S.J. Sindu's Blog, page 2

The Write Stuff: Causality and Momentum in Narrative

Last week I read and commented on a friend’s novel-in-progress, and it has me thinking about causality. More specifically, about how establishing a pattern of cause and effect in your fictional world builds momentum in the narrative.

By causality I mean the direct and indirect results of actions and incidents. Cause and effect allows for a logical flow of events. Not a predictable narrative, but a logical one. Like this: A character files for divorce. To take the edge off her pain, she meets up with an old flame at a bar. After a few beers, she drives home. On the way, she gets pulled over by a cop, and is arrested for driving drunk. Logical flow of events. One scene leads into the next. Cause and effect.

Without establishing a flow of causality, the narrative can feel unanchored and random. Causality makes the reader care. Breaking the logical flow can break trust with the reader. Expectation of the effect creates suspense and keeps the reader turning the page to find out more. Without cause and effect, you have a random string of scenes. With cause and effect, you have a story.

Let’s take our character from before. Say that she files for divorce. Then she makes a sandwich. Then she goes to work. Then she meets an old flame at a bar. Then she goes home. Then she goes to work. Then she meets a new coworker. Then she goes out and has a great time. Then she gets sad. In this version of the narrative, there is no causality. Scenes do not build on top of one another.

Let’s try that again. She files for divorce. She tries to go about her life like normal, but the pain of the divorce keeps her from focusing at work and she botches up a huge project. She gets fired. She decides to live on her savings for a while and take a trip backpacking around Asia. She drives her dog to her mother’s, and takes off for Taiwan. In this version, each scene is a result of the previous one. Plot builds like a snowball rolling down a hillside. Momentum.

In a narrative that isn’t linear, links of causality still exist, but may be revealed out of order. Take Louis Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves, an epic multi-generational family saga that is anything but chronological. The novel starts with a murder and takes the whole 300-and-something pages to reveal the who and why. The glue holding the novel together is the slow revelation of cause and effect.

Causality doesn’t have to be obvious. At the beginning of stories, causality can be and often is tenuous. Establishment of new subplots can seem random at first. But as the story starts to gain momentum—like our accelerating snowball—causality has to increase, speeding toward the end, which, as we know, should be both surprising and inevitable.

Harry Potter and the 4-Part Story Structure

At this year’s AWP in Seattle, I attended two panels on structuring the realist literary novel. In genre and commercial fiction, the plot is often external. A murder mystery. A fantastic quest. A romantic pursuit. But in realist fiction, oftentimes the plot is internal, driven by the characters’ desires and wants.

Clearly there are no hard and fast rules to structure, but the panels and AWP argued that most successful literary novels follow a 3-part or 4-part guideline, intentionally or not. I’m going to analyze a general 4-part structure, but I’ve added my own take on the points of transition between them. To illustrate, I’m going to use the large story arc of all seven Harry Potter books. (Using a genre fic like HP helps to more clearly point out the differences between the parts.) HP spoilers, duh.

I’m also going to give examples from my novel-in-progress, but only for the first part, since giving the rest of the story away kind of defeats the purpose of trying to get it published at all.

Here’s a quick look at the flow of a general 4-part novel:

Inciting Incident

The event that begins the narrative, the start of our links of causality. When I took a workshop with Darin Strauss, he told us to imagine our stories as rocks perched at the edge of a cliff. The inciting incident, then, is a bird that flies by and hits the rock, sending it tumbling down the cliff. It is the moment of change. A stranger comes to town. A character decides to quit smoking. A car crash. The inciting incident is that cusp of change that ripples into the rest of the novel.

Harry Potter Inciting Incident – Harry gets a letter in the mail from Hogwarts.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies Inciting Incident – Lucky gets a call from her mother, asking her to move back to her hometown to take care of her ailing Grandmother.

Part I

The beginning, where characters are introduced and their desires are revealed to the reader. We get acquainted to the world of the story—its internal logic, its heroes, its villains. We are introduced to what’s at stake in the story.

Harry Potter Part I – The entire first 3 books, which invite us into the world. We experience and learn about the wizarding world as Harry does. We learn about Voldemort, about the war, about the inequalities and political struggles within the wizarding world.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies Part I – We are introduced to Lucky’s family, her marriage of convenience, and the tensions between her and her mother. We learn why she keeps her sexuality a secret, and realize the stakes involved.

100-page Problem

I’m calling this such because in a 300-page literary novel, the incident usually comes around the 70-100-page mark. This is the event that kicks off the rest of the novel, the point of transition between the beginning and the middle. So far, we’ve coasted on the effects of the inciting incident, but now we need something else to carry us through the rest of the novel. At this point, causality should increase, and the rest of the scenes have to feel like they’re building toward something. This is usually when the larger story arc kicks in. The 100-page Problem introduces the major obstacle between the protagonist and his or her desires.

Harry Potter 100-page Problem – Wormtail escapes capture at the end of Prizoner of Azkaban, setting in motion the larger story arc of Voldemort’s second rise to power.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies 100-page Problem – While living at home, Lucky rekindles romance with her childhood friend Nisha, but Nisha announces that she’s getting an arranged marriage. This is the major problem that Lucky must now solve. Just because it’s called the 100-page Problem doesn’t mean it needs to come at the end of the first third of the story. Nisha’s marriage is revealed early on in Part I, but it takes a while for the romance to begin, and even longer for Lucky to be truly invested in her relationship with Nisha.

Part II

The “seeking” phase, where the character seeks his or her desires and reacts to the problem posed by the 100-page Problem. A lot of fumbling around the obstacle, but without a clear idea on how to beat it.

Harry Potter Part II – The 4th and 5th books, in which Harry seeks the things he wants, but is still reacting to the world. Things keep happening TO him, and he reacts.

Turning Point

The incident that changes the course of events, or raises the stakes. Usually comes around the middle of the story, and transitions from Part II to Part III. This is the incident that causes the protagonist to start to act.

Harry Potter Turning Point – Sirius’s death. This is the first time in a long time that Harry loses a loved one to the war. It changes the stakes of the narrative, and signal’s Harry’s loss of innocence. After this, he goes after Voldemort and is more invested in defeating him, rather than just living a normal life.

Part III

The character stops seeking and starts acting to fulfill their desires in spite of the obstacle posed.

Harry Potter Part III – The 6th book, where Harry is mature and proactive about fighting Voldemort, even as he struggles to accept his role as the chosen one.

Twist

Transitions from the middle to the end, and reveals the final hurdle—the last obstacle that stands in the way of the character and her desires. This can be an actual plot twist, or just a bend in the road of the narrative that changes the perspective or stake—either way, it’s the last piece of the puzzle, the last bit of new information we need to reach the end.

Harry Potter Twist – Horcruxes. Now, Harry knows what he has to do, even though he doesn’t know how yet. This is the last piece of the puzzle. The mystery of Voldemort’s “immortality” is revealed.

Part IV

The ending, most of which is the build up to the climax. Stakes are high, tension is high, suspense is high. Resolution is imminent.

Harry Potter Part IV – The last book, when the death count keeps rising, fissures start to form between Harry and Ron, and they’re all racing against time to find and destroy the Horcruxes.

Climax

The moment of highest tension in the story. Fight or flight. Life or death. Or something much less dramatic, but where the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before. The character comes up against the obstacle for the final time.

Harry Potter Climax – The Battle of Hogwarts.

Dénouement

The falling action. In contemporary literature, the dénouement section keeps getting smaller and smaller. It wraps up the rest of the story, and eases the reader out of the narrative. Or throws the reader out. Whatever works.

Harry Potter Dénouement – Everything after the Battle of Hogwarts and before the Epilogue (though, like most fans, I subscribe to the EWE philosophy—Epilogue? What Epilogue?).

So does this mean structure always wins?

Of course not. But pick up your favorite novel, and try deconstructing it using the 3- or 4-part structure. Not all novels follow it, and there are many novels that don’t. But for the most part, structure is interesting in that it allows us to talk about the progress of the novel, and to plot out the plot. Let’s look at the fancy graphic again.

Does this mean I support outlining? Only after drafting it all out the first time. I’m a fan of wandering, of letting the story tell itself for a while, then going back and figuring out the shapes of these parts and the moments of transition between them.

Does this mean my novel falls into this structure? Not exactly. I wrote without outlining, without a structure in mind, so the story is largely unstructured. But I can point to the general moments of transition between different parts, and an awareness of structure is never bad.

Write Here Write Now

When I moved to Boston a year and a half ago, I left most of my support network and trusted writing community behind. For first few months I struggled to write anything at all, and then through a friend I found Toni Amato of Write Here Write Now. Toni invited me to the writing group he runs, where I met some great writers and found a safe space that fostered my writing in a way completely different than grad school.

In the group I produced new work, writing that was more raw, more emotionally truthful, and more beautiful than any I’d produced before. The group was a constant presence as I drafted and revised my novel. Toni met with me regularly to talk through my revisions, listen to me rant, and make me some great coffee that I perverted with copious amounts of milk and sugar. He pushed me to think bigger, to strive for the level of language I had before only managed to produce in spurts. He carefully edited my work. When I doubted myself, he fought for me and for the work I was trying to produce.

I have written from the margins all my life. I’ve always had to explain my work, clutter it with marginalia. In Toni I found someone who not only understood my characters, but also loved them like I did.

And he did all this for free.

Toni works on a pay-what-you-can basis, and when you’re working with queer and marginalized writers, this often means a lot of pro bono work. I gave what I could, but I can’t even begin to pay him what he deserves for the help he gave me and my writing.

If you can, please donate to Write Here Write Now. I will never forget the comfort and liberation of walking into that first writing workshop. Toni offered me a place to rest my weary soul, and he helped me make my book into something I never dreamed I had the talent to write. He does amazing and important work in the community. If you have the means to contribute, please do.

Finally a Custom Website

Finally, finally, finally. A new website design, complete with twitter and instagram feeds. Still working out some kinks, but for the most part, I’m pretty darn happy with it.

If you aren’t aware (I don’t think most people who know me fall into this category), I’ve been finishing up revisions on a novel, and it’s so, so close. To celebrate, I’m going to be blogging more about my writing process, and my journey writing my very first book. Follow me on my book adventure.

Next week: my contribution to the writing process blog tour!

Also, if you’d like a writer website like this, let me know!

Reader’s Choice Contest at PhoneFiction

Go read the entries. My essays are up for voting:

“SR-9″
“Mirrors Like Silence”
“Test Group 4: Womanhood and Other Failures”

Excerpt from Marriage of a Thousand Lies

An excerpt from my unpublished novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies was published in The Aerogram.

Reading at Lambda Writing Retreat

I read a selection from my novel in progress, Marriage of a Thousands Lies. Go watch the rest of the readings from the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2013 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.

HuffPost Live

I was on HuffPost Live to talk about Germany’s third gender option on birth certificates.