Some of the strongest suspense in fiction comes from structure, not plot. John Green’s Looking for Alaska runs two devices at once, one pointed forward and one pointed back. The forward one is the countdown. Chapter headings count down to an unnamed event. One Hundred Thirty-Six Days Before. A Hundred Days Before. The reader has…
Craft books teach two ways to hide a secret: don’t tell it, or lie about it. The Blind Assassin does a third thing. It never lies, and it tells nearly everything. The structure does the hiding. Several strands braid through the book. An old woman’s memoir of a small-town childhood and a bad marriage. A…
The backstory is the story. Atwood runs two clocks: aftermath in the present, plot in the past. The zigzag is the tension.
Craft books love the epiphany. The flaw is established, the pressure builds, and one morning the protagonist sees the truth and changes. It’s a fine arc. It’s also not the only one. Some of the best character changes arrive without anyone seeing the light. The plot corners the character, and the change happens because there…
Mystery writers plant clues. That’s the deal; the reader is looking for them. But the technique doesn’t belong to the genre. Any novel can sow the seeds of a climax the reader never sees coming. The trick is what you disguise the seeds as. John Irving does it as well as anyone in The World…
Somewhere in your draft is a handshake, an answered phone, a key turning in a lock. Two seconds of story. And it’s eating two hundred words. Every scene runs on two clocks. Story time is what happens inside the world. Page time is how many words you spend on it. Readers don’t track the first…
Margaret. Trixie. Dolores. You just met three different women. A name is the first characterization your reader gets, and it happens before your character says a word. Era, class, region, what the parents hoped for. It all arrives packed into a couple of syllables. Dorothy is eighty. Dakota is twenty-five. Both names work; each one…
Plenty of nonfiction is beautifully researched and completely inert. The facts arrive in order. Nothing ever happens anywhere. Tracy Kidder has a test for this: can you see it happening, in a specific place, at a specific time? A room. An hour. Two people. If you can’t picture it, you’re not writing a scene. You’re…
Writers describe clothing in one of two failure modes: the catalog (head to toe, brand by brand) or the void (nobody wears anything at all). Both waste free characterization. A described garment is a decision. Readers read class, budget, vanity, and self-awareness straight off the fabric: a blazer cut for someone bigger says more about…
Most flashbacks arrive uninvited. The heroine touches a scar, and suddenly we’re sitting through her childhood while the story taps its foot. Backstory lands only when the present has created an appetite for it. Watch an episode of LOST and notice the order of operations. The island crisis comes first: someone’s dying, medicine has gone…
Perfect information is boring. Give your protagonist everything they need to know, and they stop living a story and start executing an outline. A lead who reads every room correctly and trusts exactly the right people leaves your reader nothing to worry about. Worry is the product. Wrong information is how you sell it. Real…
Nodded. Smiled. Frowned. Sighed. Those four verbs quietly flatten more fiction than any clumsy metaphor. They’re not body language; they’re punctuation wearing a costume. And they multiply. Write one “she nodded” and forty of its cousins will follow. The deeper problem: generic gestures describe the emotion instead of revealing the person. A frown is what…
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