Agent: Eva Scalzo
Website: EvaScalzo.com & SpeilburgLiterary.com
Preferred genres: adult (romance, SFF & mystery/thriller); YA (all genres); MG (contemporary, literary, & fantasy).
Bio: Eva Scalzo was born in New Jersey, but lived in Houston, Buenos Aires, San Juan, and Boston before settling down outside of Binghamton, New York. She has been reading romance since the fifth grade when she discovered the Sweet Valley High series. On inheriting her grandmother’s collection of vintage Harlequin Romances, she set a goal to someday finish reading them all on top of her already massive TBR.
Eva has a B.A. in the Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico and a M.A. in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Since graduating, she has spent her career in scholarly publishing, working for Houghton Mifflin, Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, and Cornell University in a variety of roles. She has been with Speilburg Literary since 2013 and started accepting clients in 2017. Eva is a member of the AALA and SCBWI.
Before you hit submit on any queries please verify her #MSWL.
1) What stands out in a good submission?
I'm drawn to characters I can root for, first and foremost. They don't have to be perfect. In fact, it's better when they're not. But the best submissions have characters I can't stop thinking about, facing circumstances I want to know more about.
2) What's a typical warning sign that a manuscript isn't ready for representation?
Opening pages that don't make progress. Manuscripts don't need to start with the inciting incident, but they need to draw you in. An opening stuck in mundanity or incessant description or relentless backstory is a sign the story isn't starting in the right place and more revision is likely needed before it's ready.
3) What's at the top of your manuscript wish list right now?
I honestly don't know. It's one of those things that I'll know it when I see it. I know that's not super helpful, but I encourage writers to shoot their shot. You never know what will spark an interest.
4) How do you define narrative voice? And how does voice impact your experience of a manuscript?
Voice is the way the story is told. It's not just one character's voice or the narrator, it's all of those things put together and is something that, when done well, will touch the right balance of emotions as you read.
5) Some people say that "agents hate prologues." Is that true for you? What is the most common reason that a prologue falls flat?
It is! I find them to often be either too disconnected from the main story or repeating a scene that will take place later out of context in a way that I personally find unnecessary. I just don't find them to be the most effective way to introduce a story.
6) If you could change one thing about the publishing industry, what would it be and why?
Long response times and lack of closure. I totally understand why everyone is overwhelmed; I'm guilty of these things too, but they're the things that create the most day-to-day anxiety.
7) What's the best (non-client) book you've read recently, and how did it hook you?
Bride by Ali Hazelwood. First of all, that cover!! It's so stunning. But also I found the fated mates story between this outcast vampire princess and upstart werewolf alpha to be really enjoyable.
8) Can you tell us about an exciting author you're working with at the moment?
My client F.T. Lukens has a new release coming on April 2nd. Otherworldly is a queer YA fantasy that has found family and a crossroads bargain at its core, as well as a lovely romance.
In the adult space, I'm so excited for my client Rebecca Kenney. Her traditional debut, Beautiful Villain, is a Great Gatsby retelling with vampires and releases on July 25th. In the meantime, she's self-publishing her take on dragon romantasy, Serpents of Sky and Flame, in April.
Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.
By David Griffin Brown
As I scrolled through summaries of must-read classics, I came upon To the Lighthouse, which was summarized as “a novel light on plot.” That was when I knew I’d found an excellent candidate for a Story Skeleton. To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s take on the modernist novel, the plot of which, according to Wikipedia, “is secondary to its philosophical introspection.”
Much has been written about the novel’s English-lit checklist of themes: love, loss, the nature of change, the war between idealism and rationalism, and the impossibility of objective truth. But less has been said about the plot, almost as if the narrative structure doesn’t matter—as if the structure has little bearing on the true greatness of this work: its philosophical underpinnings, POV rollercoaster, and commentary about human nature.
In fact, there is a plot here, though it is hidden below the surface and even disguised by a narrative technique that could be called “multiple focalization” if you want to get fancy, or if not, a masterclass in head-hopping. More importantly, the plot is directly relevant to Woolf’s philosophical and thematic explorations.
The story is summed up as follows: Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay argue about the feasibility of a trip to visit the nearby lighthouse. Then a decade passes, during which Mrs. Ramsay dies. Then Mr. Ramsay sails to the lighthouse with two of his children.
Light on plot? Yes indeed. To be sure, there are other things going on, but the narrative is built around these two movements: debating a trip to the lighthouse and undertaking a trip to the lighthouse. The novel draws its complexity from the roiling thoughts of the Ramsay family and all the guests staying at their summer house in Scotland. In fact, there is little in the way of action or dialogue. For the most part, readers are locked into the various characters’ interiority: what they are longing for, what impassions them, what they hate or fear—and of course, what they think about each other.
But does this count as plot? Doesn’t plot require a protagonist? Doesn’t plot require an inciting incident, an arc, and a climax?
Yes, absolutely. But I contend that these plot elements are present in To the Lighthouse. To uncover them, we must first determine who the protagonist actually is.
At the start of the book, it’s easy to assume that Mrs. Ramsay is the protagonist. She is the driving force of the conflict, railing against her husband’s pessimism about the weather forecast and longing to fulfill her son James’s wish to go to the lighthouse. Her passion and astute observations are endearing. But then—plot twist—she dies at the midpoint. And her death is relegated to summary.
Could she be the protagonist of the first half of the novel? She does start out with the narrative goal of seeing young James’s wish come true, but she doesn’t have a clear arc. So no, let’s set her candidacy aside.
Another possibility is Lily, a painter friend of the Ramsays. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, Lily is there at the beginning and the end. She also has a quest of sorts, which is to complete a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. Many of the story’s discussions about subjectivity and the nature of art would be mute without Lily’s contribution. But is this a story framed by the painting of a portrait? No, everything hinges on the lighthouse. And does Lily have the most significant arc? She offers engaging introspection, and some have suggested she is a stand-in for the author, but Lily does not undergo a fundamental change in worldview or perspective.
The character with the most significant arc is Mr. Ramsay. At the beginning of the story, he stands up against Mrs. Ramsay’s idealism as an unwavering rationalist. He is also desperate for his wife’s understanding and encouragement. Mr. Ramsay is plagued by self-doubt and needs constant reassurance. And then his wife dies, leaving him to face the brutal pessimism at the heart of his so-called rationalism. While she was alive and willing to coddle him, Mr. Ramsay could use his rationalism as both a shield and an excuse, but confronted with her absence, he is forced to accept how important her idealism was to his wellbeing. He is forced to concede that rationalism alone is insufficient.
But Mr. Ramsay does not jump off the page as a protagonist, especially since we are inundated with the perspectives of so many characters. Much of what we learn about him is from the outside, through the eyes and minds of others.
With Mr. Ramsay now in focus, let’s look at how the plot showcases his transformation.
We don’t get much in the way of stasis since the novel opens with the inciting incident, which we’ll get to in a moment. That’s not unusual—many books skip stasis or even start after the inciting incident. However, the stasis is still implied.
Stasis refers to the time before a protagonist’s narrative goal has crystalized. However, the seeds of that goal often take the form of an underlying motivation. As the story unfolds, we learn that Mr. Ramsay is obsessed with his legacy. He is published in the field of philosophy, but he worries that his contribution may not be significant enough for anyone to remember who he is forty years down the road. Within this worry, we glimpse his greater dilemma: he prides himself on his rationalism, which is actually a front for pessimism and negativity. In other words, Mr. Ramsay’s underlying motivation is to deny that his negativity is anything other than a flexing of his rational powers. This allows him to feign self-assuredness, but beneath the philosopher’s façade, he is very much like his son James—eager for Mrs. Ramsay’s love and reassurance.
When young James says he wants to visit the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is filled with her character-defining desire to give him what he wants. In fact, she fears that if James encounters a significant disappointment, it could become a memory that will haunt him (and shape him) into adulthood. The subtext here, perhaps, is that he may turn out embittered like his father.
Therefore, Mrs. Ramsay promises that they will organize a trip to the lighthouse at the earliest opportunity. This assertion strikes Mr. Ramsay as irrational. It is yet another example of his wife’s idealism, which he sees in opposition to rationality. The weather is bad, and all signs point to continued wind and rain. Thus, his narrative goal is formed: Mr. Ramsay will not abide his wife’s idealism when it flies in the face of common sense. There is no good reason to make promises to young James when there is little chance of the sea calming enough for such a trip. He is determined to pit his rationalism against her idealism.
Tensions rise between husband and wife as they squabble over meteorological predictions. Young James even considers stabbing his father. The conflict spills over into more tension with the other guests. In the end, Mr. Ramsay is correct in his assessment. The storm doesn’t let up. But even so, he is not vindicated. Instead, in the eyes of everyone present, he has made an ass of himself. He has demonstrated how badly he needs to be right, how he needs to be propped up by the reassurances of his wife.
The summer vacation ends, after which the family does not return to Scotland for a decade. This section of the novel takes the form of detached summary. The First World War comes and goes. Mrs. Ramsay passes away, and Mr. Ramsay also loses two children.
A novel’s midpoint can be many things. Sometimes it’s a new opportunity for the protagonist who has otherwise become stuck in their quest (like in Orwell’s 1984). Sometimes it’s a shift in character focus (like in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights). Sometimes it’s a complete reversal that forces the protagonist to reassess their path forward, taking the story in an unexpected direction (like in Lessons in Chemistry).
Mr. Ramsay can no longer pursue his narrative goal of pitting his rationalism against his wife’s idealism. He no longer has her assurances to prop him up, which forces him to contend with his negativity on his own. If he gives in to his negativity, he will remain alone and isolated. Thus, his narrative goal has changed. What he had counted on as a strength of his character has become a flaw. He can no longer reject Mrs. Ramsay’s idealism; instead, he must embrace it.
Much of this happens “off camera” during the decade that is relegated to summary. But we can see evidence of this internal struggle based on what comes next.
Also buried in summary is Mr. Ramsay’s all-is-lost moment. But he clearly reaches a point in his grief and isolation where he is forced to see what he has truly lost in his wife’s passing: her positivity, her desire to bring people together, to make people happy. As such, he crosses a threshold when he consents to a reunion vacation at the summer house in Scotland after so many years. He is softening into Mrs. Ramsay’s role and embracing the positivity and idealism that he had for so long shunned as antithetical to his rationalism.
But once at the summer house, Mr. Ramsay demonstrates that he is still mid-transformation. He turns to the artist Lily for the emotional support he used to get from his wife. She pities him for his fragility, and also for how his two surviving children treat him so coldly.
But then Mr. Ramsay proposes they sail to the lighthouse. James is no longer willing, and neither is his sister Cam. They wish for the wind to die down so that the passage becomes impossible. But they accompany their father all the same. At this point, the narration focuses on the interiority of Lily, Cam, and James—all three of them considering Mr. Ramsay’s character, how lonely he is, and how controlling. Lily also thinks a lot about Mrs. Ramsay in contrast, how much she misses her friend. But as the sailboat nears the lighthouse, all three of them shift in their assessment.
The first softening comes when Mr. Ramsay tells Cam not to throw her unwanted sandwich overboard—not to be wasteful. Both siblings have spent most of the trip dreading their father’s “tyranny,” and even though he is telling Cam what to do in this moment, “he said it so wisely,” and then he gives her a gingerbread nut “as if he were a great Spanish gentleman.”
Next, one of the sailors on board points out where a boat went down, and three men died. Both siblings dread their father’s response, but he simply says, “Ah.”
Keep in mind, we’re dealing in subtlety here! “Ah” isn’t much of a comment, but the point is, Mr. Ramsay is bucking their expectations. Even Lily back on shore notes that “Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.”
Next, Mr. Ramsay, always one to criticize, pulls out his watch and notes the quick time they’ve made, and he praises his son for steering them “like a born sailor.” While James gives no outward reaction, Cam knows what an impact this praise will have on her brother. Here is the rebirth of Mrs. Ramsay’s reassurance, passing from father to son.
When they reach the lighthouse, the protagonist’s transformation is complete. His children have both seen him in a new light, and Lily too senses the change from shore.
"He must have reached it," said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost. Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last.
This is where the story ends—with Lily reflecting on the lighthouse trip as well as on her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. In contrast to Mr. Ramsay’s earlier anxiety about his legacy, she considers that the painting is likely to be hung in an attic or destroyed, but that it doesn’t matter. She has remained true to her vision. This is also the lesson contained within Mr. Ramsay’s transformation: he has opened up; he has softened; he has eased off his need for control. His legacy as a philosopher may still be in doubt, but he has taken new steps toward posterity in his relationship with his children. Here is a legacy that will live on regardless of his intellect.
Editors frequently caution writers away from “head-hopping,” which is when the POV jumps from one character to the next within the same scene—even the same paragraph or sentence. Some famous authors still get away with it, but in general, it’s a technique that many readers find sloppy and distracting.
But anything can be done well, especially when it’s done with intentionality. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf is quite purposeful in this choice. For one thing, the novel is a work of literary modernism which was a movement characterized by experimental form, stream-of-consciousness prose, and epistemological themes.
By jumping from one character’s brain to the next, Woolf is able to explore themes such as subjectivity and perception. We learn just as much about each character through the eyes of others as from their own thoughts. This is especially true toward the end as Mr. Ramsay’s transformation is reflected in the subtle changes in perspective of Cam, James, and Lily.
Also, the shifting POV evokes the lighthouse as it shines a rotating beam into the minds of the Ramsays and their gathered friends. Some scholars have suggested the Ramsay summer home might be the narrator. Again, this is because the narrative offers no direct or experiential knowledge of the characters who aren’t present. But if the narrator is the house, then the final sailing trip would fall outside that scope, so it seems more likely that the lighthouse is the narrator.
But the narrator’s identity aside, the head-hopping narration allows for comprehensive insight into each of these characters, from within and without. In other words, Woolf’s POV choice serves the story.
Some readers struggle to get into this novel. The POV shifts can be disorienting. The dearth of plot and stakes can impact engagement. But Woolf’s prose is masterful, and every character is painted with depth and nuance. On top of that, the narrative poses nonstop questions about human perception, awareness, and the nature of knowledge and knowing.
Sigmund Freud’s theories had a strong influence on the modernist writers, and much of that is on display here. Mrs. Ramsay and Lily both demonstrate keen insight into the impacts of their unconscious mind, whereas the other characters are less self-aware—Mr. Ramsay least of all. Plus, the way James adores his mother and hates his father gives off undeniable Oedipal vibes.
The end result is an exploration of gendered psychology, gender norms, logical positivism, and the nature of art. Mr. Ramsay is a needy tyrant who hides behind his intellect while failing to see the strength of his wife’s positivity and idealism. Mrs. Ramsay is a devoted caregiver who takes her caregiving to its own tyrannical extreme by trying to engineer relationships. And Lily is caught between her artistic vision and how others might perceive her work, just as she is at odds with her desire to remain unmarried and her society’s expectations for women to find a partner.
But at the novel’s core is a singular theme that connects the story structure with all of these philosophical questions. In his stasis, Mr. Ramsay holds the misbelief that rationality represents the pinnacle of human cognition, and that legacy is achieved through the power of intellect. Over the course of his journey, he realizes the power of his wife’s emotional intelligence. Therefore, his subverted misbelief gives us the central theme: that neither rationalism nor idealism is superior but are two parts of a greater whole. And through that whole lies authentic connection—something greater than legacy.
Through Woolf's pioneering narrative techniques, notably the deft interplay of nuanced perspectives, To the Lighthouse challenges us to confront our own perceptions and biases. It compels us to engage with the text—and, by extension, with the world around us—on a profound level. This is the hallmark of truly great literature: it does not merely tell a story; it invites us into a dialogue, prompting introspection and offering insights that transcend the confines of its pages. And even though the plot may be light, it still plays an integral role in showcasing the transformation of character.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>By Michelle Barker
Characters are the beating heart of any novel. Your reader won’t care what happens in your story if they don’t care about who it’s happening to, so your first job as a writer is to make us care. We care about people we’re connected to, which means it’s critically important to create connection. Let us get to know these people. Show us who they are by what they do, how they feel, and why it matters: action, emotion, and stakes.
Where does internal conflict come into this? It’s the buried vein of gold. It’s the why behind what a character decides to do and how they feel about it—and possibly even why it matters.
But sometimes it’s a bit confusing to get a handle on.
Let’s start with a definition from author Angela Ackerman: “conflict is a force that stands between your characters and what they want most.”
It follows that external conflict is an external force blocking your character from getting what they want: a disagreeable boss, the economy, a rival. In which case, internal conflict is an internal force blocking them: a belief, a misbelief, a flaw, a fear. It can be a conflict between two internal things, such as a dilemma or a want versus need. You can also use competing desires: wanting two things that are mutually exclusive, or wanting something that goes against a strong belief or tradition. Creating that impossible emotional situation.
But it can also just be one thing, as long as whatever you choose is powerful enough to prevent your protagonist from doing what they must to achieve their goal.
Let’s look at Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games.
Katniss is a rebel at heart. She’s self-reliant, the family provider ever since her father was killed, and she feels a particular need to protect her little sister since her mother has basically checked out of life. So, when her sister is chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, Katniss jumps in to take her place without thinking twice.
What does she want? To return to her family alive.
In order to do this, however, she will need to win the Hunger Games. Which means she will have to kill people.
During the novel’s stasis, she shows herself to be resourceful—a skilled hunter who, while not especially emotional, has compassion for people. Whatever her family doesn’t eat, she gives to others in her district where starvation is a common occurrence. Most of the skills she’s honed to survive in daily life will come in handy in the games. But compassion is something she believes she’ll have to put on the backburner if she wants to make it out alive. Showing any kind of weakness in front of the camera is a death sentence—and it seems clear that when it comes to survival, compassion is a weakness. The games are all about individuality and a survival of the fittest mentality.
The external conflict is clear: it’s the other contestants in the Hunger Games, although that shifts over time to reveal the larger overall conflict of the trilogy: Katniss and the districts versus the Capitol.
The internal conflict is Katniss’s belief (misbelief) that she must deny who she is in order to survive. She must behave in a way that goes against everything she believes in.
Suzanne Collins puts her protagonist in an impossible situation both emotionally and ethically. There’s no winning here for Katniss. No matter what she does, something is not going to work out for her. Even if she wins the games, it means she’ll have murdered a whole lot of people and quite probably damaged herself.
THAT is the buried vein of gold. If you can get your character into an emotional tight spot like this, you’ve found a powerful inner conflict.
That’s really all an internal conflict is: something the protagonist has created or that has formed over time to prevent them from achieving their goal. Adding that internal barrier is what enriches your story and develops character. External barriers are not enough. If that’s all you have, you’ll give the reader a character who serves mostly as a plot construct; someone who goes through the motions in order for the external story to move forward. It will feel shallow, and the characters will likely seem stereotypical or generic.
They won’t feel like real people because they aren’t.
You know all those long lists of questions you downloaded off the internet and faithfully answered… and then set aside? Take another look at them. If you’ve given your character a fear of heights but then haven’t given them a goal that involves the thirty-seventh floor of an unfinished building or, you know, Mount Everest, then that fear will function merely as window-dressing. It’s not doing any work for you. It’s information, and we won’t care about it because it doesn’t matter to the character.
All those secrets, fears, flaws, and moral failings you’ve dreamed up for your protagonist must be relevant to what they want if you’re planning to use them as internal conflicts.
To make this work, you need to know what your character believes—truly, with all their heart—and then put them in a situation where their beliefs come into conflict with what they want and/or need.
Fear is also a good source of inner conflict because it will prevent your main character from taking the necessary steps to get what they want or need. At the root of fear there is always a belief (or misbelief) that the feared thing will destroy you.
A misbelief about the world can form an effective internal barrier to your protagonist achieving their narrative goal. Don’t be confused by the idea of a misbelief. What it really is, to your protagonist, is a strongly held view about how the world works. They don’t see it as wrong or misguided at all. It’s a useful tool in the characterization toolbox because it ensures that whatever your protagonist wants will cause trouble for them, and it most certainly won’t solve their story problem. Because what they want will likely not be what they need. However…
The tricky thing about want vs need is that your protagonist might not know what they need. Sometimes they do, like Boromir in Lord of the Rings who wants to be the hero to his father and his people but also knows he needs to support Frodo. But quite often they don’t: like Eleanor Oliphant, in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. The protagonist dreams of a romance with a musician she’s never met, but she has no idea that in order to create actual connection with anyone, she must come to terms with a past she has been actively blocking out.
Eleanor Oliphant wants connection and romance, but she goes about getting it the wrong way and with the wrong person. Her way of solving the problem won’t work until she comes to terms with her past. This very past is what causes her to isolate herself and creates eccentricities that make connection with other people difficult. Connection with others means making herself vulnerable, but she wants to feel safe and secure—which means protecting herself. She can’t have both.
Whatever you decide, if you give your protagonist an internal conflict, they will feel authentic to the reader, and you will create an essential connection between reader and protagonist that is at the heart of all engaging stories.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.
By Michelle Barker
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights promises not only to haunt readers long after they finish it, but it also has a complex narrative structure and mode of narration that are worthy of analysis. It has been described as both a Gothic novel and a love story. The gothic part becomes evident pretty quickly. The love story is more like a cautionary tale: what happens when love is thwarted and becomes selfish and all-consuming; what happens when people are treated badly; that passion has a dark side.
Brontë chooses the relentless desolation and isolation of the Yorkshire moors as her setting, which is where she grew up. Not only is the landscape thematic—a dark and dramatic setting for dark and dramatic people—it also creates a closed-room situation that allows her to keep a sharp focus on the characters populating the two estates: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. You’d think the limited number of characters would make them easy to follow, but you’d be wrong. Everyone marries their cousin, and both first and last names play musical chairs.
But Brontë has done this for a reason. The generational aspect of the novel is important—how one is raised and what gets passed on form the thematic foundation of the book. The generations also form the two halves of the narrative structure. And the one character we never lose sight of is the one who has only a single name: Heathcliff. He is never given a family name, which becomes ironic considering his narrative goal which is to inherit the family’s fortune and estate.
Heathcliff is an anti-hero and is the chief protagonist in the novel. But because the story is narrated primarily by two other characters (Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean), the structural elements become a little… confusing. As well, both Catherine (the elder) and Cathy (the younger) play key roles—the latter eventually redeeming the behavior of the former and becoming a secondary protagonist.
Heathcliff’s story forms the backbone of the novel. When we examine his narrative goal and stakes in light of Hannah Sheppard’s pitch test, here is what we get:
When Heathcliff is adopted by the Earnshaws, he forms a passionate bond with Catherine. But when Hindley humiliates him and obstructs his love for Catherine, Heathcliff vows a revenge of disinheritance and ruin that spans generations. Ultimately, he must find a way to overcome his hatred and bitterness if he ever wants to attain peace in a reunion with Catherine after death.
The novel opens just before the climax. Mr. Lockwood is not a protagonist, but he kicks off the narration (and his presence actually provokes the climax). His meeting with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights is what leads Nelly Dean, the true narrator, to tell her story.
It is 1801 when Mr. Lockwood comes to Wuthering Heights to meet his landlord, Heathcliff. Lockwood is the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, four miles away. While this meeting inspires some curiosity on Lockwood’s part, his kickstarting of the climax happens on a subsequent visit when he gets stuck at Wuthering Heights due to a snowstorm and must spend the night. He ends up staying in a small room where the name Catherine is written all over the walls. He finds Catherine’s diary and reads an entry. That night he has a nightmare in which he sees a girl trying to get in through the room’s window. She identifies herself as Catherine Linton.
Heathcliff’s reaction to this news—deep emotion and heartrending grief—is a turning point that eventually leads him into his final transformation. But in terms of the narrative frame, this moment is also what pushes Lockwood to ask the housekeeper Nelly Dean if she knows the story behind the inhabitants of Wuthering Height.
We shift back to 1767 when the Earnshaw family lived at Wuthering Heights: Catherine, her brother Hindley, and their parents. One day, Mr. Earnshaw goes to Liverpool and returns with a desperate looking young orphan they name Heathcliff. This is the early catalyst. Without this event, there would be no story, but we’re still a long way from the inciting incident where Heathcliff’s narrative goal crystallizes.
Mr. Earnshaw develops a particular fondness for Heathcliff and soon prefers him to his son Hindley. This sets up a rivalry that will endure throughout the novel. But for now, Hindley is sent away to school. While he’s gone, Heathcliff and Catherine develop an extremely close relationship that renders them soulmates. They’re both wild, partners in crime, always getting into trouble. This becomes a passion that never leaves Heathcliff and that he will make everyone pay for when it is thwarted (and, in a real sense, stolen from him).
Three years later, when Mr. Earnshaw dies, the estate of Wuthering Heights passes on to Hindley. Hindley returns with a wife, takes control of the house, and becomes tyrannical, determined to split up Heathcliff and Catherine as retribution for his father’s preference of Heathcliff as a son. This introduces both hatred and vengeance into the household, inheritances that are passed on as easily as wealth. But we are still in stasis mode here.
The inciting incident begins when Heathcliff and Catherine are out on the moors and end up at Thrushcross Grange where they spy on the well-mannered and well-to-do children Edgar and Isabella Linton. When Catherine gets bitten by their dog, the parents insist she stay there to convalesce. They won’t let Heathcliff into the house because he looks too wild, so he returns to Wuthering Heights where he is severely neglected by Hindley.
When Catherine returns five weeks later, she has been transformed into a refined young woman. She’s well dressed, clean, and polite—in huge contrast to Heathcliff whom Hindley has treated like a servant and who hasn’t washed in weeks. Catherine still cares for Heathcliff, but her treatment of him changes. She sees him through new eyes, evaluates him as inferior, wonders why he’s so dirty and rude.
Heathcliff internalizes this feeling of inferiority. He is the orphan, the one who doesn’t belong. Hindley’s poor treatment of him accomplishes his goal of damaging the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine. When the Lintons visit and Hindley orders Heathcliff to remain in the garret, out of sight, a fight ensues, and Heathcliff is further humiliated. This is when his narrative goal is formed, which he declares to Nelly: “I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last.”
Having spent so much time with the Lintons, Catherine develops a fondness for Edgar (or, in truth, for Edgar’s money and social position). She confides to Nelly that Edgar has proposed and she has accepted.
Unbeknownst to Catherine, Heathcliff is in the room. What Heathcliff hears her say is that it would degrade her to marry him the way he is now, having been ruined by Hindley. What he does not hear her say (because he sneaks out of the room in humiliation), is how much she loves Heathcliff, that she is Heathcliff. He runs away, and when Catherine realizes why, she searches the moors for him and becomes dangerously ill as a result.
That night—the night Heathcliff and Catherine are separated—a tree splits in a storm. Nerd alert: this is an interesting crossover with Jane Eyre, written by Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte, wherein a tree splits in a storm when Jane and Mr. Rochester are separated.
When Hindley’s wife dies of consumption after giving birth to a son (Hareton), Hindley goes off the rails, drinking and gambling, never to regain his footing. But that is not enough of a failure to satisfy Heathcliff. Indeed, it is just the beginning.
Catherine survives her illness and marries Edgar, and Nelly goes to live with them, leaving five-year-old Hareton to his fate with a negligent father.
Three years after Heathcliff disappears, he shows up again at Thrushcross Grange unrecognizable. He has money now, and an education—the very things he was lacking when Catherine had said it would degrade her to marry him. It’s clear that his bond with Catherine has survived. They pick up where they left off, much to Edgar’s concern. While Heathcliff goes to live at Wuthering Heights with Hindley and Hareton, he also spends a lot of time at the Grange with Catherine.
But it soon becomes apparent there’s another reason he’s staying at Wuthering Heights. When Nelly goes to visit, the child, Hareton, is violent and illiterate. He curses her. She assumes Hindley has raised the boy to be like this, but she discovers it’s Heathcliff who’s ruining him—and meanwhile also encouraging Hindley to gamble and mortgage away the Heights… to him.
Heathcliff has come back with a two-part plan, and he has now set it in motion. He is a man who was wronged and mistreated, and he’s returned to wreak that mistreatment on whomever he can. Hareton is not the only victim. Isabella Linton, who lives with Edgar and Catherine at the Grange, has fallen in love with Heathcliff. But Heathcliff couldn’t care less about her—because the second part of his plan is that he wants Catherine back.
When Edgar and Heathcliff have a falling out, Edgar insists that Catherine must choose between Heathcliff and him. Never one to take kindly to being told what to do, Catherine locks herself in her room and goes on a hunger strike. Meanwhile, Edgar warns Isabella that if she marries Heathcliff, he will cut her off financially and won’t have anything more to do with her.
In the mêlée of Catherine getting dangerously sick, Isabella runs off with Heathcliff. We then get her POV from a letter Nelly receives, letting us in on the state of things at Wuthering Heights. Hindley is a disaster. He’s a drunk and his gambling has ruined him financially. Basically, he has traded circumstances with Heathcliff. Hareton is being raised without any manners or the ability to read or write (another trade in circumstances with Heathcliff). The house is a mess. And Isabella deeply regrets her marriage. But her brother refuses to intervene, so she eventually runs away.
At the midpoint of the novel, the focus shifts from the older characters (Catherine, Hindley, Edgar, and Isabella) to the younger ones (Hareton, Cathy, and Linton)—with the one constant being Heathcliff. The older characters wronged Heathcliff, and he in turn intends to avenge himself on the younger ones.
The arc of the first half of the novel ends in despair with the death of Catherine after she gives birth to a child named (you guessed it) Catherine (though everyone refers to her as Cathy). Before she dies, Heathcliff begs her to haunt him, but she doesn’t, and he becomes even more of a misery to be around.
Isabella Linton/Heathcliff dies as well, but not before giving birth to a sickly baby (who turns into a sickly child) named Linton Heathcliff. Linton lives for a time with Edgar and Nelly, but then Heathcliff arrives at Thrushcross Grange to claim him as his son and to raise (i.e. ruin) him.
Nelly and Edgar do everything they can to keep young Cathy away from Wuthering Heights, but one day when she is thirteen, she wanders away on her pony and ends up there, only to discover she has two cousins: Linton and Hareton. As Cathy can be considered a secondary protagonist, this is the inciting incident of her storyline (and her “meet-cute” moment).
By then, Hareton is eighteen, strong, good-looking, and completely illiterate, which Cathy ridicules him for. Linton is younger than Cathy and is whiny and needy, but at least he’s not an imbecile. There is an interesting generational parallel here. While Cathy ridicules Hareton, there is a subtext of attraction between them that mirrors the attraction between Catherine and Heathcliff. Cathy should never marry Linton—just like Catherine should never have married Edgar.
But in keeping with Heathcliff’s plan to ruin everyone and inherit everything, Cathy and Linton must marry. This is the final obstacle in the achievement of his goal. Hindley dies, having mortgaged all his property to Heathcliff, but he is still not the legal heir. He counts on Linton dying young—which is certain to happen, given how sickly he is. To that end, he does everything possible to get Linton and Cathy together.
When Cathy next comes to visit at Wuthering Heights, Hareton has learned to read his own name. He’s quite proud of this, but she still belittles him. Hareton reacts with anger, and we can’t help but feel sorry for him. The message—that so much of what we become is the result of how we’ve been treated (or mistreated)—was a pretty revolutionary insight at the time.
When Cathy and Nelly come to Wuthering Heights while Cathy’s father Edgar is on his deathbed, Heathcliff locks them up until Cathy agrees to marry Linton. Linton manages to get Cathy out so she can see her father before he dies. But they do marry, thus denying Hareton his relationship with Cathy.
Linton dies soon after, as expected, and it seems Heathcliff has achieved his goal at last: he is the master of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Everyone around him is either dead or desperately unhappy. So is he overwhelmed with the joy of his victory? Not quite. Too often, what we want is not what we need.
The story could end here, but it doesn’t, because it turns out Heathcliff achieving his goal of revenge is precisely what stands in the way of his ultimate goal, which is to be reunited in some manner with his true love, Catherine. Her ghost will still not come to him. For this to happen, he must let go of his bitterness and hatred. In short, he must allow the second generation to achieve what the first could not and let the love between Cathy and Hareton flourish.
When Lockwood returns, there are great changes and Nelly fills him (and us) in. Nelly now lives at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff has died. And Cathy and Hareton are in love and plan to be married. This shift is key in the redemption of the ending and the reversal of what happened between Catherine and Heathcliff.
Nelly explains how it came about. After Linton dies, Cathy begins to feel bad for having teased Hareton and helps him learn how to read. She apologizes to him, and he forgives her. Their affection for each other grows into a force powerful enough to offset Heathcliff’s bitterness. Thus, Cathy achieves her narrative goal.
Some critics claim it is Heathcliff’s death that allows Cathy and Hareton’s love to flourish. While it may be true that Cathy and Hareton could not have gotten engaged if Heathcliff was alive, it’s their initial love that finally releases Heathcliff. It’s only after their love blooms that Catherine’s spirit comes to Heathcliff, thus suggesting that his vengeance and hatred have blocked it all along. It is implied that Heathcliff comes to realize this after Lockwood (in the beginning) tells him about his ghostly vision in Catherine’s bedroom.
In the resolution of the novel, Heathcliff spends several sleepless nights wandering the moors and finally dies—in a state of ecstasy—in the tiny room where Lockwood once spent the night.
Cathy and Hareton plan to be married; Catherine and Heathcliff are together after death. Love proves itself more powerful than hatred. A mostly tragic story ends with redemption.
The novel’s structure is complicated by the layers of narration which give us two timelines. The present moment story is mostly narrated by Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s new tenant at Thrushcross Grange. It takes place in 1801-1802 and neatly bookends the novel. The past that spans the thirty or so years previous makes up the bulk of the story and is largely narrated by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper (though technically it is Lockwood who records it in his diary). There are occasional dips into the present to remind us that this is a told story, and there are dips from present into past to fill in the blanks that Lockwood couldn’t possibly have discovered himself. The result is a tapestry of narration that is an accomplishment in itself.
Mr. Lockwood, the initial narrator, is more of a plot construct than anything, and as such is the least dynamic of the characters. He’s sort of a stand-in for the reader, functioning more as a listener than an active force. He enters the story on the same footing we do, as a stranger to Wuthering Heights, unsure of what he’s seeing. His visits allow us before and after pictures of the Heights—namely, before and after forgiveness and the redemptive power of love, the only things capable of triumphing over Heathcliff’s enduring hatred and desire for vengeance. It is only thanks to the triumph of love that Heathcliff is finally released from hatred and able to die and be with his true love, Catherine.
Nelly Dean is the chief narrator, having been the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights when Catherine and her brother Hindley were young and Heathcliff first arrived. The narration occasionally passes to other characters and takes other forms: entries from Catherine’s diary, a letter from Isabella Linton, briefly Heathcliff himself, and another servant at the Heights named Zillah.
It’s Nelly who fills in the history for Mr. Lockwood after he’s been to Wuthering Heights a few times and is confounded by its gloomy atmosphere and hostile inhabitants. It was common in Gothic novels to employ a narrator like Nelly who is not directly involved in the story. The idea is that the subjective and unreliable narration would contribute to the eerie atmosphere and create more mystery and ambiguity. On that level, it succeeds. We can never be entirely certain that what she’s telling Lockwood is true. Nelly is judgmental and has her own strong opinions that color how she tells the story and what she chooses to relate. She also harbors some bitterness toward Heathcliff. She wants to be allowed to stay at Wuthering Heights when Cathy marries Linton, but Heathcliff won’t allow it.
Nelly paints Heathcliff as an almost cartoonish villain. And there is no denying he’s a hard man—violent, abusive, and mean. But when we see the way Cathy ridicules Hareton for faults he cannot help, given his upbringing, we are reminded that Heathcliff was legitimately wronged in this story. It’s also worth remembering that Heathcliff is capable of love. Most of what he’s done as an adult has come from an attempt to better himself and make himself worthy in Catherine’s eyes.
When it comes to the typical elements in a Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights checks most of the boxes:
The only thing missing are prophecies and curses, but then again, there’s Joseph, the cantankerous servant who’s always either quoting scripture or cursing someone. He speaks in such a heavy Yorkshire dialect it’s almost impossible to understand him, though that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s hard to imagine a character more miserable than Heathcliff, but Joseph wins that award.
Duality is an interesting feature of Wuthering Heights. There are two estates, two generations of characters, two timelines, two main narrators—and one Heathcliff. What’s interesting about this is that Heathcliff contains two opposing potentials: he’s smart and attractive and capable of great love. But after being humiliated and wronged, he is also capable of turning his intelligence toward vengeance and hatred. He is both protagonist and antagonist. Given a different set of circumstances, he would have become a completely different person.
The Catherine/Cathy parallel allows for a redemptive turn in the story. What went wrong in the first generation gets corrected in the second.
Some readers contend it’s the frankness that Brontë used to create characters who all possess a dark side that makes this novel a classic. It may also be one of the first novels to demonstrate the devastating cyclical nature of abuse: the claustrophobic imprisonment of family, the power of nurture over nature, and how nurture (or its lack) can have such a terrible effect—and ultimately that it can be redeemed. Indeed, the novel’s portrayal of domestic abuse made it controversial when it was first published.
But I would contend it’s Brontë’s layers of narration and the essential unreliability of her narrators that make this book so interesting and re-readable. Heathcliff is an anti-hero—not the first one in literature, but pretty much an archetype by now. Every character gives the reader a reason not to like them, and yet we are still willing to follow them to the end.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a great novel to analyze for its complex narrative structure and its anti-hero. The echoing of plot points in this generational diptych lifts the novel out of tragedy and allows for a certain amount of redemption. In the character of Heathcliff, Brontë proves that a protagonist doesn’t have to be likable for readers to follow them; they just have to be interesting.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>If you’re writing your first picture book, you might be wondering if you have to do the drawings too—or find someone who can. But, as Kate Lee explains, it’s absolutely fine to stick to words.
Writers often worry that they might be expected to do this themselves—but it’s absolutely not the case. Some projects for pre-schoolers are created by author-illustrators, but it’s usually when an established illustrator, already skilled at bringing other people’s texts to life, has an idea for a story and discovers they can write too, rather than the other way round.
So, if your artistic skills extend only to drawing stick people, don’t fret! It can be useful to sketch out aspects of your developing story, but this is very much for your eyes only and you don’t have to show it to anyone else. For instance, if you are trying to work out where key page-turning moments appear, you might roughly sketch out where best to break up a paragraph or adapt the prose, to create a big reveal. It can be helpful to use pencil and paper for this, but the standard of drawing doesn’t matter at all—it’s visual thinking to work alongside your neatly typed manuscript. Scribbles can be gold dust as part of the creative process.
So, as a would-be published author, what do you need to submit? It’s best to present your story in a Word document, with the text double-spaced, portrait layout, in a simple 12-point font such as Times New Roman. You can divide the story into pages or double page spreads to show that you understand the classic, conventional picture book format. This is 32 pages, including covers, which allows for 12 double page spreads for the actual story.
You can include brief illustration notes, if you think it will help the fresh reader understand what’s happening in the story. An experienced editor will, however, be able to figure out what is going on without too many additional clues.
If you do decide to include illustration notes, keep them brief and present them in a contrasting manner, such as italics, so it’s clear that they are supplementary. Ideally, any notes will not overshadow or distract from the written text.
Even if you have thought through exactly what should happen on each page, it’s important to be flexible, since a picture book is a highly collaborative artform. If your text is accepted by an editor (either directly from you, or via an agent) and the project is commissioned by a publisher, a whole team of people will bring their energy, skills, and experience to make it the best it can be. This will include an illustrator, working under the direction of an art director and/or designer. They will, as a team, amplify and enhance aspects of your work such as humour, scale, expression, character and the emotional through-line. This is a joyous aspect of creative partnership and something to look forward to.
One of the key roles of the publishing team is choosing the right illustrator for each project. This is a delicate and highly skilled business. The style must enhance and complement the nature and themes of the story, the style of the prose, and the overall feel of the work. Is it funny, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking, radical? Gentle and dreamy or wildly energetic? There is room for every type of story in today’s rich and wondrous publishing space for the very youngest readers.
There are practical issues, too, as the illustrator must be available within the necessary time frame, as well as suitable. Often, a publisher will draw up a shortlist for this reason.
Then there’s the bigger picture: the overall look must sit not just within, say, the UK children’s publishing marketplace, but also have international appeal. This is because the publisher will be looking to sell translation rights. Given the extremely high costs in producing a picture book, international sales are key to making it viable commercially for many publishing houses.
Sometimes, debut authors find themselves in a situation where they have discussed their story idea with a friend or relative who is an artist, and a blossoming sense of partnership has developed: we could do this together! And yet, however excellent your friend’s painting or drawing may be, their art style isn’t necessarily going to work for your project.
Picture book illustration is a very specific type of art and many (although not all) professional illustrators will have completed a degree in illustration or perhaps a masters in sequential illustration.
Extracting yourself from any agreement or expectation, while preserving a good relationship with someone you care about, can be challenging. One way forward is to explain you’ve been advised that, as a debut author, a publisher will want to pair you with a seasoned picture book illustrator, most likely one they have worked with before. It’s always a risk, for a publisher, to work with a new creator: will they deliver on time? Will the standard be as expected? What will he or she be like to work with? If explained gently, this will hopefully make sense to your friend or relative.
If you have gone further with, for example, your friend having produced some character sketches, you could suggest sharing these with your editor, should the story be commissioned, to gain his or her view. If it’s a “no,” then it comes from a third party, rather than from you, which may soften the blow.
If you’re aiming for a traditional publishing deal for your debut picture book, the time from commission to publication will be eighteen months to two years. The publisher slots each project into their long-term schedule, working with illustrators’ commitments and acknowledging how long it takes to map out, agree, refine, and produce finished full-colour illustrations before moving onto print production.
This can come as a shock to the debut picture book author, but it shows just how much time and expertise goes into bringing beautiful words to life on the page. No stick men required!
Kate is an award-winning author who has published poetry, flash fiction, and short stories along with six picture books including Santa’s Suit (Campbell Books), a bestseller translated into seven languages. Kate followed up her MA in Creative Writing (Chichester University, UK) with a PhD (Southampton University, UK) and has a special interest in maps in children’s fiction. As a developmental editor and mentor, Kate offers a calm, experienced, and supportive approach to help writers shape their narrative and develop their craft, with an emphasis on pace, structure, character, and point of view. Kate reviews picture books for IBBY UK as a volunteer and is passionate about diversity and inclusion in children’s literature.
]]>It was a dark and stormy night… Although, actually, it wasn’t. The Darling Axe’s first ever writing retreat took place in Tofino (February 5-9), and there wasn’t a storm in sight. We had good weather for the whole week, which turned out to be just fine as it allowed for many long walks and runs, and even some surfing and swimming by a few intrepid retreatants.
We kicked off the retreat with a dinner at Long Beach Lodge, where we were all staying, and got to know each other a little before the real work began.
Tuesday’s workshops were all about character development: internal conflict, emotional draw, character stasis and misbelief, and the importance of a strong voice. After some discussion, we broke for lunch and then reconvened in the afternoon for our first round of one-on-one meetings where writers had a chance to discuss their concerns with their work in progress and brainstorm some solutions.
Everyone had a chance to get outside, do their homework (yes, there was homework), and get some writing done.
On Wednesday, we discussed plot: the elements of structure, the value of plotting guides, the importance of causality, how to avoid anecdotal writing, how to raise the stakes in your novel, and how to handle chapters and pacing. Wednesday afternoon was free, which gave the two of us a chance to exchange notes on our one-on-one meetings and to brainstorm on our own works in progress.
Thursday’s workshop began with an improv exercise that proved this bunch of writers could easily double as actors. We discussed the elements of scene, "show don’t tell," reader immersion through the use of detail, and how scenes fail. That afternoon we had our second round of one-on-one meetings, where each writer got to meet with whichever one of us they’d managed to avoid on Tuesday (haha).
That evening, we had dinner together in the lodge and then went downstairs for a wonderful session of readings.
The week flew by too quickly. It was a vibrant group that continually surprised us with their observations, questions, ideas, and fabulous writing.
We loved it so much, we’re already looking ahead to next year.
Stay tuned!
Michelle Barker & David Brown
Yes, it's true. We're taking a break from hosting contests. And we're not sure how long of a break. We will reevaluate in about a year.
When we launched the website back in 2018, we thought contests would be a fun way to help spread the word about our business while also giving back to the writing community. Our initial contests paid out of a growing prize pool: every cent that came from the entries went out to the three winners.
Later on, we thought we would attract more attention by having a fixed prize pool of $1000 CAD. That meant the entry fees wouldn't always cover the prize, but we thought it was worth the expense as a means of advertising. Shortly after that, we introduced the option for participants to pay for feedback. That added to the workload, but it ensured that the costs were, at a minimum, covered.
As the owner/operator of Darling Axe, I (David Brown) have had a crash course in business that I never expected. One of the biggest challenges for me has been work-life balance. While our contests have been an undeniably great way to connect with the international writing community, they also take up a lot of time.
In the future, with the help of my friend and colleague Michelle Barker, I want to take the Darling Axe in a new direction. Last year we came out with our first craft book, Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. We have several more books planned, and for the time being, we need to dedicate our efforts to getting our ideas out into the world.
Stay tuned. I don't know if we will resume the contests, but with the extra time, we will be writing and blogging up a storm.
Thanks for your understanding!
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>"The memoir I Can't Sleep caught my attention because of the author's plans to combine their struggles with insomnia and their experiences navigating the British health care system... as a physician. This book promises to explore a pervasive problem most of us have experienced at some point in our lives from the point of view of someone who struggled to find a solution even as a medical insider."
Dear Agent,
I was a medical student when I lost my ability to fall asleep. Instead, I would toss and turn in bed, my body stuck in fight-or-flight mode and my mind’s eye flooded by images from my turbulent childhood.
Initially, I was told that the insomnia was due to anxiety, and I diligently cycled through every recommended treatment: mindfulness, medication, therapy. Despite my efforts, by the time I qualified as a doctor, I found myself dependent on prescription pills or alcohol to fall asleep; a doctor debilitated by a symptom, with no idea why.
That is, until a memory of saving Mum’s life from fifteen years earlier resurfaced in a nightmare, and I finally realised why I had never felt safe to fall asleep since. I had complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD)—“complex” because there was no escape from my childhood scattered with traumatic events, big or small.
Now that I had an accurate diagnosis, I could simply turn to the NHS for help and very soon sleep peacefully ever after, right?
Echoing the interweaving of personal and professional experiences of illness in Henry Marsh’s And Finally, my debut book, I Can’t Sleep, details my healing journey as both mental health patient and doctor and my discovery of the harsh realities of Britain’s healthcare system, mirroring American physician Michele Harper’s The Beauty in Breaking.
I am a London-based junior doctor and freelance medical writer, holding a medical degree from the University of Cambridge. I am also a 2023 graduate of the Non-Fiction stream of the HarperCollins Author Academy for under-represented writers. I Can’t Sleep was longlisted for the Summer 2023 Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Manuscripts—an international competition—and the current manuscript length is 85,000 words.
Thank you for considering my work. I look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Maxine Meju
Maxine Meju is a British junior doctor, freelance medical writer, and aspiring author. I Can’t Sleep: A Memoir marks her debut writing project. Originally growing up in the rainy North of England, Maxine now calls the slightly less rainy London her home. When not immersed in medical work or writing, she loves practising yoga, which she also teaches to fellow NHS staff at a local hospital. A devoted enthusiast of musical theatre and film, Maxine can shamelessly recite lyrics on-demand from the most iconic soundtracks such as Hamilton and The Sound of Music.
]]>"The query letter for the contemporary romance, All's Fair in Love and Acquisitions, did a wonderful job of summarizing the novel's plot as well as capturing the voice in a way that was both humorous and compelling. Strong narrative goals, high stakes, and a considerable obstacle to success create a winning combination for this pitch."
Dear Agent,
I am reaching out to you because [reason to query this particular agent] to share All’s Fair in Love and Acquisitions, an 84,000 word slow-burn contemporary romance. It captures the steamy workplace tension of The Hating Game by Sally Thorne and the career-woman-can-have-it-all ethos of Book Lovers by Emily Henry.
Human Resources Manager Scarlett Beaton’s future has just been blown up.
When the start-up Scarlett works for is acquired by ruthless tech conglomerate Unitech, her fate lies in the hands of her new boss. Oliver Lee is the handsome, enigmatic son of Unitech’s cutthroat founder. He plans to maximize his investment by firing as many employees as possible, and HR is firmly in his crosshairs. To save everyone’s jobs, including her own, the idealistic but self-doubting Scarlett will need to convince Oliver that people are more than just liabilities on a balance sheet.
When Oliver names Scarlett his right-hand in making the acquisition profitable, it should be the perfect opportunity to do just that. But Scarlett’s not the only one with something to lose. After two failed acquisitions, this is Oliver’s last chance to prove himself to his father—and things are not looking good. Scarlett suspects that someone is sabotaging the acquisition from the inside. If she can prove it to Oliver, she’ll be able to stop him from decimating the company and save her job.
But staying focused while being so close to Oliver—with his smouldering glances and surprising sparks of tenderness—is harder than Scarlett thought. Scarlett would never compromise her professionalism by sleeping with her boss. Nope. Never. Definitely not. After all, who could ever respect an HR leader who crosses that fundamental boundary? Giving into temptation would mean losing everything.
I have worked in HR in the tech industry for over ten years, including being on both sides of an acquisition (neither of which resulted in me sleeping with my boss). I have a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Martha Carscadden
Martha Carscadden is an aspiring author and professional people and culture executive based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a BA in English Literature from the UBC and a Certificate of Human Resources Management from SFU. She lives in a 120-year-old fixer-upper with her husband and their two young kids, which would be a lot more fixed-up if she didn’t spend so much of her time writing. Martha is currently seeking representation for her debut contemporary romance novel.
]]>"It's never easy to write a query letter for speculative fiction, but the author of Prodigal Mothers managed to pitch a complex and intriguing story that includes both strong world-building details and compelling stakes. The plot feels fully realized and cohesive, and the main character's dilemma promises an exciting climax."
Dear Agent,
Following an amicable parting with the agent who sold my debut novel, I'm writing to seek representation for Prodigal Mothers, my 112,000-word multiple POV adult science fiction novel about institutional power, maternal love, and artificial intelligence. It will appeal to fans of Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City and Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted.
Dree Rogers has received what may be the most humiliating news a professional parent can get—her daughter has run away from home. Ina's decision to flee the orbital habitat of Aurora with her infant and descend into Earth's poverty and chaos endangers her life, her baby’s life, and the reputation of the Rogers family. Not to mention Dree's parenting license. If Dree can return the runaways, she can protect everything Ina's rash action has put at risk.
Although Dree doesn't know it, Ina is running because she has incurable, progressive early-onset dementia caused by the family bioengineers' botched attempt to improve her cognitive functions. Ina knows if family leaders learn what's happened, they'll institutionalize her and her baby to hide the failure. To escape this fate, Ina has concealed her condition and cut a deal with an ancient, earthbound AI named Athena. Athena promises dignity for Ina in her final days and a secure future for her child in exchange for secret Rogers Family information. To deliver the information to Athena's settlement, Ina must journey deep in The Wilds—scrublands that used to be the American Midwest, populated by anarchist nomads who revere Athena and despise families like the Rogers.
Crossing The Wilds on a bicycle with her baby in tow, Ina battles tornados, wild ostriches, and kidnappers. In pursuit, Dree must overcome uncooperative family bureaucrats, hostile nomads, and the growing conflict between her love for her daughter and her duty to the Rogers Family. When Dree catches up to Ina and learns the truth, she’s furious at how her daughter has been treated and devastated that Ina didn't trust her enough to share the secret. Now, Dree must make a fateful choice—fulfill her mandate and return Ina and her baby to Aurora, gambling she can protect them in a family she no longer trusts, or betray the family by cooperating with Athena and the nomads, risking retaliation that could include death for them all.
I'm the author of Corporate Gunslinger (Harper Voyager, 2020) and my short fiction has appeared in several small-press collections. I’ve also written a steampunk novella as work-for-hire, but it’s no longer in print. I'm not under contract with a publisher or represented by an agent, and I am interested in both original work and work-for-hire.
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Doug Engstrom
Doug Engstrom is the author of CORPORATE GUNSLINGER (Harper Voyager, 2020), an out-of-print steampunk novella, and several short stories published in small press anthologies. In the course of his life, Doug has run an Air Force base newspaper on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and bicycled across the state of Iowa twice. He worked in corporate IT before he began writing full time. He lives near Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Catherine Engstrom.
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"I highly recommend it for writers of all skill levels."
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"Michelle Barker and David Griffin Brown have crafted a literary gem that deserves a permanent spot on every writer's bookshelf."
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"This book is a treasure trove for both aspiring writers and seasoned authors, offering profound insights into the art of creating immersive and emotionally resonant narratives."
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"If you aspire to craft stories that captivate and resonate, this book is an indispensable companion."
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"An absolute masterpiece in the realm of storytelling craft."
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"This is my new favourite craft book."
Grab your copy here.
By Michelle Barker
You know how ants can lift up to fifty times their body weight? Beats are the fictional equivalent of the ant. If used properly, they can do a surprising amount of heavy lifting in your novel.
First, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Beats for screenwriters are different than beats for fiction writers. Screenwriting beats are more like plot points. That’s not what we’re talking about here.
Beats show up around dialogue. They’re those moments before or after a character speaks, in which they perform an action or a gesture, or the narrator makes an observation.
For example:
If you use proper spacing, the beat can take the place of he said/she said, thus doing double duty in your manuscript. Proper spacing means that the dialogue and its beat appear in the same paragraph so that the reader understands that the speaker and the thinker/actor are the same character.
Sometimes you need that pause before someone says something momentous or makes a theatrical exit. Sure, you could write, He paused. But you could also do better and fill the pause with a beat that highlights an aspect of the character’s personality. Speaking of which…
This is one of their most useful functions. Beats, if properly used, can show us who that character is by what they notice, how they react, and how they perform a particular act.
Dialogue is fun to write, which is why we tend to get carried away with it and forget that a scene needs rounding out with details of setting, sensory detail, and interiority, so that it isn’t just two (or more) people talking. All of that can be accomplished with beats. Beats give your characters something to do—and how a person does something can say a lot about how they’re feeling. Don’t believe me? Try filling the dishwasher when you’re angry.
If your character says one thing and then thinks or does another, you create a new layer of intrigue in the story and your reader will keep reading to figure out what’s actually going on. In the above example, Martin says he doesn’t care if Amber is still going to class, but by the way he sets down the sugar bowl, the reader knows he’s lying.
Showing how other characters react can be particularly useful if you’re writing in first person or deep third point of view and only have access to one character’s thoughts. It’s a great way to indicate to the reader how other characters are feeling or what they might be thinking.
New authors often choose omniscient point of view because they believe they must have access to every character’s thoughts for the reader to understand what’s going on—even though omniscient is by far the hardest POV to handle. But beats prove this is not true.
Here’s an example from Stephen King’s novel, Billy Summers, written in deep third, entirely from Billy Summers’s POV:
Hoff starts down the hall, but just when Billy thinks he’s rid of him, Hoff comes back. No hiding the desperation in those eyes now. He speaks low. “We’re really good, right? I mean, if I did anything to offend you, or piss you off, I apologize.”
“Really good,” Billy says. Thinking, This guy could blow. And if he does, it won’t be Nick Majarian on ground zero. It’ll be me.
“Because I need this,” Hoff says. Still speaking low. Smelling of Certs and booze and Creed cologne.
Notice how King’s details in these beats not only immerse us in the moment of the scene, but they also give us insight into the character of Hoff—without him having to resort to another POV. And without stopping the story. The details are slipped seamlessly and efficiently into the beats.
But…
In most of the manuscripts we read, beats are not used to their true potential. They’re squandered on generic gestures: nodding, blinking, sighing, shrugging, looking (in all its various forms), head shaking, heart racing—etc., etc. As developmental editors, we’ve seen these things a thousand times. These types of beats do nothing to develop the character who’s performing them, and yet authors rely on them, overuse them, and usually don’t even realize the disservice they’re doing to their readers.
Why is this such a big deal?
If your characters are nodding and sighing all over the page, chances are you have not fully visualized the scene you’re writing and, even more, you don’t truly know your characters. People are interesting. People are weird. The more you get to know them, the weirder they become. And readers read for the experience of character. A reader won’t care what happens to your characters if they don’t care about them in the first place. Which means your number one job, from page one, is to create connection. Make us care. Get us interested—not in the car crash or the kidnapping, but in the people it’s happening to.
You are here to recreate an experience, not to tell us about it. And nodding, blinking, and sighing won’t accomplish that.
But beats, if properly used, can. If you make them unique and specific, they become like windows onto your character—their secret desires and fears, their obsessions, how they see the world, how they think, how they move. With every gesture you include, ask yourself: does it tell the reader something specific and new either about the character or the situation? Hint: breathing, blinking, and looking at things tell us nothing. If your character is in the room, we know they’re looking at whatever it is they’re describing. We know they’re blinking and breathing, else they wouldn’t be alive.
You can do better.
How does your character eat? Quickly, stuffing themselves? Painstakingly dissecting their pasta to pull out every tiny piece of tomato they can find? How do they react to a spider in the room? How do they react to animals in general? Or germs? Or car horns? Are they on edge at every noise? Do they have trouble looking the protagonist in the eye?
Go to a café and pretend to be on your laptop while secretly observing the people around you. If they’re not on their phones (which, sadly, they probably are), you’ll see how interesting they can become. Pay attention to what people do when they think no one’s looking. Think about what you do. The most effective fiction is also the most honest. Why? Because when you’re being honest about your thoughts, actions, and reactions, you’re creating something relatable. It’s a wonderful paradox of writing that the specific creates the universal. The more specific you can be, the more readers will recognize themselves in your characters.
The best fiction contains memorable characters. In order to create those characters, we must know them and then convey what we’ve learned onto the page.
Honor the tiny beat and it will carry the weight of a whole character for you.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning novels.
By Michelle Barker
Ann Patchett’s novel, Bel Canto, is a stunning achievement and a great example of how omniscient point of view can be used to serve the story.
The narrative centers on a hostage crisis that takes place in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country in South America, in the official residence of the country’s vice president—although, according to Wikipedia, the novel is based on the Lima Crisis of 1996/97. A world-famous soprano, Roxanne Coss, has been invited to sing at the fifty-third birthday celebration of a wealthy Japanese businessman, Mr. Hosokawa. The government hopes to convince Hosokawa to invest in the country, so they agree to host the performance, and nearly two hundred people attend, among them several ambassadors and investors from various countries. However, Hosokawa has no intention of building an electronics plant in South America. The only reason he’s here is because of his love of opera in general and Roxanne Coss in particular.
The terrorists show up hoping to capture the country’s president and take him hostage, but they discover, to their dismay, that the president canceled at the last minute. They end up holding the other guests hostage instead.
What ensues is a brilliant illustration of how both music and language can create bridges between people to foster understanding and erase differences. Patchett uses POV to transform antagonists into protagonists, but four main protagonists emerge: Gen Watanabe (the translator), Mr. Hosokawa, Carmen (one of the terrorists), and Roxanne Coss.
Nailing down the inciting incident in this novel is a little tricky, partly because there are so many parallel trajectories—and that doesn’t even include the inciting incidents for each romantic thread. In the opening chapter there are a few contenders. The book opens with a big event literally in the first sentence: the lights in the vice president’s house go out at the end of one of Roxanne’s pieces, and the accompanist kisses her. This seems like an obvious choice for inciting incident, but I would argue that this is in fact the first of two doorways of no return, because it’s also the moment when the terrorists make their move.
Another contender for inciting incident is when Hosokawa first falls in love with opera. We get that backstory in the opening chapter: how, on his eleventh birthday, his father took him to see Rigoletto and it changed his life.
But the first and most important inciting incident for many of the characters is the invitation to attend this birthday party to hear Roxanne Coss, Hosokawa’s idol, perform. The invitation is what brings all these people together, and it is what cements the terrorists’ plan to put pressure on the president to fulfill their demands. Without it, the story would not begin.
So, the lights in the grand vice-presidential mansion suddenly go off, the accompanist kisses Roxanne Coss, and the terrorists burst in, armed and frightening, threatening violence. They’re looking for the president of the country who was supposed to attend this event. But the president cancelled at the last minute because it was a Tuesday, and his soap opera was on tv. This is the first in a series of humanizing moments, though the reader doesn’t recognize it as such quite yet. Right now, it only seems trivial and comical—but it has repercussions for the vice president who suffers a blow to the head at the hands of the angry terrorists.
It is at this stage that the terrorists could decide to leave. Without the president here, they realize they won’t get what they came for. They could slip out of the house and that would be the end of it. But they hesitate, and in that hesitation the small escape route closes to them. Sirens sound outside, and people with bullhorns shout orders. Now, if the terrorists leave the house, they will be arrested and imprisoned. There’s no choice: they must go through with their plan.
Patchett takes a moment to contrast the sound of the sirens with opera, violence with music. This is a motif that will echo throughout, and in fact music will succeed in transforming that violence into love.
But not yet.
At this point, the reader is afraid of the terrorists, much like the hostages, because we don’t know them. We see them only as their role; they don’t show any vulnerability, and there’s no way for us to recognize their humanity. Had government forces stormed the house right now and killed the terrorists, we would have cheered for the hostages’ release. Remember this; it will be important.
The terrorists make everyone lie down on the floor, and slowly we get to know the hostages, thanks to Patchett’s choice of omniscient POV. One of the most important characters is Gen Watanabe, Hosokawa’s translator who speaks numerous languages fluently and forms an important bridge between the guests so that they can communicate with each other—and so that the terrorists’ demands can be clarified to everyone.
It soon becomes clear that the accompanist is sick and needs medical attention.
There is a knock at the front door, and Joachim Messner arrives. The hostage situation is his inciting incident. He is a negotiator with the International Red Cross who happens to be on vacation in this country and has been commandeered to bridge the gap between the world of the hostages and the outside world. In return for much needed supplies, he convinces the terrorists to let some of the hostages go; there are too many of them, and the situation is untenable. The terrorists agree to free the women and children (the vice president’s), the staff, and anyone who’s sick or not useful to them.
But of course, there is one woman in the crowd who is extremely valuable to them: Roxanne Coss. They do not agree to free her. Patchett brings more to this than just Roxanne’s value as a trading chip. While the terrorists were hiding in the air conditioning shafts waiting to make their move, they heard Roxanne sing and were entranced. Part of the reason they don’t want to give her up is because they don’t want to lose the beauty of her voice. The terrorists decide to keep something “they never knew they wanted.”
They keep forty people in total. Because Roxanne Coss stays, the accompanist refuses to leave, even though he’s clearly getting sicker and soon falls into a coma. No one knows what’s wrong with him until he dies, and then they realize he was a diabetic and needed insulin.
Slowly, the story splits into various trajectories and differing narrative goals.
Father Arguedas, a young Catholic priest who is invited to leave with the exodus of hostages, chooses to stay. He forms a different sort of bridge between the characters, offering spiritual solace and connection in his role as priest. The process of humanizing the terrorists begins with him, as he notices how young some of them are—just boys, really. And, as it turns out, a few girls as well. He sees that the young terrorists are tired and scared, and he calls over one of the boys who starts to cry.
They are also humanized through Gen’s translations between the generals and Messner. This group of terrorists does not belong to the other extremist group in the country; they haven’t shot anyone. What they’re doing here is “for the people.” Because of Patchett’s choice of omniscient narration, we find out that one of the generals grieves the death of the accompanist and thinks of his brother who has been wrongfully imprisoned and who the general hopes to free through this hostage situation. This furthers the humanization of the people in charge.
A transformation starts to happen in the house as Father Arguedas administers last rites to the accompanist and asks if anyone wants to make a confession. The vice president resumes his role of host, cleaning up and making the rounds of guests to enquire if people are comfortable or if they need anything.
Outside, a drizzly fog descends like a shroud, enclosing the house in its own microcosm. One of the generals shoots the clock, stopping time. What is created is not only a classic closed-room situation but also a fairy-tale feeling of being outside of both time and place. The terrorists’ initial rules fall apart as the divisions between the two groups fade. The vice president develops a fondness for one of the young terrorists, Ishmael, who could easily be his son and offers him a new pair of boots. And then the French ambassador, Simon Thibault, turns on the television. Many of the terrorists who’ve spent their lives in the jungle have never seen a television. They’re entranced.
Someone finds a chess set, and one of the generals begins playing with the hostages. Ishmael watches and catches on quickly. It turns out another terrorist, a young boy named Cesar, can sing. Gen is commandeered by the generals to be their secretary, outlining their demands—although they are fascinated by his facility with languages.
Mr. Hosokawa spends most of his time at the piano with Roxanne and a Japanese hostage who turns out to be a talented piano player (a lot of hidden talents emerge over the course of the story). This return to music is what brings Hosokawa and Roxanne together. They begin to communicate in wordless ways, no longer needing Gen’s translations.
There is definitely a narrator in this novel apart from the various viewpoints we are privy to, and this voice occasionally interrupts the story with commentary.
At the midpoint, the narrator steps in to tell us there is a clear division in the story: before the box and after the box—the box in question being full of music that Father Arguedas organizes for Roxanne Coss. The box changes the whole mood in the house, because now Roxanne can practice, and a daily session of beautiful music is introduced into the routine. Language created bridges between people who couldn’t otherwise communicate, but it is the music that truly brings everyone together. Carmen is especially transfixed by it, and for her it is the inciting incident for a romantic subplot: she is empowered to instigate a relationship with Gen. She is very shy, but the music gives her the courage to approach him in the middle of the night and ask him to teach her to read and write in Spanish.
Over four months of captivity, the barriers between terrorists and hostages come down. The various relationships that form each come with their own inciting incidents and arcs, which I’ll tease apart in a moment, but they all arrive at a point of false victory.
Gen and Carmen fall in love. Ishmael learns to play chess, and the vice president imagines adopting him into his family. Cesar’s talent for singing is so prodigious that Roxanne takes him under her wing and gives him lessons, imagining the success he would have if she took him with her to Italy. Roxanne and Mr. Hosokawa fall in love.
The generals’ demands to Messner become increasingly outlandish. They don’t want to leave the house. No one really does, apart from the French ambassador who misses his wife. But even he gets into the rhythm of life in the house as he spends his time in the kitchen preparing the meals.
When the fog lifts and the generals finally allow everyone outside into the yard, there are contradictory forces at work here: the transformation of this microcosm feels complete. A regular soccer game starts up. A group of joggers do laps around the house. The vice president works in his garden. But the lifting of the fog also reveals the outside world that has been hidden. It’s another reminder that this can’t end well.
But by this point, the reader has fallen under the story’s spell. The terrorists are no longer antagonists. They are people, and we love them as much as the hostages do. Some reviewers have called this a dramatization of the Stockholm syndrome, but I think Patchett is doing something more interesting than that. The hostages (and readers) don’t develop a psychological dependence as a form of survival. They actually come to care for each other as people, just as the reader does.
When Messner shows up again to warn the terrorists (and us) that this can’t go on and they must surrender, this must end and it won’t end well, no one listens to him (not even us).
We’ve been warned numerous times and yet, when government forces storm the house and kill all the terrorists, the violence is utterly shocking and devastating. Patchett’s transformation of these characters is brilliant. A novel that started with violence has become a world in which violence is no longer appropriate. The people who are killed are no longer terrorists. They are humans, with names and desires and talents, and we love them as much as the hostages do. Like the hostages, we are hoping for a fairy-tale ending, but this is not a fairy tale.
Mr. Hosokawa also dies in the shoot-out, in his attempt to protect Carmen from being killed. In a great irony, the hostages get what they wanted in the first place—freedom—but it is no longer what they need. The novel ends in tragedy.
Patchett includes an epilogue in which, six months later, Gen and Roxanne are married. The two people they loved were both killed, so they turn to each other. I admit, I did not find this epilogue either necessary or satisfying (or convincing). I suppose it was their way of holding onto what they’d had, but it feels tacked on to an otherwise perfect story.
What Patchett does with point of view is critical to understanding the story because readers must get to know as many of these characters as possible. Getting to know them is the point. The goal of this process is humanization, which is what makes the climax of the novel so effective.
Patchett could have used rotating deep third to achieve her goal, but she chooses omniscient because, apart from the various viewpoints we are privy to, there is also a narrator who occasionally steps in with comments from outside the story, providing a bird’s eye view after the fact—something deep third cannot do. The narrator also occasionally slips in an “us.” Patchett includes and implicates the reader in this self-contained world. We are there with the hostages. We, too, have our prejudices and assumptions challenged by this situation. We, too, fall prey to the crazy dreams that ensue—that the vice president can adopt Ishmael, and Cesar will sing in Italy with Roxanne, and Gen and Carmen can get married.
But the movement from one character’s POV to another within a scene also becomes thematic because it contributes to a feeling of connection and community among people who otherwise would never be in the same room together.
Patchett gives us insight into many characters, which contributes to both reader immersion (we feel like we’re in the house with them) and emotional draw (we get to know them, so we start to care about them). This is not to say that every novel would benefit from this kind of treatment. This novel benefits from it precisely because it contributes to the theme.
Let’s dive into some of the arcs:
Mr. Hosokawa: A successful businessman in a solid marriage with two children who is, in fact, mostly married to his job. The one passion in his life is opera, but he doesn’t discover true passion until he meets Roxanne Coss in person and falls in love with her. His first face-to-face communication with her (the inciting incident of their relationship arc) happens after the accompanist dies and he offers his condolences. At first, he must rely on Gen’s translations to communicate with her, but as he gets to know her more deeply, words become unnecessary. Roxanne is the one who initiates the physical consummation of their relationship by inviting him to sneak up to her room, which Carmen must facilitate at great risk to herself. Mr. Hosokawa dies trying to protect Carmen when the government forces arrive.
Roxanne Coss: Before the hostage crisis, Roxanne Coss was a diva. She continues to act like one when the terrorists are deciding who stays in the house and who goes. She has performances lined up. She shouldn’t be treated this way. When the accompanist dies, she realizes she never thought much about him at all. Mr. Hosokawa’s sincere offer of sympathy is the first step in softening her heart and making her look outward at people as people (rather than just as adoring fans), though she never really stops being a diva during captivity. After a short stint of sleeping on the floor, she gets her own bedroom and breakfast in bed, and once the box of music arrives, the house routine revolves around her. But, over time, she forms an attachment to Carmen and allows her to lie on the bed with her as she braids Carmen’s hair. She sees Carmen as a person. When Cesar fears he has embarrassed himself by singing and runs outside to hide in a tree, Roxanne insists on going out to talk him down. This initiates movement into the outside world, as now all the hostages are allowed outside. Roxanne ends up marrying Gen as a way of remembering Mr. Hosokawa.
Gen Watanabe and Carmen: Gen is the translator who helps other people communicate, but he himself is shy and hesitant to reveal his true thoughts and feelings. When Carmen approaches him in the middle of the night with a request to learn how to read and write in Spanish, his defenses come down. She is a quick learner and embraces the lessons, and the two of them fall in love. Carmen’s inciting incident is when she hears Roxanne Coss sing while she’s hiding in the air-conditioning shaft. This creates a connection between her and Roxanne. Carmen starts to think of herself as Roxanne’s bodyguard. She becomes enthralled with Gen and his facility with languages and, in the middle of the night, works up the courage to ask him to teach her. They fall in love, their relationship accelerated by the prospect of the hostage crisis ending. The night Carmen leads Mr. Hosokawa up to Roxanne’s room is the same night she and Gen consummate their relationship. Despite the unrealistic situation, Gen and Carmen hold onto the fiction that their relationship might survive this ordeal, though the narrator reminds us this outcome is unlikely. Gen believes that even if the government forces arrive, they will spare Carmen. But they don’t.
Ruben Iglesias: the vice president of the country, a man who comes from poverty and recognizes that no one really knows or cares who he is. As a political figure he represents the “common man.” President Masuda has always treated him as an underling. He is the only hostage who meets with violence at the hands of the terrorists. When Esmerelda, the governess and a simple country girl, sews up his cut, he is reminded of his connection to the common people. He continues to think of the people in his home as guests (including the terrorists) and remains the host of the home, tending to everyone’s needs and cleaning up after them. When he sees Ishmael’s worn boots, he offers him new shoes and a connection is formed that develops over time into a parental bond. He decides he will speak to his wife about adopting Ishmael into their family—but then the reality of the situation comes crashing in and Ishmael is killed along with the other terrorists.
These are only a smattering of the arcs Patchett juggles in this novel. She gives consideration to even the most minor characters, humanizing everyone.
Patchett’s achievement in this novel is really quite wonderful. Her ability to fully transform the antagonists and remind us of their humanity makes me think this book should be required reading for, well, everyone. It reminds us that people are not their roles and that we are all fundamentally alike. She chooses a cosmopolitan cast of characters for that very reason. She also writes about something that is very hard to make interesting: the triumph of goodness over evil. Her tricks: the use of tension, and the transformation of character.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning novels.
By David Griffin Brown
Brandon Sanderson has become a staple in fantasy circles. Some may know him as the guy who swooped in to finish The Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan passed away, but his own book sales have put him at the top of the game—over 30 million books by early 2023 compared with 100 million for Jordan himself.
The Way of Kings is the first book in his Stormlight Archive series which, along with the Mistborn series, takes place in Sanderson’s “Cosmere” universe. As with many fantasy novels, The Way of Kings is a complex story told through a number of POV characters. Another feature it shares with the genre is an elaborate world and world history.
For this Story Skeleton, I’m going to break down the plot lines of each of the main POV characters, and then examine how Sanderson ensures the world-building is a seamless part of the story.
Kaladin is arguably the primary protagonist since his narrative takes him through two arcs—the second of which arrives via parallel-timeline backstory.
In the present timeline, Kaladin starts out as a slave in a caravan. He has attempted escape more than once and now has largely given up. Even still, he considers poisoning the slaver in charge. That means he’s not without motivation, even if he feels at present like freedom is out of reach.
Kaladin is sold to the warcamp of Highprince Sadeas in the Shattered Plains where the War of Reckoning rages between the Alethi and the Parshendi. Kaladin tries to get recruited as a fighter, but instead he’s relegated to a “bridge crew.” The Shattered Plains are like a plateau that has been sliced up by many gorges, so for the army to launch an attack, a group of expendables is sent ahead carrying heavy mobile bridges from one segment of the plateau to the next. And Highprince Sadeas is notorious for not valuing the lives of his bridge crews.
While Kaladin has no agency in where he ends up, his assignment to Bridge Four definitely gives him a clear, specific, and relatable narrative goal: survival. He might not have the freedom of a soldier, but he’s still in a war zone. His actions will determine if he makes it to the next bridge run, and the next, and as a natural leader, he is also extremely concerned about the survival of the rest of Bridge Four—after a few weeks, he is the only survivor out of the original group.
Kaladin is so dejected about his situation, especially his inability to save the other bridgemen, that he contemplates suicide. However, Syl, Kaladin’s mysterious spren companion, dissuades him from giving up. As a result, he attacks Gaz, the sergeant in charge of the bridge crews, and demands to be made leader of Bridge Four in exchange for a fifth of Kaladin’s wages. In other words, he takes a risk to get closer to his narrative goal: to survive and help his bridge crew survive.
Kaladin gradually wins over his bridge crew and convinces them to train during their free time to better ensure everyone’s survival. In particular, they train in a new technique of carrying their bridge sideways to protect themselves from Parshendi archers. Since Gaz is being pressured to arrange for Kaladin to die in battle, he suggests that Bridge Four employ their new side-carry strategy in the hope that it gets them all killed.
When Bridge Four accomplishes the maneuver, proving its effectiveness, other bridge crews try to copy them, but without the same training they end up exposed in battle and many are killed as a result. Kaladin is blamed and beaten, then left for dead—tied up outside with a highstorm approaching. However, the storm doesn’t kill Kaladin; instead, it reveals the truth behind his strength and ability to survive so many battles—he is able to draw on the magic inside spheres, even the ones used as everyday currency.
This is a midpoint for Kaladin for three reasons. First, he now knows that it’s only a matter of time before someone in command makes a more direct attempt on his life. Second, he realizes that bridge crews aren’t supposed to survive—they are meant to be bait for the Parshendi archers. Third, Kaladin has a new ability (Surgebinding) that can help his team beat the odds and possibly even escape into the chasms.
After Kaladin starts rescuing people from other bridge crews, one of the overseers decides that Bridge Four has gone too far. She decrees that they will do daily bridge runs with chasm duty every night. There is no way they will be able to survive for long.
Kaladin needs to come up with a way to keep Bridge Four safe until they have the chance to escape. In one of the biggest battles yet, they wear carapaces and shields that they have harvested from dead Parshendi in the chasms. This provides them with protection but also attracts the enemy’s rage.
Then the battle takes an unexpected direction. The bridge crews are given the order to retreat, getting Sadeas’s army to safety while leaving a second army cut off and surrounded. Kaladin decides to help, and they head to the plateau where the army is trapped without a bridge. Using his magic, he saves his men and joins the fight. At this point he hears a voice which prompts him to say, “I will protect those who cannot protect themselves,” which of course has been his narrative goal all along, even in his backstory. He not only protects his men but also saves the leader of the abandoned army.
This final act ensures that Kaladin achieves his goal.
Kaladin is offered protection for all of Bridge Four by Highprince Dalinar—the army of whom he saved in the final battle.
As a boy, Kal learns the medical arts, including surgery, from his father Lirin. Despite Kal’s intelligence and skill, he dreams of being a warrior. This stasis is drawn out over several POV sections as Kal learns from his father but also comes into conflict with him—his father wants him to be a surgeon.
Following a conflict between his father and the citylord, Kaladin’s brother Tien is conscripted to fight for Amaram’s army. As a result, Kaladin volunteers to go to war so that he can keep his brother safe.
The backstory segments skip over a few years of rising action in which Kaladin and Tien fight alongside each other.
Kaladin becomes an accomplished soldier in Amaram’s army, but he fails to keep his brother alive. Unable to return to his parents for the shame he feels at having failed Tien, Kaladin enlists again, determined to keep fighting to help those who cannot protect themselves—to cut the evil from the world like his surgeon father amputates infected limbs.
This midpoint is arguably also Kaladin’s all-is-lost moment leading up to the false victory of a tragic arc.
While fighting for Amaram’s army, Kaladin manages to defeat a Shardbearer. The implication is he can take the Brightlord’s sword and plate to become a Shardbearer himself. Now Kaladin has the potential to fulfil his narrative goal, to fight in service of those who cannot, and in a much greater capacity than as an ordinary soldier. However, he decides that he doesn’t want the sword and plate and instead gives them to Coreb, his friend and fellow soldier.
When Amaram hears of this, he sends his men to kill the four survivors from Kaladin’s squad, including Coreb. He then takes the sword and plate for himself and brands Kaladin a slave.
Kaladin begins his life as a slave—a new period of stasis that leads into his main story arc.
Shallan’s story opens after her inciting incident, the death of her father. Her backstory stasis is the time when her father was still alive.
When Shallan’s father dies, the children are left destitute—on the verge of losing their family home and reputation. Part of the issue is that their Soulcaster is broken, so the siblings hatch a plan. Shallan is to apprentice as ward to Jasnah Kholin, sister of the Alethi king, with the goal of secretly swapping their broken Soulcaster for Jasnah’s working one—with which they will be able to settle the family’s debts.
This is where Shallan’s story begins. The first order of business is to convince Jasnah to take her on as a ward, and that in itself is no easy feat. The royal researcher rejects her more than once.
Once Shallan is finally accepted as Jasnah’s apprentice, she must play her part while waiting for the right opportunity to steal the woman’s Soulcaster. While she knows that her siblings are depending upon her, she relishes the opportunity to study under Jasnah and therefore despairs at the theft she has committed herself to.
Shallan’s internal conflict—her desire to be Jasnah’s truthful student rather than a thief—leads to an “all is lost” or “dark night” peak when she finally swaps the broken Soulcaster for Jasnah’s, but she’s unable to make it work. It could be that her betrayal, which will ruin her chances as a ward, was for nothing.
Her external conflict reaches the “all is lost” moment soon after. Shallan’s confidante, a friendly ardent (priest) named Kabsal turns out to be an assassin trying to get at Jasnah. But he flubs the poisoning, dosing himself and Shallan instead of Jasnah. Shallan assumes Jasnah needs the stolen Soulcaster to save her, so she hands it over.
Shallan has been betrayed by her friend, she has betrayed her teacher, and she has failed her siblings.
Over the course of the story, Shallan has been getting better at peering into Shadesmar, another plane of existence. It’s the source of her strange drawings, and at one point (after stealing Jasnah’s Soulcaster), she manages to briefly travel there. In the aftermath of the poisoning incident, Shallan realizes that she never needed a Soulcaster—both hers and Jasnah’s are inoperable, which means she is able to Soulcast inherently. And that means the same is true for Jasnah. First, she tries to prove this to her teacher with drawings of Shadesmar, but when that doesn’t work, she travels to Shadesmar and nearly dies. Jasnah saves her, and in doing so realizes the extent of Shallan’s ability. As such, she decides not to banish the would-be thief.
Shallan’s internal and external conflicts are thus both resolved—she has the power to help her family without the need for a Soulcaster and she is able to stay on as Jasnah’s ward.
The resolution helps set the stage for what will come next in the series. Shallan reviews Jasnah’s research and agrees that the parshmen, a race of docile and mute servants, are in fact the Voidbringers of old.
As brother of assassinated King Gavilar, Highprince Dalinar Kholin is in a period of grief and torment. He feels ashamed for not having saved his sibling, but he’s also haunted by visions that have plagued him ever since. The visions have led him to believe that he must unite the high princes before the Voidbringers, a foe vanished thousands of years earlier, return to bring the next Desolation—a terrible war that will plunge the lands into chaos.
Young King Elhokar isn’t inspiring confidence as the leader of the Alethi, so Dalinar arranges a Chasmfiend hunt to help bolster Elhokar’s reputation. While fighting the dangerous beast, the young king is thrown from his mount, and it turns out his saddle strap may have been cut. This is where Dalinar’s motivation brought about by the visions crystallizes into a narrative goal: he must act to unite the high princes lest Elhokar meet his father’s fate.
Much of Dalinar’s rising action involves his rivalry with Highprince Torol Sadeas. Their dispute stems in part from King Gavilar’s assassination in that they both failed to save their regent. But Sadeas also takes exception to the ways in which Dalinar has changed—he is obsessed with an old book (The Way of Kings), he doesn’t seek out glory in Chasmfiend hunts, and he uses a more conservative attack strategy in the Shattered Plains with slower bridge crews that don’t sacrifice as many men.
Dalinar’s trajectory therefore is structured around this relationship arc. The rivals were once friends, are now antagonistic allies, and—as we soon see—will become enemies.
In his attempts to “unite them” as his visions decree, Dalinar asks the young King Elhokar to designate him the Highprince of War.
King Elhokar names Sadeas the Highprince of Information in a blow to Dalinar. The implication is that Dalinar has failed to protect the king from would-be assassins and maybe even that Dalinar had something to do with the saddle strap being cut. And now Dalinar’s rival is in a position to falsely implicate him.
This qualifies as a midpoint because Dalinar’s quest to unite the Highprinces now seems even more impossible. In his rivalry with Sadeas, Dalinar has lost significant power. In fact, Dalinar starts questioning himself and even considering abdication.
Since he has failed to persuade King Elhokar to attempt a new strategy in the war, Dalinar starts approaching the individual Highprinces, seeking to combine forces in an upcoming assault on the Parshendi. He is rebuffed.
A false victory typically precedes a tragic climax wherein the protagonist fails to achieve the narrative goal. However, as we see here, it can also be helpful in setting up a betrayal.
In his capacity as Highprince of Information, Sadeas declares that the king’s saddle was indeed tampered with, but that Dalinar could not have been involved. The two Highprinces meet to discuss their conflict and plans for the war. It seems like a significant breakthrough in their relationship arc, and by extension, Dalinar is suddenly back on track to achieve his goal. If he can get Sadeas to work with him, he might well be able to convince more Highprinces to join forces.
Dalinar and Sadeas go on to fight a battle together in which the Parshendi surprise them with a second army. Dalinar saves Sadeas’s life, seemingly cementing their renewed friendship.
Dalinar gives up on the idea of abdication, and in his next vision, he speaks some words from the Dawnchant—proof that what’s happening to him is real.
Also, this is the point at which Dalinar finally relents to Navani, the dead king’s widow, and they share a kiss. (I’ve not gone into this romantic subplot as there isn’t much to it—they have feelings for each other, but up until now, Dalinar has been too duty-bound to consider the relationship a good idea.)
Dalinar and Sadeas team up in what is to be the biggest battle yet with the Parshendi. However, once the fighting gets started, Sadeas retreats and takes his bridges with him, leaving Dalinar’s army surrounded and trapped.
At this point, Dalinar has effectively failed at his quest to unite the Highprinces. Sadeas, the only one willing to work with him, was in fact planning his betrayal the entire time.
Dalinar and his son Adolin make their amends and agree to die fighting with their honor intact.
Dalinar is saved by Kaladin and Bridge Four. After the battle, Dalinar invites Bridge Four to join his army. While he wants revenge against Sadeas, he still holds to his quest to unite the Highprinces.
When Sadeas refuses to release Bridge Four to him, even for a high price, Dalinar instead offers his Shardblade in exchange for the freedom of every bridge crew. It’s an offer Sadeas can’t refuse. Dalinar has lost a crucial and priceless weapon, but he has saved his honor along with 2000 bridgemen.
Afterward, Dalinar seeks out Elhokar and roughs up the young king. Even without his Shardblade, Dalinar is able to defeat the king in combat and crack his Shardplate. He does this to demonstrate that if he had wanted to kill his nephew, he could have done so at any time. This mistrust between them, he realizes, is the biggest threat to the Alethi.
Elhokar finally admits that he cut his own saddle strap to force his uncle to take his fears more seriously. Dalinar explains what that led to—Sadeas’s betrayal. He demands that Elhokar name him the Highprince of War so they can finally end the stalemate with the Parshendi. While this demand is left unanswered, it seems that the young king will comply.
We don’t get much of a resolution for Dalinar. There is still plenty of work ahead—and danger. The story ends with a clear nudge to the sequel. What will happen now that Dalinar and Kaladin are working together? What will Sadeas do to stop them? And what do Dalinar’s dark visions portend for the future?
This is another storyline that begins after the inciting incident, which in this case is indirectly the assassination of King Gavilar, and directly the ways in which his father has changed since the king’s death. As such, Adolin’s stasis is the time before the assassination when his father still lived up to the ideal Adolin had grown up with—a man of perfect honor, integrity, and courage.
Since the king’s death, Adolin’s father Dalinar has been acting strangely, quoting from an ancient text and having visions during highstorms. The disruption posed by this inciting incident is that Adolin’s innocent childhood image of his father has been shattered. Now the young man is questioning his father’s sanity and also his integrity as a Highprince, in part due to the rumors that are circulating.
Adolin’s storyline follows a coming-of-age trajectory in that his quest is to learn and grow. He must assess Dalinar for who he truly is—not merely the glorified version of his father that he grew up with.
As Adolin carries out his duties, he struggles with his internal conflict about his father. He tries to understand and accept the things Dalinar does that Adolin doesn’t agree with or understand—like refusing to hunt Chasmfiends when the opportunity arises. But he also takes direct action by visiting an ardent to ask about his father’s visions. The ardent tells him that his father might be losing his grip on reality and that there is no way the visions could be real.
Dalinar explains that he’s thinking of abdicating and naming Adolin as Highprince. The son implores his father to denounce the visions and move on, but Dalinar refuses. He will not lead while living a lie, as he feels the visions are important. Adolin’s brother Renarin suggest a third option: if they share specific details of what their father has witnessed during the highstorms with Jasnah, she may be able to prove whether Dalinar is peering into the past.
This is a midpoint for Adolin since he has shifted from doubting his father to accepting that his father is acting honorably and may not be losing his sanity after all.
While waiting out another highstorm, Dalinar falls into another trance and speaks in the Dawnchant, which confirms his father’s visions are real.
This is a low-key internal climax, but his narrative goal is achieved: Adolin has come to see that even if his father questions the values of their people and the war they are committed to, he does so out of honor and integrity, not out of some insanity brought about by false visions.
Adolin’s resolution, that he now agrees with his father and empathizes with his choices, is on display during Dalinar’s all-is-lost scene. Sadeas has betrayed them and left them for dead, but Adolin affirms his support and trust in Dalinar—he is ready to die side by side with his father in honor.
Some would say the hallmark of good world-building is subtlety. The reader is dropped into a story and must piece together the setting-based context and history as they go. Same goes for a magic system. Jumping into longwinded explanations tends to disrupt a reader’s immersive experience.
However, in Orwell’s 1984 there are many such sections of explanatory world-building. At one point, the main character (Winston) sits down and reads a book that is literally about the world and its history. No subtlety there. Another example is Ready Player One—in fact, I’ve heard from more than one person that they put the book down because the initial info-dumping was too much to bear.
Novels like 1984 and Ready Player One get away with big infodumps of world-building context (if they do) because the world they are explaining is so damn interesting that readers are willing to plow through it (if they are).
But these are exceptions. Most readers come to speculative fiction for the story it promises. The world, the history, the magic systems or tech—these are all a huge draw, but they should supplement the story rather than overshadowing it. And that’s exactly what Sanderson accomplishes in The Way of Kings.
Let’s take a look at three examples.
Through Dalinar’s highstorm visions, readers are presented with several scenes from thousands of years earlier. We learn about the extent to which magic used to exist, as well as the terrible Desolations that plagued the lands. Also, by learning what is unusual about the times depicted in the visions, we learn about what is considered normal in Dalinar’s regular life.
What makes these visions a strong world-building tool is Dalinar’s resistance to them. They are driving him crazy. They make the people around him think he’s going crazy. Even his son starts to doubt his fitness to lead. In other words, our window onto the world’s history AND a foreshadowing of the series conflict takes the form of a significant plot obstacle.
On top of that, note that the story doesn’t open with his visions. We learn first that the visions trouble him and that they create high stakes before we actually get to see one.
In some ways, Szeth seems like he should be listed as one of the main characters, but as an assassin-slave, he has very little narrative agency. His actions start the War of Reckoning, he helps set the stakes for the sequel, and he demonstrates what a warrior skilled in Surgebinding can achieve, but otherwise, he is not (yet) able to engage in causal plot momentum. Despite this, he has a strong internal conflict given that he hates being forced to kill against his will. This makes Szeth’s sections engaging, but Sanderson also keeps his scenes brief. We get a sense of his character, his place in the world, his ability to take on many elite soldiers at once, along with hints about what is to come later in the series. But he is more of a world-building and foreshadowing tool than a co-protagonist.
Another world-building technique Sanderson uses is the inclusion of one-off POV characters. We get several glimpses into characters that aren’t directly involved in the trajectories of the main protagonists. These glimpses help to deepen the scope and fabric of the world without conveniently dumping explanations in the reader’s lap. They are also short and sweet, such that they don’t take us too far away from the action. Each character we meet in the interludes is motivated—actively working toward a goal of some kind. When we see characters struggling or striving toward something they want, we get a clear sense of who they are and what’s important to them.
In this narrative analysis of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, we’ve examined the intricate story structure and pivotal plot points that define the novel. But central to this exploration is the recurring theme of sibling relationships, embedded in the character arcs of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar. Each character is profoundly shaped by their connection to siblings—through loss, duty, and the struggle to protect. This element not only drives the individual journeys of these characters but also serves as a unifying thread across the elaborate world-building of the Stormlight Archive. Sanderson's masterful intertwining of family dynamics with the epic fantasy setting offers a rich, multi-layered narrative experience that showcases his ability to blend personal motivations with grand-scale storytelling.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>By Michelle Barker
If you’ve ever read a novel and realized you’ve been going over the same paragraph (or page) five or six times and can’t seem to get beyond it, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled upon an infodump. Likely, the paragraph or page in question is packed full of information the author believes it is imperative for you to have (and remember) in order to understand the story.
In case you’re not sure what I mean, here is an example from a fantasy novel I actually quite liked (apart from this paragraph), called Graceling, by Kristin Cashore:
The kings of Wester, Nander, and Estill—they were the source of most of the trouble. They were cast from the same hotheaded mold, all ambitious, all envious. All thoughtless and heartless and inconstant. King Birn of Wester and King Drowden of Nander might form an alliance and pummel Estill's army on the northern borders, but Wester and Nander could never work together for long. Suddenly one would offend the other, and Wester and Nander would become enemies again, and Estill would join Nander to pound Wester.
Yes, this provides (possibly) necessary information. Yes, it tells us about the world of the story. But it doesn’t do anything to develop character, doesn’t advance the plot, and doesn’t really help the reader because there’s so much information crammed into this paragraph that we’ll have no hope of remembering it all. And it’s not presented in scene. It’s presented as information. Readers don’t pay attention very well to that kind of material because we can’t visualize it. We pay attention to what gets dramatized or shown.
Contrast that paragraph to the moment in A Game of Thrones when the characters first encounter a direwolf:
Half-buried in bloodstained snow, a huge dark shape slumped in death. Ice had formed in its shaggy grey fur, and the faint smell of corruption clung to it like a woman’s perfume. Bran glimpsed blind eyes crawling with maggots, a wide mouth full of yellowed teeth. But it was the size of it that made him gasp. It was bigger than his pony, twice the size of the largest hound in his father’s kennel.
“It’s no freak,” Jon said calmly. “That’s a direwolf. They grow larger than the other kind.”
Theon Greyjoy said, “There’s not been a direwolf sighted south of the Wall in two hundred years.”
“I see one now,” Jon replied.
What’s the difference? Well, reader engagement, for one. I bet your mind didn’t wander away from this passage. Martin doesn’t give us a history of direwolves. He doesn’t explain their biology or any of the other things another writer might be tempted to do. He brings us directly into the moment and SHOWS us what this creature is like.
While every genre is susceptible to the problem of info-dumping, it is most commonly an issue in speculative and historical fiction where world-building is of prime importance. The infodump problem is also related to the amount of time an author has spent researching a situation/place/occupation. The more work you’ve done, the more you’ll be tempted to include it in the novel. Forensic science, the biology of the cool creature you’ve created, the history of the game your characters are playing—either you want your time to pay off and everyone to admire what you’ve done, or you’re worried that readers won’t “get” it without all the extra information.
Introducing readers to a whole new world, with significant differences from our own, is a difficult thing to do. The infodump makes it easy. You simply take a couple of pages and explain it, which is why infodumps so often show up either in prologues or first chapters.
Infodumps are boring! Readers want to be immersed in the moment of the story. They want to feel like they’re standing beside your main character while all these exciting things happen to them.
Infodumps also fail to create an emotional reaction in the reader. Most are written in a way that is cold and flat—the difference between Cashore’s paragraph and Martin’s scene. When you fail to engage a reader’s emotions, you fail to engage the reader.
An infodump is telling. It is the delivery of information as information which stops the story dead. It feels like writing. The reader knows they’re reading a story, but they don’t want to feel like it’s a story. Infodumps call attention to themselves because they’re unnatural asides from the author. It’s like the director of a film stopping the movie to say, “Hey, wait a second, let me tell you what’s going on…”
Readers are smart. They don't need to know everything right from the beginning. The most important job you have in your opening chapters is to hook the reader into the adventure. Start where the story starts. The only information you deliver should be relevant to the present moment. Proceed with information on a need-to-know basis only. Ask yourself, what does the reader need to know RIGHT NOW?
How do you know if you’ve got an infodump on your hands?
In an infodump, nothing happens in the moment of the scene. Often, infodumps are passages in which a character is thinking about the past (backstory) or they’re delivering facts about the characters or the world. If you think of it in terms of a movie, ask yourself what the camera is doing. If the action has stopped so that your main character can explain what’s going on, this is an infodump.
The most common things to infodump about are:
How much is too much? Some people will say that a paragraph of straight-up explanatory information is too much, but I’m even stricter. More than two sentences and my eyes glaze over.
Here are a few strategies:
If you’re really not sure, test your material on a cold reader and see if they get it. We tend to become too familiar with our fictional world and lose perspective on how much of it actually needs to be explained.
Trying to sneak your information into dialogue might work if your character is speaking to someone who legitimately doesn’t know things. But more often than not what gets created is an “As you know, Bob.”
“As you know, Bob, we’ve been living in this city for ten years.”
“As you know, Bob, Jane is my wife.”
The trouble is, we don’t generally tell people things they already know. The only reason for this kind of dialogue is to transmit information to your reader. It’s an infodump in disguise and it doesn’t fool anyone. If you catch yourself starting any dialogue with, “Everyone knows that…” just stop. You’re doing it.
Dialogue should always contain tension. It’s not impossible to imagine a situation in which the transmission of certain information might contain tension (the code to the ringing alarm; how to dismantle the bomb), but usually, information is flat and boring and works just as poorly in dialogue as it does in exposition.
Here are a few ways to transmit information effectively:
An example of telling that has been done well comes from Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand. This section is at the beginning of the book, narrated in this part by the djinni, Bartimaeus, who has just been summoned by young Nathaniel:
The kid spoke. Very squeakily.
“I charge you...to...to...” Get on with it! “T-t-tell me your n-name.”
That’s usually how they start, the young ones. Meaningless waffle. He knew, and I knew that he knew, my name already; otherwise how could he have summoned me in the first place? You need the right words, the right actions, and most of all the right name. I mean, it’s not like hailing a cab—you don’t get just anybody when you call.
The author has told us some information on how to summon a djinni but has done it in such a way that it gives us an idea of Bartimaeus’s character—and Nathaniel’s. The voice is powerful, and Stroud keeps it brief.
If you want to see why infodumps are boring, try reading one out loud. Imagine you’re reading to a crowd and think about how many of them might be dropping off to sleep. And then, do yourself and your readers a favor and cut it down to size—or just take it out.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning novels.
By Michelle Barker
The success of Bonnie Garmus’s first novel, Lessons in Chemistry, is largely the result of two elements: voice and timeliness. The characters in this novel are utterly charming. There’s a fairy tale quality to the story that allows her to get away with a dog that has a full working vocabulary and a four-year-old who reads Nabokov, but she also does this to make a point. Dogs and children—like women—are smarter than the world gives them credit for.
And while Garmus exaggerates those characters to make that point, she does not exaggerate the situation in which many women found themselves in the 1950s and 60s. Being an unwed mother was tantamount to being a criminal; a married woman could not have a credit card in her name (that didn’t change until 1974, by the way); and the only way a female chemist could get a decent job was on a cooking show.
The plot of Lessons in Chemistry operates on a series of obstacles and reversals that interfere with Elizabeth Zott’s narrative goal, which is to do research in abiogenesis (a scientific field that was dominated by men at that time). She refuses to settle for what it seems is expected of women: second best. Each obstacle or reversal forces her to pivot and find another way into the boys’ club.
Obstacles in a plot are like roadblocks a character must get around. Reversals, however, require a total change of direction. Garmus makes liberal use of both to create conflict.
The structure of this novel is unusual because Garmus doesn’t start with the inciting incident. She starts with a crunch point near the climax, and then steps back to show how the protagonist got there.
When the novel begins, Elizabeth Zott is a single mother at one of the lowest points of her life, though the reader doesn’t know why. All we know is that it’s 1961 and she’s the host of a wildly successful cooking show called Supper at Six. She’s also deeply depressed and believes her life is over. The note she puts into her daughter’s lunch bag—most people are awful—is how she views the world. It’s only a slight improvement on her original misbelief, which is that all people are awful.
We learn that Zott is in fact a chemist who, thanks to a Life Magazine article, is known as Luscious Lizzie, a moniker she does not find amusing.
How (and why) does a research chemist end up as the host of a cooking show? The rest of the novel will answer that question.
Rewind ten years to the Hastings Research Institute where this story begins. Zott works as a chemist in the typically sexist conditions of the time. At this point, she operates on the misbelief that all people are awful, and on the truth at the time that society is a patriarchy founded on the assumption that women are inferior to men. In this job, she’s stuck in a position of ‘second best’—though she seems to be the only person (woman or man) who refuses to believe that’s all she can do.
Her lifelong dream is to do research in the challenging field of abiogenesis—challenging in the sense that a woman couldn’t possibly handle such a thing. It’s also doctoral work, and she doesn’t have a doctorate. Garmus switches into flashback to give us the inciting incident: years earlier, as a graduate student at UCLA, Zott was assaulted by her adviser when she pointed out a problem with the team’s research. She fought back and was subsequently denied admittance to the doctoral program—and because the police blamed her for the attempted rape, she couldn’t press charges.
This is the first in a series of doors that slam shut for her, the first time the world tries to tell her she must settle for a lesser position because she’s a woman. She accepts the inferior job at the Hastings Institute as a result, but she has no intention of settling. For her it’s just a temporary pivot.
At the Hastings Institute, she barges into the lab of the famous chemist, Calvin Evans, and naturally assumes he’s as awful as everyone else she’s ever encountered. At first, he is; he assumes Zott is a secretary. But as he gets to know her and realizes she is at least as smart and talented as he is, he redeems himself and becomes the first person to treat her like an equal. Thus begins a fairy-tale romance (and subplot) of two people who are true soulmates.
Zott is doing work related to abiogenesis when Dr. Donatti, the boss at Hastings, cancels her project. He wants to get rid of her. But when, in a seeming coincidence, a donor approaches him asking to fund the abiogenesis work of an E. Zott, Donatti pretends E. Zott is a man and reluctantly reinstates the project because he wants the money for the institute.
It looks at this point like Zott will get everything she wants. Calvin Evans proposes, Zott refuses—because she doesn’t want to be known as Mrs. Elizabeth Evans—and then Evans dies in an accident. That is reversal number one.
In an instant, the support she had at Hastings disappears. And then worse, Zott discovers she’s pregnant (reversal number two, because the last thing she ever wanted was a baby). When Miss Frask, a woman in HR who is jealous of Zott, realizes Zott is both unmarried and pregnant (the horror), she spreads the news. Frask is a woman who has settled. The reader doesn’t understand her motivation at this point, but it will come clear over time that she’s jealous because Zott refuses to accept the notion that she’s inferior to men.
With Evans now gone, Donatti doesn’t hesitate to fire her (reversal number three)—although he also keeps the research money and doesn’t tell the mysterious donor that E. Zott no longer works there.
Elizabeth Zott is now forced to change directions on a personal, emotional, and professional level—and she is thrown into Act Two.
Unemployed, grief-stricken, and pregnant, Zott sets about transforming her kitchen into a laboratory and regularly using the rowing machine Evans built before he died. She does everything she can to hold onto her identity and continue her research into abiogenesis, trying to convince herself that she doesn’t need a professional lab to achieve her goal and that the upcoming child won’t be an enormous obstacle.
Three people enter her life to challenge her misbelief that all people are awful: Walter Pine, Harriet Sloane, and Dr. Mason. While her bone-headed colleagues secretly visit her for help with their work and Donatti shamelessly steals her research, these three people turn out to be helpers.
Dr. Mason, the doctor who delivers her baby, is a fellow rower who treats her as equal to the all-male team and encourages her to return to rowing to keep her sanity. Harriet Sloane is a neighbor—a typical housewife—who shows up to help Zott with the baby. Having had several children of her own, she knows a few survival tricks. But Zott also has some survival tricks to offer her, since Harriet lives with an abusive husband whom she really needs to leave.
Walter Pine, a television executive and single dad, has a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Zott’s. When an altercation occurs between the girls at school and Zott shows up at the TV station to set Pine straight, he sees the answer to his problem of boring afternoon television: she’s a woman and she’s beautiful. Therefore, she belongs on a cooking show (because what else could a woman do?).
The last thing Zott wants is to host a cooking show. This is the definition of second best for a female scientist. But she agrees to compromise her goal (another reversal) because she has bills to pay—and because cooking is, in its purest form, chemistry.
With Zott as host, Walter gets more than he bargained for. She refuses to dumb down the show for her mostly female audience and offer (as the smarmy head of the station, Phil Lebensmal, suggests) a nightly cocktail in a slutty outfit.
She realizes there’s a possible pivot here: she can teach these women chemistry and, not incidentally, encourage them to follow their hearts and do what they really want in life—to not settle for second best. There are a few wonderful ironies at play here—first, that she has had to settle for second best in order to reach these women, and second, that she gives them a scientific education (something men don’t think they can handle) through a cooking show. She honors their role as mothers but also honors their ability to think by explaining the chemical reactions that occur in cooking and referring to foods by their chemical compounds.
When Phil Lebensmal attacks Zott in the privacy of his office, she fights back, and he has a heart attack. This moment is a direct echo of the earlier assault at UCLA, but this time it’s a vindication because Zott takes back her power. With Lebensmal gone, she and Walter Pine are now in charge of the station. She discovers that Lebensmal has been lying to her by telling her the show is a flop. In fact, it’s so popular that other networks want to syndicate it.
With Walter’s support, Zott is now able to reach women from all over the country. When a Life Magazine writer approaches her to do a major story on her, she eventually agrees and tells him everything. But this will turn out to be a false victory.
Here is where the novel finally circles back to the opening. The Life Magazine writer might want to do a legitimate story about Zott, but his editor changes everything and the story that is published is about “Luscious Lizzie” the television star rather than Elizabeth Zott the scientist. Zott is devastated, convinced that the writer betrayed her. That power she thought she had taken back was an illusion: she is still just the host of a cooking show.
Miss Frask, the former HR person at the Hastings Institute, sees the Life Magazine article and is infuriated. We find out she never wanted to be a secretary. Like Zott, she tried to pursue a doctorate in science and was sexually assaulted by someone in the department. She has long felt guilty for her hand in Zott’s job loss, so she makes amends by writing a letter to the editor of Life, listing Zott’s accomplishments and exposing Donatti as a fraud who stole her research and lied to his investors.
Letters of support flood the magazine from cooking show fans. The author of the Life Magazine article sends over a letter explaining what actually happened and includes the article he wanted to publish which portrays Zott as a committed scientist.
But Zott is disheartened. The author submitted his real article to ten scientific magazines, and they all rejected him. Zott’s misbelief about people being awful might be getting challenged, but her other core misbelief—that no one is interested in women in science—remains intact.
She realizes she can no longer accept all these compromises in her life. If she wants to be part of the scientific community as a legitimate scientist, she can’t do it as the host of a cooking show, so she quits her job—another reversal.
Given the show’s popularity, she assumes she’ll be flooded with offers of employment—but she gets none… until Miss Frask contacts her, saying she is now head of personnel at Hastings and wants to meet with her.
Turns out Harriet Sloane sent the actual Life article to Vogue Magazine, and it has been published. Men might not be interested in women in science—but women definitely are. And the investors have arrived at Hastings and want to meet with the real E. Zott—Miss E. Zott.
Zott is immediately suspicious of the situation. However, not only are the investors in earnest, but the head of the foundation also turns out to be Calvin’s real mother. Donatti is fired, and Zott is given Calvin’s old lab and full funding to do the research she’s always wanted in abiogenesis.
In this novel, Garmus shows us how obstacles and reversals can be used to build a plot, and how these obstacles and reversals can also work thematically. At first, they force the protagonist to settle for second best, but eventually they goad her to stop compromising herself and get what she needs—a significant position in a lab, doing the work she wanted to do and being treated as an equal.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.
By David Griffin Brown
In Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, the journey of Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd, unfolds not just as a quest across physical landscapes but also as an exploration of personal fulfillment and destiny. At the heart of the novel is the concept of a "Personal Legend," a path that each individual may choose to follow in order to find true happiness—the utmost accomplishment one can achieve in life.
“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
This maxim reverberates through Santiago’s journey from Andalusia to Tunisia and across the Sahara to Egypt.
Coelho's storytelling aligns seamlessly with the hero's journey stages or plot points—a narrative structure identified by Joseph Campbell that is often found in mythic storytelling across cultures.
Santiago, a shepherd, is content but yearns for more. This phase represents Campbell's idea of the hero's comfortable yet unfulfilled initial state. In traditional plotting terminology, this is often referred to as the story’s stasis.
Santiago has a recurring dream about finding treasure in Egypt—a symbol of the young shepherd’s desire for a greater purpose. Another common name for this plot point is the inciting incident. An inciting incident is when the story’s narrative goal first forms in the protagonist’s mind. It also sets readers’ expectations, both about what the protagonist will seek over the course of the story and what is at stake should he fail.
Note that Santiago’s dream about treasure recurs. In other words, he receives several hints of his greater purpose but has yet to take that first risky step forward. This is his initial refusal of the call.
The shepherd’s refusal ends when he again sleeps beneath the sycamore tree where he always has this dream. The next morning, he asks a fortune teller what the dream might mean, and she points out the obvious: that he is meant to travel to Egypt in search of this treasure. Now the stakes are set: Santiago will gamble everything he has worked for (his flock) in order to pursue the dream.
Soon after his discussion with the fortune teller, Santiago meets Melchizedek, the King of Salem, who encourages the young man with a discussion about Personal Legends and the Soul of the World (a divine force of fate that can help someone pursue their Personal Legend).
Santiago sells his flock and travels to Tangier. In traditional plotting terms, this is the point of no return. The protagonist is now fully committed to the quest.
Shortly after arriving in Tangier, Santiago is robbed. He is completely destitute, so he finds a job working for a crystal merchant. The boy convinces the merchant to take some chances with his business, and together they prosper as a result.
Now that the protagonist has overcome his trials, he is ready to continue his journey eastward.
Santiago joins a caravan to cross the Sahara. Here he has time to reflect on his Personal Legend, the Soul of the World, intuition, and perseverance. An Englishman travelling with the caravan tells the young man that he is seeking an alchemist, someone who can turn metal into gold.
In Campbell’s analysis, the “approach to the inmost cave” is a time in the story when the protagonist approaches their innermost fears and challenges. In comparison to “tests, allies, and enemies,” this is a more personal challenge that leads to the self-reflection needed for personal growth—a key component of a character’s arc.
In Santiago’s case, the inmost cave is a desert oasis where his journey is stalled because of tribal wars. Another hitch is that he meets and falls in love with a young woman named Fatima. His journey could end here, but he is forced to act when he has a vision of an attack on the oasis—he warns the chieftains so they can ready their defenses. When word of Santiago’s vision spreads, the alchemist comes looking for him. He will guide Santiago on to the next stage.
Here we arrive at the climax. Together, Santiago and the alchemist travel toward Egypt. Before they can find the pyramids, they are intercepted by an army and arrested as spies. His companion then declares that Santiago is an alchemist who will demonstrate his power to transform himself into the wind—in three days. This is the young shepherd’s biggest test. He must fully embody all the lessons he has learned along the way to achieve this magical feat. After much effort and meditation, Santiago unites with the Soul of God and is therefore able to turn himself into the wind.
The two travel onward until they reach a monastery. The alchemist creates some gold, which he gives to Santiago to help him complete his mission, and then he leaves him on his own.
When Santiago finally arrives at the pyramids and starts digging, he finds nothing. Some jerks rob him and beat him up because they think he is hiding more gold. Santiago shouts about his dream, saying that he has come all this way to search for treasure. The one jerk says that dreams are just dreams; he tells the boy of his own fanciful dream of a treasure buried beneath a sycamore tree in the ruins of a sacristy—and adds that “I’m not so stupid as to cross an entire desert just because of a recurrent dream.”
Here is the protagonist’s reward: he set out in search of a hidden treasure, and now he knows exactly where it is.
The protagonist journeys all the way back to where he started. His quest has come full circle.
Back in Spain, Santiago digs up his treasure—a chest full of jewels and gold. He has been transformed; he is now a very rich man and has achieved his Personal Legend. But this treasure is more than just gold; it represents the culmination of Santiago's journey to understand himself and his purpose, underscoring the novel's central theme that true success lies in self-fulfillment and realizing one's dreams.
Santiago now has the wealth and self-assuredness he needs to return to the desert so he can marry Fatima and begin the next phase of his life.
In crafting The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho dared to prioritize narrative context—in this case his personal philosophy—over traditional story elements like subplots and character development. This approach, while enriching the novel with thematic depth, also presented a risk: the potential to diminish the story’s emotional draw.
Coelho's success shows that unconventional storytelling can indeed captivate audiences when executed skillfully. With the right balance, even the most challenging narrative choices can resonate deeply with readers. Coelho’s triumph is a reminder that in writing, as with all art forms, anything can be done if it’s done well.
Paulo Coelho's publication journey with The Alchemist is a true reflection of its core message. After the book’s initial slow start with only 900 copies printed in 1988, Coelho's faith in his work never wavered. His determination led to its re-publication and global success, notably after its English translation in 1993. The Alchemist has achieved staggering success, selling over 65 million copies and being translated into a record 80 languages. It also spent over 300 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and holds a Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author. This journey of The Alchemist from its modest beginning to a worldwide phenomenon mirrors the novel's theme of pursuing one's Personal Legend with unwavering determination and belief.
How do you interpret Santiago's journey and the concept of a Personal Legend in your life? Does Coelho's philosophy resonate with your experiences? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.
By David Griffin Brown
Big Brother, Thought Police, Doublethink—these concepts from George Orwell’s 1984 resonated so widely when the book came out that they are now universally known, even by people who haven’t read it. And while 1984 isn’t the first dystopian novel ever written, it is no doubt foundational to the genre.
At its core, 1984 is a simple story built atop a visionary warning about a totalitarian future. There is a lot of explanatory world-building context, which is something I’ll come back to at the end of this analysis. But given that Orwell has a point to make and a dystopian world to convey, it makes sense that he keeps the narrative relatively uncomplicated.
Nowadays, it’s difficult to publish a book with a “straight shot” trajectory like this. Structurally, 1984 takes the form of a tragic romance. Winston meets Julia, they pursue a relationship, and then they get a (false) offer to join the revolution. This culminates in their arrest and torture. The end.
There’s not much more to it than that. The complexity that we would normally find in subplots instead takes the form of extensive world-building.
Winston has an underlying motivation: to work against Big Brother. He doesn’t like the way his society operates. He doesn’t like having to participate in the creation of propaganda and revisionist history. But while he harbors these feelings, he has no recourse to act out against the Party. Because of this, “working against Big Brother” or “joining the Brotherhood” are not goals that he can actively work toward.
That is, until he receives a love note from a coworker. Now he has the opportunity to oppose the Party by engaging in an unsanctioned relationship. The one thing Big Brother cannot control is his love for Julia. The lovers will do anything they can to sneak away and spend time together. Winston’s desire to be with Julia, physically and emotionally, is the goal that crystallizes for him in the inciting incident and which culminates in the climax as a two-stage failure.
The story opens shortly after Winston purchases an illegal journal. He is able to sit in his apartment and write out his rebellious thoughts just outside the view of the telescreen. This is when readers first get some explanatory context: how the world works and what Winston thinks about it.
Note that he is still active in this stasis by committing the crime of journaling— even though he doesn’t yet have a clear narrative goal, he still demonstrates his motivation.
Winston’s goal crystallizes in two phases. First, he notices an attractive woman (Julia) at his workplace. In romance terms, this is the “meet cute” moment when the reader gets a hint about a potential love interest. However, rather than swoon for her, Winston fears that she is an informant watching him for any signs of thoughtcrime.
When he next encounters her, she gives him a note that reads simply, “I love you.” This cements the romantic goal in the protagonist’s mind—he wants to find out why she has given him this note, what her intentions are, and whether the declaration is true. This is the beginning of a relationship quest, but it is also Winston’s opportunity to work against the Party, because an affair like this is forbidden.
Winston and his new lover Julia take risks to meet up in different places to talk and make love. They get to know each other, and in doing so, they are able to explore their hatred of the Party. Their relationship is a daring rebellion because if they’re caught, they’ll be arrested by the Thought Police and likely killed.
Winston wants to provide a more secure place for them to meet, so he rents a room from Mr. Charrington, the man from whom he bought his contraband journal.
O’Brien, a man from Winston’s workplace, sends a message that he would like to meet. Winston has had his eye on O’Brien for some time—he has an allure that has led Winston to believe he might be a member of the Brotherhood, the secret organization working against Big Brother. This qualifies as a midpoint since it gives Winston a new opportunity for rebellion—it takes the story in a new direction.
Now unified in their forbidden love, Winston and Julia want to take the next step in thwarting the Party by joining the Brotherhood. And that is exactly what O’Brien promises when they visit his extravagant apartment. The lovers swear their loyalty to the revolution, and he sends them home with a copy of the Brotherhood’s manifesto, supposedly written by Big Brother’s arch enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein.
The plot structure of 1984 can be described (in the old dramaturgist’s sense) as a tragedy. The protagonist wants to rebel against the Party by taking ownership of his heart via the relationship with Julia and then, when given the opportunity, taking control of his fate by joining the Brotherhood. Neither will come to pass. In the tragic format, right before the climax, the protagonist achieves a false victory. This is the highest point of hope where it seems Winston has finally succeeded—he “got the girl” and now he’s joined the revolution.
Winston and Julia return to their apartment above Charrington’s store and read the manifesto. Their suspicions about the Party and Big Brother are confirmed. Here, readers get a significant dose of explanatory world-building. Winston reaches an emotional high as the truth he has been seeking is made explicit. In a tragedy, reaching an emotional height in the false climax makes the downfall to come much more painful.
Winston has three significant things to lose. First is his participation in the revolution. Second is his relationship with Julia. Third is his love for Julia. As such, 1984 has an extended climax.
It turns out Mr Charrington has been an informant all along. And of course O’Brien is a member of the Party. The rebellious lovers walked right into their trap. Winston and Julia are arrested and separated—here ends the relationship and also the hope of joining the Brotherhood. Even if they survive what is to come, they will never see each other again.
But Winston clings to one hope, that the Party will never be able to take away his love for Julia. However, after extensive torture, O’Brien makes Winston confront a face-full of rats, his biggest fear. This is the protagonist’s final defeat—he begs for Julia to be tortured with the rats instead of him.
Once Winston has been fully broken, the Party releases him back into the world. His rebellion, along with his love, have been eradicated.
As I was re-reading 1984, I kept thinking about how Orwell was doing exactly what I advise so many clients to avoid: he frequently puts narrative context in the showcase rather than story.
This tends to diminish a story’s emotional draw. I’m talking about the quality of a narrative that keeps readers engaged and anticipatory—eager to find out what will happen next. The speculative genres have come a long way since 1948 when Orwell was penning this classic. Readers now expect certain things when it comes to building fictional worlds and future scenarios. In a word, they expect more subtlety than is on display in 1984.
Despite this, 1984 is still a novel that people today devour. For one thing, the dystopia Orwell paints was prophetic in many ways. His contemporaries may have found the book wildly inventive, but we can now reflect on his astute prescience. But the other reason why this book “works” despite the long explanatory passages about the world, the politics, and the mechanisms of government control is that, at its core, it is still a powerful love story against all odds.
What do you think? When you last read 1984, did you feel like the long explanations about the political backdrop and the Party’s mechanisms of propaganda and power were overwrought? Did they diminish your immersion in the story world? Why or why not?
Leave a comment below!
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>A big congrats to our client CJ Adrien on the release of his latest historical fiction novel and INSTANT Amazon bestseller. Amazing!
CJ normally writes Viking fiction, but this time he takes us into the American fur trade for an adventure brimming with romance.
The book releases Christmas day, but you can get it at a discount while it's still on pre-order: click here.
In the bustling frontier town of St. Louis, New Yorker Christian dreams of wealth in the fur trade, only to find himself perilously ill-equipped for its harsh realities. A rowdy tavern brawl thrusts him against the formidable trapper, Fergus MacBride. To his shock, the very next day, he discovers MacBride is also his new company leader.
Anticipating riches and adventure as told in New York's newspapers, Christian instead grapples with relentless survival challenges. From evading the relentless pursuit of the Hudson's Bay Company and the fierce Crow tribe to confronting the raw forces of nature, Christian is tested at every juncture.
Amidst these dangers, he finds an unexpected ally – Blue Fox, a young native woman under MacBride's employ as a guide. Drawn together by the trials of the wilderness, a deep bond forms between them. But in a land where alliances shift like desert sands and danger lurks behind every shadow, can a budding romance between two souls from different worlds endure?
]]>By David Griffin Brown
As a developmental editor, I’m frequently asked by clients about how best to categorize their manuscript. On one hand, there are some dizzying terms and trends out there, so the confusion makes sense. On the other, you don’t need to worry too much about deciding on the perfect (singular) genre. Take a look at any book on Amazon—they all have multiple genre tags.
One question I’m asked frequently is how to choose between three industry genres that have become extremely popular: literary, book club, and upmarket. These three have a lot in common, but the distinctions provide an important glimpse into the market importance of each category.
It’s difficult to define literary fiction. Unlike genre fiction, which typically adheres to certain thematic or structural conventions, literary fiction transcends these boundaries. It’s not just about telling a story; it’s about how the story is told. The prose in literary fiction is usually more elevated. It prioritizes beauty and complexity over page-turning action. Character development is subtle and nuanced in a way that offers readers a profound understanding of the characters' internal worlds.
Authors such as Ursula Le Guin and Raymond Chandler, traditionally shelved as SFF and mystery, are often celebrated for their literary qualities. Their works exemplify how literary fiction can exist within and transcend genre boundaries. Other authors who have achieved a similar balance include Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, but they are arguably seen as literary first with speculative leanings.
The line between genre and lit, therefore, is not always clear. Many novels blur these boundaries by incorporating intricate characterization and language with page-turning storylines. To better promote books like these, the industry created the literary subgenres of book club and upmarket. These aren't terms you'll typically find on the shelves of a bookstore, but they are quite important when it comes to marketing.
Upmarket fiction represents a sweet spot between commercial and literary novels. It is characterized by a strong, page-turning plot and an elevated degree of sophistication or complexity in terms of language, character, and theme.
Some of the most popular upmarket novels on Goodreads, for example, includes The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Interestingly, some classics get pulled into this genre, including The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Book club fiction, which definitely overlaps with upmarket, is defined not just by its content but by its purpose—to stimulate discussion and thought among readers. These books tackle relevant and sometimes controversial themes; they present characters and situations that provoke reflection and debate. They are the kind of books that invite analysis and discussion.
Examples of popular book club fiction include The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Classics that Goodreads considers book-club worthy include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger.
Now you might pause here and wonder: can’t a page-turner with complex characters also invite analysis and discussion? Yes, absolutely. The difference between upmarket and book club seems somewhat arbitrary. You could also argue that many of these books are in fact solidly literary. The Goodreads lists that I pulled the above examples from include many of the same titles.
If you’re trying to decide on a single genre, then you’re probably thinking about querying agents and/or publishers. It’s usually best to limit yourself to one genre in your query letter, unless your manuscript is a blended genre or subgenre like fantasy-romance. That’s especially true when it comes to the categories of literary, upmarket, and book club; there is so much overlap, it’s redundant to mention more than one.
If you’re deciding on your genre for an Amazon listing, you get to choose three. Again, it’s best to avoid redundancy, but most importantly, you want to target the right readers. (And you don’t need to worry about choosing between book club and upmarket since these aren’t among the options.)
Ultimately, the main takeaway for writers is to think in terms of your target audience. Which novels are your future readers buying today? This is the exact same question you are meant to ask yourself when choosing comparable titles for your query letter.
Understanding industry genres isn't just about fitting into a box; it's about connecting with readers who are looking for books just like yours.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
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By David Griffin Brown
When embarking on the deeply personal journey of memoir writing, many authors might not initially see the connection to the craft of fiction. One is based on true events, the other is made up—sure. But both are forms of storytelling. An engaging memoir, while rooted in reality, employs the same narrative devices that make novels compelling.
An autobiography is the story of someone’s life. A memoir is a story from someone’s life. But more than that, memoir requires a specific focus. An interesting slice of life isn’t enough—your memoir should also make a thematic statement about what it means to be human.
Autobiographies are nearly impossible to sell unless the subject is famous. They simply aren’t that interesting in terms of storytelling. Without a specific trajectory, they tend to lack emotional draw. Memoir, on the other hand, is an ever-popular genre. The specificity of memoir creates both greater immediacy and relatability because we see who a character truly is when they are struggling toward something they want.
When writing a memoir, the first order of business is choosing a specific narrative goal. Showcase a time in your life when you wanted something (badly). When the narrator cares deeply about something, the reader will too. Next, consider the all-important connection between the inciting incident and the climax. The inciting incident is the moment when this goal crystallizes in the narrator’s mind; the climax is when the narrator either achieves or fails to achieve their goal.
Aspiring memoirists often try to encapsulate too much, which means the story meanders. The result: the stakes are diluted. Instead, zoom in. Keep a tight focus on the story and what you hope to achieve with it.
Educated by Tara Westover—The quest for self-invention through education. Westover charts her journey from a survivalist childhood in Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University, framing her story as a relentless pursuit of knowledge against all odds.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed—The quest to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, alone. Strayed's memoir focuses on the redemptive power of nature and the physical challenge of hiking over a thousand miles as a pathway to emotional restoration following the death of her mother.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion—The quest to process grief and trauma in the year following her husband’s death, her daughter’s brush with death, and her own medical catastrophe. Didion weaves her narrative around reflections on mourning and the struggle to make sense of a world that has irrevocably changed.
Dry by Augusten Burroughs—The quest for sobriety through rehab. Burroughs takes us through his life in advertising in New York City and his struggle with alcoholism. The memoir serves as a raw, often humorous account of his journey towards recovery, reflecting the messy and non-linear path of overcoming addiction.
One might argue that life doesn't always present itself in a neat narrative arc. However, when we sit down to write our stories, we must chisel away the superfluous, hone in on a specific trajectory, and craft our experiences into a structure that resonates. How? By borrowing from fiction's toolbox.
The Hook: Like a novel, a memoir must draw the reader in from the outset. Consider which moment of your story has the gravitational pull to capture a reader’s interest and place that moment strategically at the beginning. This will often be the inciting incident, the moment when the narrative goal crystallizes for the narrator. However, some memoirs will begin before or after the inciting incident. Some might even begin with a scene that precedes the climax to give readers a clear idea of where the story is headed.
Pacing: Life can be slow, but your memoir shouldn't be. Pacing keeps pages turning. A memoir needs peaks and valleys, with moments of tension and release, much like a novel. But keep in mind that the tension should build all the way to the highest peak—the climax.
Characterization: Even though the characters in a memoir are real people, they must be as thoughtfully developed as any fictional character. The narrator (you) needs careful crafting to ensure depth and growth throughout the narrative. It can help to start thinking about the narrator as a character other than yourself. You might even try writing the first draft in third person.
Conflict and Stakes: Identify the central conflict and make sure it's clear why it matters. High stakes heighten engagement. What does the narrator stand to gain or lose? A large part of your reader’s emotional draw comes from being worried about the narrator, about the potential failure of their quest.
Themes: A memoir should circle around a central theme, offering readers a lens through which they can view and make sense of the events. In high school English class, discussions of theme can be abstract and nonspecific. However, theme has a specific structural role that relates to internal conflict and the narrator’s ultimate transformation. In other words, the narrator must learn an important life lesson in order to achieve their goal in the end. A statement about this lesson is your structural theme.
Climax and Resolution: Your memoir should build towards a climax—a moment when the conflict reaches its peak—followed by the falling action or resolution. In some of the memoirs I edit, the scene of highest drama comes too early, leaving only a “quiet” climax that blends right into the resolution. That tends to work against your reader’s emotional draw. You want to keep them eagerly turning pages right up until this important moment, which means you must find a way to give the climax powerful impact.
The principle of "show, don't tell" is foundational for captivating readers and creating an immersive experience rather than a mere account. Showing allows readers to live the story, to feel the textures of the world you're presenting, and to understand characters through actions and senses rather than flat explanations. Telling, on the other hand, gives the reader information directly but often at the expense of emotional engagement. While some telling has its place, it should be used sparingly. Ideally, you want to lean heavily on showing (around 90%) and save telling for only when necessary (about 10%), to maintain narrative momentum without losing the reader’s interest.
By following these tips and balancing the art of show and tell, writers can craft memoirs that are not just read, but experienced.
In crafting a memoir, the writer’s primary task is to transform personal memories into a narrative that offers an engaging and meaningful experience for the reader. The effectiveness of a memoir hinges on the reader’s journey through the text—their ability to share vicariously in the author's experiences as if they were their own. By employing the “show, don't tell” principle, you ensure that the reader isn't merely an observer of past events, but an active participant.
The journey of a memoir should be as carefully mapped as any work of fiction, with a clear trajectory from the inciting incident that sets the narrative in motion to the climactic moment wherein the “quest” is decided. It's not enough to stitch together a series of memories; the memoir must zoom in on a specific story that keeps the reader eager to know what will happen next.
Once you have found your trajectory and hammered out a first draft, it is crucial to step back and view the work through the eyes of an impartial reader. Seeking feedback is an essential step in this process. Trusted readers, beta readers, and professional editors can all provide invaluable insight. As I often tell clients, a great book is honed, not hatched. Much of the honing requires long consideration of different readers’ perspectives.
By keeping the reader's experience at the forefront of your writing process, and by welcoming the constructive critiques of your readership and editorial team, you can elevate your memoir from a personal reflection to a universal tale of the human condition.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
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By David Griffin Brown
The counsel to "kill your darlings" has been repeated many times by many editors, writers, and writing instructors. It’s often attributed to authors like Faulkner or Ginsberg, but in fact it was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who, in 1916, advised writers to be ruthless with their most cherished lines:
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
Since then, the meaning of a darling has evolved beyond only those cherished lines. A darling includes any element of a narrative that does not serve the story: a sentence, a character, a scene, a subplot.
Here at the Darling Axe, we are editors of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Our editorial philosophy is twofold: first, that great books are honed, not hatched; and second, that all aspects of a manuscript should not only serve the story, but also and more importantly serve the reader’s experience.
Transforming a draft into a polished manuscript requires both discernment and decisiveness. Here are some tips on how to bring a keen eye and a firm hand to the task:
Evaluate POV characters for necessity. Each point-of-view character should offer a unique and indispensable perspective to the story. If two characters provide similar outlooks or their narratives don't drive the plot forward, consider consolidating them or shifting their roles.
Amplify stakes to ensure engagement. Low stakes mean a lack of tension, which can make a story fall flat. At every stage, ask yourself, "What’s at risk for my protagonist?" Ensure that the consequences for failure are always clear and compelling, and that you bring your protagonist closer and closer to failure with each step toward the climax.
Use foreshadowing to counteract coincidence. Coincidences to resolve conflicts can feel contrived and unearned. Instead, plant seeds early that bloom into inevitable, yet surprising, outcomes.
Reassess the function of your prologue. Is your prologue attempting to compensate for a slow Chapter One? Or is it a vehicle for setup and context explanations? If so, then your story may not be starting where it needs to.
Ensure your scenes are causally linked. When it comes to story structure, intentionality is key. Ensure that in every scene your protagonist takes action or makes a decision that in some way determines what will happen next.
Scrutinize subplots for their impact on resolution. If a subplot can be removed without affecting the main storyline’s conclusion, it may not be necessary. Ensure that each subplot intertwines with the core narrative to contribute meaningfully to the story’s climax and resolution.
Consider the indispensability of relationships. Treat relationships as subplots. They should transform the characters and propel the plot forward. If a relationship can be removed without altering the protagonist's journey or the story's outcome, reevaluate its presence and purpose.
Streamline exposition to preserve momentum. Backstory and world-building are crucial but can become burdensome when presented in large quantities. Distribute this information in small doses through action and dialogue, ensuring it enhances rather than interferes with the protagonist's present experiences.
Revisit every descriptive passage. Ask if it enhances the setting, mood, and/or character development, or if it merely indulges in picturesque but purposeless writing. Descriptions should always work double-time, contributing to the atmosphere or shedding light on the narrative or characters.
Inspect dialogue for efficiency and necessity. Dialogue should reveal character, serve the plot, or ideally do both. If a conversation doesn't add new information or tension and doesn't reveal character in a meaningful way, it's a candidate for cutting or revision.
Get Feedback. Third-party feedback—whether from critique partners, beta readers, or professional editors—can illuminate what may be invisible to the author. This external perspective is essential in identifying and excising unnecessary writing.
Killing a darling doesn't always entail its complete removal; sometimes it means transforming it. Revision can sharpen a once meandering element into a tool that carves deeper meaning and resonance into the narrative. The act is not one of mindless pruning but thoughtful sculpting, ensuring every piece left behind is vital to the story's living, breathing whole.
Also, there is nothing wrong with creating a “darling folder” where you save scenes, characters, and subplots to be recycled in future manuscripts.
The Darling Axe editorial team is here, hatchet in hand, to help you hack and hone your manuscript on its journey toward publication. The end result should be inspiration. Our ideal outcome of a developmental edit or narrative assessment is a client who is fired up with excitement and a solid blueprint their next revision.
Want to learn more about how we can help? Click here to arrange a free sample edit.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>1) What stands out in a good submission?
A good submission will be accompanied by a tightly written query letter that has a strong hook, description of exciting plot details, and interesting character development, along with an author bio paragraph listing relevant writing experience and credentials. Personalizing the address in the submission is also important. I would much rather read "Dear Mark Gottlieb" than "Dear Literary Agent." Aspiring writers will do much better if they take that sort of care, especially one who reviews our submission guidelines on our website.
2) What is the most common error or flaw you see in query letters?
It is easy to get a few things wrong in a query letter. For instance, I see a lot of aspiring authors writing to me with query letters that list manuscripts far in excess of normal word-count range. On a few occasions I have requested a manuscript after expressing my interest, to then be surprised when the writer tells me the manuscript is not written yet since it was merely an idea. Fiction needs to be sold on a full manuscript. Only nonfiction can be sold on proposal and a couple of sample chapters. The other common error I see from those sending a query using our submissions page is from hopeful writers wanting to learn how to get published. That is not the purpose of a query letter since those letters are meant to exhibit why the writer is worthy of getting published.
3) What's a typical warning sign that a manuscript isn't ready for representation?
Word count. If a manuscript exceeds normal word-count range (80,000 to 120,000 words) or falls short of normal book length in the territory of novellas (roughly 50,000 words) then that is an instant sign the manuscript is not suitable for most major trade publishers. This has to do with the cost of printing and production in the case of manuscripts in excess of 120,000 words. In the case of shorter manuscripts, the margins for profit are too small on a shorter book. After word count, I begin looking at the quality of the writing in the manuscript itself and I seek out an exciting plot with good character development.
4) What advice can you give to writers who are submitting their work?
I would suggest researching a literary agent's social media pages. For instance, writers can read about me and some of the books I represent on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That will lend a good sense for the type of books I have worked with and what I am currently looking to represent. A smart writer might want to review my personal page on the Trident Media Group website or read an interview with me to learn more. With all that information, a writer can really personalize their query letter.
5) You've just decided to represent an author and the contract is signed. What steps do you take to prep the manuscript for submission to publishers?
From there we make a further evaluation to see if the manuscript needs any editorial guidance. If the manuscript feels fully polished, then I craft a pitch and a submission list of editors. Assembling comparative/competitive titles can be very helpful in the submissions list process since I can figure out which editors at which publishing houses published a similar book. We then go out on submission to various editors at different publishing houses. That process can sometimes go very quickly (in some cases I have sold books within a day or two) and in other instances it can take more time, like a few months on average. In the rarest of instances, I have sold books to editors sight unseen... simply based on my pitch!
6) What is your strategy for a client whose manuscript isn't selling?
If a manuscript is not selling, then it is important to regroup and see what the editorial or market concerns might be, based on the feedback of the editors. That is an opportunity to make some quick adjustments to the manuscript before plugging it back in along a submission. In other cases it might be worth trying a new manuscript out on the marketplace before revisiting that submission again. It worked for Stephen King very early in his career when earlier novels of his did not sell as well under the name of Richard Bachman and they were later published again under the name we all know and love, Stephen King. I have worked with authors that hit a home run their first time at bat, as well as those that had to strike out first before they could get another chance at hitting that homer.
7) What's the best (non-client) book you've read recently, and how did it hook you?
I recently enjoyed reading SLADE HOUSE by David Mitchell, the author of CLOUD ATLAS and BONE CLOCKS. I enjoyed the movie based on CLOUD ATLAS too. I was hooked by how naturally the author transitioned us between worlds within his novel. It made me an instant believer, despite the fantastical elements of the novel. I also had the pleasure of meeting David Mitchell at a writers convention in San Antonio, Texas. I just wish I'd had his books with me in order to get them signed.
8) Can you tell us about an exciting author you're working with at the moment?
I am very proud of all of the authors I work with. Rather than pick something randomly from the stack, I can mention my most recent book deal: ELI'S PROMISE by Ronald Balson, National Jewish Book Award-winning author of ONCE WE WERE BROTHERS, KAROLINA'S TWINS, and THE GIRL FROM BERLIN. This work of historical fiction spans three eras: Nazi-occupied Lublin, Poland; post-war displaced person's camps in Allied-occupied Germany; and twenty years hence in a peaceful Chicago neighborhood. This sold to George Witte at St. Martin's Press in a six-figure+ deal.
By David Griffin Brown
As the leaves turn and the days shorten, a different kind of transformation is at hand for writers worldwide. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the annual internet-based creative writing project, turns the solitary act of writing into a community effort. It began in 1999 with a modest cohort of 21 participants and has since burgeoned into a global endeavor. It’s where the seeds of novels like Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell were first sown (among many, many others).
With that spirit of transformation in mind, let's delve into how you too can join the grueling fun to launch a shiny new literary project of your own.
Rhythm Over Rush: Find your writing cadence. Whether it’s the quiet of dawn or the wees hours of night, let your productivity ebb and flow with your natural rhythm.
Embrace the Community: NaNoWriMo is about communal courage. Engage with forums, attend virtual write-ins, and remember that every other participant is a potential comrade.
Preparation Meets Opportunity: Even a minimal outline can help. Think of it as a map; you may deviate, but you'll never be lost.
The Art of Subtlety: Craft immersive experiences by minimizing overt sensory and cognitive directions. Let the readers feel the rain on their skin without being told it's wet and cold.
Goals as Guiding Stars: Ensure your protagonist's desires are clear, specific, and relatable. Their quest should be the reader's compass, orienting every chapter with purpose.
Causality is King: Each plot point should flow into the next with causal connectivity. Events that happen 'just because' are the bane of emotional draw.
Emotional Resonance: Always circle back to the emotional draw. It's not just about what happens, but how what happens affects the characters we've come to care about.
Skip and Skim: Stuck on a scene? Move forward. Write the parts that excite you. Momentum is key; you can always circle back.
Dialogue Drives: When in doubt, write dialogue. It's a dynamo for character development and can often lead you out of a creative impasse.
The What-If? Game: Challenge your plot with twists. Asking “what if” can unravel new pathways you hadn't considered. What if the genre was Western instead of science fiction? What if the story was set in a different country?
Revisit the Roots: Sometimes, revisiting your story’s inspiration—the image or idea that sparked your narrative—can reignite your writing fervor.
Persistence in Pace: Continue to write post-November, even if the sprint slows to a stroll. Your story deserves to cross the finish line.
A Restful Eye: Grant your manuscript a peaceful slumber. A month or two of space from your work can sharpen the senses and the blue pencil.
Community Critique: Seek out your fellow NaNoWriMo voyagers for feedback swaps. Fresh eyes find new opportunities.
The Revision Quest: Approach editing not as a chore, but as a quest for clarity and engagement. A great book is honed, not hatched.
As we crest the hill of November's end, take a moment to bask in the glow of your accomplishment. Whether you've churned out tens of thousands of words or simply a few thousand, you've breathed life into a world that didn't exist before. That is a profound act of creation. Remember, storytelling isn't bound by word counts or confined by month-long endeavors—it's a craft honed over lifetimes, one that continually evolves as we do.
You have the power to create immersive and emotionally resonant stories for your readers. As you press on, remember that the architecture of narrative allows for infinite possibilities. Yours is unique. Keep shaping it with the care of an artist and, when ready, share it with the world. For the tales we tell become part of the tapestry of human experience.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.
By David Griffin Brown
Dictionary.com offers the following definition of parable: “A short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson.”
While George Orwell’s Animal Farm, at 140 pages, is long enough to be considered a novel, it is relatively short. But regardless of the length, it approaches narrative in the manner of a parable. As per Wikipedia, it can also be considered a satirical allegorical novella. According to Orwell, the story is meant to represent the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Much has already been said about the allegory, but the narrative structure deserves a closer look. The surprising achievement of Animal Farm is its unusual skeleton. Orwell has skillfully subverted traditional narrative structure while still spinning an engaging tale.
For starters, there is no single protagonist. Instead, the story follows the successes and failures of the farm as a whole. And yet, aside from Napoleon the antagonist, very few of the farm animals (co-protagonists) can be described as active. They aren’t struggling and striving toward a goal. Instead, they are following orders, occasionally raising questions and concerns, but largely going along with the rule imposed on them by the pigs. Much of the tension, then, comes from dramatic irony—readers know what’s really going on. The unfortunate animals are, for the most part, too daft to recognize the wool that’s been pulled over their eyes.
If we try to frame the farm animals’ plight in a log line, it doesn’t quite work. Here’s an attempt using a pitch formula from our Book Broker interview with literary agent Hannah Sheppard: When A (inciting incident) happens, B (character) must do C (action) otherwise/before D (catastrophe).
When Napoleon and the pigs take over their farm, the other animals must resist the new paradigm of oppression, otherwise they will be just as badly off as they were before the revolution.
The problem is—the animals have no recourse to resist. The pigs are smarter than they are; they can read and write, and more importantly they are capable of deception.
So does that mean Animal Farm doesn’t have a plot? Not at all. It’s a simple one, but it’s still there. The plot causality belongs almost entirely to the antagonist.
Napoleon drives the story from beginning to end. His goal is to wrest control of the farm from the humans and, ultimately, to become human himself. When we view Hannah Sheppard’s pitch test from the antagonist’s perspective, suddenly it works:
When the animals of Manor Farm stage a revolution and depose Mr. Jones, Napoleon maneuvers to secure himself as the supreme commander before his reign can be challenged, whether by the animals he governs or the other humans around Willingdon.
The animals, as governed by Mr Jones, live a difficult life in which they must labour endlessly, are kept hungry, and are often slaughtered and sold to other humans.
A venerable boar named Old Major (feasibly Marx or Lenin) decries the animals’ treatment under the human regime. He teaches the animals of Manor Farm a revolutionary song called Beasts of England, but then he dies before he can lead the revolution. Two younger pigs, Napolean and Snowball, assume control of the animals, stage a revolt, and thus Animal Farm begins its hopeful collectivism under a new name.
You could argue that the inciting incident and point of no return are one and the same. Once the animals overthrow Jones, Napoleon’s gambit to install himself as supreme commander is underway. However, symbolically, the point of no return could also be the animals’ adoption of the Seven Commandments of Animalism, which are painted on the barn.
One of the first causally crucial things Napoleon does is sequester a litter of puppies with the purpose of teaching them the principles of Animalism. In fact, he is planning ahead.
In the first major challenge to Napoleon’s plans, Mr Jones returns with other humans to take back his property. However, Napoleon and Snowball organize an effective defense, with Snowball in particular playing a heroic part and getting shot in the leg.
After the Battle of the Cowshed, Snowball proposes the animals build a windmill, which will eventually reduce their collective labour. Seeing the threat to his leadership, Napoleon declares Snowball an enemy of Animal Farm, then sends his puppies (now grown into vicious dogs) to chase Snowball away.
Following this, Napoleon convinces the animals that the windmill was his idea, and after a purge of other animals whom he claims are Snowball’s spies, few are left willing to question his authority.
The first windmill fails, but with time they rebuild. Animal Farm is poised to do well. But then comes the midpoint. Mr Frederick, the neighbouring farmer, leads a new attack and blows up the windmill. The animals manage to repel the humans, but many are wounded, including Boxer the draft horse.
The attack by Mr Frederick leads to a new crisis for Napoleon in that Benjamin the donkey figures out that Boxer has been sold to the glue factory. Boxer is well respected, and for a moment it seems the animals will finally realize the truth about Napoleon’s scheme. However, the pigs spin more lies and convince the animals that Boxer has been sent to a veterinarian.
The erosion of the Seven Commandments of Animalism begins soon after Snowball is ejected, but there is still a bit more rising action for Napoleon as he makes further changes. “No animal shall kill another animal” becomes “No animal shall kill another animal… without cause.” Bit by bit, he paves the way for the pigs to act more and more like humans, for example by sleeping in beds (“No animal shall sleep in a bed” becomes “No animal shall sleep in a bed… with sheets”) and drinking whiskey (“No animal shall drink alcohol” becomes “No animal shall drink alcohol… to excess”).
When the pigs start wearing clothing and walking on two legs, the first commandment is changed from “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy” to “Two legs are better than four.”
The climax comes, not in the sense of a final high-stakes drama, but in Napoleon’s crowning achievement: he cements his ownership in the eyes of his human neighbours. In order to prevent humans from staging another attack, Napoleon decides to form an alliance, and so he hosts a dinner party. He also ditches the revolutionary traditions that led to the formation of Animal Farm and reverts to the name Manor Farm.
As the humans and pigs share food and whiskey and play cards together, some of the animals peer inside the farmhouse. They can no longer tell the difference between the humans and pigs.
Experiences transform us. Though there isn't a singular protagonist with a complex character arc, the farm and its inhabitants undergo substantial metamorphosis.
Initially driven by a common goal, the animals unite against human oppression. However, as the story unfolds, their unity fractures. The animals' faith in the commandments wavers, their memories of the rebellion blur, and their allegiance to the pigs becomes a matter of survival rather than choice. This transformation, from hopeful revolutionaries to oppressed subjects once more, serves as a powerful commentary on the cyclical nature of power and rebellion. And this is underscored by Napoleon’s transformation from a revolutionary leader into a corrupt tyrant.
In Animal Farm, structure and theme are intertwined. While the story's arc, events, and character dynamics form its structure, Orwell's choice of animals contributes much of the underlying meaning.
The pigs’ intelligence and cunning allow them to maneuver themselves into positions of power, reshaping the farm's hierarchy. They are an elite class leveraging its knowledge and resources to exploit and dominate others. Their transformation from comrades-in-arms to rulers mimics the way leadership can evolve in political scenarios, showing the shift from revolutionary ideals to oppressive rule.
The sheep, on the other hand, epitomize the blind followers of any regime. Their incessant bleating of simplistic slogans like "Four legs good, two legs bad," serves as a metaphor for propaganda and the dangers of unthinking loyalty.
Boxer, the horse, stands as a tragic figure of the working class. His unwavering dedication, evidenced by his mottos "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right," reflects the proletariat's exploitation. The eventual betrayal of Boxer is one of the story's most heart-wrenching moments and is emblematic of how totalitarian regimes often discard those who serve them once they're no longer useful.
The choice of animals thus isn't just a creative storytelling device. It's where Orwell invests the simplistic parable structure with thematic depth.
Animal Farm is a testament to the versatility and boundless possibilities of storytelling. “Narrative” almost universally involves a protagonist struggling and striving toward a goal, the failure of which comes with significant stakes. It is the stakes that make readers care—the closer a protagonist gets to failure, the more readers cheer them on; the more they want to know what happens next.
But through this parable-like tale of Soviet communism, Orwell demonstrates that dramatic irony can be another potent tool to engage and sustain a reader's emotional draw. While most stories weave their magic through the interplay of character desires, stakes, and conflicts, Orwell's masterpiece thrives on readers’ apprehension, their knowledge of the looming doom, and their expectation of the tragic, inevitable descent of the hopeful revolutionaries. Stakes are still there, even without a singular protagonist fighting for their heart’s desire. Thus, Animal Farm gives us commentary not only on history and political philosophy but also on the art of storytelling itself—demonstrating that narrative structure is a playground for innovation rather than a formula or paint-by-numbers approach to novel writing.
David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
]]>"The Bobici House captured me with both its strong voice and evocative imagery. The historical details gave the setting a feeling of authenticity, and the author deftly wove in intriguing details of other characters while keeping the tension of the moment high."
Torente, Istria, 1919
Caterina is pretty sure she can outrun the Fioretti boys, but she isn’t sure if she can outrun their father. She pushes onto tiptoes and peers over the stone wall into their orchard again. All she can make out is three silhouettes, father and two sons, over by the storehouse. It isn’t quite dawn, and the rows of fruit trees are still tucked up in the indigo mist of the night before. The Bora wind is up, though, shaking the orchard awake by the leaves and leaning its icy weight against Caterina’s hemp shirt and trousers, the June morning suddenly January. She pulls her flat cap down over her ears, but it bobs back up, the brown curls underneath having ideas of their own.
Caterina studies the figs, drooping low off the branches. It’s too shadowy to see, but she can picture their purple skins starting to tear, the sweet syrup readying to ooze through the cracks; she can taste it on her tongue, sense the gritty crunch of seeds between her teeth. Her mother says that if you imagine things hard enough, they become as real as the real things.
Caterina’s empty stomach rumbles in disagreement.
The only thing standing in her way is the Fiorettis. Caterina is twelve now—well into double figures—and she’s nippy and she knows it; especially dressed in her brother’s clothes, with no petticoats to slow her down. But the Fioretti boys look tall. Dark tendrils of hair hang from their heads like dirty mops, as they bend over their cart, trying to fix something, it seems.
Caterina usually avoids the orchard when she goes out foraging. Since the war, the other village children have started calling Papa Fioretti “La Bestia, The Beast.” They say he lost his mind on the Isonzo Front; that if he catches you stealing, he’ll yank off his boots and beat you with the hobnails until the flesh falls off your backside and all you have left to sit on is bone—it happened, it happened to someone’s brother’s friend, it really did.
Sounds like a tall tale to Caterina, as so many village rumours do. But “every tall tale has a pinch of truth,” as her mother used to say with a twinkle in her eye, back when her mother’s eyes used to twinkle. She wonders what the gossiping voices say about Mama. Oh, Mama. Caterina will take two figs: one for her mama as well. And the first? Well, the first is for Mora, of course.
Hannah Croft is a British writer, currently based in Italy. She studied modern languages at Oxford University, before training as an actor and becoming a writer/performer, as half of comedy duo Croft & Pearce. The Bobici House is her first novel, inspired by conversations with her Italian husband’s family, who fled their village in what is now Croatia as part of the little-known Istrian–Dalmatian Exodus. She has won the BPA Pitch Prize and made it onto the shortlist for the Page Turner Awards mentorship programme and the Stockholm Writers Festival's First 5 Pages Prize. Hannah spends most of her free time fending off two young children and battling to perfect a simple spaghetti carbonara.
]]>"Willoughby's haunting atmosphere of menace made it a close second. The author created several small mysteries that promise to produce full blown crises over the course of the novel. I loved the subtlety of the writing and the gap that was created between what's happening and why."
Before we head off for Archie’s swimming lesson that evening, we visit the chemist. I buy a tube of arnica cream, despite the pharmacist’s insistence that it isn’t really necessary, and apply a generous amount to Archie’s arm as soon as we get outside.
He watches me, my fingers sinking into his plump forearm as I rub it in. “It’s all right, Mummy,” he says. “It’s better now.”
I try to smile at him. It doesn’t look as red as it did; maybe it might not bruise too badly after all.
We leave early, because there are roadworks all over the city, and major ones on the ring road, as usual. I have to detour way out into the countryside to bypass them all. Silent, silvery fields and dark clutches of tightly packed trees whip past the windows as I drive; the long branches of ancient oaks hang in the space above the road, obscuring the darkening sky. I shiver. I’d hate to break down out here.
I don’t really know the area, so I have to concentrate hard. We sweep along a narrow lane, banks of dirt piled up on either side of us now, as though the road has only recently been carved out, and the car glides down into a dip. As we emerge from it, a set of temporary traffic lights looms up ahead. I swear under my breath and put my foot down. We make it through on the green light, and I do a little inward air punch.
“Mummy,” Archie calls from the back seat. “This is where me and Willoughby lived.”
I frown. “Who’s Willoughby?”
“At the Hall,” he says. “Up there.”
I glance at him in the rear-view mirror as he points out of the window. “Did you see this on TV?”
He shakes his head, and we drive on in silence. Willoughby? Where on earth would he have heard that? Some of the kids in his class do have strange names—Mimosa, Serenity, Argus. Maybe Willoughby’s one he just hasn’t mentioned before.
Donna Tracy lives in Norwich, England. Her short stories have been published in Mslexia, Litro, Ellipsis Zine, After Dinner Conversation, Literally Stories and Dear Damsels, and her story ‘Dear Puss’ was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Liars’ League, London. She is currently working on a historical novel about a poison pen letter writer, set in the fog of Victorian London.
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"The opening of the 100-Year Flood made great use of tension and gripped me right away. The rising floodwaters created an immediate ticking clock, and with the narrator's stepmother trapped in the valley, the stakes are high."
The rain may have stopped, but the water will continue to rise.
I know this. I tried to tell Joan as much. It’s why the evacuation order was issued in the middle of the night. But my stepmother refused to leave, saying that there wasn’t a drop of water in the creek at seven this morning. That there hadn’t been water in it for many, many years.
But knowing and seeing are two different things and I’m stunned by the sight of the flooding valley below me. I glance at the dashboard clock. Eleven. This has happened in four hours. Murky brown water is snaking everywhere. Around the barn, through the yard, embracing the bottom of the house. The garden is gone. The once dry creek is overfull. My brain is glitching, unable to comprehend how this happened so fast. I stare at the old white bungalow, with its grey shingled roof, willing Joan to walk out now and save me the grief of driving down there.
Betty barks from the backseat—a short, high-pitched yip. Her warning bark. In the rearview mirror, Emerson and Lucas are both staring out the window, eyes wide at the disaster building in front of them.
“Gramma’s down there?” Emerson asks, her voice rising in pitch.
“I think I forgot to close the back door this morning,” Lucas says. He’s now watching me, his normally bright hazel eyes—Ivy’s eyes—darkened.
“What?” I ask.
“I forgot to close the door after I let Betty back in. We should go home and check.” His gaze jumps back out the window.
Ah. I understand. “Honestly, I would love nothing more than to go home too, but we have to get Grandma out.” We are wasting time up here. I let off the brake, promising Lucas we’ll be fast, that water can’t move quicker than us. As we descend into the valley, I leave behind the safety of high, dry land and focus on rescuing the woman who once rescued me.
Nicole Brooks has a Bachelor of Science and worked as an environmental consultant before staying home to raise her children. Her first novel, Just Because We Can (2018), inspired by her former career, was a Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist. Her current novel is set during the 2013 Calgary 100-Year flood that devastated much of southern Alberta. She lives with her two daughters and husband just outside Calgary. If you can’t find Nicole, she’s probably out driving around searching for bald eagles or playing pickleball.
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Thanks to everyone who submitted. This year about 160 entries landed in our inbox. It's always a pleasure to read snippets from so many stories brimming with potential.
Here's what happens next:
Thanks again, everyone!!
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By Michelle Barker
When an editor mentions stakes in their feedback on your novel, it’s a polite way of saying, who cares? The answer of course is that the reader should care about what’s happening in your story. If you want them to keep reading, they must care. Your job as the author is to make them care. It’s probably the most important task you have. If your reader doesn’t care what happens to the protagonist, they’ll put the book down.
So how do you make them care?
By raising the stakes for your protagonist. What happens to them has to matter. It has to make a difference in their life. There must be consequences—significant ones—if they fail to get what they’re after. They must stand to lose something important.
Which presupposes another important thing: they should be going after something in the first place. They must have a goal—something to gain. And it should be specific, tangible, and measurable. If the reader doesn’t know what the protagonist wants, there’s no way for them to care about what will happen if they don’t get it. They can’t root for someone who’s aimless.
So your protagonist must want something—badly. And it must be something worth wanting. The protagonist must want it for a good reason (not necessarily the right reason), and the reader should understand why it’s important to them.
The key with stakes is what happens if they don’t get it. What they stand to lose. The stakes must be high. Not necessarily the end of the world—since not every story can involve a world war or an apocalypse. But in a personal sense, yes: the end of something big. Emotional breakdown. A loss of love, or of life. You get to decide what that bad thing is. And you’re free to make it escalate. Bad can get worse. Not just humiliation; jail. Not just jail; death row.
Remember the ring Frodo has to destroy? The story doesn’t start out that way. At first, he thinks he has to find a good hiding place for it. Then he figures he’ll just leave town. Then he decides to drop the ring off with the elves. They try to destroy it; that doesn’t work. By the time they realize they have to take it to Mordor, the reader has a clear idea of what Mordor is, what it means to go there, and what’s at stake if Frodo doesn’t succeed.
The inciting incident is your first chance to introduce stakes into your story. The reader meets the protagonist in their ordinary circumstances and then something happens to turn their world sideways.
We see the idyllic life of the hobbits and then Frodo finds the ring that will bring unimaginable danger to his community. We learn what Katniss Everdeen is willing to do for her family in the harsh world of District 12, and then her sister Prim is chosen for the Hunger Games, prompting Katniss to volunteer in her place. In Pride and Prejudice, we understand the challenges facing a family of five unmarried daughters in the early nineteenth century and then the eligible bachelor, Mr. Bingsley, arrives in town. We watch as orphaned Anne Shirley arrives at Green Gables, only to realize that the Cuthberts were expecting a boy. We journey with Holden Caulfield in New York City, unraveling after his expulsion from Pencey Prep.
It should always be the case that once this inciting incident happens, the protagonist is not free to go back to their simple existence as though it had never taken place. Even if they initially turn down the call to adventure, there’s no way to deny it: the call has happened; the adventure exists. Sure, the protagonist could go back to business as usual, but now they know there’s something else out there for them. Maybe someone desperately needs their help. Maybe this call to adventure is the only way out of their crappy life that they’ve been waiting for, for years. On the surface it might seem like business as usual, but emotionally? No way. Everything has changed. They’ll never be happy unless they answer that call. They know it, and the reader knows it.
Could Anne Shirley just accept being sent back to the orphanage after Marilla’s initial disappointment in not getting a boy? In theory, yes. But she'd never quell the yearning for a place and family to call her own, especially given her fondness for Matthew and the beauty of Green Gables.
Could Holden Caulfield just stay quiet and go along with the phoniness he perceives all around him in society? In theory, yes. But he'd never reconcile with the inauthentic world he so deeply despises.
This is why the inciting incident is so important. It is literally a catalyst. It starts something that, once begun, cannot be undone. It’s your chance to show the reader: this is what the protagonist wants, and this is why it matters.
It must matter. It must be the most important thing to them. If they care, the reader will care. If they have a ho-hum attitude, then the reader will yawn and find something else to do.
By making it personal.
Katniss Everdeen doesn't only volunteer to participate in the Hunger Games to save her sister Prim from certain death. That alone would be brave and selfless. But Suzanne Collins gives her more motivation. Katniss has already lost her father to a mine explosion and lives with the daily pressure of feeding her family. She knows the weight of loss and sacrifice.
Similarly, Frodo isn't just handed a ring to take to Mount Doom. He learns of its dark history and the calamity it can unleash on Middle-earth. But J.R.R. Tolkien goes further, showing us Frodo's love of his uncle Bilbo and the Shire, the bond he forms with the members of the fellowship. The fate of his friends, family, and beloved homeland hangs in the balance, making his quest deeply personal.
Novels must contain conflict on two levels: external and internal.
External conflict is essential to keeping the story moving. But you can have all the car chases and explosions you want in order to raise the external stakes; if they’re not happening to people the reader cares about, the pyrotechnics won’t save you—or your book.
It’s the internal conflicts of your characters that make the reader care. The threat must be personal, and it must be happening to people who seem so real they could materialize in the reader’s living room.
Think of Die Hard. The building could blow up, and yes, that’s bad… but it becomes much worse because John McClane’s wife is in there. Not just his wife; his estranged wife with whom he hopes to get back together. It’s Christmas. They have children. He has something personal to lose.
Use your character’s backstory to both create and deepen their internal conflict. Show the reader how this story is personal to them. It’s an immediate way to raise the stakes.
Here are some more things to consider when it comes to raising the stakes in your novel:
Honor the chain of causality: Everything your character does should have consequences. Make sure those consequences create bigger obstacles to the achievement of the protagonist’s goal.
Add a ticking clock: Remember that television series, 24? The ticking clock would pop up on the screen as a reminder to viewers that if Jack Bauer didn’t figure out the situation soon, something terrible would happen. But this strategy doesn’t just apply to thrillers, and it doesn’t have to be a literal clock. Make it a deadline. A pregnancy. A diagnosis. Age. The ticking clock element adds automatic urgency to any story situation.
Make sure every scene has stakes: Every scene in your novel should contain a goal, a conflict, and a disaster or newly created obstacle. Something should be different by the end of the scene, either externally or internally. And if different means better, then in the next scene it should take a turn for the worse. Things can always get worse. Your reader is counting on that.
If things remain the same in a scene on both an external and internal level, you either need to rewrite it so that it contains change, or it should be summarized—or removed.
Don’t be afraid to tell the reader the stakes: Tell them again. And again. How many times are we reminded of what will happen if Frodo doesn’t throw the ring into Mount Doom? Several. Gandalf tells us. Galadriel tells us. We see the Orcs, the Uruk-hai, Saruman with his tragically long fingernails. We look into the palantirs. We KNOW. And we’ve already formed an attachment to the members of the fellowship. We don’t want this terrible thing to happen.
Consider the family motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones: “Winter is coming.” How many times do we hear that phrase? And we know that winter will be even worse than expected because we’ve seen the White Walkers.
Let Failure Be One of the Possible Outcomes: This is why George R. R. Martin unexpectedly kills off his heroes. He lets us know early and often that it can happen to anyone and he’s not afraid to do it.
Let your characters do stupid things, make bad decisions, take risks. Let things go wrong for them. Let your reader be afraid for them. As I often say to clients at the end of a chapter, give us something to worry about.
Keep a Leash on It: The end of the world sounds great as a threat, but it must make sense in your story. Not all stakes have to be that dramatic. The more you push the envelope here, the more you risk straining credulity and alienating your reader.
If there is a secret sauce to novel-writing, it’s this: give your readers a reason to care about your story and they will forego Netflix and Instagram and bedtime in order to keep turning pages.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.
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