Getting Ahead of Yourself…and Your Reader
By Donald Maass | July 6, 2016 |
Have you ever read a novel that was a slog? I know. Kidding. You don’t have to answer that question. Of course you have.
What makes a novel a slog? Slow pace, mostly. But what is “pace”? It’s the speed with which narrative events unfold. Here’s the thing, though. There are exceptions. There are mile-a-minute plots that make us yawn, and riveting novels in which very little happens.
Fast plot pace isn’t a magic bullet. So what is? Voice? Inner Journey? Micro-tension? (A favorite topic of mine.) All the familiar craft elements we might discuss are important, but there’s an intangible one less often discussed that also deserves a look.
It’s leaping ahead. By that I mean zooming ahead of your readers, keeping them surprised by bringing them quickly to a place they haven’t yet anticipated. Readers are speedy. They’re shrewd. They like to guess what’s going to happen. Drop onto the page any plot or character bombshell and readers are already zipping ahead. They’re weighing the implications. They’re second guessing your characters, and you.
Put plainly, they’re writing your novel in their heads. What produces a sense of slog, then, is when readers get your story’s direction and developments right. When you eventually, slowly, catch up to where they’ve already arrived, it’s a letdown. A slog.
I’m not just talking about predictable plot. Relationships can unfold predictably too. Scenes can go exactly as we expect. The inner lives of characters can plod down an obvious path. Inner journeys can unfold obviously, too, their outcomes signaled from the beginning and no surprise when they arrive.
Most of all there is an inner rhythm to characters’ experiences. Characters dwell in a state, that state shifts, in turn producing a feeling of dynamic human evolution, change, movement. Raw human experience has pace, just like plot.
That kind of pace is harder to manage. Some authors aren’t even aware of it. What I’m talking about are inner shifts in self-perception, awakenings, new understandings, ah-ha’s, and anything that produces a feeling that, okay, things somehow just got different. Screenwriters call these beats. On camera they’re caught in reaction shots. Dialogue ceases. The actors’ faces say it all: something unnamed has just changed.
Change, in turn, has implications and that especially is where your readers may speed ahead of you. The solution is to bring about inner changes, and to address their implications, before your readers arrive on their own. Accelerate what cannot be seen. Spring surprises of self-perception, awareness, or insights and the actions that result from those.
Jazz drummers keep swing music lively by slightly anticipating the beat. You can do the same in POV writing. Let’s take it from a practical standpoint:
- Pick any scene. In this scene, what insight, realization or discovery is the POV character going to have about self, someone else or the situation? In what way will this character’s understanding of anything have shifted by the scene’s end?
- Move that insight, realization or discovery to the middle of the scene. Make it a surprise not just for readers, but for your POV character.
- This shift in understanding means that this character will now have to say or do something differently. Do that immediately, before we even understand why.
Leaping ahead can be done in many ways. Dialogue can take sudden turns. Hidden truths can pop to the surface. Characters can smack their foreheads before we realize they need to be smacked. They can call each other out. They can unexpectedly withdraw. They can see things about others before we do. They can see things about themselves that aren’t obvious to anyone else.
When your POV characters leap ahead of your readers, you’re evolving those characters’ inner states at a smart pace. What you’re pacing brightly is a kind of shadow plot, the always-unfolding story not of events but of a human being.
How can you leap ahead of your readers in the scene you’re writing today? Surprise us!
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Don – Over the holiday we binge-watched HBO’s The Pacific. In one of the final few episodes, the marine unit of one of the MCs, Eugene Sledge, has been slogging through the jungles of Peleliu for weeks, rooting out the remnants of a vicious and determined Japanese occupation. They’ve seen it all—the horrors of war as can only be imagined by those who survived them. The island is deemed “taken” by the brass, and the unit arrives back to their base-camp on the beach to a group of WAVES (the women’s naval reserve) in crisp whites, handing out lemonade to the returning men, dragging themselves by the lemonade table in exhaustion, wearing their tattered and filthy field uniforms.
Sledge walks up to a pretty blonde. She hands him a cup and says, “Welcome back.” He stares at her, and you can see it all. She looks like an alien to him, so pretty, so clean, so civilized. And he’s realizing *he’s* become the alien. He’s been pushed to the point of savagery. He knows he’s no longer civilized, that he’ll never really be clean again. That he’ll never be *normal* again, even with a beautiful gal back home. An officer shouts, “Okay, Marine, you’ve had your look-see. Move along.” The bastard thinks he’s ogling the girl. Sledge gives him a black look and throws the lemonade away. The officer hadn’t been through what he had. He doesn’t need to take orders anymore. But the war’s not over, so he will… for now.
It’s got to be the most wonderful encapsulation of innocence lost that I’ve seen. Two words: “Welcome back,” are spoken. It surprised me because we’re expecting the usual WW2 narrative—war is hell, good guys went and got the job done, and they came back and married their sweethearts, who waited for them under the apple tree, and then had the baby-boomers. It made me realize, better than I ever have, why my dad never spoke of the war—why he buried it away, how painful having it brought back must have been.
And now your post makes me realize how smart readers/viewers are, and how brilliant story can be if it’s deftly done, in surprising ways. The resonance came because I was surprised, and I wasn’t spoon-fed or hit over the head with it.
Thanks for bringing it all together for me here. That’s certainly worthy of a coffee. Heading back in to the manuscript to apply these valuable lessons.
Thanks for the java, Vaughn. And the wonderful scene from The Pacific. That goes on my watch list.
I do all this. You taught me to.
The Fire in Fiction sits next to me every time I write.
Many thanks.
Great to hear, thanks!
As you do so often, you’ve taken a familiar concept and explained it a new way – a way that made me see it fresh and dig deeper.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Reading one of your posts is like listening to a wine connoisseur describe the 15 different flavors he gets from one sip of Pinot Noir, and all I can say is, “It’s good.”
I’m actually just beginning book 2 of my Navy Brat Books. So I’ll have to think about this one. But it would get chapter one off with a bang if I could surprise my protagonist (12 year-old girl in 1972 Hawaii) as well as my reader.
You continue to challenge, Mr. Maass. Thank you for another gem.
Most welcome.
Maybe it’s like in all relationships, you are going along at a certain pace, a defined set of rules unexplained but felt and in place and then a curve ball is thrown that takes you out of that pace. This happens in relationships all the time. But in writing, your POV character has to get there before the reader. One question: can this method work early on in a novel when the manners and actions of two characters haven’t been definitively laid out for the reader? That’s something I am puzzled about. As always, you challenge me and so THANKS!
Great question, Beth. I do think establishing characters is a fundamental, but little leaps ahead of the reader (in, say, dialogue) can happen at any time.
Don,
to pick up on Vaughn’s binge-watching thing, I’ve been re-watching the West Wing. As I read (and re-read) your post, I found myself applying what you’re saying here to a particular story-line that, even the second time around, had me guessing about outcome. Someone leaks a story with huge national security implications. It’s a go-to-prison offense and red-herrings abound, so I start watching the facial expressions of the actors and thinking about their back-stories. It was like reverse-engineering the writing from impact back to inception. It all started when one character mentions something to another in an offhand way, then several episodes later, someone else mentions it in a new context and as a potential problem that quickly grows into a nightmare. There’s a spike in tension which then rolls back to simmering boil as an investigation weaves through the ongoing episodes. I couldn’t stop watching because I couldn’t get ahead of it. The writing has spoiled me for other offerings! Thanks for this.
Keeping viewers (or in our case, readers) guessing is, to me, more about concealing and teasing than leaping ahead, but the net effect is the same. We are hooked.
Who can ever get ahead of Aaron Sorkin!! He’s amazing. Love everything he does.
One of the most brilliant films from the regards to tension that I have ever seen is Apocalyptico.
The high stakes game of personal survival, family survival, and inner and outer change are pitched to such a degree, that when the protagonist hits the beach, and is confronted by the Spanish ships, I literally felt the unexpected deep shock the way he did.
Everything the protagonist has been through has changed him forever, and it’s only the beginning.
Although on hindsight it makes perfect sense to me, the viewer, I never saw it coming.
My POV changed along with the protagonist’s, forever.
Haven’t seen Apocaliptico. Now I must. Thanks!
I spelled the title incorrectly, but it’s well worth viewing IMHO.
I’ve attached a link. (I hope that’s okay. Apologies if it’s not.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypto
Awesome, thanks.
This is a new one! I’m searching my brain for books that do this, but I honestly can’t come up with any and/or pinpoint examples. TV, however, does this all the time. My husband and I call it the “by God” moment, first noticed (by us) when we were watching House, back in the day. Dr. House would have his ah-ha/”by God” moment: that facial expression of pure understanding telling the viewer he’d made the jump before we ever could have. Then we watch to see what his realization was. I’m wondering now if books do it less often than TV, or if it’s simply less noticeable because we don’t see that look of realization which has become so common as to border on cliche. Very interesting take, Don. You’ve given me something to chew on.
The leap ahead of the viewer is a stable of screen storytelling, but just as viable in fiction, ask me.
I see the Eureka Moment in nearly every mystery novel, and sometimes in other genres. (If you visit that link, scroll down and click “Literature” for many examples.Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Da Vinci Code are in there.)
I think it can work in either a screenplay or a novel, but in either case you have to plan ahead. The ploy will come across as artificial and cliche if you just drop in a shocking discovery with no build-up.
Instead, you should nudge the reader to realize something they didn’t know they already knew. You plant clues beforehand, hidden in plain sight. Then when the protagonist smacks himself on the forehead, readers smack themselves on the forehead. Why didn’t they notice that earlier? Now everything makes sense!
“Raw human experience has pace, just like plot.”
Don — I love this! Most of my “writing” time is time spent editing the fiction of others, but nonetheless this principle is one I’ll be making use of there as well. I like to think of editing and writing as the tricep and bicep of storytelling, and your posts, which I enjoy each month, continue to inspire me to push the boundaries further in all the work I do to improve as a storyteller (and in turn to help other storytellers improve as well).
Stop in again next month, John, I’ll see if I can come up with yet more craft to work on!
Thanks, Don. Your post reminds me of President Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia in 2008 – first address the specific issue or scene, then step back and address the bigger picture or entire story. I remember the powerful impact that speech had on me (and still has – I have seen it again several times), and a big part of the impact was in the connection between the specific and the larger issue. The end of your blog says it beautifully – “…the always-unfolding story not of events but of a human being.” Inspiring.
Our President delivers some ringing speeches, for sure. I glad you mentioned this: suddenly enlarging the context of things. That’s a good way to get ahead of readers, as in dialogue:
“Come on, you know what we’re really talking about here, right? We’re not talking about Grandma’s kittens, we’re talking about her failing mind.”
Something like that. Bigger context. Good example, thanks.
Hi, Don:
In my class at Master Craftfest yesterday, I talked about some writers who seem to get away with murder, violating the sacrcosanct laws we’re taught in creative writing classes. How do they get away with it?
The first kneejerk response is: genius. But the real answer I think lies closer to what you’re getting at here.
My example was Kate Atkinson, who violates the truism that inner life is dull and action is needed to move story forward. On the contrary, her characters are often in their own minds, but they’re cross-examining their lives, searching for answers, grappling with the dilemmas that afflict their lives.
Now, the key to why succeeds, I think, lies in the verbs: Cross-examining, searching, grappling. They’re not just navel-gazing or belaboring the obvious. Their revelations and discoveries create new levels of self-awareness and self-definition. The underlying machinery: constant growth, moving toward truth — or reckoning.
One way to make that growth compelling is, as you say, make a leap, show the character reaching an awareness ahead of the reader. Don’t be afraid to let the reader fill in the blanks — unless your leap is simply into thin air.
We shall discuss further tomorrow at T-Fest, I hope. (E-mailing you now re: getting together.)
Pace is very important to me as a novelist. I think good writing combined with fast pace is an art that has declined in recent times. You usually find one or the other but rarely both together.
So thanks for your post. I’m always looking out for writing advice on pacing but there appear to be few manuals or instruction guides devoted to the subject.
David-
I agree. Pace is a difficult subject to address, more difficult still when we’re not talking about plot. But it can be done and I hope this is a start.
Yes! When an author’s being interviewed and says that his characters tell him what they’ll do next, this is what the author is talking about. Sometimes authors can genuinely surprise themselves, and other times they can do exactly what’s described here. Thanks for the peek behind the curtain.