Ways of Maintaining Suspense

• Ticking clock/deadline
• Convergence – multiple pov characters and the reader’s knowledge that when two of them get together, something bad will happen
• Planet/damsel in distress
• Revelation of mysteries/connections/relationships
• Cost – the hero will have to pay something in order to find something out
• Weakness of character which the character will have to find out

Don’t use just one of these things. Keep your reader turning pages.

The richer your cake the better, but it’s still got to look like cake at the end. – Walter

Examples: Dorothy Sayers, who uses many red herrings and reveals; The Floating Admiral; the note at the beginning of Gaudy Night.

Raising Stakes and Reveals

Raising the stakes, also known as escalation, works at both micro and macro level. For example, in “Jumping Jack Flash,” we start with a small favor which is low stakes, and then things start escalating.

Raising the stakes serves to draw the reader in. A personal investment can get larger, or an interest, or an interest can become an obsession. Or a character can find out things about him or herself.

Examples:

• Pygmalion – not just a ball at the end, but must fool a language expert.
• The person who could tell you needed information is missing or dead.
• The walls of the trash compactor start closing in during Star Wars.
• The Millennium Falcon breaks down.

Escalation can occur by making the danger get closer as well as larger. For example, the Xeroxing scene in “The Nasty Girl”, in which she is Xeroxing papers while someone gets closer and closer to catching her, so we hear the slow grind and whir of the machine as the other person approaches and the tension gets higher and higher.

You can also raise the stakes by inserting a deadline. Things like weddings and courtroom scenes have built-in deadlines. These deadlines can be real or artificial, but artificial deadlines usually occur in comedies. Examples of deadlines: “Around the World in 80 Days”, “The Batchelor”, in which he must get married by a deadline in order to receive his inheritance.

Reversals occur when an action happens that sends the plot in a completely different direction. They change the question that the reader is asking. Reversals almost always raise the stakes. You can have double and triple reversals as well as reversals that take you off guard and set up the next reversal. The dinner scene in “Hello Dolly” is a study in one reversal after another.

J. R. R. Tolkein is the master of reversals that do something that is simultaneously good and bad. Bad events with a good consequence and vice versa. Examples include Gollum’s snatching the ring, going through the forest and getting attacked by Old Man Willow but escaping the Barrow-Wights, Eowyn’s almost death and subsequent meeting Faramir.

Reversals do not have to be bad. The Red Sea parting is a reversal, as are all miracles.

Reversals can occur at any point of the story. If they occur in the beginning, it’s part of the set-up. They most commonly occur at the end, as in the stories of O. Henry and Saki.

One way to plot raising the stakes and reversals is to make a smallest to the greatest chart. Hitchcock’s “The Birds” is a study in escalation.

Plot Devices

(This is not an exhaustive list.)

• Doubling – have another character whose story mirrors and comments on the main character’s story. For example, Laertes and Fortinbras in Hamlet.
• Conflict
• Backstory – helps you avoid one damn thing after another. For example, the two stories in Nova.
• Sidestory – a subplot or “B” story, which parallels and comments on the main story. Example: almost every Buffy episode. A counterarc for the arc, or perhaps some minor mystery.
• Foreshadowing – Nova is full of foreshadowing.
• Red herring – Send a character off on a wild goose chase and distract the reader from what you should be thinking about. Could solve some side problem.
• Deleted affair – deliberately not telling the reader something they want to know. For example, in Chinatown, revelations are withheld, but inform everything. Don’t make this frustrating, and it also can’t be the Big Secret.
• Raising the stakes
• Reveals – anagnorisis. Foreground action. Something that has previously been hidden and which changes everything about the story. Example: “Luke, I am your father” in Star Wars.
• Literalize the metaphor – a classic fantasy and science fiction device
• Pyrrhic victory – A combination of triumph and tragedy. Example: nova.
• Narrative hook – Can be at the beginning of end of a chapter.
• Frame story or framing device – Example: the cafeteria scene in Pulp Fiction.
• Reversal – peripateia. Example: The Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams has four reversals in the last chapter.

Rhetorical Devices

• Flashback – Usually takes the form of a flashback to backstory.
• Cliffhanger – Old fashioned, but enjoyable. Example: Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• Irony
• Parody
• Pastiche
• Unreliable narrator – Example: The Magus by John Fowles.
• Symbolism
• Inclue-ing – Smooth and graceful exposition. Example: Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. While the protagonist is repairing the spacesuit, we find out everything about its mechanisms that we will need later when he's on the Moon.
• Infodump
• Defamiliarization – Taking something familiar and making it strange.
• Chekhov’s gun

An advanced technique often practiced by Hemingway is to take out every unnecessary thing and one necessary one. Examples: the abortion in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the shellshock in “Great Big Twohearted River”. Similar examples include Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, and Passage to India by E.M. Forster.

Walter on Plots

Plots are like Musical Movements

This is the Sean Stewart description of plotting: the symphonic theory of the novel. You can’t have fortissimo all the way.

1. First movement is the sonata. Introduce the theme and then a variation on the theme in a second key, and then variations that blend the two.
2. The second movement is usually slow, passionate, emotional. Very different than the first movement.
3. The third movement is a lively scherzo or minuet.
4. The fourth movement is a new theme that blends with the rest and then finishes with a boom! Themes appear and reappear here.

Types of Stories/Narratives

1. The story of resolution, in which there is a problem, then attempts to resolve it, then either the failure or success of those attempts. Example: Nova by Samuel Delany.
2. The story of revelation, in which the character must discover something, often about themselves. Examples: stories by James Joyce, H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Shadow over Innsmoth", Bob Shaw's“The Light of Other Days”.
3. The story of character, in which the central character is put under pressure in order to show the reader what s/he is like. Example: “Lot” by Ward Moore.
4. The story of paralysis, in which a passive character is not in control. This is usually not seen in genre fiction.
5. Trick endings, which used to be a staple of science fiction.
6. The story of decision, in which a character must make a decision. The trick is to surprise the reader with the result.
7. The story of explanation, in which a character is puzzled until they figure the explanation out. Example: stories where the ending turns out to be “We are all living in a jar of Tang”.
8. The mystery story, where a character must find out something that is hidden.

Stories can fit into multiple categories – you can blend and mix these as the themes of one’s story.

Some additional types of plots:

• The “one damn thing after another” type story.
• Deliberately unplotted, a technique which is for experts only. Examples: The English Patient (book, not film); Course of the Heart by M.J. Harrison.
• An idea with variations. Examples: Heinlein’s juvenilia, particularly The Puppet Masters.

Avoid plot coupon stories: “First, get the Spear of Wanking, then the Cup of Congratulation, then travel to the Mountains of Metaphor for the Simile of Smiting." In a quest story, each stage changes the hero. You have to bring something to the formula that makes it unpredictable.

Ways of Plotting

• The Daniel Abraham method – he sets a word limit, figures out 14 chapters, in which each chapter is four scenes of 1500 words each.
• The Stephen Brust method – he doesn’t know what he’ll write, just starts and is charming and entertaining while he writes towards a big scene in the middle. If something is introduced in chapter three, it gets worked out three chapters from the end.
• The Walter Jon Williams method – Like a multi-stage rocket or multi-act play, with one huge reversal in each stage. Work out the three or four big scenes in each stage and write towards those. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary, with the biggest at the end.

Mickey Spillane example with a reversal in the last word.

One reason to have multiple people on stage is because that creates many, many options. (Connie).

Plot whole-heartedly – “If you’re going to bump it, thump it when you bump it.” (Gypsy)

Get really close to characters and they will behave in the ways they should.

I'm going to stretch out the notes in order to facilitate valuable discussion. ;) This is from a lecture by Connie.

What is Plotting?

            Plotting is more than the stuff that happens in a story; it’s also the arrangement, the order of telling stuff. It involves what you do and don’t choose to tell, the choice of narrator, and where the story starts and ends.

            Story and plot are not the same thing. The plot can start well into the story. People usually start their story too early, rather than too late. You want to start the story when the problem has become a crisis. Begin it in media res. In some stories, this won’t work. Try starting and then going back the smallest amount of distance that you can. You can have a set-up but it must be as short as possible.

Kinds of Plots

1. Plots where the question is “What happens next?’. This is the soap opera style, since soap operas are pure plot.
2. Plots where the question is “What’s going on here?” In this type, we have unexplained things that we or a character must figure out. The readers may not what’s going on while characters do not. Examples include the Truman Show (readers know while character does not) and Memento (neither character nor viewer know what’s happening).
3. Plots where the question is “What happened in the past to bring this situation about?” All mysteries are in this category.

The best plots involve all three kinds of plotting. Example: Hamlet.

In all plots, the most critical thing is movement and change. The stability that is restored at the end is never the stability one starts with.

Things seldom happen in a straight line. The plot is a twisty road, one that circles back on itself and is very windy but still gets to its destination, despite the operation of Murphy’s Law in full swing along the way. What was wanted sometimes changes along the way.

Plots are about causality; they’re like dominoes. Things should lead into each other – “this so that, but then” rather than “this and this and then this”. The first event can be small, but events must be connected to each other. 

(And yeah, I have some posts to catch up on still that I was tagged for, but I thought I'd go ahead and start putting those notes up. I also have a LOT of e-mail and things I've procrastinated on to catch up on as well.  Just cleared 300 e-mails out of my Armageddon account, UGH

There was a small kerfuffle with my ticket and some question as to whether or not I'd be spending the night in Salt Lake City. But there was a chance at an earlier flight right as I got there, so I hopped the earlier plane and got to SLC faster than the majority of the other people on the same overbooked flight and managed to secure a seat. Thank you, gods of travel! And thank you, kelly_yoyo and baddolly, for being such delightful travel companions.

Now I'm transcribing the sixty pages (holy cow!) of notes from the workshop, doing some catching up on e-mail and TV and dipping into Harry Potter at intervals. It's very nice to be back.

When I land in Seattle, we're going to order a Pagliacci's Salmon Primo pizza from the airport and pick it up on the way home. I'm getting pizza scurvy, which is caused by a lack of melted cheese in one's diet.

It's the traditional low point, but yesterday was counteracted with cake!, both chocolate and carrot, and a splash of champagne, to celebrate kelly_yoyo's birthday, thanks to baddolly. (LJ is misbehaving and not letting me add those as usernames but they are!) And afterwards there was....more critting.