CHAPTER 11

PLOTTING WITH
SCENE AND SEQUEL

LET’S TAKE A FEW MOMENTS to review where we’ve been so for.

We started our analysis of fiction’s structural components by looking at cause and effect as the principle underlying linear story development. Then we looked at stimulus and response transactions, and how they work. Then we moved into the larger fiction building blocks, scene and sequel, to see how stimulus and response transactions lie behind the moment-by-moment structure of scene, and how sequel connects scenes in a cause-and-effect fashion.

Having laid all this groundwork, it’s now time to move on to some of the structural principles underlying the master blueprint of your long story, the planned sequence of story events we usually call “plot,” and how scene and sequel fit to give structure to a lengthy narrative.

The first principle to remember in plotting with scenes and sequels is that the force underlying both stimulus-and-response transactions and scenes and sequels is the same: cause and effect. Something happens, and then – sooner or later, but in fiction usually sooner – something else happens as a result.

In the microcosmic stimulus-response world, the chain of virtually instantaneous cause and effect can go on for as long as you make sure that each response becomes in turn a new stimulus, like this:

(Stimulus) “What time is it?” Rick asked.

(Response) “Noon,” Arnie replied. (New stimulus as part of response package) “Why do you ask?”

(Response) “I’m nervous.” (New stimulus as part of response package) “Wouldn’t you be, if you were in my situation?”

(Internalization establishing viewpoint) Puzzled and a little irritated, Arnie tried to read his friend’s expression, but failed.

(Response) “What do you mean, ‘in your situation’? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And so on, each structural part causing the next.

In the macrocosmic world of scene and sequel, each scene leads to the next, through the internalization-like process of sequel, in exactly the same way. Just as you build credible scenes by following the law of cause and effect in stimulus-and-response transactions, you build credible plots by linking scenes through the process of making one scene logically lead to the next via a linking sequel.

To put this another way, when we talk about “plot,” what we are talking about, essentially, is a long series of scenes and sequels interlinked by the dynamic of cause and effect. Thus, if you can write effective scenes and sequels, you have the basic structural components to build a novel. All you yet need to learn is how to manipulate the parts you already understand, which involves essentially three areas:

1. Dramatic principles and devices you should remember as you plan your scenes and their linkages from the opening of the story (the crucial moment of change and formation of a viewpoint character’s story goal) to the end of the story (the climax scene in which the story question is finally answered).

2. Weaving subplots into the main story line.

3. Scene and sequel content tricks to keep the reader worried.

I’ll attempt to look at these areas one at a time, but because they interrelate so closely, you should be warned that sometimes it’s impossible to discuss one principle without alluding to another.

DRAMATIC PRINCIPLES AND DEVICES

Every novelist should have one question in mind at every step of planning, writing and revising her novel: How can I make sure the reader isn’t getting bored? For if you can keep the reader on tenterhooks, eagerly turning pages to see what’s going to happen next to characters he really cares about, then you have succeeded as a fiction writer.

Now, there are probably some authorities around who would contend that wonderful characterization is the key to keeping the reader on the edge of his chair. Others might argue that a strong story theme is what primarily fascinates. Still others might suggest that high story stakes, or colorful locale, or richness of research background, or some other aspect keeps the reader glued to your story. These are all good ideas, but my own opinion – obviously – is that readers are initially interested, then held enthralled, and finally satisfied primarily by excellent handling of narrative structure.

Solid handling of mega-scale structure – how cleverly and well you arrange and develop your scenes and their linking sequels – gives you a framework in which story happenings can be presented in their most fascinating and suspenseful way. It also provides the framework in which you can best develop your characters, for the heart of every scene is conflict, and in fiction conflict not only reveals character, it virtually creates character as the story person is tested again and again in harrowing struggle – and disastrous developments which might destroy a lesser character.

Further, a well-organized story with inexorable forward movement – inevitable if the scenes are working right – will sweep the reader along like a raftsman being carried pell-mell down a rushing river; there will simply be no place where the reader can relax and hop off. Well-thought-out sequels, arranged properly in your story, will provide not only impeccable story logic, but a depth of vision into every character who is given a viewpoint.

Good structure, in other words, is in my opinion the key to getting every other aspect of your fiction right. A few specific principles underlie such good structure.

Probably most important in the matrix of ideas underlying sound novel structure is the concept of what literature teachers sometimes call rising action. By that they mean story action which seems to become more and more intense, more and more affecting, more and more involving, somehow, with each succeeding major development. We talked earlier about the need to build scenes around crucial issues. But now, in addition, if we are to be sure we have rising action, we need to make certain that the reader’s tension in scene 20, say, is higher than it was in scene 10, and that the tension generated in the reader by scene 10 was greater than that built in scene 5.

This is another of those “easy to say, hard to do” operations. But if your scenes are arranged in the correct – i.e., most dramatic – order, so that each disaster puts your major viewpoint character deeper into trouble or seemingly farther from his story goal, then that character’s desperation and worry will intensify. At the same time, the reader’s worry and tension will increase proportionately, assuming you’ve achieved reader identification with this viewpoint character.

And how do you achieve such identification? First, as outlined earlier in this book, simply by establishing the viewpoint. Second, by making sure to make clear that the viewpoint character’s story goal is vitally important to him. And third, by being careful to assure that this story goal is one that your reader can sympathize with, and also see as important.

Thus good arrangement of your scenes to tighten the noose around your viewpoint character’s neck, combined with thoughtful handling of viewpoint and story goal, will put you well on your way to achieving rising action in the plot.

A plot with scenes arranged in the most dramatic order will work in one of the following ways:

1. The scenes will move the viewpoint character farther and farther away from any quick shortcut to the original goal. (Remember the old woman and the pig?)

In such an arrangement, your character from an earlier chapter who wanted to climb a mountain might find himself ten scenes into the book trying to get his brother to lend him fifteen dollars so that he can put some gas in his car so that he can drive to Dallas so that he can get copies of his military records out of a bank safe-deposit box there so that he can hurry back to Oklahoma City so that he can prove to the credit bureau that he has a valid GI insurance policy so that he can get a cleaned-up credit report so that he can make a new appointment with the banker so that he can go back and reapply for the loan so that he can start assembling climbing gear so that – well, you get the idea. Your hero has been working his fool head off, meeting disaster after disaster and trying again and again, and the further he goes into the story, the further he seems to be away from the attainment he really seeks. He thinks about this, and feels increasingly frustrated and scared with each new development moving him further away from a straight line to the mountain. The reader worries and gets tenser, too. But your character keeps going, doggedly moving backward. Your reader admires him for his tenacity – and worries all the more.

2. The scenes will develop through a series of disasters which heap new and unexpected woes on the character’s head, but do not obviously relate to one another.

With this kind of development, the character is not moved so much along lines of increasing distance from, and immediate relevance to, his story goal. In this kind of story tightening, most of the disasters are not delays or new, temporary side-shoot plot vectors, as just above, but truly new and more pressing immediate trouble.

In this kind of arrangement, by scene 10 your wishful mountain-climber may find himself in a rotting jungle jailhouse in the Central American highlands because he was mistaken for a drug cartel kingpin because he flew into the local airport because he had to find his missing brother because he learned his brother was missing when he went to New Orleans to visit him because his brother called to say he was ill because – again, you see how this works.

One example of such development can be found in the John D. MacDonald novel Cinnamon Skin. Starting out to solve a murder, Travis McGee later finds himself in Mexico, where the disappearance of a woman suddenly forces him to abandon his original quest for a time and search for the missing person – and those involved in her disappearance. The relationship between the original story line and the Mexican adventure is tenuous, at best. It only works because Travis realizes that he has to work through the new, more pressing problem before he can get back to the old.

Now, on the surface, the two techniques we’ve been discussing here – backward development and the piling on of entirely new sources of trouble – seem similar. They are in the sense that both put the viewpoint character further from his ultimate goal. But in the one case, if he can ever get the first domino to fall, he may make a lot of progress very fast, just as the old woman did with her pig. But in the second case, the new disasters that have taken him further and further afield are not obviously related in a domino-falling relationship; our hero may escape the Central American jail and be no closer than that – still several disasters separated from getting back on what looks like the right track.

3. The scenes will develop in such a way that the hero must take on some entirely unrelated, shorter-term goal-quest to clear the decks for an eventual return to the original story line.

Here’s an example wildly exaggerated to make the point clear: Your hero started out wanting to climb the mountain. But when he goes to see the banker, the banker tells him, “I don’t have time even to discuss this right now. My daughter has been missing for three days and I’m worried sick.” Our hero decides to try to help, because in this scenario his young daughter went to school with the missing child. He starts asking questions, is slugged in an alley and left for dead, gets patched up and heads for a mountain cabin that he knows the banker’s family sometimes rented, and … It’s a long time before he gets through all this subplot and back to the bank loan officer.

4. The scenes will be arranged in an interleaved pattern with scenes representing other plots – subplots – most of which will relate in some distant way to the central quest, but some which may not have anymore obvious link than the fact that they are playing out in the same setting at the same time.

In such development, the viewpoint moves around in the story, our main hero’s viewpoint clearly dominating, but the spotlight swinging regularly to other viewpoint characters with strong problems of their own. Your reader will tend to get interested in all the story lines if the characters are generally sympathetic, and have their own goals. Every time the main viewpoint character strikes a particularly bad snag (disaster), making the reader most intensely interested in what is going to happen next, the viewpoint switches to one of the subplot characters until the reader gets re-interested in that story line, at which point this viewpoint character, too, encounters a page-turner of a disaster – at which point the viewpoint swings to someone else again, or back to the main story line.

This kind of interleafing of story lines radically slows the reader’s progress through a longer story simply because there is so much more to read. This slowing-down in itself creates some additional reader tension. Furthermore, there is a cumulative effect of intensifying reader interest as more and more viewpoint characters struggle and meet with disasters, and rise to fight again. This accumulation of reader worries makes him tighten still further, turn the pages faster – and lose some sleep tonight because he “couldn’t put it down.”

5. Scenes can be arranged under a plot assumption that puts a clear-cut time limit on the story action – a deadline which must be met – so that a clock is always ticking.

And with every tick of the clock, the reader gets tenser – the story has better rising action – because time is running out.

As you recognize how well this principle leads to rising action, you may be amazed to notice how often published novelists plant some bit of business or otherwise unnecessary plot assumption to set up a ticking clock. Once such a clock is ticking and time is running out, the action rises intensely as both the viewpoint character and the reader sweat worse and worse – whether it’s a time bomb hidden somewhere in the courthouse and set for 3 o’clock or the heroine’s impulsive decision that “I’ll force him to make his intentions clear during our date tonight – or else!”

6. The scenes will be arranged so that options dwindle.

Here, as the character tries first one thing and then another – reevaluating remaining options open to him in various sequels – the author makes it clear that first there may be ten things that might still be tried to get to the story goal … but later the character sees that there are only five options left, after five have already failed … and later, “If this doesn’t work, there are only two things left I can see to try, and they both look miserable to me. If they both fail, what am I going to do? Will it mean I’m finished?”

7. Plot complications and potentially terrible developments previously hidden from the reader can be revealed.

Here, in effect, has been an author holdout. For example, the author might know quite well, in planning her story, that some character who seems like a minor player in the early parts of the book did some terrible deed ten years before the time of this novel, and now he is himself like a ticking time bomb, slumbering innocently – as far as the viewpoint character and reader can know – until, at the end of some scene, this hidden ogre’s longtime vendetta crashes into the present story to make things infinitely more complicated for the hero than he had previously guessed.

This brings us to another general point about dramatic plotting which the beginner often overlooks in focusing so hard on the plot developments she intends to show onstage, in the story “now”: every narrative is really composed of three parts: the backstory, the present story and the hidden story.

The backstory is everything that took place before you started page 1. Sometimes you must imagine many years of development before you have set up all the factors that will make the present range war or star-crossed romance “work right.” In planning one of the early novels in my Brad Smith suspense series for Tor Books, for example, I had to go back two generations in a family and plot out crucial things that happened to the parents of my heroine as well as her grandparents before I could start chapter 1 knowing that she had a lost brother she did not know of. In Appendix 5, already looked at from another standpoint, one of the functions of the sequel is to introduce a considerable amount of that backstory.

The novels of the late Ross MacDonald, especially those featuring detective Lew Archer, were rich in backstory. Their usual plot showed something happening in the story “now” that seemed insignificant; yet terrible things then began happening, only slowly was Archer able to dig back … back into the ghastly secret hidden so long, yet motive for all the tragedies he was currently investigating.

The present story is the one you write in the story “now,” of course. It’s the present time shown between the covers of your book.

The hidden story also takes place during the present time of the story action. But it is composed of things that happen to, or are done by, characters outside of the viewpoint character’s knowledge. These are a bit like events taking place backstage while the play is going on out front for the audience. But in fiction, the hidden story must be as carefully planned, in sync with the present story events, as if you did plan to present the hidden actions.

As an obvious example, suppose you plan for your hero to walk out of a hotel building and narrowly escape death when a heavy flowerpot falls from above and smashes to the pavement beside him. In terms of what you tell the reader, or let the viewpoint character know, this is something that simply happened. But you the author must have plotted out any number of possible actions, decisions and movements in the hidden story that you will know who dropped the pot, how he decided to do it and why, how he got to a good vantage point for the dropping at the precise right moment, etc.

Careful planning of the hidden story must involve imagining scenes and sequels involving characters “offstage” at the moment the present story is being played on the stage. Often you must work just as hard planning and imagining these unseen story events as you do on the material that the reader will witness. You must also work hard on the timing of events in the hidden story.

As an example of why you need both kinds of planning, consider the example of the flowerpot just above. If you are to put antagonist Jason in the building and planning to drop the pot, you have to imagine where Jason was earlier in the story, how he reacted to story events in which he was seen in the present story, and what plans he made, as well as why he made them. You can’t just leap in at the last instant and drop a flowerpot out of heaven. In an identical way, you must plan the timing of Jason’s movements. I have seen manuscripts in which the author did not carefully time the events imagined for the hidden story, so that a character operating momentarily in the hidden story would have to get from New York City, say, to Baltimore in sixty seconds.

As a practical device to keep track of hidden story events and their timing, let me suggest that you find a large calendar of the type which shows a month at a glance, a rather large empty block being allowed for each date. Jot in notes for your present story scenes in black or blue, putting the events in the proper calendar date and, if necessary, listing various events on the same date by time of occurrence. Now plot out your events in the hidden story by using a red pencil or ballpoint to write them into the same calendar blocks.

If your plot is very “dense” – which is to say, if you have many events taking place on the same days – you may need to abandon the calendar at some point and fill out a sheet of paper for each day of the story. If you do this, I suggest drawing a vertical line down the center of the sheet, top to bottom, and labeling the left-hand column “Present” and the right-hand column “Hidden.” I myself have gone so far as to show every hour of a really busy plot day, putting events in on both sides at the time I envision them happening.

This may seem like a great deal of work, but it will assure that you allow time for people in the hidden story to have offstage scenes if needed to motivate them, work through sequels to draw up new plans, and have time to move through space from their last present-story location to the spot where they’ll pop into present-story view, dropping a flowerpot or starting an argument or doing whatever you planned for them to do.

Clearly, plotting the hidden story is vital, even if you never actually hand the viewpoint momentarily to some of the characters for whom you must plot out backstage thoughts and actions. But whether you are writing single or multiple viewpoint fiction, you can never afford to forget your important characters and what they might – or must, for the sake of your story – be doing when off the present stage.

WEAVING SUBPLOTS INTO THE
MAIN STORY LINE

But let’s suppose now that you will not limit your viewpoint to a single character throughout the novel. This will involve creation of subplots, because you should always remember that every viewpoint character should have a plot or subplot. In some cases, the subplot for “Character C” will be little more than following the main plot line and trying to help when he can. More often, however, secondary viewpoint characters should have more reason for being in the story than forming a cheering section.

This, of course, makes it all more complex. Now you only have to juggle the timing and motives of everyone in the present and hidden story; you must also create subplots and figure out the most dramatic ways to weave them into the story that’s told onstage.

On this point here are a few observations to bear in mind:

1. In any given segment (scene or sequel) restrict your viewpoint to a single character. (This was said before, but bears repeating because of its importance.)

2. One viewpoint must clearly dominate in your manuscript. If, for example, you have 100 scenes, then major characters Bill and Dan must not each have the viewpoint in fifty scenes. If there were just two viewpoints, Bill and Dan, and, if Bill is your main character, seventy (or more) of the scenes should be told from his viewpoint. If you add a third viewpoint – Janis – then you will need to establish a “viewpoint hierarchy” which shows the relative importance of each character by the number of story segments given to each viewpoint. Working with our same example, Bill should still probably have the viewpoint 70 percent of the time, giving the #2-ranked character, Dan, 20 percent and Janis, who is #3, only 10 percent.

Earlier discussion of reader identification with the viewpoint character, as well as our study of reader desire to worry about a central story question, have already shown why such a dominant viewpoint allocation is mandatory. If you start spreading the viewpoint too evenly around in the story, the reader will not only foil to identify as strongly as we wish, he will also tend to get mixed up about which of the viewpoint characters’ goals is the one he is supposed to worry about most.

3. Different viewpoints should be different. They should not all hold identical opinions about everything, react to disasters in exactly the same proportion of emotion and thought, etc. For example, if one major character feels very strongly about working to improve women’s rights, fine. If several characters tend to talk incessantly about the same issue – and with the same set of beliefs – the characters will blur together, and none of them will be believable. If one character tends to react to every setback with major emotional outbursts – tears, gestures, and long-developed internalizations and sequels – then not every other character should show the same emotional pattern; perhaps another should be very cool, and experience little strong emotion, while a third might react strongly, but control his reactions sternly so that he shows little, and forces himself not to brood during his sequels.

4. Viewpoint ordinarily should be changed only when necessary to enhance reader curiosity and suspense.

Authors sometimes switch to a different viewpoint merely to show what the other character is thinking at the moment when revelation of that thought really doesn’t give the reader anything more to worry about. Such changes should be avoided. On rare occasion you may find it desirable to change viewpoint to characterize the person taking the viewpoint, or perhaps to show that secondary character’s opinion of the major viewpoint character and his plight. But fully 90 percent of your viewpoint changes should be done to heighten reader tension.

5. If and when you change viewpoint, the best place to change is immediately after a disaster has ended a scene. The next-best place is in the thought portion of the sequel. Third-best is at the moment of new decision in the sequel.

If you pause a moment to remember that we are working to keep the reader on tenterhooks, you will see why changing viewpoint in the places listed above is best. Any time a disaster falls at the end of the scene, the reader turns the page eagerly, wanting to see how the viewpoint character is going to react, and what he is going to do next. If your reader turns the page and finds himself plunged into some other viewpoint, he is going to be thrown momentarily off stride, and will read eagerly to get back to the viewpoint plight he just read about.

If you choose to carry the same viewpoint character into his sequel before changing to another viewpoint, the best places to change them are in the thought segment or at the moment of decision. The rationale for this is not as obvious until you think about it. If you can drop out of a viewpoint at the time that character is trying desperately to sort things out, you are still in effect leaving his viewpoint in crisis. This is suspenseful for the reader. If, on the other hand, you carry on to the moment of new decision, you will then be switching to another viewpoint just as the new decision has been reached, which gives the story a forward thrust, and the reader a potential new scene question to worry about.

In regard to leaving the viewpoint at the moment of decision, there is also another way to worry the reader by leaving at this point. And that is by writing something like, “Then he knew what he had to do.” And change point of view without telling the reader what it is that the character just decided. This kind of a holdout drives readers nuts; use it sparingly, or they’ll start writing you nasty letters.

You can see, I am sure, how this device of changing viewpoint at a moment of high reader tension and curiosity creates the kind of story that’s hard to put down. As you plot with multiple viewpoint, you play a suspense-game of hopscotch with your reader. You take Character A to a disaster, let us say – and immediately switch to Character B. And where do you later leave the viewpoint of Character B? Again, at a disaster, or in his thought process as he evaluates and worries, or just as he makes a new goal-oriented decision. So now the reader is hooked again – and again reads eagerly.

But what about returning to the viewpoint of Character A? How do you again reorient the reader’s focus to him? The answer: You pick Character A up exactly where you left him in terms of the structure.

By that I mean simply this: If you left him at the moment of disaster, then structurally the next thing that should happen is the emotional part of his sequel, and that is precisely where you return to him. Similarly, if you left him in the middle of thought, you pick him back up again still thinking about it. If you left him at the moment of decision, you repeat that decision as the opening lines of the section where you return to him – and then immediately show him moving into new action.

By maintaining such structural integrity, you will seldom if ever confuse the reader, or give him much trouble reorienting to a viewpoint. The reader will probably have no idea that you left a viewpoint at the disaster and picked him up later at the precise moment he started his sequel, for example – the reader doesn’t know structure and he doesn’t know the terminology. But since the progression of parts of scene and sequel are so true to human behavior, the reader will reorient instantly, and without much trouble.

Does this mean that you always have to go back in time to where you left a viewpoint when you return to it? By no means, and this is another beauty of the way the structure works. You can leave a viewpoint character for quite a bit of story time – you can even move him around offstage while you’re in other viewpoints – and then you can pick him up later, and even in some other place, and simply continue his structural pattern as if there had never been a break in his viewpoint. You can leave a viewpoint character at the moment of a disaster befalling him in San Francisco on a Thursday, for example, and then follow one or more other viewpoints for several hours or even days. When you’re ready to go back to the original viewpoint character, you don’t have to “flashback” to Thursday in San Francisco. You could, if you wished, plot it so that in the hidden story he flew to Jakarta. You can then rejoin his viewpoint in Jakarta the following Monday, and the reader will have no trouble at all with the space-time transition if you observe structural integrity – if you open his new segment showing him still stuck in the next structural compartment he should be in, the emotional part of the sequel following the San Francisco disaster.

For the reader, it will be as if no time had passed, and the transition simply doesn’t matter to him because structurally nothing has happened. All you would have to do is write something like this:

Tim was still reeling with shock from the outcome of Thursday’s board meeting when he walked into the Jakarta hotel the next Monday morning.

Thus the author has brought the reader back to Tim’s viewpoint precisely where his viewpoint was last seen, structurally speaking. The author left Tim at the moment of disaster, and now picks him up again in the throes of his emotional reaction to the disaster (the first part of his sequel to that disaster). The transition in space and time is irrelevant; nothing has been left out in terms of logical, classic structure.

Such devices allow for a swift-moving story and heightened reader suspense while keeping complex developments clear.

SCENE AND SEQUEL CONTENT TRICKS TO
KEEP THE READER WORRIED

Of course most of what has gone before centered on keeping your reader worried – glued to his chair. There are many other tricks you can play with the content of scenes and sequels which will also add to the reader’s pleasant discomfort.

In a Scene

1. Drop hints about things the antagonist seems to know which the viewpoint character doesn’t. This can be as simple as having the antagonist say, “I am quite aware of the rival company’s plans for its new product,” when the hero doesn’t know diddly. This raises an ancillary question or worry in the reader’s mind, and he’ll mentally fuss over it for quite some time. Just remember that you have to satisfy his curiosity sometime!

2. Have the antagonist reveal something that the hero didn’t know when he started the scene. This bit of bad news can alter all your viewpoint character’s assumptions about how the scene might unfold – even force him to deviate slightly from his stated scene goal. This puts the hero at a decided disadvantage – which worries the reader more. For example:

“I know you came in to ask for a raise, John,” the personnel manager said.

“But perhaps you didn’t know that we’re considering downgrading your position from Level Five to Level Three.”

3. Conversely, show new information in the scene which makes it clear that your viewpoint character had faulty intelligence coming in, and assumed something that is not so. Perhaps he comes in to argue for a promotion to a new job that’s opening up – but learns that job is not opening up. Now he has to scramble around to try to salvage something in the interview, perhaps information on other jobs that may be opening.

4. Have your antagonist set a ticking clock on the duration of the scene, perhaps by saying something like, “I’ve got exactly five minutes to give you. You’d better make it good and you’d better make it fast.”

5. Show that the stakes are higher than the viewpoint character had realized. The antagonist might reveal that a sought-after promotion involves not only a pay raise, as our hero had thought, but also a profit-sharing program and use of a company car.

6. Have your viewpoint character think about (in internalization) or even orally hint at the fact that he has more of an agenda here than the reader can be fully aware of. (This is only possible when you are writing from a very cool viewpoint, and in the preceding sequel held back some or most of the details of his plans for this scene.)

In Sequel

1. Set a clock ticking so that the character has only so many minutes to reach a decision. Some other character may set this time limit, or the viewpoint character may set it on himself.

2. In the thought segment, have the character realize whole new dimensions of the previous disaster and his present plight that he hadn’t thought of before.

3. Consider having the character’s emotional reaction overwhelm him, so that he plunges back into the story battle with insufficient thought.

4. Devise a way to insert a “roadblock” scene in the early stages of the action segment so that the viewpoint character must, in effect, have a sidebar fight of some kind to find his way back to the next scene which he sees as relating directly to his long-term story goal.

5. Hold out on the new decision, as mentioned under No. 6 in the list of scene devices just above. You write something like, “Then he knew what he had to do.” But don’t tell the reader.

6. Stage an interruption – an outside stimulus – which forces the character to “stop sequelizing” and meet the new threat.

You will find as you work more with dramatic narrative structure that some of the devices mentioned herein can often be spotted in published stories. You will also notice how some authors “mix and match” their techniques, using a hint of one trick and parts of one or more others. This should not discourage you. You now understand the basics and can work the same magic yourself.