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way to choose a scene to do that is to keep a single question
firmly in mind: What do these people want?
In fiction, something must be at stake. People can't just move
through their ordinary lives, because fiction isn't ordinary life
not even when it's trying to look as if it is. Fiction is life re-
arranged into clearer patterns and meanings than real life usu-
ally yields. In fiction, people try to accomplish things, or cope
with things, or just make things go away. They want something,
even if it's just to be left alone.
Grasping this truth can greatly simplify plotting your story
or novel, which just means deciding what will happen in the
scenes of your story. Ask yourself, "What does each of my charac-
ters want?" Once you know I usually make a short list you
can figure out how these particular individuals would go about
getting it. This in turn suggests scenes.
The Later Beginning: Your Second Scene 39
Jane, for instance, wants her daughter to be a model child.
She has a firm idea in her head about how a fourteen-year-old
girl should behave, and what she wants is for Martha to stick to
it. Jane sets about trying to get this by fighting with Martha,
fighting with Sam, easing her own frustration through complain-
ing to her friends, and drinking too much. These are not neces-
sarily the best methods to get what Jane wants, but they're the
methods she knows and she's using them.
What does Sam want? He wants to avoid any trouble; it
makes him feel too awful. So he refuses to confront Martha (this
is what Jane's so furious about), he works late at the office, he
turns on the TV the moment he gets home to avoid talking, and
finally he moves out. He didn't foresee the bus.
What does Martha want? She wants her parents to stop has-
sling her. She wants to feel okay inside, which she hardly ever
does. Hanging out with older kids and doing drugs for three
days makes her feel okay for a short while if the older kids are
okay and they accept her, that must mean she's okay, too. But
eventually she has to come home. Her mother is terrible about
the missing three days, which makes Martha feel awful. So she
splits. That will end the hassling.
It's easy, once you know what these people want, to see all
kinds of potential scenes for this story. Choose a second one from
the possibilities, depending on whose story you're concentrating
on (in a novel, maybe all three people's stories). Then, adjust the
conflict level to contrast with the first.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? INTRODUCING
AND DEVELOPING YOUR CHARACTERS
So far we've talked about writing the first two scenes to develop
conflict and imply change. Notice, however, that in everything
I've said so far is an implicit assumption: Different characters will
have different kinds of conflicts and changes. The Jane who reacts to
the fight with her husband by going to church to pray is not the
same Jane who reacts by pouring three fingers of Scotch. An-
other Jane, in fact, never would have had the fight in the first
40 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS
place. She would have simply pretended not to notice that Mar-
tha was gone for three days.
This means that as your beginning scenes portray conflict,
they also portray character. The two cannot be separated. A
character creates or reacts to conflict in ways dictated by the kind
of person he is. How you show him acting will in turn create
further conflict or alleviate it. "Character is plot," Henry James
said, and this is what he meant. Every paragraph in your story
should accomplish two goals: advance the story (the plot), and
develop your characters as real, individual, complex and memo-
rable human beings.
Most of this character development will probably go on in
the middle of your story or novel (and we'll address it there in
greater depth). But even in the beginning scenes, before we un-
derstand all the reasons behind your characters' behavior, they
shouldn't be ciphers. They should show us early on that they're
people interesting enough to justify investing our reading time
in their problems.
The first step in creating characters who are not ciphers is
for them not to be ciphers to you. Sometimes a new writer will
work out an interesting plot for her detective story or thriller or
romance or fantasy novel, and then immediately start writing.
Instead, spend some time thinking about your characters. What
makes them individual? Where did they grow up? What was their
childhood like? What is their life like now? Notice that these
questions don't focus on what the characters want in terms of the
story. These questions go back further than that, before the story
events began to happen. These are questions about who your
people are when they're not in the story.
"Does that matter?" you might ask. If this information isn't
going to be in the story, why bother to think about it? Mark
Twain had the answer to that. One of his nineteen rules for
writing fiction required "that the personages in a tale shall always
be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader
shall be able to tell the corpses from the others." Imagining back-
grounds for your characters helps bring them alive in your mind.
The next step is to bring them alive on the page right away, in
the first scenes.
The Later Beginning: Your Second Scene 41
At this point, characters reveal who they are in six ways, some
of which we've already discussed:
Actions They Initiate
Fighting viciously with one's spouse, packing to move out, run-
ning away on a bus all are major actions that not only advance
the plot but also start to characterize Jane, Sam and Martha.
However, actions alone can't fully develop character. That's be-
cause the same action can spring from different motives. Is Jane
fighting with the passive Sam because she's genuinely frightened
about her daughter, or is Martha's behavior just one more ex-
cuse for Jane's real motive, which is to bully Sam? In the opening
scenes, we probably won't find out. Such complex motivations
are usually made clear in the middle of a story or novel. Still,
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