Part VIII: PLOT: John Barth and his Incremental Perturbations

***This post is the last in a series of eight exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***


You’re probably scratching your head right now wondering why on earth I saved “plot” for last, and you’re probably right to wonder about that. Maybe back in August (when we began the work of turning the first drafts of our short stories into unforgettable masterpieces) we should have begun our revisions by studying plot before we talked about all those other things-- like dialogue, structure, setting, and emotion, or how to engage readers using authenticating detail.  

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing fiction, it’s that no matter how hopeless or unwieldy the task may seem, it’s never too late to fix a troublesome passage—or even an entire manuscript, if that's what's required.  If we’ve taken the time to introduce our characters and delineate their myriad flaws, fears, and emotions, and to fill their little mouths with crackling, subtextual dialogue… And we’ve gone through all the effort to create vivid, dynamic descriptions of the settings they inhabit, why would we not invest the time necessary to tell our story in the most compelling way we can—no matter how many revisions it takes—until we’re satisfied that the story on paper is as good or better than the one that originally took shape in our heads?

“Though character is the emotional core of great fiction, and though action with no meaning beyond its own brute existence can have no lasting appeal, plot is—or must sooner or later become—the focus of every good writer’s plan.”  Wise words from the late John Gardner, novelist and creative writing teacher, and our mentor for this series of short story exercises.

So what is plot, exactly? And how can we apply it to the draft of a story we’ve already written (and in fact have already been revising for the last three months)?  First, a definition of plot from a few of my favorite mentors:

From The Lie That Tells A Truth by John Dufresne:  “An idea is not a story.  A first draft is not a story.  A moral is not a story.  A character is not a story.  A theme is not a story.  A plot—now, that’s a story! So where do I get me one? you might ask. At your writing desk.  Because plots don’t exist.  They can’t be shopped for or ordered on-line.  They are coaxed into being.  They develop.  They grow in the course of the writing.  A plot begins to form as soon as you begin to ask yourself the appropriate narrative questions: What does my central character want? What is preventing her from getting it? What does she do about the various obstacles in her way? What are the results of what she does? What climax does this all lead to? Does she get what she wants in the end? Plot, then, is the element of fiction that shapes the many other elements—character, theme, point of view, language, and so on—into a story.  It’s the organizing principle of narration, let’s say. […] Plot is the force that holds the universe of your story together.”

From Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich: “If you don’t write from an outline, once you have finished a story, you still should be able to see its outline, the way after a touchdown it’s easy to draw a chart of what happened in the play.  Something must happen, and in the end, we must know why it has happened.  Plot is partly what you discover in the writing of a story, not what you “insert.” You raise questions and seek answers, connect your sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into novels.  This thread of investigation may be a thin one, but you must have it to give yourself and your readers something to look for.”

From Brandi Reissenweber in her lecture on “Plot & Structure”: “Structure and plot are the architecture of storytelling. The façade of a building may be beautiful, brilliant, breathtaking even, but it can only be that way if it is standing, right? That’s where these foundational elements come in. All other aspects of fiction—characterization, description, what distinguishes your voice from others,—hang on the basic structure and plot of the story.”

John Barth, noted novelist, short story writer, and witty professor of creative writing, writes that “Dramatic effect, not linear chronology, is the regnant principle in the selection and arrangement of a story’s action,” that “a story’s order of narration need not be the strict chronological order of the events narrated.”

However we decide to arrange the “action” in our stories, that action traditionally includes the six ingredients below. [Bracketed explanations are capsulated passages from “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” an essay by John Barth. To learn more, and to understand his "systems analysis" theory on the workings of plot, read Barth's classic (and humorous!) essay in Creating Fiction]:

1.  Status Quo: [the less-than-stable “Ground Situation.” An overtly or latently voltaged state of affairs preexisting the story’s present time; one that tends to regulate itself toward equilibrium but is essentially less than stable (otherwise there would be no story). The Montagues and Capulets have been hassling each other in Verona for a long time before the story begins: a taunt here, a street scuffle there, but nothing the two families can’t quite absorb.  No ground situation, no story, however arresting the action to come, for it is its effect upon the ground situation that gives the story’s action meaning.]

2.  The Inciting Incident: [A present-time turn of events that precipitates a story out of the ground situation… “And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the dramatic vehicle rolls into town: Young Romeo Montague falls for young Juliet Capulet, and vice versa.] 

Note: David Harris Ebenbach of Gotham Writers Workshop says it’s the responsibility of the writer to begin the story at the point of change (the inciting incident), when “something’s happening that stands out.” Take Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” for example.  Carver didn’t begin his masterpiece “a few weeks earlier, when nobody was coming to visit.  [He began with] the day that’s the focus of the whole piece.”  In order to “drop the reader right into the middle of the action” and almost simultaneously provide him with the necessary information to set up the ground situation (exposition), you’ll have to work hard to strike just the right balance.

3.  Complications (escalating conflict): [Incremental perturbations of the ground situation; the successive complications of the conflict. (The star-crossed lovers declare their love, but…) In the story’s middle these “perturbations” follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next (as the story’s middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto)]

4.  Climax: [A comparatively sudden and consequential effect triggered by comparatively small incrementations, like an avalanche, or the click of the thermostat—whether or not it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery.  Even in the most delicate of epiphanic stories, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), the little epiphany that epiphs, does so in a comparative flash—and, for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence]

5.  Denouement: The consequence of the complications and climax. [measured by the net difference it effects in the ground situation.  If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told…. The equilibrium of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: The surviving Capulets and Montagues are sadder but perhaps at least temporarily wiser in the “glooming peace this morning with it brings.”  It is an equilibrium complexified, qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be back to normal.  Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but, for better or worse (usually worse), it’s not a story].

6.  Wrap-up [the little coda, closing fillip, or dolly-back shot often appended to the denouement like a jazz drummer’s “roll-off” at the end of a number, and usually suggestive of what the story’s completed action portends for the principal characters].

John Barth: “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” from the text Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Josip Novakovich:  Fiction Writer’s Workshop

Brandi Reissenweber: Instructor, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and author of the "Ask the Writer" column for "The Writer" magazine. Be sure to check out "Letterpress," her wonderful blog on the craft of fiction.

David Harris Ebenbach: The chapter "Plot: A Question of Focus" in Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide (also contains the full version of "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver)

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Write a Story, Part III: Character Motivation & Change

***This post is the third in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

Now that we’ve set the mood of our stories and grounded them in time and place, let’s focus on our main characters for a bit. What motivates your character to behave the way she does?  What does she want at the beginning of the story, and how does that desire change by the end? Does your character at least begin to undergo a change by the end of the story?

Of course, not all protagonists change during the course of a story, but according to Brandi Reissenweber of Gotham Writers’ Workshop, they should at least “possess the ability to change, and the reader should see this potential. Change is particularly important for a story’s main character.  Just as the desire of a main character drives the story, the character’s change is often the story’s culmination…. If you don’t create the potential for change, the character will feel predictable and the reader will quickly lose interest.”

Showing character change (and the potential for change) is not simple.  Nancy Kress, author of Beginnings, Middles & Ends, devotes twelve pages to character motivation and change, and tells us how to pull it all off in her chapter “Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory.”  The first thing we need to do, she says, is to convince the reader that a character is capable of change by “showing him doing it” either through flashback or small parts of scenes that “can foreshadow your character’s ability to become whatever you eventually have him become” (for example: maybe the reader sees through flashback that your character has changed his mind once before).  In a short story (as opposed to a novel) you obviously won’t have much time (words?) to accomplish all of that. 

Once you’ve shown that a character is capable of change, the next step is to show the character actually changing, and to convince the reader that the change is genuine.  This, according to Kress, is accomplished through a pattern of incidents that the character is forced to live through.  As Kress says, “…one mention [of your character changing] on page sixty-eight isn’t going to do it.”

Josip Novakovich, author of Writing Fiction: Step by Step says, “When you introduce a character, imagine what her motive is.  Setting several characters in motion, with conflicting motives, may give you enough momentum for the whole story.  You need not worry about plot as much as about getting several characters together with strong motives at cross-purposes.  Let the motives in conflict work until a climax, a showdown, occurs, and from there a conclusion will flow.”

Nancy Kress: Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction: Step by Step

Brandi Reissenweber: Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, the Practical Guide, "Character: Casting Shadows"

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Write a Story, Part II: Setting & Emotion

***This post is the second in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

There’s a famous writing exercise you’ve probably heard of, an exercise in technique that the late John Gardner developed to explore links between character emotion and setting. There are four parts to it.  Here’s one of them:

“Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just bee killed in a war.  Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover.  Do not mention love or the loved one.”

I’d like to tweak this exercise to help me develop the setting in my own story.  It would be easy to write only one side of this exercise.  The happy lover’s point of view, for instance, if that’s an emotion that works for your story.  But it’s helpful, I think, to write the contrasting POV as well, to write both extremes in order to really understand the setting's "dramatic potential".  In my story my POV character, Victoria, arrives with her family at a Christmas tree farm in the country, the setting where most of my story will take place.  She’s irritable and on edge, angry with her husband for ruining a day that is supposed to be joyful, playful, and fun. I think it will help me develop the setting and character if I explore how different her interpretation of the tree farm would be were she to be happy instead, and thinking about how much she can't wait to make love to Tom as soon as the tree is up and decorated. 

The Christmas tree farm is an important part of my story--almost as important as one of my main characters (if not, the story might as well take place somewhere else). So instead of just describing the tree farm as if it were a photo or a painting, I want to use Gardner’s exercise to set the mood of the story, to anchor the reader in time and place, to move the story forward, and most importantly, to reveal something about Victoria’s character and the whole family dynamic.

As Janet Burroway writes: “Our relation to place, time, and weather, like our relation to clothes and other objects, is charged with emotion more or less subtle, more or less profound.  It is filled with judgment mellow or harsh.  And it alters according to what happens to us….  Imagine experiencing a thunderstorm when in the throes of a new love: the rain might seem to glitter, the lightning to sizzle, the thunder to rumble with anticipation.  The downpour would refresh and exhilarate, nourishing the newly budding violets.  Then imagine how the very same storm would feel in the midst of a lousy romantic breakup: the raindrops would be thick and cold, almost greasy; the lightning would slash at the clouds; the thunder would growl.  Torrents of rain would beat the delicate tulips to the ground.”

Take a look at this passage from Louis L’Amour’s novel, Hondo (used as an example of “how to weave character, landscape, and action” in Writing Fiction Step by Step by Josip Novakovich):

Novakovich writes:  “L’Amour creates suspense while giving us the setting from the perspective of his protagonist; the setting not only helps us get into the story, it also helps us experience the character’s mood (tension, vigilance)…. if L’Amour simply described how the southwestern landscape looks every summer, he’d create no suspense. His fiction would be reduced to a travelogue.” (Novakovich).

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step by Step
Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Sound

For me "sound" has always been the most difficult of the five senses to describe.  It's easy to write: a truck rumbled past, or the neighbor's dog barked; she heard a scream; his voice was higher than usual; the sound of silence filled the air. A little of that is fine I suppose, but when we allow ourselves to become lazy and rely solely on the fill-in-the-blank technique, it seems to me we miss an opportunity to engage the reader by drawing him into our fictional dream. 

This week, while approaching my story from a new and hopefully more illustrative angle, I've begun to pay closer attention to some of the more creative ways writers describe sound. Here are a few of my favorites:

A scream:
There was no fear in the scream.  It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy.  It was a nasty sound.  It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.  [Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep]

Silence:
Hotels, late at night, are never still.  The corridors are never entirely silent. There  are countless barely audible sighs, the  rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti  seemed to  move  through a  perfect  vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern  that decorated the wallpaper. [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"] 

Background noise:
Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his  ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"] 

Footsteps:
"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners. [Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"]

Rain:
It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. [James Joyce: "Araby"]

A woman and her granddaughter hide under a dock and listen to the sounds of the men who are searching for them:
They crouched there then, the two of them, submerged to the shoulders, feet unsteady on the slimed lake bed.  They listened.  The sky went from rose to ocher to violet in the cracks over their heads.  The motorcycles had stopped now.  In the silence there was the glissando of locusts, the dry crunch of boots on the flinty beach, their low man-talk drifting as they prowled back and forth.  One of them struck a match… The wind carried their voices into the pines…. The carp, roused by the troubling of the waters, came nosing around the dock, guzzling and snorting…. The bike cranked.  The other ratcheted, ratcheted, then coughed, caught, roared.  They circled, cut deep ruts, slung gravel, and went.  Their roaring died away and away.  Crickets resumed and a near frog bic-bic-bicked.  [Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"]

Sounds of a neighboring homestead:
From the Workman's valley came the sounds of industry at all hours of the day: the buzz of chain saws,  the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingle-trace rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats….  the next day the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the shouts and orders and complaints, the buzzings and grindings, the hammerings and sawings, backfires and outbursts. [Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks"] 

John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"

Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks" in Zoetrope All-Story, Spring 2005

Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"

James Joyce: "Araby"

Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

 

Surprise Ending

Not all of us love a surprise party, but most of us probably enjoy a well-crafted and unexpected turn of events in the stories we read (be they fiction or nonfiction) just when we thought we had the whole thing figured out. I'm not talking about those playful-but-clever O. Henry kind of endings, but endings that feel organic and right--satisfying on every level. How do writers come up with those great endings? I wish I knew. I wish there was a simple formula for that -- or even a complicated one. 

Needing a break from my novel and the slow, seemingly never-ending progress I've been making on my third rewrite,  I thought I'd tackle something new for a while -- a project I could start and finish in a month or two -- a short story, maybe, just a few thousand words.  A piece of cake, or so I thought. 

It wasn't difficult to come up with a premise right away. A week later I even had what I thought was a pretty decent rough draft of the first two-thirds of the story.  So far so good, but as always, the final third of the story had my brain tied up in knots.  How do I find that perfect surprise ending, the kind of ending that resonates and sends the reader back to the beginning to see how in the heck I pulled it all off?  An ending that's totally unexpected, but feels in retrospect like the story was working up to that final moment all along...?  

To pull off a surprise like that, we need to really know and understand our characters, especially those who'll be surprising us with their unexpected and seemingly unpredictable actions.  We need to know who they are and what they're capable of.  What motivates them to behave the way they do? Have they shown through past action that they are capable of such behavior?   What are their secret and not-so-secret yearnings and fears? 

In Writing Fiction Step by Step author Josip Novakovich suggests that in order to avoid the sense of "foregone conclusion" when creating and defining our characters we should look beyond simple "character traits" that tend to pigeonhole our protagonists and other characters into behaving in predictable ways:   

When we do what Novakovich suggests above, we need to make sure that we've prepared the reader ahead of time. We don't want to spoil the reader's surprise, but we want the ending -- and the character's unexpected behavior -- to ultimately make sense. 

Brandi Reissenweber, author of the “Ask the Writer” column for The Writer magazine (and my all-time favorite online writing instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop) explains in the following three snippets (from one of her many in-depth lectures on craft) the importance of carefully setting things up so that when the surprise comes it doesn't feel forced:

My favorite bit of advice on "endings" and "surprise" comes from author and creative writing professor John Dufresne in his enthusiastic and inspiring book on craft, The Lie That Tells A Truth.  It comes from his chapter on plot titled "The Queen Died of Grief." I find myself returning to this passage every time I approach the ending of a new story, and I imagine that you will, too:

Below the exercise I've listed a few of my favorite short stories with surprise endings that work really well. I'd love to hear about some of your own favorites. The more we read stories with good surprise endings, the closer we'll get to actually pulling one off ourselves.  Oh, and hey -- if, during your travels and studies, you happen to come across a simple formula for generating the perfect surprise ending, be sure to let me know, would you?

Maass notes that in his workshops, "nearly three-quarters of participants find that they prefer the approach to the scene that this exercise yields.  Why is that? First choices in writing a scene often are the easiest: the ones that make sense and feel safest.  But safe choices make a scene predictable. Reversing motives shakes up a scene.  It makes its course less expected, yet no less logical since the action still comes from your character's true, deep motives." 

Seems to me that you could use this same exercise for the "endings" of stories as well. Or the endings of novels.  Or the endings of chapters in novels. What is it your character yearns for? Make a complete list of his reasons for wanting it.  Come up with several new and surprising "endings" based on each of the motivations on your list and write a brief summary of each.  Do any of these new endings surprise you more than others? If so, find places earlier in the story to show that your character is capable of such an unexpected action. Can you convince the reader through your character's past experiences that his surprising action later in the story is not only plausible, but right? 

A few of my favorite short stories available to read online:

"Neversink" by David Benioff  

"Twin Study" by Stacey Richter 

"The Wig" by Brady Udall (transcript from "This American Life", NPR) -- my favorite flash fiction piece (only 372 words!)

~

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step By Step

Donald Maass:  Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

John Dufresne:  The Lie That Tells A Truth

Brandi Reissenweber: writing instructor for Gotham Writers Workshop and author of the "Ask the Writer" online column for "The Writer" magazine

Why Writing Exercises?

Some writers dislike them.  Others despise them. Some find them boring and a waste of already too-limited writing time. Others see them as too restrictive, taking the writer far away from where he really wants to be: home with his own settings and characters; his own conflicts; his own carefully woven plots and subplots.

Believe me, I hear you.  I don't want to leave home either.  That's why I choose exercises that work for almost any project-in-progress, be it short story, novel, or memoir. You'll be surprised how easily almost every exercise here can be tweaked to work for your particular story and characters.

What I really love about writing exercises is how they take me out of that dreaded state of mind in which everything is expected to come out perfect on the first pass, or as John Gardner would describe it: that dark psychological mindset with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at your back.  I hate that mindset.  I love how exercises loosen me up and get me to examine problematic passages from a whole new perspective.  I love to steal delicious passages from the novels and authors I admire and try to do something similar in my own scenes.  Josip Novakovich, author of the wonderful Writing Fiction Step by Step says:

I have yet to apply an exercise to a passage in my own fiction that failed to improve it exponentially.  After  focusing for some time on one particular element of craft, the passage is always richer for the time spent; more textured, more nuanced; better in every way.  I encourage you to research this phenomenon for yourself.  As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction:

When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional.

Now who wouldn't want to strive for that?

~

Josip Novakovich, Writing Fiction Step by Step

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

The Art & Craft of Revelation

A few months ago I attended a writers conference where the impressive and charismatic keynote speaker, novelist Christian Moerk, led a workshop on "Building the Writer's Toolbox." He covered such topics as how to create satisfying chapter openings and closings;  the importance of layering-in details in act one that you can pick up later in the story; and how to create a "skeleton" in the form of a chronological synopsis of your novel.  But the tidbit I found most interesting was Moerk's suggestion that we must include periodic "reveals" in our stories-- at least one every five or six pages or so; and that it's the revelations that will keep the reader engaged and turning the pages. In a recent interview he talked about doing just that when working on his latest novel Darling Jim:  "I wanted to attempt a multi-layered story in which each scene becomes part of a daisy chain; the more you pull on it, the more will be revealed."

Before that writers' conference I hadn't thought much about revelations in fiction, or seen much mention of them in any of the books and articles I'd read on craft.  But now it seems they're everywhere. They're popping up in almost every book and article on craft I come across these days.

One of the most detailed references is in John Truby's Anatomy of a Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller.  Truby defines a revelation as "a surprising piece of new information" that forces a character to "make a decision and move in a new direction." As part of the 22 steps he breaks down the different types of revelations and where they typically occur (or should occur) in a well-told story. 

One such reveal is the protagonist's "self-revelation" that comes just after his apparent defeat (some refer to this point in the story as the end of Act III):

Just after the apparent defeat, the hero almost always has another major revelation.  If he doesn't, the apparent defeat is real, and the story is over.  So at this point, the hero gets a new piece of information that shows him that victory is still possible.  Now he decides to get back into the game and resume his quest for the goal….  The story turns in a new direction.

In his book Rewrite, Paul Chitlik describes this revelation as coming just before the beginning of his last, biggest battle, the final struggle to the summit: when your hero "sees something, hears something, or even remembers something that reanimates him and gives him the will to continue."

As part of Truby's 22 story steps all the major story revelations are covered: the protagonist's first revelation and decision near the end of the beginning; added revelations in the middle to keep the plot from stalling; the second major revelation after the hero's apparent defeat; an important audience reveal (information that the reader receives before the hero learns it); a third and powerful revelation for the hero when he learns new information about a supposed ally; the all-important self-revelation at the story's crisis point; and if you're looking to "express your character's change with more complexity and emotional impact than the standard method allows, he offers the advanced technique of the "double reversal".  A reversal is "a reveal in which the audience's understanding of everything in the story is turned on its head." 

For each of these different reveals, Truby goes into detail about why it's important, how to write it well, and how to make the revelation meaningful.  I can't recommend this book enough.

Christian Moerk talks about reveals as being  a reward for the reader, that you should present the reader with just enough information to keep him going until the next reveal a few pages down the road.   His advice when writing is to start at the end (of the reveal) and work backwards so you can lay out your "clues" along the way.

Donald Maass, in his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, describes these revelations in character as "high moments" in the story -- moments that make him "suck in his breath, lower the book for a second, and admire what the author has just made happen." These moments (or story events) don't need to be huge to have an impact.  Examples of character revelations might be an unexpected act of forgiveness, a small but surprising act of self-sacrifice, or a simple, perhaps sudden realization by one character that things aren't quite the way he thought they were (as in the example in the exercise below). 

John Truby writes that "the more revelations you have, the richer and more complex the plot will be." And here's a surprising assessment:  Truby says that revelations are usually missing in average (as opposed to great) stories.  What?? Really??? Well…we're not going to allow "revelations" to be missing from our stories, are we?

Exercise  

Part I:

The following excerpt is from Writing Fiction Step by Step by Josip Novakovich, novelist, short story writer, and professor of English at Penn State University.  This book, and his popular Fiction Writers Workshop, are two of my all-time favorite books on the craft of fiction.  I'll talk more about his books in a later post, but for now I'll just say that if you love a good writing exercise, especially one you can hone to your current work-in-progress, and one that'll help make your scenes sing out loud, you've got to get your hands on a copy of Writing Fiction Step by Step!

Read this excerpt from Novakovich's story "Hats and Veils" and pay attention to how the scene flows forward and backward in time, ending with a revelation.  Novakovich: "Chronologically, we follow father and daughter on the bus, on a short ride.  We deviate into the past reveries a little to prepare us for the present, which is the mainstream of the scene:

         They climbed onto the bus together.  There were several elderly people; a dozen high-school students; a leathery adolescent with green hair and a ring piercing his lip; and two young women, with black lipstick, in mink coats and torn fishnet stockings….

        "Could we go sailing?" Sonya asked in German, looking at the bouncing sailboats among the choppy waves of the lake.  He did not answer because he was busy with his reveries.

      He remembered how when Sonya was thirteen months old, she had loved fish.  Whenever she saw a drawing of a fish, she'd silently open and close her mouth.  When he showed her a red starfish picture -- and said, "Starfish!" -- her finger tried to trace the mouth, and not finding it, got confused, stopped on the picture of a submarine rock.  She put her tiny forefinger back in her fist, and stared at Vadim openmouthed, as though confronted with the concept of a lie for the first time.  Later, on a moonless night with a breeze murmuring through pines, when he pointed to the sky and said "Stars!" she opened and closed her mouth happily, and turned to him to show him how well she was doing.  She's learned to accept all kinds of fishes, in their variety, even those that did not have mouths and that swam in the sky at night.

            "Sag mal," Sonya began again. Tell me…

            "Mozda kasnije," he said in Bosnian.  "Maybe later, after I teach you how to ski.  Would you like that?"

            "Hush!" Sonya put her forefinger on her lips, and said in English, while blushing, "Somebody might hear you!"

           As he stared at her red face uncomprehendingly, she whispered in Bosnian, apparently thinking that he was not capable of understanding other languages.  "Keep quiet, people will hear you."

            "So? That's what speech is for!" he said.

            She turned her head away and bit her lips.

           So that's it.  She's ashamed of me.  She's afraid of being identified as Bosnian.  I'm a Bosnian peasant, and she's a Swiss lady.  My child, my best friend, is a foreigner to me.

Novakovich again: "The reveries, with their images of stars and starfish, enhance the man's nostalgia and dreaminess, out of which he is jolted in the conversation with Sonya, when he realizes that she, though he has and is going to sacrifice a lot for her, is actually ashamed of him, and ashamed to be a foreigner."

The following is an exercise not only in revelation, but in the "elements of scene" as well.  Novakovich says:

When you read novels, watch for scenes that work particularly well.  Analyze them.  What do you like in them?  Can you do something similar?  If it's all right in tennis to imitate a good stroke, why not in writing?  You will still end up doing it your own way.

He invites you to steal his scene above and do something similar with your own story.  Using his scene as a general guide, write your own scene, preferably one using two of your own characters --a scene you might use in your current novel or work-in-progress.  As an exercise in structuring a scene and negotiating flashbacks, try doing something similar to Novakovich's scene, keeping it to about 500 words or less:

Begin by briefly describing the setting. What does your POV character notice? If he's been there before, what's different this time?  The other character wants something and a dialogue begins. During the conversation your main character drifts off into a brief memory that will inform the present action.  Bring your character back to the present, being careful to anchor the reader in place and time as you move from present action to memory and back again.  Continue the conversation, bringing it to a close with the main character receiving some kind of meaningful revelation. (500 words or less)

Part II:

"Good writers know that revelations are the key to plot.  That's why it's so important that you take the time to separate the reveals from the rest of the plot and look at them as one unit.  Tracking the "revelations sequence" is one of the most valuable of all storytelling techniques." John Truby, in Anatomy of Story: 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller (read the book to learn much, much more!)

Make a list of all the revelations in your story in the order they're revealed to the protagonist. Beside each reveal, note the effect that the new information has on the POV character.  How does the revelation change his desire? How does it impact his course of action? How does it change everything that follows? 

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Writing Fiction Step by Step, by Josip Novakovich

Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, by John Truby

Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, by Donald Maass
Rewrite, by Paul Chitlik

Christian Moerk, Keynote speaker, 2009 Central Coast Writers' Conference

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