A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty):
Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.”
Me: “Sounds familiar.”
Writer (despairing): “How do you decide what comes next?”
Me (frowning slightly): “That’s not really your problem yet.”
Writer: “Huh?”
Me: “You can’t make a decision until you have something to decide. Right now, you have nothing.”
Writer (wails): “So what do I do?”
Me: “Make stuff up. Then you decide whether it’s useful, because you’ll have something to decide about.”
At which point I got a blank look, but after a bit more discussion (OK, a couple of hours worth), she did get things back on track. The problem was that the writer was looking too far ahead. She was trying to think about the next scene, the next chapter, what the next exciting bit was going to be, how to get her characters from the bottom of the ravine to the triumphant climax of the novel. What she wasn’t thinking about was the very next step.
Getting to that step can be a little trickier than it sounds (which is why it took a couple of hours). First, you have to be clear about where the characters are. Where is their location? What do they know (or think they know) at this exact point in the story? And most important of all, what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?
What the characters think they need to accomplish right now – whether it’s rescue someone from the villain’s dungeon, or head to the cafe for a well-deserved cup of coffee after having decimated the wolf pack that was (they think) eating the sheep – will play a large part in determining the next step they take, and what direction they take it in. If they want to rescue a companion from a dungeon, the cautious one will want to plan a rescue mission and then get some supplies, while the reckless one may grab a musket and head for the lockup, but whatever they pick as the very next thing to do, it will take them in the direction of the dungeon, not in the direction of the coffee shop.
Sometimes there are multiple ways in which the characters can proceed. If they have just realized that the villain is up to something, and that they need to find out what, they may spend some time discussing the best way to find out, or they may go running off instantly in a variety of possible directions. Once the writer recognizes this, the first step is to figure out what the likely possibilities are.
Then one has something to decide: would these particular, individual characters, in this particular situation, do A, or B? If they need to find something out, will they stay in the ravine and plan for a few hours, dash back to town as a group to check the local gossip sheet, or send one of their number off to the oracle while the others compile lists of things to investigate and people to question?
Having made this first decision – what is the next step, or the next several steps, that the characters are going to take to try to do what they need to do – one has a second thing to decide: whether it is interesting and relevant enough to show in detail, or whether one would be better off skimming lightly past all the planning and dashing around, and going straight to the meeting three days later when they tell each other what they’ve found and realize, to their horror, that things are much worse than they thought.
The second decision is more complex, because it’s not only a decision about whether the next few things your characters choose to do are interesting and relevant; it’s also a decision about whether the writer can or should try to make them more interesting by throwing in something unexpected or having something go totally wrong. A trip to the library to check the microfiche of the 1851 newspapers that haven’t been digitized yet may not rate a full-blown scene if that’s all that happens, and sometimes what the writer wants is to say “Three days later, they got together and Gerald told them what he’d found.”
Sometimes, though, the trip to the library is the perfect opportunity for the secondary villain to send a thug after Gerald to collect that gambling debt, or for an unexpected car accident, or a fire at the library, or an apparently unrelated attack by mutant ninjas on the library. So the writer has to decide: is this worth making into a scene on its own, and if not, do I add something to make it something worth showing? Or would that be too distracting? What does it do to the pace and the plot development and the characterization if I show or don’t show the scene – and which is more effective for the story I want to tell?
My writer friend was trying to start by knowing about the gambling and the fire and the ninjas, before she even knew that the characters were going to send Gerald to the library. What she really needed was to back up, slow down, and think about what her characters needed to do next, one tiny step at a time. (And not just the characters in the ravine – the villain wasn’t just sitting around twiddling his thumbs and waiting for the heroes to show up and thwart him, after all.)
Too true! One thing I see a lot of writers doing is having events happen to their characters, rather than having the characters act, which makes things happen. To act or be acted upon. A story is more interesting when there are decisions that lead to consequences.
I often go flat after the decision has been made, when the prose turns to lead.
At which point, I take the decision and turn it on its head, so the opposite happens.
I hadn’t really thought about how much the characters deciding their next step affects the action. Thanks.
Sometimes I have to let the characters slog out of the ravine in their own way, and only then decide between:
1) Wow, that got us all out of the hole, all right!
and
2) With one day’s slog and an unfortunate incident with a chicken, Jack was free. After he got out of the hole…
3) [Shouts up from the bottom of the hole where my characters have left me]: Hold on there, guys, you ain’t gonna have done that at all!
The third happens surprisingly infrequently, all things considered, when I actually grit my teeth and commit the slogging. But I’ve found it never pays me to forget the option.
This was really helpful! Thanks! I’m in the process of finshing/editing my latest NaNoWriMo novella, and in some parts, the writing is so dry and flat that it’s hardly writing! Now I realize that I was spending way too much time on the not-so-important “library scenes”, rather than having the characters get to the decisions. My characters in this story have an annoying tendency to sit around and talk FOREVER about NOTHING.
*nods to Gray’s #3* The ability to write step-by-step — even knowing it’s likely to be edited out later — can sometimes get one through a messy place. (My take: if the subconscious is freezing up on the transition, then walk it through one step at a time and see what exactly the subconscious thinks needs to be learned about the character during that transition. Even if it’s axed, the character bits are going to remain in the author’s mind.) But then, I’m one of those people who finds out the most about characters (and often their worlds) by winding up the emulation in my head and letting it patter around and bounce off other emulations.
Pat,
the next time you sneak into my home and look at the files on my computer, please say ‘hi’ and I’ll off you a cup of tea.
what is it that they think they need to accomplish next?
How did you know that I needed exactly this? I got stuck in the ‘trying to force the characters to do things they didn’t do’ manner which at least I’ve learnt to recognise. *I* want my current protag to find out how her friend died. *She* wants to protect her friend’s children (all four of them) from their unpleasant relatives. She has no interest in going around to the temples and trying to view the body; She would like to say good-bye, but she expects there o be a proper funeral, with the body laid out at the temple.
It doesn’t matter what *I* want her to do. She ain’t doin’ it. So I backed up; let her do what she wanted to do, let her tell me what *she* is interested in, and it turns out not to be all that useful to the plot I had envisioned.
Ah well. Maybe I can get another protagonist to peek at the body?
*Offer*. Damn you, autocorrect.
Oh, it’s my first time here at the blog… And I just wanted to say, I try to write things cause I usually start imagining stories while I’m reading and want to put them into words, but when i get the pen my mind just goes blank ><
Thinking about it now, though, I see what happens to me is exactly what happened to this writer – I was so excited to get to the next part I didn’t quite know what was happening at the moment.
Oh, I’m looking forward the third book from Frontier Magic *-*!
This is exactly where I’m at right now. And I agree with you Mary, I’ve made the decision and the scene is falling flat.
But I’m going to write through it then when I go back I’ll fix the emotional flatness. This first time through I’m getting the plot right.
However, it’s very frustrating and slow going…