critique technique tagged posts

This article begins a series on flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory: that ancillary material that fills out a story and its characters by introducing information that doesn’t fit into the piece’s main flow. As with so many of the other subjects I’ve discussed, this topic applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

Before I get to flashbacks, etc., though, I need a transition: this post on transitions.

What Is A Transition?

A transition is a bridge, a connection between two pieces of a story, such as when the story changes:

• Time, that is, moves into the future or past relative to the current moment;
• Location;
• Point-of-view or focus character, in other words, whose perspective the story is being told through ...

I was originally going to title this article “Confused Timeline” but as I put my notes together I realized time isn’t the problem (other than me not having enough of it). Of course it’s important that a story flow in a logical sequence of events from its beginning to its end (with some exceptions I’ll get to in a moment), but that sequence doesn’t have to follow a time-linear order.

In fact, more than likely, it won’t. Consider:

• If there’s even one flashback, flash-forward, or instance of a character remembering something, the perfect time sequence is broken. This is true even if the story is written in the present tense.
• Same thing if there are multiple plot lines or point of view characters...

In a way it’s hard to say that a story’s plot is overly complex. Many stories have multiple plot lines, each with their own subplots, and yet the story “works”: the reader can understand what’s going on, the plot lines all make sense (eventually, anyway), and things come together at the end. Maybe the conclusion doesn’t tie everything together in a pretty bow—if the book is part of a series, it shouldn’t unless it’s the last one—but the story doesn’t end in a Gordian knot, either.

So the question isn’t whether a story’s plot is too complex, but whether it’s too complex for the space allotted to it...

This is the first of a 3-part series on critiquing a story’s plot.

The basic concept of plot is simple: it’s the series of events that the characters experience and are involved in that builds in intensity, leading to the story’s climax and resolution. Every story—fiction or non-fiction—has one. In a so-called “literary” story, most of the “action” may be internal to the characters (emotional and/or psychological) rather than external. It may seem like there isn’t much plot, but there has to be some. At the other extreme, pick up any Tom Clancy novel and there’s tons of external activity—chases, explosions, spycraft, you name it—as well as internal action.

The point of this post isn’t to examine...

The flip side of providing vague or insufficient setting detail is providing too much. Drowning the reader in the minutia of a setting not only kills the momentum of the story, it causes readers to lose track of the story. When they do that, they lose interest. For the lucky author, the reader will just skip ahead—a few times.

Brace Yourself

But for the unlucky author, or the one who insists on writing a description like this—deep breath—“the three green sateen ribbons on the head of the second Pekinese from the left, the one with the ghost-grey patch of fur on its back that looks just like a giraffe if you look at it from the right rear, which is hard to do because the dog insists on spinning around—always clockwise,...

Last time I wrote about authors not providing setting information at all, or not providing it soon enough. Not providing enough detail about the setting is a similar problem. Next time we’ll go to the other extreme and discuss providing too much information.

It’s easy for an author to fall into the vagueness trap: after all, his mind’s eye sees the setting the characters are in. That knowledge becomes so ingrained that he can forget the reader isn’t right there with him: she doesn’t see what he sees, know what he knows, etc. In the end, details get left out, even when they’re new and important, and the poor reader becomes a member of the Fugawi Tribe. (See Part 18 for an explanation of who they are.)

Setting detail...

This is the first of three posts on setting.

Remember that old TV show, “Lost In Space”? Neither do I, really, but that’s OK. The title’s the important thing. I used to be in the Air Force, and there was a joke among us aviators that navigators were members of the Fugawi Tribe. (This was true for Naval aviators, too.)

“Why is that?” you ask.

“Because,” I reply, “you could often find them huddled over their paper charts [this was back in the day—today they huddle over GPS displays, mostly] with their compasses and protractors and special rulers and rotary slide rules...

Back in Part 9 I wrote about conflict. One form of conflict for characters is the obstacles they face: the things that keep them from achieving their goals. Obstacles come in many forms: physical objects, situations, people, animals, laws, psychological or emotional blockages, and more. Pretty much anything can be an obstacle given the right circumstances.

That, unfortunately, can be a problem as well as an opportunity.

The “Right” Obstacles

Authors have the opportunity to select the obstacles their characters will face. Pick the right ones and the story’s tension and conflict ratchet right up. Pick the wrong ones, though, and the reader is left scratching his head.

So what makes an obstacle “right?” H...

A story’s characters have—or should have—a variety of wants, needs, desires, and longings. Those words may seem to be similar, but the shades of difference between them are important.  Goals—things a character hopes, intends, or needs to achieve or accomplish—make those wants, needs, desires, and longings real. In a romance, the heroine has a goal to catch that special man; in a spy thriller, the spy has a goal to do his job without getting caught; in a literary novel, the protagonist may have a goal of reaching an understanding of a long-ago relationship gone bad.

Levels of Goals

In his excellent book Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham writes about characters having goals at the story, chapter, and even scene level...

In Part 9, I wrote about timing as it related to conflict. But there’s another layer of the writing onion that I need to discuss: timing as it relates to revealing character. I have a feeling this is one of those things that many writers, especially new ones and “pantsers” (writers who don’t plan out their stories in advance, but instead write “by the seat of their pants”), don’t think about. I admit I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t be surprised if experienced writers, whether they outline, stitch together scenes written in random order, or pants-it, do this more subconsciously than consciously, no matter what genre they write in.

Examining whe...