Shades of Doubt

The definition of doubt is to be uncertain, consider questionable or unlikely, hesitate to believe, distrust, fear, or to be apprehensive about.

Your job as a writer is to instill doubt in your reader. Most readers go into a story expecting a happy ending. Some genres allow twist endings, down endings, or up-down endings. Either way, your goal is to make your reader doubt the final outcome until the climax of the story. 

You can plant a seed in the character’s mind that calls the reader to question the outcome in the following ways: 

1) Bait and Switch 

Pose a question at the beginning of the story then point the finger at an alternative answer. It can be a crappy alternative or a brilliant one. Make your reader believe the alternative is unavoidable until the climax. 

2) S-Curves 

Pose a question then offer a series of distractions and blind alleys before revealing the final answer. The distractions must be subtle. Oftentimes in mysteries, the reader knows it can’t be the first or second suspect; that would be too obvious. If you lead the reader on a blind chase, you can circle back to the truth at the climax. 

3) Loop the loop 

Pose a question and convince the reader the alternative answer is the best outcome at first, then circle around and change his mind by the climax.

4) Side by Side 

Offer two viable, attractive answers and make choosing between them difficult. Explore the pros and cons, staggering the attractiveness and cost for each choice. This creates a satisfying push-pull.

Learning to manipulate the reader’s expectations takes you from beginner to expert.

The Takeaway

I like a takeaway even in the shortest flash fiction or poem. It can be a tidbit of wisdom, a message, a challenge, or something that makes me question a belief or opinion. It can shine a  bright light on a dark corner or reveal a horror. It can uplift and inspire. It can make me sigh, “Oh, yes!” or shout, “Oh, hell no!”

I know. I know. Art is art. There is no one definition. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. A single blot of color on a canvas can be considered a masterpiece.

I'll be honest. My tastes are far too pedestrian for that. I like being able to easily identify what I’m supposed to be viewing. I prefer paintings that tell me a story, draw me in, lead me down shadowed wooded paths, toss me on churning white crests in an ocean struck with lightening, or a pierce me with a portrait’s stare that seems to follow my every move.

I have trouble connecting with short stories or flash fiction when they lack definition. A short story can be a slice of life vignette. It can examine one moment in time with laser-locked focus. Occasionally the language is so mesmerizing, I’ll read it anyway, even if the action goes nowhere. That is a rare occurrence. I usually thumb past after a few sentences or paragraphs or skim read it. If I get to the end and there was no takeaway, I turn the final page with a sour aftertaste.

My point is this: you can wax lyrical about anything you like in any way you like. Your words can be a blot of color on a piece of paper. You might engage a few readers along the way. But, by and large, story structure has a purpose. It provides an outline so your reader knows what she is supposed to be viewing. It insists that your ramblings have a point, preferably one that  skewers the reader to gain her attention.

Example:

Dick is searching for meaning. Your verbal camera follows him to a street-side cafe. He sits at an outdoor table and stares at the Seine over his mocha latte. He downs the chocolate coffee concoction and watches people go by, wondering who they are, and where they are headed. He stands and shuffles down the avenue, aimless, adrift.

I'm snoring at this point. Thematically, Dick watches life go by but isn't participating. By the end of the piece, Dick has not come to a conclusion, changed his life, or made his peace. He remains in a rut and I'm left feeling that my time has been wasted.

Let's examine what happens if you give the story a takeaway.

Example:

Dick is depressed. (Yawn).

Dick is depressed because his wife died. (It happens.) 

Dick is depressed because his wife died and he keeps seeing her ghost.  (Prickle of interest).

Dick is depressed because his wife died and he keeps seeing her ghost. He realizes she is enjoying the netherworld with her demon lover and vows to destroy them both. (Wow, did not see that coming. Please tell me more!).

Which version will you remember?

Engage the reader’s curiosity by giving the character something to aim for, no matter how minuscule, and make the reader question whether he will/could/should achieve it. This can be done in a three line haiku or a five-hundred-page novel. It can flow along the slow lane of Literary or the creepy crawl of Horror.

The takeaway? Offer your audience something to remember so they remember you and look forward to your next work with anticipation.

What's Your Angle?

The point of view you choose is like a verbal camera recording everything that happens in your scenes. The character or narrator you choose determines whether that lens is close up or remote.

A scene should be told from one camera angle. Stories are usually told from one camera angle. Each camera angle serves a different function.

How close or how far your camera angle/POV is determines the level of intimacy between your reader and your characters and the dimensions of the stage they perform on.

The omniscient narrator is an observer distantly recounting the story from his lofty box seat. He can be sympathetic or snarky. He can follow whatever character he chooses and have an opinion or be completely neutral. 

The third person remote point of view is distancing. The reader experiences your story from the nose-bleed seats at the back of the theater. The advantage is being able to see the entire stage from left to right. Your reader can take in everything that is happening. She can focus on stage left or stage right. The camera can relate what each character is thinking or feeling. The danger lies in moving the camera too abruptly. You don’t want to make your reader dizzy or confused.

Third person close up narrows the focus to a specific character. The reader is drawn to either stage left or stage right and the action that particular character is involved in. The camera angle is narrower. Things may occur on the opposite side of the stage, but the reader isn’t privy to them. The camera can follow different characters in each scene, but the action is still presented through the lens of a specific character. The danger here is accidentally inserting the third-person narrator's viewpoint. Each point of view character you follow dilutes the reader’s emotional connection to the story. If you veer away from the stars to follow the secondary characters too often, you risk losing the reader. 

First person is placing the camera on the shoulder of the character. The reader steps on stage and shadows the character, hearing what they hear and seeing what they see. This is the most intimate way to tell your story, but it limits your angle to the action happening in the spotlight. The danger is veering off to the author as narrator or other characters. Picture  home movies where the camera is trained on a specific event and the cameraman swerves for a second to follow someone else then jerks back to the main event.

Third person works well for mysteries. First person works well for YA. If in doubt, examine the books you’ve enjoyed in the genre you write and consider the point of view used. If most of the books are written in third person, how would using a first person camera angle affect the flow? Can you or should you change it up?

Unlike movies where camera angles can swoop and cut, the key to successful fiction is consistency. Consistency keeps your reader engaged in your story stream and that is the kind of page turning you should aim for.

Five Tough Questions

It is important to flesh out your cast with motivations and believable conflicts as much as faces and names. You may hate the idea of outlining or thinking the conflicts through initially. That is acceptable. Don’t let the concept stop you from stream of consciousness writing. If that is how your muse works, accommodate her. 

However, at the end of the draft, you should be able to answer some tough questions:

1) Did the scene contain conflict?

If not, you have some revision to do. A scene should contain something relevant to keep the reader from flipping past it. 

2) What did my characters do or not do, say or not say? 

It’s easy to write lots of cool stuff. We put our pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and translate the images in our heads into print form. If, at the end of the first draft, your characters are talking but not really saying anything important, or doing things that sounded like fun but don’t advance the plot, you have some revision to do. 

3) Why did they do or say it? Do you know? 

Character intention is important. We all do things for a reason. If a character’s intention does not mesh with his actions or words, it creates cognitive dissonance for your reader. This is a speed bump in the flow. The reader pauses when things don’t make sense to them. That is not to say you can’t obscure intent. There are suspense devices that keep the reader reading to find out why something didn’t make sense, especially in Mysteries. However, if a character behaves or speaks in a way that is out of sync with the rest of the story, it doesn’t sit well. The reader is detoured from the ride you are taking them on. Once or twice, they might forgive you. More than that and you risk losing them. 

4) Does it fulfill my intention? 

If a passage was fun to write or you just love it, but it doesn’t serve your plot or characters, it may have to go. I hate cutting those parts. It’s painful, but necessary. 

5) What does the obstacle force the character to do next? 

When a character is faced with an obstacle, he must overcome it. He either succeeds, fails, finds out he needs something different, requires more information, or must take a different action to get the same result.

The answers to these questions are critical when the scene involves your protagonist, antagonist, or love interest. The answers are important for the rest of your cast unless they are walk-ons who serve no plot function. Every primary and secondary character should serve a purpose. It’s more effective if they have an opinion on, or stake in, the overall story problem or the thematic argument at the heart of it. Secondary characters should create obstacles or make things easier for the protagonist and antagonist. That's what keeps your readers interested in what happens next.

The Importance of "Why?"

When plotting your story there are key factors to establish at overall story and scene level:

1) Who (characters)

2) What (goal/result)

3) When (timeline)

4) Where (setting)

The most important and often overlooked question is:

5) Why (motive)

Faulty logic and missing motive are plot holes that cause reader disconnect. The reader growls and shrieks, “The character would never do that!” or with a woeful sigh, “I guess the script called for it.”

At best, readers smirk and continue to read. At worst, they stop reading and never pick up another book you’ve penned. Fleshing out your cast with believable motivations makes them feel real. When you provide the characters with believable obstacles, the reader cares what happens.

Thinking writers, or planners, enjoy selecting obstacles before sitting down to write. They use brief notes or full character and plot outlines before typing “Chapter One.” Feeling writers, or pantsers, balk at the idea of outlining. They prefer to channel motive based on their understanding of human nature and their life experience. Their characters “write themselves.” Whether you plan or wing it, you should take a hard look at the finished draft and ask tough questions at scene and overall story level:

1. Did the scene contain conflict?

2. What did my character do or not do, say or not say?

3. Why did he do it or say it?

4. Did it fulfill my intention?

5. Was the motivation believable (not necessarily rational)?

6. Does the conflict serve the plot in an effective way?

7. How does overcoming, or failing to overcome, the obstacle lead to further conflict?

8. What does overcoming, or failing to overcome, the obstacle force the character to do next?

9. What is the price for failing?

10. What is the prize for succeeding?

The answers to the above questions are critical when the scene involves main characters. The answers are important for the rest of the cast unless they are walk-ons who serve minimal to no plot function. Secondary characters should serve a purpose when they appear. It’s more effective if they have an opinion on, or stake in, the overall story problem and the thematic argument at the heart of it.

Secondary characters and their subplots or story threads should slow down, complicate, or accelerate the protagonist’s and antagonist’s progress toward their story goals. Secondary characters and subplots that run alongside the main plot as a distraction encourage readers to flip past those pages. Secondary characters help supply the friction in your fiction.

Speed Bumps

Speeds bumps are anything that force a reader to slow down as they journey through your story. Examples are sentences that don’t make sense, items they need to Google, and things written in languages they don’t speak.

The goal of a master storyteller is to keep your reader focused on the plot. Things like funky formatting can pull focus. You can do it, but why bother? Gimmicks usually mar enjoyment rather than enhance it. There are books published with dashes instead of quotation marks and the like. I will never know if they were good stories because the format was a turnoff. 

Let’s address one of my personal pet peeves: italics. 

There are rules about when you should use italics. One or two words, or a few sentences conveying a character’s thoughts, are acceptable. However, pages of them are a chore to wade through. I skim read or page past them.

I have polled other readers about this and received a mixed response. Some didn’t mind reading pages of italics. Others agreed they skipped over or skimmed them. 

A novel by one of my favorite authors featured entire chapters centering on a past story crafted in italics interwoven with the present story in normal type. I skimmed the first italics chapter then skipped the rest. I’ll never know if the past story was interesting. I wasn’t in the mood to work that hard and the present story flowed without them. 

You can effectively weave a present day story with a past story without resorting to italics by transitioning into and out of the passages properly. I have seen it done both ways and much prefer an effective transition over italic type or odd formatting. You could also use chapter headings to cue the reader to the transition. 

If your manuscript uses long passages of italics to convey past story, dreams, internal dialogue, etc., try replacing them with skillful transitions.

A writer’s goal is to give the reader a seamless ride, not a journey full of speed bumps and plot holes. Don’t make them work too hard. You might lose them along the way.

Conflict Overview: The Americans

The Americans is a new television series about KGB spies living in the suburbs of D.C. in the early 1980’s during the Reagan era. The stars, Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, play undercover Soviet agents forced to live as man and wife (and have children) to blend into suburban America.

Let’s look at how this breaks down into the story building blocks.

The premise and overall story problem is KGB agents living in suburban DC in 1981. 

The genre/sub-genre is Spy Thriller. Which means “the promise” is cat and mouse games between the protagonists and the antagonists.

The central question is: Will they catch them or stop them in time?

Secrets a character is willing to die or kill for are always powerful. The premise raises good story questions. Will their cover get blown? Will they be executed or returned? Will they defect or turn double agents? If they defect and go into witness protection, will their marriage survive? What would the children do if they found out their parents were Soviet agents?

The interpersonal conflict comes from navigating the suburban 1980s and living with an arranged marriage (long enough to have a teen-aged child). It's fun to watch their children spout anti-Soviet rhetoric. You know the parents want to argue the point! More tension.

The internal conflict arises from the husband wishing to defect to the U.S. because their children are very much American. The wife does not agree with him. Their exact feelings for one another are in question.

The antagonist conflict is provided by the United States Government counterintelligence department. This is represented by an FBI agent who moves in across the street from the spies.

If you practice breaking stories down into their building blocks, it becomes easier to build your own stories. Whether you are watching television and movies or reading books, give it a try. Can you identify the key elements? What did you like? What didn't you like?

Once you get a feel for what worked, you can apply it when planning your next novel.