C. Aubrey Hall's Blog, page 45

The Showdown: Writing Diagnostics IX(a)

HIGH NOON image courtesy of United Artists.

When planning a story, you need to know where and how it's going to end.  No doubt you're aware that a climax of some sort looms on your idea's horizon, but perhaps you aren't quite sure what it entails or how it's set up or what should go into it.

It can be so tempting to just launch your protagonist into trouble at the start of a story and see what happens.  How creatively liberating!  Right?  Well …

When I was a child, my parents usually visited my grandmother on Sunday afternoons.  She lived in a rural area about an hour's drive from our house.  If we happened to leave early when homeward bound, my father liked to turn down a road at random and see where it came out.  Sometimes we found a cool discovery, but otherwise we just meandered around and wasted a lot of time.  Occasionally we found ourselves way off course and then it took so long to get home that I would miss my favorite TV program and Mom wouldn't have sufficient time to prepare the dinner she'd planned.

If you wander around in your story because you don't know where you're going, readers are likely to lose patience with you.  And you will find yourself hitting a lot of dead ends and having to redo pages.  You may even get so stuck you abandon the manuscript without completing it.

Think of climax as your story's destination.  From the sentence that introduces the story question to the plot, the ending becomes a much-anticipated element.  Clashing goals, scenes of conflict, and progressive setbacks all work together in driving characters — and -readers — to this showdown.

Gary Cooper must face his enemy in HIGH NOON's climatic showdown. Image courtesy of United Artists.

Once you get everyone there, you need to settle matters, once and for all, between the protagonist and antagonist.  In movie terms, it's called "the third-act payoff."

The story goal creates the story question, and the story question is answered in the climax.  Not with a maybe.  Not with it was all a dream.  But with a YES or a NO.

Yes, the protagonist overcomes the story problem and saves the day and finds the solution in the nick of time and wins true love, wealth, and happiness.

Or …

No, the protagonist crumbles at the key moment of crisis instead of showing courage and so fails and is left alone, miserable, wretched, and ruined.

When evaluating your plot for soundness, ask yourself if you're planning a big or intense confrontation between hero and villain or if you're just hoping to achieve some sort of muddled stopping point.

It has nothing to do with luck, and everything to do with utilizing the writer's craft.

Why, Oh Why? Writing Diagnostics VIII

Remember GALAXY QUEST?  Remember when Jason is confronting the rock monster and calling for help?

Sir Alexander Dane:  You're just going to have to figure out what it wants.  What is its motivation?

Jason Nesmith:  It's a rock monster.  It doesn't have motivation.

Sir Alexander Dane:  See, that's your problem, Jason.  You were never serious about the craft.

That dialogue never fails to make me laugh.  As a writer, it's my job to always consider the motivation behind any character.  I should hope that were I really facing a monster, I wouldn't be quite as pedantic as Alexander, but when I pit my characters against monsters — or even against each other — I had better know why.

Sometimes, when we're working hard to create a viable story premise, and we're busy juggling action, a goal-oriented protagonist, lots of conflict, an oppositional antagonist, and a series of cause-and-effect events leading to a showdown while trying to be original, we may forget a little detail called character motivation.

There's so much else to deal with.  Does it really matter? 

I'm afraid so. 

But I'm writing scenes.  I have conflict.  The actions are speaking plainly.

They can.  They will, for a while.  But you can only dodge and fake your way along to a certain point.

There always comes a time in the story, a crucial scene, a big confrontation, a turning point … where the stakes begin to go up.  At such places of high conflict, the motivation of your characters must be clear to you.  If you haven't figured them out by then, the scene can't help but be weaker than it should be.

Early on in my career, I knew enough craft to put credible, fast-paced novels together and get them published.  I was still gaining experience, however, and although I understood why I needed strong conflict in scenes and why I needed high stakes I couldn't always figure out everyone's motivations.

Impatiently I would go at things the hard way, slogging through a rough draft, writing and rewriting scenes.  Somewhere in the middle of the book, the big confrontations would start to happen, and then I'd achieve clarity.  Oh, that's why he's doing that.  Oh, that's why she loves him.  Oh, that's why he's lying.

It was always such a relief to hit that place in my manuscript where I understood my characters.  Then I'd set about revising the front half of the manuscript to reflect what I'd discovered.  It always made a difference to the characters' actions and dialogue.  And rewriting — reweaving — the storyline could be quite tricky and difficult.

With time, and a certain number of completed novels to my credit, I learned how to evaluate an idea first before plunging in.  And I learned the value of figuring out character motivations before I wrote.  Doing this saved me at least one draft of writing effort, and I could write progressive scenes that were stronger, closer to the mark of what I wanted to accomplish, and even contained subtext.

So take the time to ask yourself why a character is refusing to accept a marriage proposal, why a character is rebelling against authority, why a character wants so desperately to reach Mars, why a mobster wants to wipe out a witness. 

Not understanding what lies behind your characters' actions and comments can lead to the pitfalls of silly plotting, implausibilities, lapses of logic, and plot holes.  It can allow the story stakes to fall, and scene conflict to become trivial.