Fiction Plotting 3/4

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Fiction Plotting 3/4

By: PEAbresch

BookMarc  –  Plotting Fiction

    Part 3/4

In talking about plot in part one and two, we mentioned

the need to face and overcome obstacles to build reader

interest, and need for these obstacles to be logical.

For our example, let’s not start with a preconceived

need–like joining meeting a friend at the top of a

mountain. Rather, instead, in the opening lets create a need

that will require our protagonist, Protag, to climb the

mountain, just to show another way of doing it. This, BTW, is

one way to handle thrillers, take an ordinary person and put

them in an extraordinary situation and see how s/he plays the

hand. So, remembering we said about hopping into a Humvee and

plowing straight to the top is bo-oringgg, lets begin.

    Objective: climbing Plot-line Mountain.

    Starting point: the base of the mountain.

Our hero, Protag, is out for a Sunday drive in the

wilderness. He crosses a bridge on his planed drive around

Plot-line mountain, but jams on the brakes as the road is

blocked by logs. Then an explosion blows away the bridge

behind. And bullets start zinging off the Humvee’s

downhill fenders. See folks, a casual afternoon has turned

into what’s called, in Cliché City, a situation.

Protag has a sudden need to get the heck out of there by the

only way open to him, over the mountain, and maybe needs a

restroom as well.

Protag slams the Humvee into gear, yanks the wheel and

mashes the pedal, spraying gravel as he bounds over rocks and

humps and bumps, hell-bent on a yo-yo for the summit. A few

hundred feet up, out of rifle range, he finds an old logging

road and eases along it with birds singing in filigree

sunlight.  All is right with the world.  Oh yawn.

Then Protag barrels around a curve and over a crest hiding

a deep wash, and the Humvee soars like a lead eagle. It

mashes nose-down into the gulch, and Protag, neglecting to

wear a seatbelt, no doubt earning him a traffic citation,

crashes against the windshield. The birds now sing inside his

head, and the Humvee rolls downhill. Backwards. Toward a

sheer drop-off. And the brakes no longer work. Oh, and the

door won’t open. On either side. Protag hops in the

back and by punching and kicking and cursing and--when all

else fails--praying, breaks open the tailgate. He dives out

pancake-flat into a bed of thorns. The Humvee scrunches over

him and plunges off the cliff. And we listen with Protag,

dear writers, and wait, wait, and wait. A crunch of metal

meeting stone, followed by an explosion, disturbs the idyllic

day. A black cloud rides on an updraft to waft away in a

gentle breeze.  Ssssson-ofagun.  Is this too obvious?

Protag climbs back up to the logging road on the other

side of the gulch. Now the grade is easy again. A lazy

zephyr drys the sweat on his brow, a chipmunk complains at his

passage, and the scent of pine needles fills his nostrils.

The sun is warm on his back. The reader’s eyes start to

glaze.

When Protag checks out the view from a rock overlook, tiny

puffs blossom at his feet, sprouting sprays of stone shards.

Say what? A rifle crack echos in the mountain air. And

again. Holy excrement--or whatever--someone is shooting at

him. Protag dives for cover and lands in a rocky wash,

bashing his knee. Oh darn. And breaking his elbow. Oh

pshaw. And loose stones send him sliding down an escalator to

hell.  Egad gazooks.

Weeeell, you get the picture. All of this up and down is

to get our readers to buy deeper and deeper into Protag's

future, to grit their teeth in determination to hang with him

till journey's end. Compare this to a Humvee driving up

to the top in third gear.

Also notice that these setbacks are not equal in

intensity. Or shouldn't be. At the outset there's

a blast of guns and he quickly and easily gets out of danger.

When he plows into the gulch and starts rolling for the drop

off into oblivion, things become rather more stimulating. But

once he is out of vehicle, the climb up the gulch to the trail

is mainly one of exertion rather than danger. And finally

when he is on the overlook and someone starts shooting at him,

he easily dives out of the way, but the significance is that

whoever shot at him at the bottom, is still around ready to

take him out. Then landing on the loose stones and slipping

down the hill presents another level of anxiety, Protag

against the mountain.

If the intensity of our obstacles is always the same, it

becomes obvious and therefore intrusive, and anything

intrusive yanks us out of the story. So we need to plan our

obstacles so they vary in intensity. It should be pointed out

that I've used a lot of exaggeration–oh

really–just to give the example. For instance, if your

initial incident has too many things piling up again Protag,

it becomes obvious. And I think it's worth repeating,

when any technique becomes obvious it is intrusive, and

intrusive yanks the reader out of the story.

One other thing we need to notice. Occasionally things

happen in our hero's favor. Riding along on the easy

road, and then walking on it after wrecking the Humvee. We

could have had one bad thing happen after another, the ride up

toward the trail and falling into the gulch and climbing up to

an outcropping and getting shot at. I have read books like

this, piling one obstacle relentlessly upon another, but I

believe this brings about reader fatigue. It gets to be so

much that it doesn't jive with what we would expect from

real world events. Remember what we just said about a device

becoming obvious. So we want to bring some relief into it and

have things sometimes go easy for our hero, or at lest appear

so.

The mountain is a metaphor for all plots. It is not the

story, but an example of how to build our plot line before or

as we write our story. As we mentioned earlier, Protag must

continually face downturns and overcome them, growing stronger

each time, mentally if not physically, till at last he’s

ready for the big finale, the mountain-top climax we have

targeted from the beginning.

But before that, in BookMarc #12, we have one more thing

to do before the denouement, the final outcome.

    How's this for leaving you in suspense?

August 23, 2014

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Comments

Will

Peter E. Abresch is the author of Easy Reading Writing, which you can get from Amazon.com (or the first link below). But don't miss out on Mr. Abresch's other great writing goodies which can be found by pasting the following links into your browser:

http://blog.easyreadingwriting.com/
http://www.elder...

November 5, 2014
·

alice17

It says that there are four parts, but I only see three. Anybody seen part 4?

November 5, 2014
·

booboo17

@alice17 - try going to the links in the first comment.

November 6, 2014
·

Fiction Plotting 3/4

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