Wordcraft -- The bones of a novel, part II

Editorial director of the science fiction/fantasy imprint Pry, Lou Anders, promised the members of his recent writing workshop at FenCon a discussion of the three-act method for structuring their novels. Then he spent the first half of his discussion, based on Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay book and classes, instructing us about characters. Did he misspeak?

He insisted he had not -- that the characters must come first in writing a story. “Page counts, events at act breaks, ups and downs are all by-products of proper Character Structure,” Decker wrote. “Putting the by-products first is writing backwards.”

Accordingly, in defining the functions of Act I (read: approximately first quarter of a novel), Anders listed the introduction of the main character, the villain (opponent or antagonist) and relationship character. In a screenplay for a two-hour movie, these occupy the first thirty pages. Within the first eleven to thirteen pages of the screenplay, the main character must make a fateful decision -- a yes or no answer to a choice that determines whether there will be a movie (or novel) or whether we’ll quit and go home.

Although the page numbers are for 120-page screenplays, I’ve noticed that even in 300-400 page novels the main character’s decision arrives almost as quickly as in a screenplay. It was a lesson all the workshop’s participants seemed to have absorbed. With rare exceptions, their protagonists made the fateful choice at least by the end of the first chapter.

The first half of Act II -- up to the story midpoint, whether for screenplay or novel -- consists, Anders said of “asking questions.” The act’s second half begins to answer those questions and ends with the low point that finds the protagonist as far as possible from the goal. The purpose of Act III is for the protagonist to fight from hopelessness to win the goal. The last act’s tension, Anders said, “is not for ‘will she win?’ but for what she goes through to achieve it.”

He reminded us that achieving a goal doesn’t mean the ending is always the happiest one. Using the movie Casablanca as an example, the main character, Rick, doesn’t walk off the screen with his lover Ilsa. He doesn’t get what he wanted. He gets what he needed -- redemption and purpose.

Writing partner Robin Yaklin (see her blog at http://debutauthors.wordpress.com/) and I are on a novel structure jag that includes Randy Ingermanson’s “fractal” approach. There’s so much more that after a break next Wednesday for another topic, I’ll be back with more ways to structure a novel, including additional suggestions from Anders.

(By the way, Anatomy of a Screenplay is temporarily out of stock at http://www.amazon.com but available at another online book source, http://www.alibris.com/ And if you read this before Friday, you’ll get to see a new Halloween skeleton illustration from another one of my favorite sites, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ Or see its link at the bottom of this page for wonderful copyright-free images.)

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Correction to Monday’s blog -- The Heard Museum’s Halloween event is this Saturday, October 22, instead of October 29, as originally reported. Tickets are available online for Halloween at the Heard, http://www.heardmuseum.org

　


　

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part I

image: Wikimedia commons

On the last day of the recent FenCon writing workshop, workshop leader Lou Anders wanted to teach us to write screenplays. Why, some participants must have wondered, would Anders, editor for a press that publishes novels, want to discuss screenplays in a nonscreenwriting workshop?

Because when he taught it to other novelists, he said, their beta readers went from merely sighing to weeping aloud at the climax of their books after putting the principles of Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay into practice. And maybe because Anders, who has taken Decker’s classes, is a former screenwriter himself. And he’s the guy you’ve got to please if you want to get published at the Pyr imprint where he’s the editorial director.

Having struggled with the structure -- rather, nonstructure -- of the fantasy novel I pulled out of my files for the workshop, I was willing to learn more. I’d read enough books on screenwriting to be a fan of adapting the three-act structure of screenplays to the longer format of a novel. But I’d struggled not only with the structure but also with character relationships.

Protagonist I could pretty well get, although it helped to hear Anders point out that the protagonist’s desire -- the overriding reason for the story -- must be concrete. “It can’t be ‘happiness,’” Anders said.

Okay, but why, when I picked out a bad guy, didn’t he (or she) always work the way an antagonist is supposed to?

Surprise, Anders said, clicking through the stills from classic films that illustrated his talk. The antagonist is out to prevent the protagonist from achieving his desire, but he’s not necessarily a bad guy. So in the movie Casablanca, the antagonist isn’t the Nazi. He’s “good guy” Victor Laszlo -- because Laszlo and protagonist Rick want the same thing -- Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa.

And when Anders mentioned a third party, the “relationship character,” most of us looked knowing until he told us, this person isn’t necessarily the romantic interest. Instead, the relationship character is the one who accompanies the protagonist on his journey, has often “been there” before, and is the person to whom the protagonist expresses the theme of the story. Or who may express it himself. So in Casablanca, the relationship character isn’t Ilsa. It’s Claude Rains’ Captain Renault, who insists that Rick is a sentimentalist at heart, and who stays with him to the end, even when Ilsa leaves.

Those less steeped in older classics might find Anders’ analysis of the Batman movies more helpful. The relationship character is the Joker -- he’s always there.

Now we had a triangle of character relationships -- protagonist, antagonist and relationship (also known as dynamic) character. Need to expand the list of characters to fill the needs of a novel-length work? Give each member of the trio her own corresponding triangle, remembering that every antagonist and relationship character is the protagonist of her own story, every protagonist is somebody else’s antagonist or relationship character. Happy writing!

(But wait, is that it? Where are the three acts? Coming up next Wednesday, in bones of a novel, part II.)