Dilemma…

The progressive complications are focused on one thing… getting the main character to make a decision. But, in order to make a decision, there has to be a dilemma. They can make the “right” choice… or the “wrong” choice. That will determine what happens with the rest of the story, but there has to be a dilemma. Good v Evil, Love v Hate…

Or, there can be something else. There can be a choice between the lesser of two evils. Or, there can be two good options that are irreconcilable. The dilemma may be external… should the main character shoot one person or the other? Or it could be internal. Should the MC break his own moral code in order to save the day?

The dilemma has to be striking. there is a clear choice that HAS to be made. The MC can’t do both. One or the other.

Climax…

In essence, the climax is the point of the whole story. It’s what matters. The Main Character will be tested. They will pass or they will fail. Love may flourish. Regardless, we have reached the peak of the action.

Love may triumph over hate. Life may win over death, or something that’s worse than death. Good may win out over evil. The problems aren’t all solved in one easy boom, but the light shines through the darkness. A way through can be glimpsed. All is no longer lost.

There may be several plots that need climaxes in a single story. Sometimes, there may be completely separate events that climax at once… or they may need individual climactic scenes. But, each must be wrapped up in order for the story to be complete.

Denouement…

That’s a wrap. Literally. Is it a wedding or a funeral? Or both? The solutions should be wrapped up with a bow, giving the reader their final glimpse into the life of the characters, at least until next time.

This might be done in one or two scenes. Maybe just one. But it gives the reader a little satisfaction… a little time to come off the high of the climax… to moment to reflect on the story or perhaps its meaning.

Maybe it includes the wrap-up of a sub-plot. Or two. If there is a romantic sub-plot for the story, we could have the culmination.

I have linked a few of my books in here… and even a short story. Sometimes I think I have hit really well on some of these elements. Other times, maybe not as much. But, I hope to hit all of the points on the next one I’m writing. And I think there will be edits to the couple of stories I have in the pipeline. Novel writing is a craft, and as such, I think I’ll always have room for improvement.

Exposition…

The “Exposition” starts the story. It sets the place and introduces us to the characters. It sets a tone for the story. Some also call it the “hook” for the story. The idea is to lure in the reader and give them a desire to keep following the story. Building relationships with the characters as we create an enjoyable world.

It can be several scenes or it can just be part of a scene. Some of the decision regarding the length may be determined by the overall length of the work. A 2,000 word short story will have different needs than a 90,000 word novel. I have spent a couple hundred words setting up the story, and as many as several thousand.

But, as we are setting up our story, we should NOT just list off characters and describe the world. We need to tell a story. Oddly, the same six elements are needed to the scene or scenes we are building out as our exposition.

This is why I wish I were better at plotting as opposed to pantsing my stories. And that it why I am working hard to design my next story. And partially why I am writing this series…

Inciting Incident…

If there is a story, something has to happen. And that something will start the ball rolling. You can’t skip it. A story without an inciting incident is boring.

We were sitting on the couch watching TV. Nothing happened. The end.

That just sucks as stories go. Who wants to watch, read about or listen to someone NOT doing anything. Nobody.

We were sitting on the couch, watching TV as we usually did. It was a normal night until…

That has tension. Something is happening in the story. We don’t know what it will be yet, but there will be something. There might be a car wreck outside or there could be an explosion. A long lost love of one of our characters may show up… or a long lost grudge may resurface. Regardless, it will make the rest of the story happen.

Of course, there are a few rules for the inciting incident, as well. It must: be early in the story, an interruption to the characters normal life, out of the protagonist’s control, life-changing, and it must be urgent.

It will likely only take a single scene to stage the event. It isn’t a series of cascading events. It is a moment. It is the beginning of the ball roll. It is immediate and something that REQUIRES the main characters attention. It isn’t a can that can be kicked down the road.

Rising Actions/Progressive Complications…

Here is where the dominos can start to fall. The inciting incident leads to more and more problems. Perhaps they seem overwhelming to the main character. Perhaps they are daunting. The problem gets deeper and deeper for MC. Perhaps these aren’t as drastic as the inciting incident, and they may also not be as immediate.

But there is a very important purpose of this plot element. The problems facing the main character become increasingly focused on forcing him or her to make a decision. Which will be covered in part 4…

Or maybe it is more like a prisoner that can’t get outside.

Several times in the last few days I have had interactions on FaceBook with people on my friends list. They aren’t seeing any of my posts about writing. If I post something political, it is everywhere. Mention a book, invisible.

Perhaps it is the algorithm looking for conflict to create engagement. Or maybe it is related to the 50 ads I get from FaceBook each day offering me more eyes on my posts starting at $5 a day.

Either way… I have become invisible. And without more marketing, my books won’t be read. It’s frustrating. Really frustrating. The flip side of the coin is that there are a million different marketing paths I can take. But… most of them suck. All of them promise massive sales and engagement, but there is always a little hitch.

Regardless, I either have to find a way to break out, or just accept that actually selling books is too far fetched. Personally, I think stealing the spoon from the prison food line and trying to dig under the wall is a lot more attractive than giving up. But the question remains… Will I just dig myself into a different prison?

Previously, I have not managed to participate in NaNoWriMo. My timing has been a little off. Each time I had just completed a book going into November, or had one that was mostly written. This year, I’m going to try to do coordinate myself with the event enough to write a book that month. For me, the goal is about 100,000 words, but that is because of the genre I write in and my desire to do a little cutting in the editing process.

So, in the last installment, we talked about creating a story arc from your idea, and the primary elements you needed to have. Here is a link if you haven’t read it yet. This time, we are going to talk about your characters, as well as organizing other things in your story.

There are probably as many ways to organize story elements as there are authors. Some go old school and pin items to the wall in front of their workspace. Others may use post-it notes. I write in the living room of my house, so those don’t work for me. I also have intricate timelines in some of my books… in fact, some of my timelines intersect in other books. So I have to track those as well.

The first thing I do as I begin to write is create a “notebook” in Evernote. There are other note-taking programs or apps that likely work as well… maybe even better… but this is what I use. Then, I begin populating the notebook with the details that I need to track.

Characters… As I create a character that will appear more than a time or two, I try to build a dossier for them. I grab a picture from the web… it’s just for me… so that I can look at them. I describe them… physical characteristics, as well as personality. Even if it will change through the story, I need a baseline. I also add significant events… maybe a marriage or divorce, loss of parents. Often, I will create a backstory for them. At a glance in their dossier, I can refresh myself on their character so that I don’t unwittingly change them.

Places… I do the same thing. For a house, I have been known to grab a Pintrest pics of an interesting house, business or other location and build up from there. I will add descriptions as needed as well. A location can be just as important as a character in that regard.

Because I’m me, I also add cars to some of my characters. If they drive something unique or special, I may include a file just for the vehicle.

Timelines can be pretty loose or very specific.

In the Dixon-Prince series, I use dates. So, I will check the calendars for a specific year, and use the date. I track those dates in a master Excel Spreadsheet for the series. I enter the date, and what happened then. Sometimes it’s backdating, such as in a character’s backstory. I include birthdays and anniversaries in those dates as well. I keep them organized by date for future reference. That is in addition to having special dates noted in character dossiers.

In Triple Cross, I included day and month in the book, but not year. I did track the year, but it was as a note in the margin for my purposes. That helped when I was “going back twelve years” and had to keep the timeline straight. Kids age, and since there were kids being born and growing up, I couldn’t just wing it on the times. The character dossiers have birthdays and other similar information, just like the Dixon-Prince books, they just aren’t completely identified.

Lies and Omissions is a little more open on dates. We have a start time, but aside from me identifying it as “the early 1980s” in the preface, there are no specific dates given. Oddly, I found that harder than either of the other ways to write. It gave me the most freedom to break up into chapters, but I felt the need to meticulously track the dates. I started out not doing that, but quickly saw the error of my ways. Again, character dossiers had important dates, and there were margin notes for when each action took place.

Honestly, each system presents challenges and opportunities. For the Dixon-Prince books in the future, I will continue with the same regimen, but for other books I likely won’t. It is easier, but limits the ability to break the action up into chapters. For example, in Unknown Caller (Dixon Prince 6) I had a flashback in the middle of a day. Luckily, it was an long and action-packed day, so I was able to easily cover three chapters (early in the day, flashback, late in the day). But that is seldom the case.

And the completely wide open arrangement I used in Lies and Omissions was hardest to write, and more importantly, to track accurately. I didn’t start with all of the dates recorded, so I had to build that out after writing the first draft. And I figured out that I had a lot of impossible timelines that needed to be cleaned up. Perhaps nobody would have figured it out, but I think it would have shown through as sloppy.