Authors: Jerry Cleaver
Note that the want does not always express itself first. It's always there, but not visible until it is denied or thwarted, as in
Hamlet when
his father's ghost appears or in my Larry scene when I see my wife kissing Larry. Hamlet was not wishing,
I hope Dad doesn't show up and order me to avenge his death.
Nor was I thinking,
I hope my wife's not cheating on me.
Nevertheless, the want must be there even though it's buried since it's satisfied.
The second question is always WHAT'S THE OBSTACLE? Where does it first appear on the page? Find it, and mark it. Does it appear as early as possible? Could it be stronger? Is it as determined/driven to block the character as the character is determined to overcome it? Could the character do nothing and suffer no injury? If the character can ignore the obstacle and get away with it, you have a false obstacle/false conflict, which means no conflict, no drama, no story.
Once you have the want and obstacle cranked up to the maximum (without violating the sense of your story—a character can be driven without being as whacked out as Ahab or Hamlet), then it's time for ACTION. WHAT'S THE CHARACTER DOING TO OVERCOME
THE PROBLEM? Is he making an all-out direct attack upon (or defense against) the obstacle? Where does this action first appear on the page? Find it. Mark it. Could it happen sooner? What else could the character do? Could he do more? Is he using himself to the maximum? If not, make it happen. Remember, thinking is action if it's struggling with and planning how to attack or defend against the obstacle. Remember, the obstacle must counterattack/fight back/resist with equal force.
Now, if you have WANT, OBSTACLE, ACTION working, it's very rare that you'll be in any real trouble. The RESOLUTION, which is simply a matter of a victory or a defeat, should not be a problem if you have a deep want, a threatening obstacle, and a character who is using all he has to overcome the problem. With those elements, the one, two, three of dramatic momentum, working, it's impossible to have a weak story.
Want, obstacle, action, and resolution are elements of form. The other crucial concern is not form, but a product of it. It's EMOTION, and it's more of an ingredient, a seasoning, that's all over the place, rather than part of form. But it doesn't matter what we call it, as long as we're aware of what the character is feeling
at all times.
A good way to get to the emotions in the character is to ask what the character's worries, fears, and hopes are at every important moment in the story. These should appear on every page and often several times on a page and should be expressed through both the character's inner thoughts and his actions, which are not always the same.
Anyone who is wrestling with a threatening problem that can harm him or something dear to him will be
worried
and
afraid
of what might happen while, at the same time,
hoping
that he can do something to win out. With such a threat, the emotion is intense and nearly constant and needs to be expressed in the character whenever you have the chance. Go through your story and ask of every line possible, "What are the character's worries, fears, and hopes?" Remember, emotion is the payoff. It's where the ultimate connection is made, where identification occurs, where the reader becomes the character. If the reader doesn't know where the character is emotionally, he doesn't know where he himself is, and he drifts away from the story.
The other concern is a matter of technique: SHOWING. Showing is creating the experience, making it happen right before our eyes, word for word, moment by moment, rather than describing it or generalizing about it. Showing is your constant method of presenting your story, your ongoing concern at all times. The purest and most effective form of showing is scene. You need to be showing as much as possible.
Those are your basic elements—CONFLICT (WANT + OBSTACLE), ACTION, RESOLUTION, EMOTION, SHOWING. They need to be working not only in the overall story, but in every single scene. For every scene and every chapter, you must deal with want, obstacle, action, resolution. Every scene is a struggle/confrontation between two forces, between the want and the obstacle. Every scene has a resolution—not a final resolution, but a scene resolution. In other words, every scene is a little story in itself. And at the end of each scene,
things are worse
than at the beginning. In stories, things get worse and worse, the plot thickens and complicates, until the final resolution—victory or defeat.
Romeo and Juliet,
for example, is one complication after another. Shordy after Romeo and Juliet are secretly married, Romeo tries to stop his friend Mercutio from fighting with Tybalt, but instead causes Mercutio's death. In his anguish and fury, Romeo kills Tybalt and is later banished for it. Her lover gone, Juliet is despondent. That's bad, but to make matters worse, her father proposes that she marry Paris. When Juliet objects, her father flies into a rage and orders her to marry Paris and sets a date for the wedding. Shakespeare heaps one
difficulty after another onto the "star-crossed" lovers. Stars are crossed—who crossed them? Shakespeare.
Things may get better in a story, or seem to, briefly. If they do, it's only a setup to knock them down and make things even worse—to reenergize the characters and the drama. Each scene needs to end in the mind of the character, who is more upset than he was at the opening and stewing over the new complication besetting him and what to do now. If things aren't worse at the end of every scene and every chapter, your story is marking time, standing still. If the story isn't moving, the reader will move—away.
It's these basic elements that make you or break you. They're all you need. If you get them right, any other mistakes you make won't matter.
Every
story that I've seen that failed was lacking in one of these basic elements. So, the first thing to do when rewriting, always, is to go over your story and check for these elements.
Once you're sure that you have these elements working, you're ready to try the other rewriting techniques in this chapter to get the maximum out of your story and yourself. You can take each of these techniques and go through and apply it to your story. There's a lot here, and it may seem like an exhausting list, but with practice, you'll master them and be able to apply several if not all of them simultaneously.
RULE NOTHING OUT
Go over your story, and let your mind run wild, imagining anything and everything that could possibly happen, what else the characters could think, feel, and do. Go for the far-out possibilities. Don't worry about going too far. At this point the problem is not going far enough. We shy away from pushing things to the limit—and beyond. We're organized personalities with boundaries and defenses. To ere-
ate, we need to break through those boundaries, to be open to anything and everything that's in us. And because you can't really go beyond yourself, no matter how far-fetched an idea feels, it will have your personal stamp, your sense of order, on it.
If you do go too far out with your story, you can always cut back. An old writing rule says: The best way to find out what's enough is to do too much. So, if the man's wife shocks him by asking for a divorce and he's desperate to keep her, what might he do? Initially, you might have him argue, make promises, beg, or even threaten. But later you might consider having him attack, stalk, bribe, blackmail, murder, or slander his wife—or a combination of these—to uncover what's in him and you. He may not do any of these, but you need to explore every possibility. And even if he doesn't do them, he could well contemplate and dream of doing them. Thought is action. So, go as far as your imagination takes you, then see what you have and use what works.
LET NOTHING BE EASY
Let nothing be easy for anyone ever. Create and take advantage of every opportunity to cause trouble. Think about how difficult things were for Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Ahab, Gatsby, Scarlett O'Hara. Who made them difficult? Who drove Hamlet crazy? It wasn't his father's request for revenge. It was Shakespeare. The whale wasn't the real cause of Ahab's death. Melville was.
You, the author, do it all. Make all the trouble. Exercise sadistic license. One way to do that is to raise the stakes as much as possible. For example, if a young, successful lawyer, practicing in a prominent firm in a well-to-do county is asked to do something he feels is unethical, immoral, or illegal and he tells the senior members of the firm that he can't, in good conscience, go along, they might tell him:
"Well, Martin, if you can't help us out on this, you don't have the kind of loyalty and team spirit you need to work here. In other words, you're out of a job."
OK, so it's play ball, or you're out. That's one level of conflict. But, for the same effort, without changing the meaning of the story, they could say:
"You're out of a job, and we'll see to it you never practice law again in this county."
We've intensified the drama without changing the sense of the story. But have we gone all the way? Can we go farther? What if the young lawyer's bosses say:
"We're sorry to hear you won't back us up on this, Martin. Frankly we had our doubts about you. So, just in case, we took some time to cook up a little file on you. Some of it's true. Some of it's not so true, but it'll stand up in court. If you don't go along, you're not only out of a job, but we'll have you disbarred. You'll never practice law again anywhere."
Now, we haven't changed the thrust of the story, but by raising the stakes we've made it more intense and dramatic.
Have we gone all the way? For this story, as I imagine it, we have. As I imagine it. That doesn't mean that someone else can't imagine it differently, push it farther, and make it work better. The senior partners could threaten to murder the young lawyer's wife and child. The story could get to that point, and it could be made to work, but it might border on becoming a different kind of story (a crime thriller)
than I had in mind. That's my sense of it. You may go for something more extreme, and it would be just as valid.
Fiction reflects reality—the truth of reality. But fiction is not reality. It's concentrated, intensified reality. It's the essence of reality. In a sense it's more real than reality. It certainly reveals more truth than everyday reality. And it's never as mild as reality often is. So, you must put pressure on your characters to force them to use themselves. The more they use themselves, the more they reveal themselves. The more they reveal themselves, the more we experience and identify. You'll never go wrong by making everything as difficult as possible for everybody, bad guys as well as good guys, at all times.
TRY THE REVERSE
Consider having your character do the opposite of what he's now doing. This may seem like a violation of your character, but there's truth in it. The frustrated mother who says of her bratty kid, "I give him everything he wants, or I beat the crap out of him. Nothing works," is expressing this truth. When we're desperate, we go to extremes. So, the powerful man, after trying to intimidate his wife into not divorcing him, may fall to his knees and beg. The nerd who tries to avoid being harassed by blending into the woodwork or pleading to be left alone could get a gun and go berserk, blasting his enemies away. By considering the reverse, you're working to uncover possibilities in your characters, your story, and yourself—opportunities for your characters to express themselves and reveal themselves. Remember,
revealing character is the number-one purpose of fiction.
So, consider the reverse. If it works, do it. You'll be surprised at how often it uncovers new possibilities and gets you deeper into the heart of things.
DOUBLE DUTY —TRIPLE DUTY
Your story and you, the author, should never be doing only one thing at a time. Only
setting scene
(describing setting), for example. You never want the reader to be sitting around waiting for you to set things up so the story can begin. Set scene, OK, but at the same time you can be revealing character. We get character if the setting has meaning for the character, if the character is affected by it, if he has strong feelings about it. The setting should be a necessary element of the story, and the character should be reacting to it in a revealing way.
In good storytelling, everything has a purpose. Everything contributes. Nothing is just there. Nothing is neutral. Nothing is along for the ride. The old writing rule is: If it's not helping, it's hurting. Now, this is art, not science. So, you have some latitude—a lot in fact. If you can thrill us with brilliant, poetic description for no other purpose than the beauty and pleasure of it, you may pull it off.
Also, if something pops up on the page that you like, that feels right, that appeals to you, but you have no idea why it's there, leave it. If you put it in, it may have a connection that you don't see at the moment. The thing to do is to work on making it a necessary part of the story. When you do that, you challenge your inventiveness and often create a deeper and richer story. The last thing you do is pull something out that you like just because it doesn't fit. In the end, you may cut it, but only after trying your best to make it work. That's what fiction is about—relating things that aren't always related. In a good story, everything relates to everything else because that author has made them relate.