There are so many story elements to consider in writing a story. Creating a page-turning plot alone has multiple elements to manage. Last month in Part 1 of You Can Develop a Page-Turning Plot with Character-First, I gave examples of how to develop the basics of your plot using the Russian nesting doll method. This month we talk about balancing all the rest of the elements essential for a story with a page-turning pace. We’ll start with the stakes.
Making the Stakes Matter
When you build the stakes of each of your scenes and the acts or sections in your story, you can use the Russian nesting dolls idea.
For each scene and each act or plot point, remember what the goals are of your protagonist and the antagonist. Start your plot steps with the smallest nesting doll and make each next step a little larger by asking questions:
What does each of your characters want to do as their next step?
What do they not want to do? This is where you can tie this to your character’s backstory and/or theme. A lot of writing instruction uses the idea of going up a staircase here to show upward movement. Don’t be afraid to use something that makes your character feel as if she lost ground (found herself back in a smaller nesting doll).
What does your protagonist actively choose to do?
How does that action make her worst fear come true or make it even harder for her to reach her goal?
What does she do that makes her desperate enough to do something she doesn’t want to do? Notice the wording. It’s not “what happens to her.” It’s “What did she do?”
Each time she acts there are consequences. They can be big, medium, or small. If you make each stake life and death, it will grow to mean very little. However, if you start with a small consequence and build to larger and larger consequences until it is a question of life and death. You’re on your way to having a page-turning plot.
The next elements in this article are often elements that cannot be refined until you are in the editing phase of working on your story. Drafting a story is messy. Knowing the elements that need to be strong to make yours a page-turning plot, goes a long way to making each draft closer to a page turner than the draft before. Knowing what the overall pacing of your story should be is the first step.
The Overall Pacing of Your Story
There is a diagram commonly used to show the rising and falling action of your story. It’s a simple inverted check mark.
That is helpful for understanding the big concept, but not helpful in writing the story. Your story’s pace is far more like a long staircase going up to the peak, or climax, with a lot fewer steps down from there. Each step is a bit of rising action that builds on the previous step.
If you make each step the same height and width, your pacing is off. A far more interesting plot follows a more Escher-like staircase where one set of steps leads to a blank wall, so you must go down to the last branching of staircases. You take another set that leads to a new doorway and more stairs.
If your plot drives the movement instead of your character, your pacing will feel off. Remember the TV commercials that make fun of the horror trope of not calling for help? If your character has to say, I know I should do xx but I’m going to…., your plot is not character-driven.
The longer (more words or scenes) your character struggles to get up to the next goal, the slower the pace. The faster your character discovers the next clue or achieves the next interim goal, the faster the pace. One word of caution: give your character (and your reader) a chance to breathe and consider her next move. In a character-first plot, your character’s personality and experience and education will dictate how difficult the struggle, how long the struggle takes, and how long the character needs to breathe and choose a new direction.
There is a balance of struggle, winning or failing, breathing and considering time, and choosing a new direction. That balance is specific to your genre. That balance is also specific to the type of story you are telling. Study your favorite books in your genre, and you’ll be able to recognize and emulate that structure and pace.
Choose Your Words
Many things affect the pacing of a story. None of them are the word count of a scene or chapter or even of the book.
Small things like word choice, the order of the words, the amount of detail, the length of sentences, and the rhythm of the words affect pace. As well as the larger things like narrative to dialogue ratios and the size of, placement of, and character reactions to plot events.
I hear you asking, what has word choice to do with developing a page-turning plot with character first? Whether you are writing close or distant first person or third, or you’re writing dialogue, or interior thought, or description, you are telling the story of a particular character. Giving that character a unique-to-her way of speaking makes her distinct from other characters. It can make your readers want to turn the pages to see what happens to that person.
Opening Lines that Convey Character
“I celebrated my birthday with a small, very exclusive, very festive, and very fun party on Fifth Street. It was just the way I wanted it.
Damon had come home from boarding school in Massachusetts as a special surprise. Nana was there, acting large and in charge of the festivities. Along with my babies, Janie and Ali. Sampson and his family were on hand; and of course Bree was there.” I, Alex Cross. James Patterson, 2009.
“Sheridan Street in Jamaica Plain goes uphill from Center Street for about two hundred yards, crests and heads down toward Chestnut Avenue. It’s a narrow street, lined with two- and three-family clapboard houses. Many of the houses had been broken up into apartments, and a lot of the apartments were occupied by students and recent graduates. The rest by people who worked without a tie.” Crimson Joy. Robert B. Parker, 1988.
“Waking, I head a warm wind strumming the loose screen at the open window, and I thought Stormy, but it was not.
The desert air smelled faintly of roses, which were not in bloom, and of dust, which in the Mojave flourishes twelve months a year.
Precipitation falls on the town of Pico Mundo only during our brief winter. This mild February night was not, however, sweetened by the scent of rain.” Forever Odd. Dean Koontz, 2005.
You would not mistake one of those characters for any of the others. They all establish a place and a voice and the expectation that something is about to happen. The voice, the rhythm, and the pace of each are quite different. Why? What word choices, sentence lengths, and cadence did each author make that give the reader a sense of who that person is?
Pick up any two or three of your favorite reads. Copy the first 70-100 words into an electronic or physical notebook. What is the difference between each of these examples? What makes each of them unique? Consider applying what you learn from your examples to your own work.
Detail Words in Opening Lines
“Once upon a time there was a girl called Little Red Riding Hood. She lived with her mother in a village near a forest.” Little Red Riding Hood. The Brothers Grimm, 1812.
What if the Brothers Grimm wrote those two lines like this:
A very long time ago, there was a little eight-year-old girl whose name was Gertrude, and she always wore a red riding cloak with a hood, so everyone called her Little Red Riding Hood. She lived in a village of three-hundred and nine people called Hainich. Now Hainich was on the edge of a dense and dark forest of spruce and beech trees.
That version of the story would be grim. (Pun intended). Overloaded with details that aren’t vital to understanding, the pace is ponderous. If someone had written the entire fairy tale that way, would people remember and reprint it more than three-hundred years later?
Re-read the last paragraph. It’s a little ponderous itself, but it works because the length of the sentences helps draw you along.
Rhyme, Rhythm, and Cadence
“Little pig! Little pig! Let me in! Let me in!”
The story of the Three Little Pigs has a compelling cadence and rhythm. It produces a musical, memorable, and predictable flow. The story itself is quite simple. But who doesn’t remember, “Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin” and “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” The rhythm of the story pulls us along and makes it fun to read.
Unless you are writing something that’s intended to be fun-to-read, I don’t recommend using as much rhythmic writing as in this fairy tale. However, a well-placed rhythmic sentence can increase tension or romance, among other things.
Look back at the examples from Dean Koontz, Robert B. Parker, and James Patterson. How do they use rhyme, rhythm, and cadence?
If you’d like to see how rhythm and cadence work, read Margie’s Rule #10, a post on the Writers in the Storm Blog.
It’s a Balancing Act
Striking the right pace for your story is a case of balancing characters, needs and wants, obstacles and struggles, the word choices you make, your sentence and scene lengths, and knowing your story, your genre, your audience.
Do you need to do every single step, answer every single question I’ve suggested? No.
There is no single correct route to a page-turning plot. Plots can be very simple and still be entertaining because of the characters and/or situations. Every great page-turning plot has characters with transformative dilemmas that live in the reader’s head well after she turned the last page.
What questions do you have about developing a page-turning plot with character-first?
Image Credits:
Simple plot line image by Lynette M. Burrows
Juggling act image by Michelle Pitzel from Pixabay
All other images purchased from DepositPhoto.com