Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
— Red Smith
And brick by brick, you can add levels of complexity to your plot. Because while a fast-moving story is a good thing, a story that lingers inside the reader long after the last page is another accomplishment entirely.
A memorable plot requires that you take your writing to the next plateau. There are numerous ways to add complexity to your plots. We’ll look at a few of them in this chapter.
But first, we ought to ask, “Why complex? Isn’t the prevailing rule in life KISS — Keep it Simple, Stupid?”
Not when you consider the beauty of complex structures. They seem simple because they work so well. That’s the effect you want to achieve in your own work.
At some point in your plotting, ask yourself what the take-home value of your story is going to be. What is the lesson or insight — the new way of seeing things — that you want the reader to glean?
Put it into one line. This will be your theme.
Think of theme as the meta-message, the one big statement about the world your work of fiction will convey. A novel should have only one meta-message, though it may offer several submessages.
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov propounds numerous messages, such as the futility of pure intellect and the burden of free will. But it has only one main theme, which might be phrased faith and love are the highest values of human existence.
Themes deepen fiction, but you must beware of a common danger. It is tempting for a writer to take a theme and force a story into it. This results in a host of problems, including cardboard characters, a preachy tone, a lack of subtlety, and story clichés.
How can you avoid these novel killers? Here is one simple rule to remember: Characters carry theme.
Always.
Develop your characters fully and set them in the story world where their values will conflict with each other. Allow your characters to struggle naturally and passionately. Theme will emerge without effort.
Weave theme into plot. Like a tapestry, thematic strands must come together in a seamless way to create an overall effect. The feel must be organic. This is most often done through subplots.
A subplot can be primarily thematic, concerned with what the Lead character needs to learn.While the outer action of the main plot is going on, causing all sorts of problems for the Lead, the thematic subplot focuses on issues that are personal and interior.
For example, you have a detective who is trying to solve a murder. In the main plot, he is going to interview witnesses, follow leads, avoid death, fight with his partner, run up against his captain, and so forth.
At the same time, he is having trouble at home. His wife has started drinking because of the stress. This is affecting the kids. The detective’s marriage is falling apart because he has not learned how to give his wife what she needs.
This is the subplot that carries a theme, which might be learning to love is as important as success at a job.
A thematic subplot can end on a positive or negative note and still carry the meta-message.
If the wife leaves the detective at the end, that’s a negative, but the Lead has learned the lesson in a bitter fashion. He may not accept the lesson, but it has hit him in a personal way.
Or the detective figures out he must sacrifice something of his professional life to keep his marriage alive. He and his wife reconcile, a positive note. Same lesson.
A thematic subplot adds depth and meaning to a story. It allows you to make a statement about the important things in life, even if the main character isn’t thinking about them most of the time.
Symbols and motifs deepen your plot, but only if they are not larded on. Again, naturalness is the key.
A symbol is something that is representative of another thing. A motif is a repeated image or phrase.
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” is a story where water is a central motif. It begins: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana. …”
From the start, we have a connection between water, religion, and family (not to mention the symbolic significance of fishing). The river becomes the central image repeated throughout the story. When the narrator watches his brother fly-fishing from a boulder, he reflects “the whole world turned to water.”
And at the end, the narrator tells us “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. … I am haunted by waters.” The motif was literal at the beginning, symbolic at the end. It frames and defines the story.
Janet Fitch weaves symbols and motifs into White Oleander. The oleander plant — tough, attractive, poisonous — represents Astrid’s mother, who tries to control Astrid’s life from prison. The tomato plants “groping for a little light” signify Astrid herself as she faces various challenges. These elevate the story from a collection of plot incidents to a commentary on life, love, and human resiliency.
Whales become a symbol of hope in Lisa Samson’s The Living End. The grieving narrator, Pearl Laurel, is having doubts about life. She goes on a whale-watching trip, and someone tells her it would be awful to go through all this trouble and see no whales. This causes Pearl to reflect. “I am convinced. This life is more than just the face value. It has to be. There have to be whales at the end.” In the next scene, Pearl gets a look at the whales and takes pictures, “the first pictures I’ve taken on this camera in years.”
Here is an opening moment from my novel Breach of Promise. The father of a girl named Maddie is looking back on happier times:
And then the time we were watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV one Christmas. Maddie was four. Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart started singing “Buffalo Gals” as they were walking home from the high school dance. I glanced at Maddie and she seemed mesmerized.
… aaaannnd dance by the light of the moon.
Jimmy and Donna, singing.
Maddie looked at me then. “Can we do that?” Paula was on the phone in the kitchen. I alone had to field this one, and knew from experience that Maddie’s questions sometimes threw a bolo around my head.
“Do what, honey?”
“Dance by the guy in the moon?”
“By the light of the moon.”
“Whatever, Daddy.”
“You bet we can.”
“Now?”
It was one of those things you don’t stop and analyze. I think God implants a certain instinct in fathers (who are somewhat slow on the uptake) which tells them to heed their children without extensive cross-examination.
“Sure,” I said. I lifted her off the couch — she in her soft cotton PJs with rabbits and me in my cutoffs and Dodger tee-shirt — and went to the kitchen to tell Paula we were going up on the roof of the building. Paula, phone at her ear, put her finger in the air, telling me to be quiet.
I carried Maddie up to the roof.
The moon was almost full. It seemed huge. It cast a glow over the hills, where million dollar homes gawked somewhat incredulously at the apartment buildings below. The kind of homes I dreamed of living in, with Paula and Maddie and a big, fat $20 million contract to star in the next Ridley Scott movie.
But tonight I did not care that I was on an apartment building roof. Maddie had her warm arms around my neck, and I held her and swayed, swayed, swayed. Time went completely away as we danced by the light of the moon.
The moon and the dance became a motif that was to repeat in memory, and in a final image of the novel. I had not planned it that way, but after writing the above decided this was exactly what I was looking for. It held the whole book together for me and gave me an image in my mind as well.
You find symbols and motifs in your work by paying attention. Write scenes rich in sensory detail and look closely at what you’ve created.
Length of novel, especially when it involves expanse of time, presents another layer of complexity. One challenge for the novelist of long books — epics, histories, and the like — is how to keep the reader interested for 500, 800 or 1,000 pages. With such scope there is plenty of room to go wrong, pad, or overstay your welcome. Even some of our best novelists have fallen into the abyss of prolixity from time to time.
Style alone is not enough to pull the reader through.
Furthermore, the episodic nature of some long novels seems to defy the LOCK system and three-act structure. But, as we’ll see, this is mere illusion.
Let’s take a historical novel as an example. Suppose the author wants to tell the story of young boy in Ireland in the 1860s and end with him being a crooked and successful politician in the 1920s. There will be settings in Ireland, England, on board a ship, in Boston, and eventually in New York. In New York, there will be several parts chronicling the Lead’s climb to the top.
Along the way, too, the Lead’s objectives may change. In the early parts of the book, his struggle is to survive. In the middle, it is to make friends with the powerful. In the latter parts, he is trying to gain power.
There will be different opponents over the course of time. A villainous neighbor, an oppressive sea captain, a crooked cop, a Town Hall mayor.
You get the idea. Loads of material and plenty of ways to stall.
How do we keep a plot of such complexity paced for readability?
The same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
Each bite, in this instance, is a major section. And the jaws of mastication are the old reliables, the LOCK system and three-act structure.
Simply treat each section as a mini-plot.
Let’s say the Ireland section of our proposed historical novel is to take our Lead through his hard youth to his setting off for London. Let’s say, further, that this section will be about 20,000 words.
Think of this section as a 20,000-word novelette. Use the LOCK system, only turn the L for Lead (which in our example remains constant) to Locale and turn the K from Knockout to Kick-in-the-pants prompt — you want the reader to be compelled to read the next section. At the end of the novel, you will write a knockout ending.
In the following table, the Lead is always going to be Connor, an Irish lad:
| LOCALE | OBJECTIVE | CONFRONTATION | KICK |
| Ireland | Get out of Ireland | Father, Neighbor | Beats up father and runs |
| England | Find work; survive | Constables, crime boss | Framed; he flees |
| Ship | Avoid punishment | Evil captain | Jumps ship |
| Boston | Find a niche | Prejudiced cops, Irish rivals | Kills cop |
| New York 1 | Make money | Cheating partner | Gains business |
| New York 2 | Get power | Political bosses | Knock out ending |
Within each section, you may construct subplots, adding further to the complexity. A subplot character may also span the sections, making connections with the main plot.
The movie Forrest Gump is like that. There are several sections, beginning with Forrest as a boy. He goes to Vietnam, later becomes a Ping Pong champion, then makes it as a shrimper, and so on.
But consistent throughout is his relationship with the girl, Jenny.
Now let us subject our sections to the three-act structure. We’ll use the first New York section as an example.
In Act I of this section, Connor arrives in New York and finds lodging with a friend of his family, an Irish immigrant. There is some equilibrium established here. The rundown tenement on the East Side becomes Connor’s new “ordinary world.”
But then the friend is forcibly evicted for not paying the rent, and Connor is out in the street. This is the new inciting incident, the disturbance in the ordinary world we’ve established.
Connor’s objective becomes to make money. He believes that money is the key to everything in America.
He meets a fellow who convinces him to become business partners. Connor signs an agreement with the man, linking the two — a “doorway of no return.”
Over the course of this section’s Act II, however, Connor becomes suspicious of the way the business accounts for its money. There are ups and downs as Connor pursues his objective, money. He runs across a major clue or suffers a major setback that puts him in direct conflict with his partner, who has been cheating him. This becomes the second doorway, leading us into Act III.
Through some clever ruse or with the help of a lawyer, Connor cheats the cheater and gains control of the business. Suddenly he has a taste of power. What will he do with it?
That’s the kick that propels the reader forward.
The LOCK system and three-act structure will never let you down, no matter how long or short your novel.
In a parallel-plot novel, you switch back and forth between the plot lines. If you can manage to end each section in a fashion that makes readers want to read on, you’re going to achieve that magical effect — I couldn’t put it down!
Parallel plots are just that: two or more plot lines that run along the same forward path. You may have a main plot — featuring a lead character you wish to emphasize — and one or more parallel plots to go with it. Or you can equalize among the plot lines.
The Fan, a thriller by Peter Abrahams, is a simple, two-track story. The first track is about Gil Renard, a salesman, and how his life is slowly coming apart. The second part is about Bobby Rayburn, a millionaire star baseball player, and what he is going through.
Gil does some bad things, but we keep reading because what happens to him could happen to us. He starts losing his edge in sales, his child is a disappointment to him, he has a key sales meeting that he misses and loses the client. He attacks the man his ex-wife has married. He is let go from his job at the company his father had started. His wife gets a restraining order preventing him from being around her or his son.
So he goes back to his hometown and takes up with a childhood friend who is now at the criminal end of the spectrum. He starts burglarizing with him, and eventually that leads to murder.
While this is going on, we cut from time to time to Bobby’s troubles as a star baseball player. Back and forth until Gil makes his way into Bobby’s life by killing his rival on the team, then eventually getting a job working as a landscaper for him after saving Bobby’s kid from drowning in a pool. The supreme stalker. How will it end?
Stephen King’s The Stand has several plotlines that run along the same path. Gradually these plotlines converge, eventually all coming together for a shattering climax.
Dean Koontz produces the same effect in Strangers.When you unpack the book’s plot, it’s really about a fifty-page science-fiction suspense story. But by adding several parallel plots, Koontz transforms the book into a seven-hundred-page epic.
Some novels and movies are told in nonlinear fashion. They jump around in time, and things don’t unfold in the way we normally think of for three acts.
But you will notice that the best of these work because the LOCK elements and the information necessary for the beginning, middle, and end eventually line up to create a coherent story.
As a trial lawyer and teacher of trial advocacy, I would stress to students that the jury is looking first of all for the story. They don’t care about the law during the taking of testimony. They want to know what happened. Evidence comes to them in a choppy way. They’ll hear from various witnesses on different aspects of the facts, usually in a nonchronological fashion. But what they are doing all the time is trying to fit the pieces into a coherent narrative.
In closing arguments, the lawyers — if they are doing their job — weave a narrative and only then apply the law to the facts.
Your readers will be doing the same thing if you write a nonlinear plot. It can work, so long as you help them fit it all into a coherent pattern.
A classic example of a nonlinear narrative that works well is the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. The story of Charles Foster Kane is told through the flashback remembrances of various characters who knew him, jumping around the various stages of his life. Each remembrance brings us a little closer to the full story.
Another example is the cult favorite The End of the Night, by John D. MacDonald. It is a story of four young people on a cross-country killing spree. It could have been told in a straight line, but MacDonald lets the story unfold in another way.
The prologue is a letter written by a prison guard to his friend Ed. It describes the electrocution of four murderers. It is written in a singular voice (“All I can say is, I’m damn glad they didn’t spread the four out, say about two weeks apart. A man would hardly have no love life at all. Ha, ha.”). So, in a unique way, we get the end of the story first.
Chapter one is written in the omniscient point of view (POV). It has the feel of a documentary in describing the lawyer, Riker Deems Owens. Language such as “Should the discerning reader detect …” is almost Victorian. Then the chapter switches to a memorandum Owens wrote, so it is naturally a first-person POV. The memo describes the killers who became his clients, known as the Wolfpack.
Chapter two is a third-person account of Helen Wister, who became the last victim of the Wolfpack murderers.
Chapter three introduces the death-house diary of Kirby Stassen, one of the Wolfpack. In first person, he tells about himself and the events leading up to the murders.
The chapters then bounce back and forth among the Owens memo, third-person accounts, and Stassen’s death-house diary.
Each chapter gives us a little more of the story, until we have it all by the end. And by changing styles in each chapter, MacDonald creates different tones that also add to the effect. I highly recommend you hunt this little gem out at your local library or used bookstore. MacDonald was a master plotter.
Another great plotter is David Morrell. In Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing, he explains his thinking about the structure of Double Image. His hero, Coltrane, is a photographer, and the events of the book reveal that his life has a “double image.”
The novel starts out in the past, in Bosnia, with Coltrane photographing Ilkovic, a war criminal. Coltrane barely escapes from the experience with his life. We then cut to present-day Los Angeles, where photographer Coltrane meets Randolph Packard, an old, dying, legendary photographer. Packard suggests doing a project with Coltrane. Eventually, this project leads to the old house of Packard’s that Coltrane wants to buy. Within that house is a mystery: photos of a beautiful woman. Who was she?
Coltrane starts getting strange messages on his machine. Like someone is playing with him. Who? On page 95, he figures out it’s Ilkovic, back to hunt him. From there until about page 215, there is stalking and action until Ilkovic is killed by Coltrane.
So the Ilkovic plot has intruded on the mystery plot. Now Morrell moves back to the “who is the woman” plot. Double plots. Double image.
The range of play within structure is wide. Just remember that when the reader gets to the final page, he’s going to want to know what happened.
Make three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, record the rich details that stand out in your scenes. In the middle column, list your main characters. In the last column, catalogue the significant settings. Now look for connections between the columns. Connect a detail with a character and place. Or work the other way, from place to character to detail. Pick the strongest two or three connections, and see if you can weave them into your plot as motifs or symbols.
Determine the take-home value for your novel, and put it into one line. This can be done at any stage of your plotting. If you do it early, keep it in mind as you develop your scenes. But be careful of heavy-handedness when you do. The message must come out naturally.
Music is a great way to brainstorm images for your novel. Relax and do some deep breathing. Put on a piece of music that moves you — perhaps a movie soundtrack, classical music, or jazz. Don’t play anything with lyrics. You want the music to wash over you. As it does, close your eyes and let images and even scenes suggest themselves to your imagination. Stop and record these on paper or in the computer. Repeat this exercise from time to time as you write.