The Fire in Fiction (12 page)

What about your first and last lines? Suppose you did a first line/last line draft, doing nothing but honing the bookends of every scene in your manuscript. Would those little changes give your story a bigger and more effective shape?

I thought so. Is that a checkered flag I see waving?

THE TORNADO EFFECT

Novels need events. Things need to happen: little things, big things. Especially big things. Big events shake protagonists, change the course of lives, and stay in readers' memories.

What is a big event? Is it only the kind of thing that makes the six o'clock news? Can it be an interior shift; a realization of the truth, say, that has a seismic jolt? Having read I don't know how many manuscripts and novels over the course of my career, I've realized two truths of storytelling: 1) Most novels don't have enough big events; 2) What makes an event big is not its size but the scope of its effect.

To put it another way, a big narrative event is one that affects not just one's protagonist, but everyone in a story. Making an event big, then, is not so much a matter of dreaming up a natural disaster (useful as those can be) but rather measuring an event's impact on more than a few characters.

Mystery writer Nancy Pickard's stand-alone suspense novel
The Virgin of Small Plains
(2006) was a finalist for the Edgar, Dily, and Macavity awards and winner of the Agatha Award. Set in the town of Small Plains, Kansas, it's a complex story revolving around the murder of an unknown teenage girl seventeen years ago. Moved by the death of this nameless runaway, the town paid for her burial. The grave of "The Virgin," as she's known, is now a shrine that is said to heal.

Of course, the truth is more tangled. Two of the main players are Abby Reynolds and Mitch Newquist, who on the winter night of the Virgin's death, were a teenage couple. On that night, Mitch suddenly left town without a word, presumably having some culpability in the Virgin's death. Seventeen years later, Abby vows to learn who the Virgin was; meanwhile, Mitch returns to Small Plains. A storm of secrets is unleashed.

The book's climactic sequence also involves a storm: this being Kansas, a tornado. The sequence in which the tornado rips through Small Plains is an extended one, seen from a number of points of view. Mitch is one of those who sees it coming:

He was facing southwest, looking straight into the leading edge of the blackest, biggest, baddest storm he had seen since he left his hometown.
My God,
he thought,
did I ever take these for granted? Did I used to think this was no big deal?
The line of black was huge, rolling for miles horizontally, and also up, up, up until he had to bend his neck back to see the top of it. He'd seen dramatic clouds in the city sky, but nothing had the overwhelming drama of this panorama in which he could view the whole front edge, and watch it marching toward him.

It was close, he realized with an inner start.

The wind was kicking up in front of it.

He could see the lightning now, hear the rumble of thunder.

It was spectacular. He didn't know how he had lived without seeing this for so many years. He felt as if it was made of sheer energy—which, he supposed, it was—and that all of it was starting to infuse him with something that felt exciting. Ions of excitement.

That passage would be enough to convey the tornado's power, but
The Virgin of Small Plains
is a big novel and Pickard wants a big impact. A second point of view on the twister is that of a young woman, Catie Washington, who is in the terminal stage of cancer. As the tornado approaches, she lies on the Virgin's grave:

When she reached it, she turned over and lay spread-eagle, her face to the clouds.

All around her, the branches of the trees danced and the trees themselves leaned one way and then the other. There was a howling all around her, and then there was a roaring like a train coming closer to her. She felt like a damsel tied to the tracks, but that's how she had felt for months in the path of the cancer that was killing her. This was no different: No one could rescue her.

No strong, handsome man would come along to pick her up this time.

This was her third go-round with chemotherapy for her brain tumors. Each of the first two times, she had "known" she would lick it. When the third diagnosis came in, she lost the will to fight. She would endure one more round of chemo, she told her doctors, but that would be it. In the other two rounds, she had fought to control the nausea, using acupuncture and medicine, using whatever worked, and for a while, it had seemed to work.

It wasn't working anymore, nothing was working anymore.

She was in pain a lot of the time, and so very ill.

Now, from under the black, black oily layer of clouds, she watched the funnel form high in the air, watched it dip down once, watched it rise, back up again, always moving in her direction.

When it traveled over her, it was one hundred feet wide at the tip.

She gazed up directly into the mouth of it, where she could see the revolution of the air and things—objects—

whirling around inside of it. The roar was deafening and terrifying. She felt her whole body being picked up as if she were levitating, and then being laid back down. And then some of the things inside of the funnel began to fall on her. She closed her eyes, expecting to the killed by them. But they fell lightly atop her and all around her.

When she opened her eyes, she discovered she was covered with flowers.

The unexpected and solace-giving rain of flowers is one of the novel's remarkable high points. There are other perspectives on the tornado, too: townspeople, the sheriff, and Abby, who owns the town's nursery and gardening center, which, as it happens, is the one place where the tornado touches down and where it picks up the flower petals that comfort Catie Washington.

In the immediate aftermath of the tornado's passing, Mitch and Abby meet for the first time in seventeen years. Is the tornado a symbol? Certainly, but it's also an event that unlocks the town's secrets. It turns out that Mitch did know the Virgin, but his involvement with her was not as expected. Who really killed her and why Abby's father battered her corpse's face with a golf club on the night of her death (an event Mitch witnessed and which sent him on the run for his own protection) takes a little longer to learn.

What gives this sequence the force of a tornado? Is it Pickard's selection of this common plains phenomenon for her climax? Is it her descriptions? Is it the healing rain of flowers on Catie Washington? Is it how it brings Mitch and Abby together?

I would argue that it is not one aspect of the tornado or its effect that gives Pickard's sequence its power; rather, it is the cumulative impact of all of them. A tornado is just a tornado. To create the tornado effect on the plot, Pickard had to put a number of Small Plains residents in a whirl.

What is the Big Event in your current manuscript? How many people does it change? How many of those changes do you portray? To create the Tornado Effect, you will need to portray all of them. It's extra work but the extra impact will be worth it, don't you think?