Announcement, plus the Big Three again

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Happy almost-Halloween! For those of you who are going to be in Minneapolis between January 17 and February 2, 2025, I have an announcement—The Phoenix Theater (https://www.phoenixtheatermpls.org/)  here is doing a production of Dealing with Dragons during that time. Tickets available at the link above.  I love live theater, and I am really looking forward to seeing what they do with it, as I haven’t been involved or seen the script or anything. Now for the actual blog post.

Periodically, I find it useful to review some of the writing basics—things most writers have figured out and incorporated in their work—because after a while, it’s easy for the habit to wear off. Especially when it’s being presented all over as some sort of absolute writing rule, and the writer has discovered that it isn’t that simple. (An example is the “don’t ever use adverbs because you should be able to say what you want without them” rule. “The band played” is not the same as “The band played badly,” and I cannot think of a shorter way to get the correct meaning across.)

Which brings me back to The Big Three. It’s one of the first pieces of writing advice I internalized, at a how-to-write panel at my first convention, and I thought it was time to revisit it.

As I learned it, the idea goes something like this:

In any book or story, there are three main things a scene can do. 1) It can advance the plot. 2) It can deepen the characterization. 3) It can fill in setting and backstory. A scene that does none of these things does not belong in the book.

A scene that does only one may be necessary at times, but it’s not ideal. Usually, the writer can improve it by getting it to do more than one thing. A scene that does two of the three things is a good, solid scene. It’s a keeper. A scene that does all three things is golden.

It took me a while to figure out how to tell what a given scene was doing. Once I did, I felt extremely silly, because it is ridiculously simple. You take the scene out, and see what necessary and important links in the story are suddenly missing.

I learned this on a cellular level when I was editing my third novel, Talking to Dragons. An editor was interested, but wanted me to cut almost 20,000 words to get it within the then-upper-limit for word count on that type of kid’s book. I started by looking for scenes I could cut, as that seemed like the quickest and easiest way to shrink it by 20,000 words.

I quickly discovered that every time I cut an entire scene, something didn’t make sense. Without this one, the friendship between the two central characters was sudden and inexplicable. Without that one, the little dragon had no reason for avoiding wizards. Without this other one, a huge chunk of the plot fell out, and not in a good way. I eventually resorted to cutting paragraphs, sentences, and phrases, though I never did get anywhere near removing 20,000 words.

Since then, I’ve seen various hierarchies that try to link these three basic story elements with things like theme, or atmosphere, or structure. To me, those aren’t very helpful. Structure is about how a story is told. Theme is about what the story tries to say, sort of like the morals of Aesop’s fables. Atmosphere is an emergent property of style. None of them are as fundamental to the story itself as the Big Three—plot, characterization, setting-and-backstory.

The Big Three are also the things that almost all readers complain about when they’re trying to explain why they don’t like a particular story. “The characters don’t work.” “The plot is full of holes.” “The book was pretty realistic until a tsunami wiped out Iowa City.”

Plot, characters, and setting/backstory have to work in the world of the story. If the story is supposed to be real-world, the writer can’t have a tsunami in Iowa, because Iowa is over 900 miles from the coast and most readers are going interpret that as a major mistake. However, if the writer is doing an alternate universe or future setting, they can provide backstory earlier in the story explaining the massive earthquake, tectonic shift, and/or sea level rise that put Iowa City on a coastline. Once that’s established most readers won’t complain about the tsunami.

Surreal, fantastical, or dreamlike settings let writers get away with playing cards and chess pieces that talk and move around like people, or dormice sleeping in teapots, or a talking cat that slowly disappears, leaving only its grin behind, none of which would work in a strictly realistic tale. Characters, too, need to behave consistently with the way they’ve been shown in the story, or if they don’t, it has to be a big deal with an eventual explanation. Plot holes and twists need a certain amount of planting, so that they don’t come out of nowhere.

The Big Three don’t have to be equally important to a story, and they certainly don’t have to be given equal word count in a scene, a chapter, or even over the whole novel. Writers can and do (and should) play to their strengths. If you’re especially good at characterization, lean into it. Find a plot that revolves around your characters’ psyche—perhaps the protagonist coming to terms with a childhood trauma, or recovering from one that’s more recent, or coping with something that disrupts their self-identity. If you’re good at plot, lean into that with stories that favor action or puzzle-solving. If your strength is setting, come up with strange, fascinating places that your characters can discover as they chase their plot through the place.

And if one is uncertain about what one’s strengths are, well, look at what you’ve written and, for each scene, write out what it does in bullet-points. “Establishes run-down neighborhood.” “Introduces Paul, and that Jane instantly dislikes him.” “Sets up that someone is following them.”  Then sort the bullet-points into columns, one for each of the Big Three. The column that’s longest is the one that you, personally, gravitate toward.