making really bad choices because your family is encouraging/pushing you to do something you don’t want.”

Pretty obviously, this is a thematic idea rather than a plot. At least, it’s obvious to me.

“Andromeda is a smart-mouthed girl from the wrong side of the tracks, with lots of street-smarts but not as much confidence as she sounds like.”

This is a character. Few people mistake this for a plot, unless it’s combined with something else:

“Andromeda is a smart-mouthed girl who was adopted by the King and Queen.”

This is character plus backstory. Still not a plot, though desperate writers often latch onto “adopted by the King and Queen” and try to make that into a plot instead of backstory. Sometimes, this works very well; other times, there’s not enough meat there yet.

“Andromeda is a smart-mouthed girl, adopted by the King, who is tied to a rock with a sea monster coming to eat her.”

Nope, not a plot. Character plus backstory plus situation.

“Andromeda is tied to a rock and Perseus rescues her from being eaten by a sea monster!”

Once again, not a plot. It’s an event or an incident. This is one of the hardest for many people to recognize as not-a-plot, because something is happening — something dramatic and with lots of action. But action alone is not plot. Not even if you make Perseus the main character instead of Andromeda.

Let me repeat that: action alone is not plot. This is hard for some people to remember, because so many movies and TV shows have action-oriented plots, and there are so many action-adventure novels around, that “action” has gotten strongly identified with “plot” in the minds of many people (readers and writers alike).

The thing that makes all of these starting places confusing is that each of these elements could be used in a plot – as the start of a scene, as a set-piece, as a dramatic opening or climax, as background. How they get used will depend on the writer and the kind of story the writer wants to write…and to a lesser extent on which idea-cum-story-seed the writer is starting out with.

Starting with theme or character or a general idea like “I want to retell a famous myth” or “I want to write a particular type of story (e.g., action/adventure or character-centered or murder mystery or family saga) can be a lot more work than starting from a situation or an incident, because you have less to go on to begin with. You have your choice of millions of stories about bad choices or streetwise smartmouths or murders; you have thousands of folk and fairy tales you can pick from. On the other hand, if you have a theme, character, or story type in mind, it can be a lot easier to throw out possibilities and alternatives that don’t work, because you have more to judge by than “that doesn’t feel right.” It can also be easier to take a possibility that looks as if it won’t work, but that really is appealing, and figure out what it needs to make it work.

Starting with a situation or an incident seems to be really common for plot-centered writers, but developing the situation/incident into an actual plot is often not nearly as easy as one might assume. This is especially true when the writer assumes that because they started with the idea “Andromeda is about to be eaten by a sea monster,” that event is perforce the opening of the story. It might be, but usually the super-dramatic rescue scene makes a better climax or mid-story turning point than it does an opening. The rescue will have a lot more emotional impact if the readers have had a chance to get to know Andromeda (or possibly the sea monster) and start to sympathize with her/its situation.

Whether the incident belongs at the beginning of the story, in the middle, or at the end will also depend on the kind of story the writer wants to write. Ideas do not always match up perfectly with a writer’s preferences. When the action-adventure writer’s backbrain presents him/her with a theme or character, or the character-centered writer’s produces an action situation, the writer generally has two choices: either assume that the backbrain has a reason for wanting them to write this type of story, grit their teeth, and write it the way it has presented itself, or else work out a way to develop the intriguing but uncongenial idea into something more like the kind of thing the writer likes writing.

For instance, a writer starts with Andromeda tied to the rock, about to be eaten. That writer wants to write happy-ending action stories with Andromeda as the main character, but Andromeda has no agency in this situation; all she can do is wait to be rescued by Perseus. This makes a terrible match-up if the rescue is the end of the story…but if the writer opens this way, they can make Andromeda’s helplessness in this situation into her motivation for learning swordcraft or magic or Houdini-esque escape techniques (so that she will never, ever be in that situation again), which in turn develops her into the kind of character who, over the rest of the story, can have all sorts of adventures, culminating perhaps in rescuing somebody else from a sea monster.

I think next time I’m going to talk more specifically about the process I go through when developing possible plots from one or more of the kinds of story-seeds.

Oh, and Points of Departure, the collection of Liavek stories that Pamela and I are doing as an ebook, is now available for PRE-ORDER. It’s supposed to go live in May; I’ll post a specific date when I have it.

Here we go again!

The elbow is not completely healed, but it is much better. I’m still not allowed to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup, but typing isn’t about lifting, so that’s all right. However, I’m planning to ease back into things – I’m going to be posting once a week, on Wednesdays, until at least the end of June. After that, we’ll see how it goes.

In other news, the four Enchanted Forest books are being reissued in September with 25th Anniversary introductions…and they will also FINALLY be available as e-books! I just finished proofreading all four of the new editions, and I will blame any remaining errors on the oxycodone they gave me for my broken elbow and the surgery.

On top of that, Pamela Dean and I have a collection of short stories coming out as an e-book – it contains the Liavek stories that we wrote for the five Liavek shared-world anthologies back in the 1980s, plus two new ones (one that didn’t make the cut the first time due to space considerations, and one that we wrote to fill a hole in the joint storyline for this anthology). It is supposed to be out in May, from Diversion Books, and will have a print-on-demand option for people who want paper copies instead of or in addition to the e-book one.

Putting together this collection was a lot more work than I think either of us quite bargained for – after all, the stories were already written; it should have been just a matter of putting them in order and sending the manuscript to the publisher to format…we thought.

Unfortunately, the 1980s were long enough ago that there were a number of problems with this scenario. Some of the stories were not in electronic format (or at least, not in any that we could find. Possibly they dropped out somewhere during the migration from one computer to another over the past thirty years. Or the floppy discs got lost…remember floppy discs?). Other stories were in electronic formats that were unreadable by a modern Windows 8 machine, and neither of us still has a DOS one, let alone the programs we were using back then. Still others had been converted to rich text or some other format that we could read, but the conversion had problems and had to be proofread carefully.

The older “new” story, the one that I wrote for the second Liavek book that was far too long, needed some significant revisions – I basically rewrote the last half so it would make more sense. The new story, which was a joint project, has a deliberately confusing non-linear format that was hard to make work as well as it does (and that will probably not work for everyone, but that’s life). And when we finally got everything in one file, there turned out to be consistency problems with things like capitalization or italicization of certain terms that were unnoticeable when the stories were in different volumes, but had to be dealt with when they were all together in a row. So the whole thing had to be carefully proofread again.

When we finally got it to a publisher, they did a copy-edit, which we had to review, and then sent electronic page proofs. All of which took just as much time as writing a brand-new-original book would have. But they gave us a lovely Liavekan cover – the city skyline silhouetted against a hot desert sky and reflected in the waters of the Sea of Luck. Did I mention that it’s supposed to be out in May? I will post the exact date it goes live when I have it.

That should bring things up to date; next week, I plan to get back to that discussion about creating plots from non-plotty ideas that we were having ages ago when my elbows were both still whole. Unless someone has something they’d rather talk about – it has been a while, and perhaps you’ve all moved on.

Update Two

So about three and a half weeks ago, I fell and broke my elbow; a week later, I had surgery to repair it. I now have two screws holding the chipped bit in place…and after making bad “I don’t have a screw loose” jokes for the first week or so after surgery, I found it mildly hilarious when it turned out that the thing I have to watch out for is, in fact, one of them working loose (very low probability, I am assured, but I did ask, because I am hoping to be living with them for another thirty years or thereabouts).

Recovery is proceeding very well; I have enough range of motion back to scratch my nose with my right hand, though I can’t quite manage scratching my ear. It is amazing how annoying it is not to be able to reach that far. I am, however, forbidden from lifting anything heavier than a coffee cup for the next month, which annoys the cats, especially Karma (who weighed in at 15 lbs on her last vet visit).

The main problem is that I’m still getting my energy and endurance back, and I need to save it for vital stuff like laundry, proofreading, and trying to get the next chapter finished. I’m guessing that it will be at least another week before I’m up to resuming the blog. Thank you for your patience!

Update

So here is the story: I was walking at the gym last Tuesday, tripped, and fell heavily onto my right forearm. Which felt really painful, and then after the initial really painful part, really weird (and wouldn’t bend or rotate). So my walking buddy took me to the ER and after a couple of hours, an X-ray, and some good pain drugs, I was diagnosed with a fractured radial head. To be more specific, the end of the radius (one of the two bones in my forearm) has a chip out of it, which is now floating around in my elbow. The orthopedic surgeon was a bit puzzled as to how I managed to do that – it’s apparently not the sort of way radial heads normally get fractured.

Since there are lots of important nerves and blood vessels that go through the elbow, this is not an ideal situation. Also, I still can’t fully straighten my arm (though as you can all see, I have my typing back. Temporarily…more on that in a minute), I have next to no muscle strength in that arm, and no rotation. I also have no endurance to speak of – just holding my arm in place to type these two paragraphs  has tired it out noticeably.

So I go in for elbow surgery tomorrow, to remove the bone chip. I anticipate that it will be at least a week after that before I can really do much at all, let alone do much with my right hand. (Yes, that’s my dominant hand.) When I do start getting it back…well, I currently have five sets of page proofs to review before the end of the month and progress to be made on The New Thing. So it will be at least a couple of weeks, I think, before I can get back to blogging. Which is really frustrating, but that’s life.

Thank you all for your good wishes, and I hope you’ll all check back in a few weeks. If nothing else, I’ll try to post another update on how things are going.

Technical difficulties

Patricia has asked me to post on her behalf to let you know that although she has lots to say, she must suspend posting temporarily. She broke her elbow Tuesday morning. She will resume posting when the dictation software permits.

— The Webmaster

Plot, development, stakes, and patterns

One final word about what’s at stake: the real stakes, the thing that is of greatest ultimate importance to the main character, not only are not necessarily connected to the perceived stakes, they don’t have anything whatever to do with the type of story you are writing. In other words, you can write an action-centered plot in which the ultimate stakes are internal and emotional; you can write a mostly internal, emotion-and-character-centered plot in which the ultimate stakes are external and action-oriented. Lois Bujold’s Memory has a strong action plot – figuring out whodunnit and how – but I think that the thing that is of greatest importance, the thing that’s really at stake, has to do with the main character’s identity. I’ve argued before that the true climax of the book is the scene in which Miles is alone in his room, wrestling with temptation and deciding just what kind of person he is going to be for the rest of his life; the action climax that follows is the validation, and could not have occurred at all in the way it did if the internal, emotional, man-learns-lesson plot had not already been wrapped up.

Which brings me to my next point about plots, to wit, very few SF/F books these days are all one thing or another. However central the action-adventure plot is, there’s still an emotional thread tied to it; however character-centered the story, there’s still something going on at the action level.

This has interesting implications for the way one develops the plot, as well as for the way one wraps it up at the end. There are two basic cases: first, the type of story and the type of stakes are congruent (the writer has an action-adventure plot, and the real, ultimate stakes at the end are action-adventure stakes, like Saving The World or killing the dragon); second, the type of story and stakes are not congruent (that is, the story has an action-adventure plot, but the thing that is of ultimate importance is emotional or internal – the hero’s integrity, or sanity, or ultimate happiness). Each type has its own pluses and minuses.

Plots are patterns of events, and human beings are very good at finding patterns in things. Patterns are, however, not lots and lots of the same thing. Patterns need contrast. The rug in my office is red; the patterns on it are made of dark blue, green, and white. One could make a red rug with a pattern in darker reds and lighter reds, but the pattern would be much more subtle, possibly even invisible if the different reds were too close together. If all you have is 200,000 bits of yarn that are exactly the same length and color, you can’t make them into a patterned rug.

Thus, if the ultimate stakes are congruent to the kind of story the writer is telling, the writer often has trouble building and maintaining tension, because there’s  not enoug contrast in the build-up to form a satisfying patten. Romance novels whose plots involve one angst-ridden choice after another often have a hard time holding the reader’s interest after a while because all the ramp-up is emotional. It’s an all-red pattern: the only way to increase the tension is to increase the importance of what appears to be at stake, and the reader adjusts much too quickly to the new level because it’s so similar to the old one.

This is one of the reasons why, in an angst-ridden Romance, one frequently finds a physical threat of some sort cropping up halfway through – someone is kidnapped, or there’s a robbery or murder, or a building burns down, or an espionage plot is uncovered (without uncovering the spy). Because one of the ways to build and maintain tension in a story is by introducing some contrasting problems that the main character needs to solve in order to get to their primary goal. This works just as well in a story that is primarily action-adventure, though in that case it’s generally a romantic or lesson-learning subplot that shows up, rather than yet another action element.

Personally, I think it is frequently more effective to introduce a contrasting-element subplot early in the story, as this allows the author more flexibility. If the first couple of chapters reveal that Our Hero has a complex background and lots of trust issues, it’s a lot easier to work that into various action incidents, where it can boost tension or lower it depending on how that aspect is played. In one scene, Our Hero may be worried that a companion will betray everyone before the rescue can be completed, upping the tension in the early part of the scene and lowering it farther when it turns out the companion stuck with them. In another place, Our Hero may successfully break into the villain’s hideout and retrieve the magical doohicky, only to discover, along with it, a note that seems to prove somebody else’s betrayal, thus adding some new tension in spite of the apparent tension-relieving success of the mission. In fact, one of the most effective ways to get a riveting climax is to give the character an action goal and an emotional or identity goal of equal personal importance, and then arrange things so that it looks as if the two are in conflict and the protagonist can only achieve one at the expense of the other.

For stories where the type of plot is one thing but the stakes are another – like the action-adventure plot in which what’s really at stake is the heroine’s integrity or Romance plot in which what’s really at stake is who rules the kingdom – there is usually plenty of contrast built in. The difficulty arises in keeping things balanced. It’s often easy for the writer to get carried away by the surface plot and forget what’s really at stake, which tends to lead to an unsatisfying climax that only solves half the problem…and not the half most readers were expecting.

A slightly different way of looking at plot development is the frog-in-boiling-water analogy. (Supposedly, if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately hop out, but if you put it in cold water and then slowly heat it up, it will sit there til it boils to death.) If Gandalf had told Frodo straight off “Hey, you have to take this Ring to Mordor, sneak past thousands of orcs who will torture you if they get their hands on you, and drop it in a volcano,” I very much doubt that Frodo would have returned a positive answer. But that’s not what happened; first, Frodo just has to keep the ring safe and secret for fifty years or so, then he has to take it to Bree where Gandalf is supposed to meet him. Once he gets to Bree and Gandalf doesn’t show up, it’s a lot easier to make the decision to push on to Rivendell than it would have been if he’d been expecting to trek all that way on his own, right from the start.

In other words, most stories don’t start at a peak of tension. Instead, they start with a small problem, which leads to a larger one, which leads to a larger one, easing the main character into things until, by the time it becomes clear just how hard it is going to be to finish all this, the main character has a) got too much invested and/or is too involved to be able to turn back (by the time Frodo gets to Rivendell, Sauron and the Black Riders will be happy to kill him whether he still has the Ring or not), and/or b) has grown in strength and/or skill and/or intestinal fortitude enough that they’re willing to take on the Big Final Problem, even if they wouldn’t have been at the start of their journey, and/or c) has collected various things that will allow him/her to ultimately achieve that final goal.

A story that opens with Frodo at the Cracks of Doom or Andromeda tied to the rock is 1) not starting in the correct place for that story, as the only way for either of them to get out of the situation is via what looks like a deus ex machina because Gollum and Perseus haven’t been established, or 2) depending on the reader knowing about Gollum or Perseus from their other reading, which limits the audience for whom the story would be effective, or 3) the beginning of a completely different story than the one we are expecting, which could be anything from a monolog depicting the character’s internal struggle in their final moments to an entirely different plot that starts with the destruction of the Ring or Andromeda’s rescue and goes off in an unexpected direction. If the writer wants to avoid this, he/she has to 1) start in a place that allows for proper setup of the rescuers, or 2) accept that the story will only work for a limited number of people, or 3) write the totally different story. There really aren’t a lot of other options.

Andromeda and More Stakes

Lots of writers have a problem figuring out what the actual stakes are (as opposed to the perceived stakes). Quick review: the actual stakes are what’s really at stake for the character; the perceived stakes are what the character currently thinks is at stake.

One reason for this is that “what the character and/or reader currently thinks is at stake” is generally, in fact, at stake. The peace of the Shire, and his own promise to Gandalf, are both things that matter to Frodo and that are “at stake” when he finally leaves to take the Ring to Rivendell; it’s just that in the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot more that is also at stake (like, the whole world), but that Frodo doesn’t know about yet.

In this example, the two stakes – the currently perceived stakes and the ultimate actual stakes – are on the same continuum. Saving The World and Saving The Shire are the same sort of action-adventure type goal; we’re not looking at Saving the Shire and then finding out that the actual stakes involve Getting the Girl. When the perceived and actual stakes are on the same continuum, it is a lot simpler for both reader and writer to follow the movement of the plot as the stakes rise and rise again, until the ultimate actual stakes are revealed.

If, however, the current/perceived stakes are one kind of thing and the ultimate/actual stakes are different, the writer has to be a lot clearer and more focused on the actual stakes a lot sooner, or the reader won’t follow the shift. If the reader has been cued to look for emotional stakes, like Getting the Girl, they may not recognize that the real stakes involve Catching the Murderer, and therefore they end up feeling unhappy and unsatisfied when the romantic plot they thought they were looking at seems to drop out of the book midway through.

Writers can have the same sort of problem. They’ve set up a lovely romantic situation, then realize their hero/heroine has no reason to be interested in the supposed love interest (or no obstacles whatever exist to their union), and they’re so busy looking at the non-romance plot that they don’t see that the real stakes involve temptation and the integrity of the main character. This is particularly common when a writer is facing an action-adventure situation in which the supposed protagonist “can’t do anything,” like the Andromeda-tied-to-the-rock incident people were discussing in the comments.

Andromeda is in peril of her life; that’s clearly a major thing that’s at stake for the character. But is it the most important thing that’s at stake for that character? If the writer is looking at a straight action-adventure story, maybe her life is the most important thing for Andromeda. It is, however, quite possible to imagine a story in which it isn’t – one where Andromeda is fighting an internal emotional battle or learning a personal lesson that is more important in some sense than getting killed by the dragon. Perhaps she has to be a volunteer in order for her sacrifice to save the kingdom, but she’s having trouble holding on to her willingness to die for others. Or perhaps she’s always been a spoiled, entitled brat and only realizes it when she’s hauled out and tied to the rock. I can picture a really moving story in which Andromeda is actually eaten by the dragon, but it’s still a triumph because she’s won her internal battle, even though no one else will ever know.

And then there’s the matter of timing: Andromeda tied helpless to the rock certainly looks like the climax of a story, but even in the original myth, it isn’t. The climax of the Andromeda story comes when her father tries to go back on his promise to marry her to the man who rescues her, and Perseus turns him and his court to stone with Medusa’s head; the climax of the Perseus story comes when he gets back home after his adventures, rescues his mother, and takes over the kingdom (or hands it off to someone else, depending on what version you have).

The writer who has a protagonist in a situation they can’t do anything about – tied to a rock waiting for rescue – may be looking at the beginning of a story, with the eventual actual stakes involving the consequences of the rescue. Those consequences can be action-adventure, raise-the-stakes consequences (Grendel’s mother is a bigger threat than Grendel, but she doesn’t show up until after Beowulf kills her son), or they can be on another continuum entirely (Andromeda dealing with the PTSD from being tied to the rock or survivor’s guilt from the court being turned to stone, or the difficulty of making her marriage to a stranger from a completely different culture work, or her personal development from the vain, shallow girl who was tied to the rock into, eventually, a woman of strength and wisdom). As long as the writer is only looking at Brave-Little-Tailor plots (because “dragon about to eat girl tied to rock” has action plot written all over it), he/she is unlikely to spot the potential Boy-Meets-Girl and Woman-Learns-Lesson possibilities, where “what’s at stake” is Andromeda’s marriage, her evolution into a better person, or her self-worth, all of which come after the rescue and all of which necessarily involve her “doing things.”

Strongly character-centered stories practically beg for the real stakes to be internal or emotional, even when they’re action-adventure stories on the surface. Unfortunately, action-adventure stakes are usually pretty clear and obviously important, and thus tend to have more mental weight for both writer and reader. This means that the writer has to either have a great intuitive sense of the internal/emotional stakes, or else pay more careful attention to figuring out what the internal/emotional stakes could be and whether they should be the ultimate/actual stakes for the main plot, or only a subplot. It also means that if the writer is going to start with something that looks like action-adventure (Andromeda tied to the rock), but intends the ultimate stakes to be on some other level, that writer needs to bring in hints and focus on the emotional/internal stuff very soon, as well as being very clear about both plot patterns. Because otherwise, the action-adventure that’s supposed to be a subplot can end up looking so important that it swamps the internal plot.

Next time, some thoughts on how one can keep things in balance and make it work.

Stakes

OK it looks like I’m going to do a series of posts on plot. Let’s start with the stakes.

Objectively speaking, the stakes are the thing that is to be lost or gained, depending on how things go. The stakes are crucial; if they don’t matter, the story won’t work. Nearly everybody realizes this; what a lot of writers don’t think about, though, is: Who is the person to whom the stakes matter, and why?

The answer is that the stakes have to matter to a minimum of two people: the main character and the reader. If the reader doesn’t care about the stakes, they’re unlikely to finish the book, or perhaps pick it up at all. If the main character doesn’t care – if he/she has nothing important to them at stake – then they have no real reason for slogging through whatever horrible plot events the writer has dreamed up.

What makes stakes important? Different things for different people – and this is the first stumbling block for many folks. First off, what the writer thinks is important about the story may not be important to the readers, or to the characters. I’ve met several writers who believed sincerely that a particular message or character or plot element was the important one, when their readers and even characters obviously cared much more about something else. The clearest was a writer who thought she’d written a murder mystery, and was astonished when it sold (and quite well) as a Romance novel, because the relationships had always been more important to the characters (and thus more interesting to readers) than the murder.

More common is the situation where what is at stake is, or should be, important to the readers and characters both, but the readers can see that, while the characters don’t know enough to care about it yet. As soon as Gandalf checks the ring for fire-writing and finds the inscription, the reader knows that this is important. It may not be clear yet exactly what is at stake, but we’re sure it’s not anything small. Frodo, however, doesn’t figure this out for quite a while. Oh, he believes it when Gandalf says the ring is important, and even agrees to take it to Rivendell, but then he keeps putting off leaving, because the trip isn’t really important to him. It is only when the Black Riders show up and the Shire he loves looks like being threatened that he really starts moving…because protecting the Shire is what is important to him.

And finally, there’s the case when the characters care passionately about something that is pretty much unimportant to the readers. The events of West Side Story are propelled, initially, by a turf war between rival gangs over a two-block stretch of city street in a rough, run-down section of New York City. The fate of those two blocks does not matter much to me personally, nor to the vast majority of theatergoers, but the story has riveted audiences for decades because the characters do care, passionately. When a set of sympathetic and/or interesting characters care passionately about something, however trivial that something may be in an objective sense, readers are usually willing to let themselves be swept along with them.

There are two other things to remember about what is at stake in a story: first, that there can be a difference between the perceived stakes and the actual stakes in a story, and second that both the perceived and the actual stakes can change over the course of a novel.

The perceived stakes are what the readers and characters think is at stake at any given point in a story. In The Lord of the Rings, the fate of Middle Earth is at stake right from the start, but neither the reader nor the characters know it for certain until the Council of Rivendell, two-thirds of the way through the first book. The perceived stakes, up to that point, are things like the lives of the hobbits, fulfilling Gandalf’s request successfully, and keeping a magic token out of the hands of obvious bad guys. Those are plenty important enough to be going on with.

Similarly, there are thrillers that begin with a seemingly random murder. The perceived goal at that point is catching the murderer; it is only as the story proceeds and new evidence gets uncovered that the characters and the reader realize that the murder was part of a larger plot to rob a bank, which in turn is revealed as a way to finance an even larger plot to bring down the government. The larger plots were there all the time (and probably known to the author), but the perception of readers and characters develops more slowly.

The other track a plot can take is for the actual stakes to change and develop over the course of the story. This generally means that what the character wants or thinks is at risk becomes larger and more important – the hero’s village needs food for their big anniversary feast, so he shoots a deer; shooting the deer means he is arrested for poaching; being arrested and convicted for poaching means he’s given the choice of being hanged or working for a wizard; working for the wizard causes his previously-unknown magic to go haywire and destroy the tower; destroying the tower wakes up the dragon sleeping underneath it, which now threatens the kingdom… What’s at stake goes from the success of a party to the hero’s freedom and perhaps life to the survival of the entire kingdom. Each problem solved results in a new, larger problem with more at stake than before.

When the writer knows that what is really at stake is much larger and more important than what the main character initially thinks is at stake, there is sometimes a tendency not to pay attention to the character’s current perceived stakes, because they are so trivial compared to the ultimate actual stakes. This often results in what, to the reader, looks like a lot of pointless running around for insufficient reasons (because the writer is neglecting what the character wants and needs now, as opposed to what the writer knows the character is going to want and need four or five chapters from now). The writer is so busy setting up things for the eventual revelation of the true stakes that they forget that the characters won’t ever get to that point without a reason.

Alternatively, some writers rush the story to get to the most important problem, dumping everything on the main characters as early as they can manage, in the mistaken belief that this is an effective way of getting the reader and characters involved. “OH NO THE WORLD IS GOING TO END TOMORROW!” is not usually the most effective way of opening a novel, because it’s practically impossible to a) be convincing about it or b) maintain and raise the necessary level of tension over the course of an entire book. It might work for a short story, or for something humorous (especially if the next line is something like “Joe sighed. ‘What, again? That’s the third time this month.’”)

For either sort of writer, it can be useful to ask themselves, “What do these characters think is at stake right now, for them, at this exact point in the story, that makes them willing to take the next step?” It doesn’t have to be a big reason; “what is at stake” can be something as trivial as “satisfying their curiosity,” especially early in a story when there don’t appear to be any dangerous or threatening consequences. But if your characters don’t have a reason to move forward, the reader won’t believe it when they do.