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I wanted to go over some very basic tools I use during revision specifically when I am looking at plot elements. My third book (in draft) isn’t a thriller (which one could clearly call my first book) and it’s not a “let’s solve this murder and uncover the mystery of this town” like my second book. I suppose I would call it a crime novel entangled with a family drama. Anyhow, the less squarely you fit within the specific confines of genre, the harder it might be for you define what your book is. While I’m not intending this book to move at as fast a clip as my first book, I definitely want to avoid feelings of “this middle is soggy” which is very, very often a problem of books. (One could argue that the entire second book of the Hunger Games trilogy didn’t need to exist..)
So I’m going to go over how I use notecards to help me “see” the overall structure of my books. Forgive my handwriting—I will provide translations.
This is from the first chapter:
1 = what chapter it is.
There are three timelines in this book: the present, flashbacks, and “future” is from a magazine article a third party is writing about the events that transpired in the past.
The “3” is my ranking of how much tension there is in this chapter (more on that later). (nevermind the “O”)
The left side of the card is bullet points of all the major plot points that happen or are revealed. That is to say things that actively move the plot forward. The right side are important contextual things that the reader (likely) needs to know, but they don’t necessarily move the plot forward. A notecard might look really small—how are you supposed to fit all the points? The point being is that you to really have to drill down to what would you say if you only got two or three sentences to distill the entire plot down. This chapter is a magazine article that mixes hints of details about a crime—a murder of four people—with the story of these individuals in a band, Nemesis, in particular, its lead guitarist, Owen.
O/Nemesis (a band) is implicated in a murder
O’s biological family coming into conflict with Nemesis
Murder occurred at the Hudson Estate
They were murdered in bed
Article is written in a tone that makes O look suspicious
He refuses to answer questions about his family.
These index cards are often a bit different for the very first or second card, because there are some liberties you can take in opening chapters. Technically this chapter doesn’t contain the actual people being murdered in bed, but it’s our first coming into contact with that knowledge, so it is a plot point or clue. Also because of the nature of it being an article, we are told some things rather than shown them. Sometimes plot points will be more obvious “Devon releases text messages that start a cascade of gossip” or “an unsuspecting housewife finds a bloody knife in her husbands briefcase.” But sometimes the “plot points” in opening chapter are more like “establishing facts on the ground.” ie, “Chloe is an incoming freshman on a scholarship she gets for being part of the psychology department’s psychopath program.” The action in that chapter was just her checking in at the psychology department, which is really just a way to show the reader details about the program and scholarship. But in the case of all of the above bullet points, you need all of them to understand the plot moving forward. In other words, if you don’t understand that there is some intense tension between Owen and his family, you’re going to miss something in Chapter 2.
On the right side of the card:
Owen’s meteoric rise
supernatural talent
introduction to the band and their dynamic
Owen is strange, larger than life
Is his weirdness an act?
The right side of the card is important contextual things that the reader probably needs to know, but technically they don’t move the plot forward. It’s important to establish what should go on the left vs right side of the card. In the above cases of right-side information, I could hypothetically move the sentences that contain this information to another chapter if I had to—and you could still read chapter 1 and the plot of chapter 2 would make sense. This is not to say that what is on the left side (the plot) is more important than what is on the right (context.) I think of the plot as skeleton—all skeletons look alike (okay some are taller) but all the other stuff that gets piled on it (context) the muscles, organs, skin, eyes, these are the things that give a book its unique flavor. I could take the same exact plot points in chapter 1, replace all the context info with different stuff and it would be a different book.
In the case of the first few establishing chapters, that contextual information is really critical in establishing the characters, setting, tone, relationships, etc. In my second book, after a couple initial “oh no, we have a murder here, and the murder has a past” chapters, we get six very important establishing chapters: one for each of the POVs. Each character gets a chapter where we see a variety of things about their lives their families, their social status, who they are as a person, but also through their lens we see what the town is like, because the small town setting is critical for the book. All that stuff is very important context, but we do have basic info that moves the plot forward: In Jia’s chapter, the local megachurch harasses her family for running an occult novelty store. In Kelly’s chapter, she is expelled from the popular group by Maddy—a member of the aforementioned church. In Padma’s chapter we are introduced to the Pastor of said church. In Casey’s chapter we learn something sinister about that church. In James’s chapter we learn that the end of year party is going to take place in the town’s abandoned coal mine, which is strange and terrifying. These are pretty fat chapters—maybe even riskily so—because it was very important to me to establish each of the kids fully to make readers invested in them. The balance between left-side and right-side stuff is subjective.
IMHO, books that run at an extremely fast clip tend to not have that much right-side stuff. This is why books like that also tend to suffer from character development, rich settings, etc. I think books like that are exactly the type of books that you breeze through, think, that was fun, and leave on a table at the airport and never think about again, forgetting even the main character’s name.
However, sometimes books can have ALL contextual information and NO plot in those first few chapters, which is not good. More on that later- let’s look at chapter 2.
On the left (plot) side:
Magical concert ends with Owen collapsing.
On the right (context) side:
Owen has no game. Emery is his ex.
Boys in the band have good synergy
Owen is friends with Ella (a musician who is at this concert)
Cyrus (in the band) genuinely cares for Owen.
After I wrote the card I was like…uh, is enough STUFF happening in chapter two? It made me wonder if 1) could chapter 2 be combined with chapter 3 (which is the aftermath where Owen is at the hospital and they find out why he collapsed) or 2) the best parts of the concert—the high of how great it was, then Owen collapsing and fans thinking he was dead—taken out and used as flashback in another chapter? I still haven’t decided. But seeing that on paper is helpful for me to know in terms of knowing where things should go, and how much real estate things should get. (the yellow sticky is a note from me later, wanting to amp up the drama in this scene on the basis of some feedback I got.)
What if you have a chapter where there’s nothing on the left side? Well, then you’ve got a chapter where nothing happens. No bones = no fundamental structural basis. There’s very few cases where you should have a chapter where nothing happens. And very, very few cases where it should be amongst the first few chapters. When can you get away with it? 1) your prose is so lyrical and astounding that even you writing about nothing happening is profound and interesting. (not true even of most literary writers.) 2) you are making a strategic, carefully thought out choice. When I see a chapter where nothing happens in a manuscript it is almost always because the author doesn’t understand that, technically speaking, nothing happened. If you asked them, “what happened in this chapter?” and they say, “the reader learned how the band got together.” No, that isn’t what happened— it’s what you did, or what you showed to the reader, but that isn’t a “thing that happened” unless the story is “how did the band get together?” This book is about a murder that happens to involve a band, so “how did the band get together” is incidental (though important) information. Another type of misstep often happens with sci fi and fantasy. Worldbuilding is so important, and authors are often in a hurry to get that established that they will just dump a lot of information at the beginning. Sometimes in the form of entire chapters learning about the Thieves Guild or something. They will start with an action scene where the thief steals something. Then the entire second chapter is an exposition world-building dump. It’s really risky to do this. When an agent or editor is sitting down with a manuscript, they are asking themselves “What is this book about?” which is fundamentally the pitch plus the plot. The Thieves Guild is the background. However important, it’s background.
I made a risky strategic decision in my first book. In the second chapter, nothing happens. I did this on purpose. I did this knowing that the first twenty pages or so are really, really critical in getting an agent. This was my thinking: the first chapter introduces you to this girl who seems to be up to something; you learn that she’s in a program for psychopaths; and the very last sentence of the chapter is her saying that she came to this school to kill Will Bachman (you have no idea who this is.) The second chapter is effectively a list of information about Will. Here’s the beginning, some stuff cut out, then the very end of the chapter.
Here is what I know about Will Bachman.
He lives at 1530 Marion Street, NW, exactly 1,675 feet from my dorm. The nearest police station to his house is a five-minute drive away. The house is a row house, attached on either side to other row houses. The first floor windows and front door have iron bars welded over them. Within the past year, there have been thirty-three violent crimes near that house, most of which were armed robberies.
Here is what I’ve derived from any number of his online accounts.
Will Bachman is in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity—SAE, whose frat house is a few blocks away. His roommate is Cordy, also in SAE. Will Bachman is a junior majoring in political science and deciding if he wants to minor in econ. He’s on the lacrosse team, but also likes swimming. I used to swim with him when we were kids. He likes house music and smoking weed. He owns a black Volkswagen Jetta that some asshole dinged in the parking lot of the Giant supermarket. He reads the Drudge Report and thinks that all snowflakes need to be melted. He has a mother who wears pearls and volunteers for the Red Cross and a younger brother. They live at 235 Hopper Street, Toms River, NJ, 08754.….. [I’m skipping a page and a half here to show you the end]
Will Bachman probably does not have a gun because of the strict gun control laws in DC.
Will Bachman posts enough about his classes that any intelligent person such as myself could easily figure out his schedule. The hashtag #SAElife is used often enough that one could tell what the brothers are up to on any particular weekend. Where they’re going, and who with, and how inebriated they’ll be.
Will Bachman drinks too much and hangs out with people who don’t look after him.
Will Bachman has made some mistakes.
Will Bachman has sixty days to live.
This is a thorough and detailed documentation of just how much information she has gleaned about Will even before moving to the same city as him. It’s cold and calculating. You realize, she wasn’t fucking kidding when she said in chapter 1 that she was going to kill him. She knows where he lives, the security of that house, who he hangs out with, where he buys groceries, where he stumbles home drunk. I thought it was okay to make this strategic risk of nothing happening for three reasons: 1) it’s short. We get enough to get the deal. 2) We understand just how serious she is. 3) Even if nothing is happening it absolutely ups the tension.
Going back to the “3”s that appear on the notecards: these are my self-ratings of how much tension one feels by the end of the chapter. Nothing happens in chapter 2 of Never Saw Me Coming in the sense that there’s no plot points, but the tension is increased when we see just how cold and calculating Chloe is—we fear just what she is capable of, maybe we delight in it a little, and it does make us wonder why she wants to do this. Lots of books contain lines about someone wanting to kill someone. But Chloe has actually measured the distance between his house and the nearest police station. It also sets up a 60 day ticking clock. It also makes you wonder, what is going to happen in the time between now and day 60?? Tension is what gets people to turn pages quickly. I might enjoy a book that doesn’t have a lot of tension—people are even seeking them out these days, but depending on your genre and how much pushback you’re getting, consider looking on how much tension you have, particularly if they are saying things like “pacing” or “soggy middle.”
I rated the tension for each chapter of Book 3 and then graphed it across the book.
I don’t expect anyone to be able to read the text—those are just little notes to myself to remember what the chapter was. The Y axis is tension. The little letters are whose POV it’s in (this is because the colored pen wasn’t showing up well enough for me to see.) The color coding helps because I can immediately see an issue: not counting D [for which this makes sense], the other narrators L, R, and O all have both high tension and low tension chapters—but C doesn’t. I actually didn’t notice this until just now, writing this. C is a character that some (but not all) of my test readers “had trouble connecting with.” I love C! How dare you! But… might this not be a function of who he is, but actually a function of a lack of tension in his chapters…? This might be an unintentional byproduct of the fact that C is a level-leaded guy. R is also a level-headed guy but batshit insane things happen to him. So I think to think about C and increasing tension for him.
The other thing you will notice is the shape of chapter 8 to 13. It’s a straight slope going downhill, and this is not skiing where that would be fun. Incidentally, the feedback I got about this book is “well… when they get to the house in the middle..?” Soggy. You can physically see the problem area. The sort of lopsided U-shape of Chapters 1-7 makes sense to me— you jolt them, then you slow down, then you ramp up. Then after 7 you do need some aftercare.
Anyhow I’ve gone on long enough, now I have to go figure out how to fix this..
Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash