Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story. (29 page)

When creating a story arc, you're an artist stepping back to look at the entire painting all at once — you're surveying the big picture. This means your story arc needs to be
big
. And
big
is relative. It's certainly
big
if the character saves the world from an invading army of ghosts. But it's also
big
if the character does so by overcoming a decades-long hatred and mistrust of his mother in the process. The latter may not be big to anyone else, but it's certainly big to the character.

In a long arc, a character oft en goes from a position of weakness to a position of strength. A magician's apprentice grows into his power until he's the equal of his former master. A young woman escapes her abusive husband in Book I, starts her own business in Book II, and establishes herself as a woman of wealth in Book III. A new werewolf is saddled with the Beast in Book I, learns the extent of his powers in Book II, and gains control of himself in Book III. You should create your own supernatural protagonist with this sort of long-term growth in mind.

In addition to long-term growth, character arcs must also provide continual small bits of growth. The character needs to have small personal setbacks and victories within the overall arc so the reader can watch the character change and evolve. For example, a werewolf fighting to keep the Inner Beast under control might initially lose that battle big time and do serious damage to the people around him (setback), spend some time dealing with the guilt and recriminations (victory), gain some control over the Beast (victory), lose it again (setback), and finally admit he can't do it on his own and join Beasts Anonymous (victory). Mercedes Lackey uses this arc in her Diana Tregarde books. Diana, a paranormal investigator with some magical abilities, suffers from nightmares and panic attacks related to her earlier cases. As the novels progress, she slowly gains more and more control over herself (victory), though she backslides from time to time (setback).

Another story arc can involve stopping a hugely powerful antagonist. The hero starts off far too weak to confront the Big Bad Guy directly, but fortunately, said BBG either doesn't know the hero exists or doesn't view the hero as much of a threat, and the hero ends up fighting someone who works for the BBG instead. (In some arcs, the hero thinks he
is
fighting the BBG, then learns the guy he barely managed to defeat is a mere minion, and the real fight is just getting started.) As the protagonist works his way up the badguy ladder to the BBG one book at a time, he slowly gains power and overcomes flaws — part of that “going from weakness to strength” thing — until we get the final showdown. Harry Potter follows this sort of arc, with Harry battling the minions of Lord Voldemort until the seventh novel, when the two of them finally square off for a wizardly smackdown.

A different arc uses a long-term goal. The character needs to accomplish something that can't be done in a single book. Like most long-term goals, it's broken up into several short-term goals that are handled over multiple books. The smaller stories along the way may veer off in some interesting directions, but the character is always working toward this goal. Naomi Novik's Temeraire series runs this way. Temeraire wants to change the way the English treat dragons, while Will Laurence wants to win the war against Napoleon. The search for ways to accomplish these goals takes them to Europe, China, Africa, and Australia. They resolve several shortterm goals along the way — bringing more dragons into England to fight Napoleon, finding the cure for a plague that threatens the English dragon population, forcing the English army to grant the dragons certain rights and privileges, rousting Napoleon from England, and others. All of these short-term goals feed into the long-term ones, allowing Novik to continue her story lines over multiple books.

One problem of the arc was mentioned back in chapter six: how to challenge the hero. Conflicts are supposed to escalate, in theory. If you threaten to destroy the world in Book I, you naturally have to go further and threaten the entire universe in Book II. So what's left for Book III?

The ever-escalating arc is actually a trap, and you don't have to fall into it. True, you can try to increase the stakes every time, but this tires the readers after a while — and takes on an air of ridiculousness. The solution is actually to scale back. After your hero has saved the world, tone things down and threaten just the main character. It won't matter to the readers that the threat is smaller. By now the readers are vested in the fate of the protagonist, and they'll be on the edges of their chairs if you go after this beloved hero — or someone close to him.

Naomi Novik, to return to her again, uses this technique to great effect. (I'll be revealing the outcome of some of her novels here, so if you haven't read them and don't want them spoiled, you might want to jump down to the next section.) In
Empire of Ivory
, a plague is decimating the English dragon population. Temeraire and Laurence barely manage to uncover a cure in Africa, only to discover that the English government intends to use it on their own dragons and then infect Napoleon's dragons with the original disease. Temeraire is horrified — all European dragons, including those allied with the English — will eventually die. More dragons fall ill, and Napoleon's superior forces amass across the English Channel. The stakes are enormous — thousands of dragons' lives. Eventually, Temeraire and Laurence commit treason by sneaking into an enemy camp and giving Napoleon's army the English cure. A terrible fight follows, and Temeraire is led to believe Laurence is killed. The book ends.

Novik raises the stakes in the next book,
Victory of Eagles
. Napoleon conquers England and occupies it. We've gone from threatening the dragon population to threatening all of England. Temeraire, newly reunited with Laurence, leads the fight to throw Napoleon out. In the end, they succeed. After nearly destroying England, where can Novik go for another novel?

She scales back. In
Tongues of Serpents
, the next book, Temeraire and Laurence have been charged with treason and transported to Australia, even though they saved England. The new conflict initially surrounds the characters we've come to love. We share their outrage at the injustice, and Novik doesn't need a worldwide disaster to get us interested. Threatening characters themselves is quite enough.

One vital part of an arc is small satisfactions. You can't plan to drag out an arc without resolving
anything
. Readers need something to cheer about along the way to the final ending. Each book should have its own satisfying resolution of some goal or conflict so the reader doesn't feel too strung along. In other words, each book in a series needs to have its own story that gets resolved, even if that story is part of a larger arc. To refer to Harry Potter again, the first six books in the series ends with Harry defeating an antagonist of some kind and wrapping up a major story, even though the ultimate goal of defeating Lord Voldemort remains unresolved. The reader is anticipating the next book, yet still feels satisfied with the current one.

So how do you make sure the reader feels satisfied with the plot of the current book? Let's zoom inward a little and take a look.

The number three rules. Seriously. How many paranormal stories can you name in which stuff comes in threes? You know — three wishes, three bears, Red Riding Hood notices three things about the wolf, and so on. And as I noted above, paranormal books oft en come in sets of three. In fact, let's do a quick exercise about this:

Even now that the exercise is over, more trios are probably occurring to you. They keep showing up the more you think about them. There's a reason for this: Humans like stories that come in threes. It's a natural rhythm. The first event tells you what's going to happen, or creates an event. The second event sets a pattern. The third event breaks the pattern and resolves the problem.

Possibly no paranormal story illustrates this better than the German version of “Cinderella.” (The American version has been shortened considerably and made nicey-nicey.) In the story, we have three girls — two stepsisters and Cinderella. The first stepsister is cruel (this is the event), the second stepsister is cruel (set the pattern), and Cinderella is nice (breaks the pattern). The king announces three balls. Cinderella is forced to sneak out to go to the first one (event). She sneaks out to the second (pattern). She leaves her golden shoe behind at the third (break). When the prince arrives at Cinderella's house with the golden shoe, the first stepsister tries it on, but it's too small, so she cuts off her toes to make it fit, but the prince discovers the ruse and refuses to marry her (event). The second stepsister tries on the shoe and cuts off her heel to make it fit, but the prince refuses to marry her as well (pattern). Cinderella tries on the shoe and it fits, so the prince marries her (break).

Adding another stepsister to the mix would overburden the story. By the third foot-chopping incident, the reader would be thinking, “Okay, we get it, we get it.” Removing one of the stepsisters wouldn't work, either — the events wouldn't build very far and the story would be cut too short, so to speak. Three is often Just Right. Goldilocks certainly thought so, too.

In any case, this is why so many fictional events come in threes. It simply makes for fine storytelling. Not
every
set of events needs to come in threes, of course, but it's a good pattern to keep in mind, both when you're looking at the overall book and when you're looking at individual scenes.

If you back up and look from a distance, the plot structure for a novel looks like a smooth mountain with one side shorter than the other. (Rising action, climax, and falling action, incidentally, come as a set of three.) Once you get closer, however, you can see that the structure is a little more complicated. It's actually a fractal pattern, a bunch of little mountains that form the slope of the main mountain, climbing steadily upward toward the peak. In other words, there are conflicts within conflicts, climaxes within climaxes, and resolutions within resolutions. We can take the structure from big to small.

Every plot starts off with a main character who has a problem, called a
conflict
. It has to be a major conflict. Minor conflicts — paper tigers — aren't enough to hang a novel on. And since you're reading this book, it's going to be a
supernatural
conflict. If the character's difficulty has nothing to do with the paranormal, you've pushed the supernatural elements into the background and you aren't writing a paranormal novel. You should always be able to sum up the protagonist's conflict in a single sentence that uses action verbs:

Take note of the prominent supernatural elements in all three of the above examples.

Being able to create this active sentence grants you two advantages: It ensures your plot has focus, and it gives you a quick way to sum up your book to an editor or agent who asks, “What's your book about?”