Wisdom's Kiss (90 page)

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Author Commentary: The Structure and Format of
Wisdom's Kiss
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Want to write good books? Start by writing
bad screenplays
.

That's been my experience, anyway, and—based on this sample of one—it's a pretty useful route to publishing. Before I tried my hand at fiction, I spent eight years studying screenwriting and learned—well, I learned everything I now know. I learned about dialogue, character development, pacing, description, plot, theme ... However awful my screenplays ended up, I absorbed an enormous amount of information about how to make a story good, because a movie, first and foremost, is a story, and it needs to be really good because someone's spending millions of dollars to make it. (This, by the way, does not mean that the final product ends up good; many movies are terrible. But the point is that they're not terrible on purpose.)

"Three-act structure" is a bit of screenwriting jargon that for me has paid off in aces and spades. Basically it means that the first quarter ("first act") of a movie/story introduces the characters. The middle two quarters ("second act") features escalating conflict culminating in a "low point," easily identified as that depressing spot when you want to quit watching. In the last quarter ("third act") everything resolves and the hero emerges emotionally and/ or physically victorious.

There: you just saved yourself eight years of screenwriting classes.

Every time I start a new book, even before I start formally outlining the story, I pull out my screenwriting notes to review how to link the character's internal and external conflicts, how to pace the first act, et cetera, et cetera. I do this partially from superstition: given that it's worked five times, I don't want to mess with success. And it works as a writing exercise to get me thinking, rather like my other favorite exercise of imagining a scene without any dialogue and then with dialogue alone ... These processes open a lot of mental doors. But I also do it because the three-act structure really does work, and my stories are stronger for it.

When I outline a story, I translate the three acts into four columns, each representing one quarter of the book. Sometimes this four-column format makes it all the way to the final product:
Princess Ben
has four parts;
Front and Center
has sixteen chapters (16—4 x 4).
Wisdom's Kiss
has four parts, too. (Part I includes the Introduction.) Part III, entitled "All is Lost!" is particularly notable—those are the exact words I wrote on my original outline to remind myself that this is the low point. But it's also the point of storytelling generally, a perfect summation of our craft: create conflict; then resolve it. All is lost ... but not really.

The
Wisdom's Kiss
format, as I discuss in my commentary on
Tips
,
Trudy
,
Dizzy
,
Ben
,
Felis
,
The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax
, and heavens knows
where else
, came about because I wanted a story told from three points of view. Almost immediately I realized that three points of view wouldn't be enough, that the story had facts and incidents and experiences that three voices alone couldn't manage. It's akin to a football game told only from the perspective of the place kicker; adding the stories of a coach and a ref and a fan would add immeasurably to our understanding. I could have pulled back and told the whole story in third person, the way a football game is told in a newspaper, but I would then lose the intimacy and emotional intensity of those personal perspectives, and lose as well the suspense. If a narrator doesn't know what's going to happen next, then the reader doesn't know either. Or the reader might know a little bit from another narrator, or know the wrong thing. That mystery feeds the dramatic tension. Dramatic tension is the gold ring. Dramatic tension is what we're aiming for.

Thus the eight perspectives of
Wisdom's Kiss,
and all the headaches and challenges and nuance that eight perspectives entailed. The story needed them, but to be honest I needed them too. I enjoyed
Wisdom's Kiss
more than anything I've ever created, a satisfaction marred only rarely by the fear that no one, in the whole future of the world, would want to read it. But it was immensely, hilariously satisfying to write Dizzy's diary without commas, to make sure that only Trudy got to use the word "horrid," to puzzle out what Tips could spell and what he couldn't, and to decide whether the three entries that constitute Wilhelmina's encyclopedia biography should conclude with ellipses. The
glossary
was equally satisfying, though I'm surprised at how those marvelous words often came across as stuffy; writing zippy dictionary definitions is a lot harder than I'd thought. But please, please don't let that dissuade you from putting to use your own e-book dictionary. The English language is an extraordinary achievement; think of
Wisdom's Kiss
as a present to us.

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