What is a "Story?"
(SF or otherwise.)
A character
with a problem.
Every story is about a
character trying to deal with some sort of difficulty. Characters who
have happy lives, who are content with their lot, and who have achieved
their goals are not good fodder for fiction. The people we read about
are people in trouble.
The central
problem.
Most genre stories can
be thought of as revolving around some central problem, or problems.
The central problem(s) can be considered to be, in some sense, what the
story is "about." Will the mystery be solved? Will the protagonist
survive? Will the rebellion succeed?
Begin with
a crisis...
Whatever the length
you're dealing with, short story or novel, you want to begin with a
character in crisis. The reader should find characters in difficulty
within the first chapter, the first page, and ideally, the first
paragraph. Structurally, it may not be possible to have the story's
main problem begin on the first page, but every story should begin with
some problem, often with the first line.
...end with
a resolution.
If the story is
organized around a single central problem, it ends naturally when
you've resolved that problem. If the story deals with a series or
complex of problems, it ends when the last problem is dealt with, or
when all the problems identified as most important are solved. A story
can persist as long as there are problems to deal with.
What makes a Story
SF?
The central
problem and its context.
A story is SF when the
central problem dealt with by the characters is a science-fictional
idea, or when the central problem is resolved by science-fictional
means. This means that if the SF elements are removed from the story,
either the central problem, or its resolution, will cease to exist,
causing the story to collapse.
"If it's a
western, it ain't SF."
It is by no means a
consensus, but there is a large body of thought that says that a story
has to have more than an SF setting to be SF. In other words, if the
characters and plot can be successfully transplanted to a non-SF
setting, it isn't really SF. If all you're doing is setting a western
in a post-apocalyptic setting, you're probably better of simply writing
a western.
What is
Plot?
Cause and
effect. Stimulus and response.
Plot is the structure
of events within a story and the causal relationship between them.
There is no plot without causality. "Captain Stronghead piloted his
spacecraft to Proxima Centauri," is an event with no plot. "Captain
Stronghead piloted his spacecraft to Proxima Centauri in order to
escape the despotic regime on Earth," has the beginning of a
plot.
The causal
chain.
The plot of a story is
a chain of events, each event the result of some prior events, and the
cause of some subsequent events. The plot of a story will extend beyond
the bounds of the story itself.
How does Plot
develop?
Things get
worse.
Up until the resolution
of the story's central problem (or up until the resolution of the most
dire of the story's problems) the situation should steadily get
worse— or more difficult— for the protagonist. Even
if the protagonist's situation objectively improves, which happens in
many "rags to riches" stories, the forces arrayed against the character
should grow comparably in magnitude. If the protagonist picks up a bat,
the antagonist should pick up a knife. If the protagonist picks up a
knife, the antagonist should pick up a gun.
The active
protagonist.
Not only should the
difficulties increase steadily until the climatic moment when the
central problem(s) are resolved, but the difficulties should be
increased as a result of positive action by the protagonist. Your
characters should not sit by and watch the world fall apart, doing
nothing. The characters in your story should have an active part in
destroying the world around them. Every attempt to solve a problem
should make the problem worse, or create a new, more tenacious,
problem. Problems can worsen without interference by the characters,
but the characters should always be doing something about the
problem(s), and what the characters do should worsen— or at
the very least, change— the problem(s) they are trying to
solve.
Complicate,
Complicate, Complicate
Things getting worse is
not a matter of simply increasing the magnitude of the problem.
(Discovery of the fact that the asteroid about to hit Earth is 1500km
across rather than 500km across.) Things getting worse in a story sense
means a proliferation of new problems rippling from the old. (The
realization that the technical failures in the escape spacecraft are
the result of sabotage.) Complication means that the problem the
characters were trying to solve is not quite the same as the problem
they actually face.
Character as
Plot.
Motivations,
desires, goals.
Since plot is not just
event, but the casual relationships between events, plot can not be
isolated from character. Characters do things for reasons, and those
reasons form an indispensable element of plot. Every character in a
story desires things to varying degrees, and has personal goals in
mind, some of which may not have anything to do with the central
problems of a story. Whatever these desires and goals are, they form
the basis for your character's motivation to act. You want the
characters within your story to be acting from these desires and goals,
and not from the external demands of the plot.
Conflict
with others.
A great source of
difficulty for your characters is when their personal drives are at
odds with the central problem in the story. A man whose highest
ambition in life is to live a quiet life and raise a family is going to
be torn if he is drafted into an army in the middle of a civil war. He
will act differently than a man who has a hedonistic lifestyle and
whose desire is simply to make each moment as pleasurable and exciting
as possible. Placing these two characters together in a combat
situation and they will start arguing immediately.
Conflict
with self.
Perhaps the greatest
source of difficulty for your characters, and the most emotionally
satisfying when finally resolved, is when the characters have goals and
desires that are mutually exclusive. If both goals are illustrated in
the story, and are of comparable importance to the character, the
character will be in a constant state of tension that can border on
agony. Consider the family man above. Give him a strong sense of
justice that has placed him in this civil war to battle against the
atrocities that he's seen the enemy perpetrate (perhaps his family was
victimized, driving him into the war.) Give him and the hedonist an
opportunity to capture enemy soldiers that've been committing such
atrocities. Then have the hedonist begin committing similar atrocities
upon the enemy soldiers. What does the protagonist do, is he after
justice or revenge?
How does Plot
create
Suspense?
Certainty
of threat.
The first basis of
suspense is the foreknowledge that something bad is going to happen.
The reader has to anticipate some event for there to be suspense
associated with that event. A surprise bombing creates no suspense
beforehand, but leads to suspense if it creates an expectation of
future bombings. Often, in stories relying heavily on suspense, the
reader will be given information that the characters don't have. The
reader will be told that a character's car is wired to explode, and
then will be given the time to think about the fact as the character
walks through the parking garage.
Uncertainty
of outcome. The author as evil bastard.
Suspense can be defused
completely if the reader is convinced that the author is going to
figure some way out for the characters in trouble. This why it is
difficult to work up suspense over the fate of a character in any
ongoing TV series. (How many times, for all the threats it endured on
the show, was the Enterprise really in danger?) If you wish the reader
to feel real suspense, you have to convince the reader that you, the
writer, are an evil bastard that will, occasionally, follow through on
your threats. This means allowing bad things to happen to good
characters. If you let the car explode at least once, you let the
reader know you could do it again.
Coincidence,
Mystery and
Surprise.
Coincidence
shouldn't make things easier.
Sometimes you can get
away with using an accidental confluence of events in a story, such as
having otherwise unrelated characters be at the same place at the same
time. You can get away with this in two cases. The first is when the
fact of the coincidence is one of the initiating forces of the story.
(The whole story is the consequence of this chance meeting in an
airport.) The second is when the coincidence makes things worse for the
protagonist. (The protagonist is trying to sneak out of the country,
and the guy he bumps into is a reporter who recognizes his face.)
Coincidences seem contrived and false when they're used to help the
character. (The guy in the airport is an old college chum who's more
than willing to loan our hero the two grand he needs for an airline
ticket.) Remember, it's not a coincidence if it is a logical
consequence of prior events in the story. (Our hero's at the airport
because he has an old college chum who's an airline pilot.)
Lay
groundwork for your revelations.
To paraphrase the last
point, most events should be a logical consequence of prior events.
Mysteries should not be mysterious once solved, and surprises should
not be surprising in retrospect. The solution of mysterious events (as
in a classic murder mystery) or the surprising revelation, should
be— as much as possible— the result of the bringing
together of already known information with some final crucial element
that brings the whole into focus.
Never
withhold information the reader should know.
Withholding information
from the reader is annoying. The reader should always have the
following information unless there is a overwhelming reason not to
provide it; the identity of the point of view character, where that
character is and what that character is doing, and all the relevant
background information known to that character that is needed for the
reader to understand who the character is, where the character is, and
what the character is doing. Holding back these basic elements of
information does not create surprise, mystery, or suspense. It creates
confusion on the part of the reader, and annoyance when the reader
realizes there wasn't a legitimate reason for the writer to be
coy.
The payoff and the
appearance of
inevitability.
A problem
resolved is a climatic event.
Whenever a major
problem is resolved in some way, you have a climatic point in your
story, a point of high tension and drama. When the problem is a major
one, or the central one, the climax is comparably major. These events
need to be given weight within the text comparable to the weight the
characters give them. They need to be dealt with in fully developed
scenes. There is nothing quite as dissatisfying as having a major
problem in the story be dealt with off-screen.
The
resolution should feel inevitable, even if it surprises.
This is the same point
as "Lay groundwork for your revelations," only more so. The resolution
of your story can be thought of the ultimate surprise, the revelation
of the central mystery. Even more than the smaller mysteries and
surprises, the primary resolution of your story should be the logical
coming together of facts and events known to the reader. Inevitability
comes, like suspense, from foreknowledge.
Don't
dangle threads without dealing with them.
Lastly, when you raise
a question or a problem in a story, do so with the intention of
eventually dealing with it before the end of the story. Dealing with it
can be as simple as an acknowledgment that the problem isn't going to
be solved within the space of the story, but the acknowledgment needs
to be there or the reader will feel as if the writer simply forgot
about it.
A four step
exercise in Plot
development:
- Create a character.
- Give this character a problem to deal with.
- Imagine at least three different ways this particular
character might possibly
deal with this particular problem.
- Pick one (or more) of these options, and imagine at least
three different ways
it a) wouldn't work, and b) would make the character's situation worse.
(Short of killing off the protagonist and ending the story.)
By doing this, you have
evolved from a character dealing with a problem, to a character dealing
with a worse problem that's directly and causally linked to the first.
This is all plotting is; the evolution of the character's difficulties,
through the story, until a resolution is reached.