Part 5 (2/2)

Characters caught in a crucible won't declare a truce and quit. They're in it till the end. The key to the crucible is that the motivation of the characters to continue opposing each other is greater than their motivation to run away. Or they can't run away because they are in a prison cell, a lifeboat, an army, or a family.

The following examples are drawn from memorable fiction that most writers will have read: * In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the man and the hooked fish are in a crucible: neither will give up to the other.

* In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary is married to a man she loathes. Divorce, then, was impossible. Her marriage is the crucible.

* In Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert is in love with a young woman who is still a child. For most of the book Humbert and Lolita are in a crucible because she has nowhere else to go. When a third character, Quilty, provides an exit for her, the crucible cracks.

A crucible is an environment, emotional or physical, that bonds two people. It can be a scene or a series of scenes, but more often the crucible is an entire book. The crucible is a relations.h.i.+p, often one influenced by locale. Two prisoners in a cell are in a crucible because of where they are, and their confrontations are accelerated by the fact that they are thrust into the cell with different scripts. The Kiss of the Spider Woman is an excellent example. In my novel The Magician, the crucible is a high school. The villain, Stanley Urek, goes to the school, and so does the protagonist, Ed j.a.phet. Neither is free to go elsewhere. The crux of the conflict between the two boys derives from Urek's role as leader of a gang that extorts protection money from the other students and j.a.phet's refusal to pay. Both boys must continue in school and live in the same community. The school, and in a sense the community they live in, is their crucible.

In The Best Revenge, Ben and Nick start out as archenemies. Ben is producing a play for Broadway that is in deep financial trouble. Nick is a gangster nouveau, a new-style moneylender whose terms are severe, but Ben has no choice except to borrow from Nick and involve him in the production of the play. They are locked in the crucible of the play Ben is producing and Nick is financing. Ben is forced into a relations.h.i.+p he cannot leave. Nor does Nick want to leave once he gets a taste of the excitement of being involved in theatrical production. Remember that the essence of a crucible is that the characters are drawn more to the crucible than to escaping from it. In the end, the enemies, Ben and Nick, become friends, their lives melded in the crucible.

In his book How to Write a d.a.m.n Good Novel, James Frey came up with some excellent examples of characters caught in a crucible. I have adapted them and added others for use by my students: * All the people in a lifeboat are in a crucible.

* Business partners, one a workaholic, the other lazy, are in a crucible.

* A wife and husband, bonded together by marriage, love, and duty, remain in conflict until separated by death or divorce. Their crucible is marriage.

* A father and son in conflict are also bonded by a relations.h.i.+p that even death doesn't end. They can walk away from each other, but neither can get the other out of his memory. Their relations.h.i.+p, for better or worse, is for keeps.

Some situations do not lend themselves to creating a crucible environment in fiction, but you'd be surprised how many do. Test the possibilities. If the locale you have chosen for a particular scene does not add the stress of a crucible, can you change the location of the scene, making it difficult for one of the partic.i.p.ants to leave? Or is there anything that you can add to the background of either or both characters that would link them in a crucible and thereby raise the stress of their relations.h.i.+p?

Putting two characters in a crucible is an excellent way to proceed in plotting. Some writers, however, prefer to work with a simpler concept, that of a closed environment, the locale where the action takes place. Here are some examples to ill.u.s.trate the difference: * An astronaut who gets deathly ill during a s.p.a.ce mission is in a closed environment. The location is a crucible, but as yet there is no overwhelming relations.h.i.+p that keeps him there. He is caught in a capsule in outer s.p.a.ce.

* Robinson Crusoe and Friday on an island are in a closed environment. While their isolation from the rest of the world is the most important fact of their lives, their relations.h.i.+p gradually dominates the reader's interest.

* In Moby d.i.c.k, Captain Ahab's s.h.i.+p, the Pequod, is a closed environment. The most interesting relations.h.i.+p is that of Ahab and the White Whale. Therefore, it is not the s.h.i.+p that is the crucible, it is the vast ocean that contains both Ahab and the whale.

* In Jean-Paul Sartre's brilliant play No Exit, which every writer should read, all four characters are in a closed environment, giving the play its dramatic intensity and its theme: h.e.l.l is other people.

When devising a locale for a scene, it always pays to give a few moments thought to the possibility of choosing a closed environment. It will invariably increase the tension of the scene. The ideal time to think of that locale is when you are first imagining your characters. What crucible might they be in? If you can find the right crucible, you will be on the way to a mesmerizing plot.

Your predecessor, a storyteller of many centuries ago, recited his stories around a fire. If he failed to arouse his listeners' antic.i.p.ation and droned on, or if his audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.

You are lucky! If you fail to arouse your reader's interest, the worst that will happen is that is you won't get published. However, if your goal is publication, whatever the nature of your story please pay close attention to what follows because suspense is the most essential ingredient of plotting.

You can have a remarkable style and intriguing characters, but if your writing doesn't quickly arouse the reader's curiosity about what will happen, the reader will close the covers of your book without reading further. Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader's curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible.

Readers aren't articulate about what keeps them reading a particular work. Some, impatient to find out what happens to the characters next, will say, ”I can't put this book down,” which means the reader's curiosity is greater than his need to do almost anything else. Suspense is strong glue between the reader and the writing. I remember my pleasure at getting a letter from Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and author of many books, including the novel Matador. Conrad had just finished reading a novel of mine, which, he said, he had been unable to stop reading except once when he ”got up to micturate.” The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger of an overfull bladder. Of all the reviews of my novels, the line I remember best was in the New York Times: ”If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein book while walking, you'll walk into a wall.” That's the idea: immerse the reader so deeply in the story that he'll let go of the book only when the real world intrudes.

”Suspense” derives from the Latin word meaning ”to hang.” Think of yourself as a hangman. You take your reader to the cliff's edge. There you hang your hero by his fingertips. You are not to behave like a compa.s.sionate human being. You are not a rescuer. Your job is to avoid rescuing the hero as long as possible. You leave him hanging.

Hanging, of course, is an extreme situation from melodrama. Suspense can take many forms, some of them subtle. Suspense builds when the reader wants something to happen and it isn't happening yet. Or something is happening and the reader wants it to stop, now. And it doesn't.

Suspense needles the reader with a feeling of anxious uncertainty. Here are examples of the kinds of situations that create suspense: * A prospective danger to a character.

* An actual immediate danger to a character.

* An unwanted confrontation.

* A confrontation wanted by one character and not by the other.

* An old fear about to become a present reality.

* A life crisis that requires an immediate action.

The writer's duty is to set up something that cries for a resolution and then to act irresponsibly, to dance away from the reader's problem, dealing with other things, prolonging and exacerbating the reader's desperate need for resolution.

Therefore: * Don't eliminate the prospective danger to a character.

* Don't let the character overcome the immediate danger without facing an even greater danger.

* If your character is apprehensive about an unwanted confrontation, make sure you hold off that confrontation as long as possible.

* When an old fear is about to become a present reality, don't relieve the fear. Make the situation worse than the character antic.i.p.ated.

* If a character's life crisis requires an immediate action, make certain that the action backfires. Prolong the crisis.

The point, of course, is that you don't resolve the suspense you've aroused. Your duty is to be mean. You are giving the reader a thrill he yearns for in books and detests in life. You frustrate the reader's expectations.

Let's look at some examples.

Isak Dinesen, a remarkable short story writer, began The Sailor-Boy's Tale with a young sailor observing a bird caught high in the rigging, flapping its wings, turning its head from side to side, trying to get loose. The young sailor thinks, ”Through his own experience of life he had come to the conviction that in this world everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from others.”

The reader wants the young sailor to climb the rigging to free the bird. That action is delayed by the young sailor's thoughts about the past. The delay causes tension in the reader. In the fourth paragraph, the boy is climbing up. The bird turns out to be a peregrine falcon, which has special meaning for the boy. But just as he frees the bird, the falcon hacks him on the thumb, drawing blood. The reader wanted the bird freed, and look what happened.

The reader has to wonder what will happen now to the sailor boy, to the falcon, to the young sailor's notion that ”everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from others.” In other words, the reader's curiosity is thoroughly aroused by boy, bird, and theme, all in a few paragraphs of a short story that ends not many pages later. The novelist's job is even harder, for he must arouse the reader's curiosity enough to hold him for hundreds of pages. That means that suspense and tension must be constantly renewed.

In popular or transient fiction the author usually relies much more on plot than character to arouse suspense initially, as Frederick Forsyth does in The Day of the Jackal.

Forsyth's ingenuity in creating suspense is worth noting. Based on an outline of the plot alone, more than twenty publishers turned down his first novel, The Day of the Jackal, I among them, because the plot was about an a.s.sa.s.sin out to kill General de Gaulle-who was already dead! However, when Forsyth, unanimously rejected, wrote the actual novel, he skillfully held the reader with powerful negative suspense, the reader hoping that the a.s.sa.s.sin would be stopped before he could kill de Gaulle. In other words, the reader was forced to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot. And he was made to do so by the author's technical skill in arousing suspense, not through character as much as through the intended action that the reader wanted desperately to see stopped. The Day of the Jackal is worth studying for its use of suspense.

One of the most common complaints heard from editors is that a novel ”sags in the middle.” By ”sag” they mean the story loses its momentum, suspense flags, the reader no longer has his curiosity aroused about what will happen next.

To prevent this problem from happening in the first place, you must understand the ideal organization of a novel and how each chapter can be made to contribute to the suspense of the whole.

In speaking before writers' conferences, I demonstrate a method for achieving suspense throughout a book by summoning eight or ten volunteers up onstage. I ask each person to think of a location for a scene and to announce it to the audience. The likelihood is that we get a series of wildly unconnected places, the desert near Palm Springs, Chicago, Hong Kong, a cave in Virginia, an island off the west coast of Florida, and so on. The audience laughs, enjoying the wild hopping about in s.p.a.ce. We enjoy the surprise of moving around to unexpected places.

I organize where each person stands to get the most interesting mix of locations. Then I ask each person in turn to remind the audience where his or her scene is located. I then point out how suspense will work throughout a book consisting of those eight or ten different scenes.

Let us say that the first scene takes place in the desert near Palm Springs. The scene will end with the hero in serious trouble in the desert. Do we then start the next scene (or chapter) in the desert with the hero? Absolutely not. We leave the reader in suspense and go to the next location, Chicago, where we see a scene with a different character, say the hero's fiancee, getting into trouble. We still want to know the outcome of what happened to the hero in the desert, but our attention is now diverted to the heroine in Chicago. At the end of scene (or chapter) two, we desperately want to know what the heroine in Chicago, who is in serious trouble, will do to extricate herself.

We now have two lines of suspense going: what will happen to the hero in the desert at Palm Springs and, most urgently, what will happen to the heroine in Chicago.

We begin the third scene in either of two places. We can go on to a third location, Hong Kong, and leave the reader in suspense about both the hero and heroine, or we can go back to the desert and continue the story of the hero at Palm Springs, leaving the reader in suspense about the goings on in Chicago. Of course, at the end of scene three, the hero is facing an even greater obstacle than he did at the end of scene one, and the reader is left hanging, and in scene four we go back to the heroine in Chicago, or to a third person in Hong Kong.

The places don't need to be as far apart as Palm Springs and Chicago and Hong Kong. The entire novel can take place in Marshalltown, Iowa, with the first scene ending with a bank being held up, and our hero, the bank manager, being tied up and gagged by the daring robber, and shoved into the vault. The second scene can then be, say, in the bank manager's home, where his wife is preparing dinner and wondering why her husband, always on time, hasn't arrived home yet. The wife, nervous, cuts her hand badly. She tries to stop the bleeding but has difficulty tying a tourniquet with one hand. She runs to a neighbor's house. The neighbor isn't home. She gets in her car, and drives to the next neighbor, who is quite a distance down the road, meanwhile getting blood all over the seat of the car. As she arrives at the second neighbor's yard, she pa.s.ses out in the car. End of second scene.

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