Guest Author Peter Bernhardt on Structuring a Novel

Structure—A Novelist’s Best Friend

You wake up in the middle of the night with this brilliant idea for your next novel and feverishly scribble it on a notepad kept on your bedside table for just the occasion when your muse strikes. When you make it to your computer during your regular writing time, you input your handwritten notes and then sit there, fingers poised over the keyboard, but not typing. What’s the matter? You still think the inspiration is great, but how do you get a novel out of it?

It’s a daunting task, isn’t it? Where do you start? Where do you want to go, and how do you carry your readers all the way to the end? Endless questions every novelist faces.

Can you say “structure” without images of constraint and limitation flooding your mind? If so, you’re on your way to writing a novel that follows a natural progression and is easy to follow. Proper structure does not stifle creativity but enhances it. You object: all this is rather abstract. All right, bear with me as I dig up examples from my two novels.

When I became serious about writing a novel a few years ago, I had to confront every writer’s fear: what could I possibly write that others would want to read? To a wannabe like me, the mantra “write about what you know” made sense (though now I subscribe to the notion, “write about what interests you”). For my first novel, The Stasi File [Stasi], I cooked up a plot featuring an American lawyer (Rolf) being sent on a spy mission to his native Germany. While I’ve never been a spy, I certainly know a lot about the other two areas. Problem solved, right? Little did I know that was the first of hundreds of baby steps that finally brought me to the overall story idea: a thriller detailing a Stasi plot to prevent German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now how could I make it interesting, distinct from other spy stories of that era? I drew upon my passion for opera and invented an aspiring opera diva (Sylvia) as a co-protagonist. I had to give her a past, both with Rolf, and with a terrorist organization. And I had to have at least one interesting subplot.

So how do you weave all these strains together in a plot complex enough to captivate readers yet not so convoluted as to confuse them? This is where the author needs to make several structural decisions. For this blog, I’ll focus on four: (1) whether to write significant backstory in a prologue or insert it in small doses throughout the main plot; (2) the number of POVs that will best tell the story; (3) the best way to write climactic chapters; (4) whether to switch tenses between story lines.  

1.       Significant Backstory: Both my novels have backstories that greatly influence the main plots. In Stasi, Sylvia’s betrayal of a terrorist boyfriend and Rolf’s abandonment of Sylvia drive the events of the main plot twelve years later. In the sequel, Teya’s Kiss, Rolf’s role in the expulsion of a fellow law school classmate comes back to haunt him nine years later. Neither novel features a prologue. While I never drafted a prologue for Stasi, I did write two drafts for Teya’s Kiss, but put them in the outtakes file. After consulting an excellent article on the subject, see http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/prologue.shtml I concluded that the structure would be better served by a strong first chapter, followed by incremental insertion of crucial backstory throughout the plots.

2.       Number of POVs: There are those who proclaim that a novel should be written from very few POVs, some insisting few means one. By paying such an arbitrary rule any mind, you jeopardize the structure of your novel and stifle your creativity. If you lay out your story in the best possible way, the number of POVs required will reveal themselves. You would be a fool to reduce them based on someone’s rigid pronouncement. My thriller detailing a Stasi plot to prevent German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Stasi agent trying to defect with secret documents, a West German terrorist group’s involvement, and Sylvia and Rolf’s running for their lives in communist East Germany required no less than twelve POVs to tell the story in a compelling and understandable way. Teya’s Kiss is not as complex, but with the intertwining story lines that are three centuries apart still demanded six POVs. If you have done a good job outlining the structure of your story, you will know how many POVs will serve you the best, and you won’t be tempted to let someone talk you out of your well-grounded decision.  

3.       Climactic Chapters: Conflict is what drives most novels. The question is how to best write tension-filled chapters and scenes. In some novels the best way is to write a climactic chapter from the protagonist’s POV. Others are better served by switching POVs, perhaps between the protagonist and the antagonist. In Stasi, I chose a different approach: numerous and rapid POV shifts in a climactic chapter featuring an escape scene in the East Berlin Opera House. The POV switches no less than sixteen times among six different characters. I chose that structure to keep tension at the highest possible level throughout the chapter.  

4.       Tenses: As the muse whispered the story idea for Teya’s Kiss into my ear, I shuddered at the challenge of writing two plots separated by three centuries and having them converge at a crucial plot point. Moreover, how could a German white male possibly write convincingly in the voice of a thirteen-year old Pueblo Indian girl who would play a crucial role—in the author’s imagination—during the Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1680 that drove the Spanish from New Mexico? How to write the two stories side by side in a way that would keep the reader engaged?

Going against convention and well-meaning admonitions, I wrote the current (1990) plot line in past tense and the 1680 story in present tense. The only novel I’m aware of that has used a similar approach is Anita Shreve’s, The Pilot’s Wife, but if I may say so, it’s not nearly as daring. Her backstory in present tense involves the same two characters as the current story in past tense while in Teya’s Kiss the two story lines feature completely different characters. I believe adhering to a logical structure was a key factor in pulling this off.

In these and other instances, I found that far from hemming me in and restricting my creative juices, a well-thought-out structure freed my imagination to guide me to a unique creative endeavor. It can do the same for you.

Peter Bernhardt, Author, The Stasi File: Opera and Espionage - A Deadly Combination; Quarter Finalist 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award; Amazon/Amazon Kindle; Sequel: Teya's Kiss. http://sedonawriter.tripod.com - http://sedonaauthor.blogspot.com - tweet @sedonawriter

Peter also shares these thoughts at  http://literarythunderbay.blogspot.com/

Color Your Way to Consistent Dialogue

The following article was previously published in Volume 11 #3, Fall issue (2000) of Once Upon a Time… a Magazine For Children’s Writers and Illustrators. Enough time has passed that the rights have reverted back to me, so I believe it’s safe to share the article with you.

Color your way to consistent dialogue. Dialogue has to sound like real people talking, or it fails. Every character must have his or her own voice, and that voice must remain consistent. Once you’ve read your manuscript aloud, and you’re sure the characters are unique and the dialogue flows naturally, take one more step.

Get some colored highlighters, a different color for each character. Go through your manuscript highlighting all of Character A’s dialogue in pink. Highlight all of character B’s dialogue in yellow. Continue through the manuscript until each character’s dialogue is a different color than that of the others.

Next, read-only the pink sections of dialogue, keeping everything in between. Read as if practicing lines in a play. Does the voice in the first pink sections sound like it’s from the same person as the voice in the last pink sections?

If not, go backward through your story. Stop when you get to a pink section that sounds the same as the first pink section. Revise all of the ladder stretches of dialogue until they blend with the voice in the earlier parts. Do the same for the other colors. This method of examining dialogue for consistency is especially helpful with novels.

Example: Character Chad might use the word “jerk” three or four times when referring to someone he isn’t crazy about. Tanya generally uses the word “nerd,” but on page 76 of the manuscript, Tanya comes up with “jerk,” and the reader accidentally assumes it’s Chad speaking.

You might have a character who always says “’Sides, …” Unless the character took a quick course in proper English, he or she isn’t going to later say “Besides” in Chapter 8.

Consider a character’s tone and vocabulary.

Example: “You know me, no ruffles or lace. But for my daughter? I was going to do her all up with more ruffles than Bo Peep.”

The same character is not likely to say “While pining for a partner who shares my deepest emotions, I stumbled upon the perfect companion, one not far from the fictional soul mate I’ve created through the privacy of my journal.”

If there are 75 pages of text between one character’s two contrasting voices, a writer may not recognize the error during a reading. However, if the two bits of dialogue are highlighted in the same color, and read back-to-back, the writer will immediately recognize the inconsistency in voice. Just as you can see the colors sneaking outside the lines in a coloring book illustration, the voice slipping outside of the character’s familiar tone will draw you right to it–if you’d done your coloring right.

About Writer's Block

There must be different kinds of writer’s block. The worst I can imagine is not being able to come up with anything to write for days on end – egads – maybe even a whole week. Here’s what I think. If you are trying to come up with a new story and only have that blank screen staring at you, suck it up for at least an hour, the whole time playing little mind games with yourself. Look out the window and talk to a squirrel. Decide who you think the squirrel looks like. I once had a teacher who looked kind of squirrely.  Think about the squirrel in your life and talk to him or her. 

You don’t have to physically put words on the page to be writing. If you are a writer, you are writing even as you are thinking. You’re storing your little gems or germs for future use. Try another mind game. Pull on a hair on your arm and see what reaction you get. Now give that reaction to a character. Write the name of the character along with his or her reaction. Go from there. Now how can you say you have nothing and that you suffer from writer’s block if you just wrote about the tears that welled in your eyes as you watched the skin pull up from your arm when you jiggled that little hair?

There must be more than one kind of writer’s block. Maybe writers are referring to a brain fart stopping them from working on a specific scene/chapter/or plot they want to write, even though they could probably come up with a line or two on something totally unrelated. Like a squirrel. Or a monkey. I can relate to that.

My advice is to trick yourself. It is often when you are doing something you detest that great ideas pop into your head, or your characters say things and you wish you were at the computer--so put the horrible duty of washing dishes or whatever is keeping you busy aside. Some may view this as a way of talking yourself into procrastinating on household or other non-writing obligations. And it is. But so what? If it works, use it.

To me the worst chore ever, or at least right up there with cleaning a toilet, is cleaning my bedroom. I’m one who prioritizes, so the first room I clean is usually the one company would step into first. Why clean more than that if they never get past the point of entry? Plus, that is the room that will give the first impression, thus the most important. Second, I clean the next room they might pop into, if they’ll be staying awhile. The kitchen or wherever we’ll eat if they’ve come for a meal. I rate each room in this way, which means the bedroom is last. Company never goes in there, and my subconscious must know this, because I always seem to run out of energy or time before I ever get to it. On those rare occasions I feel I must clean the bedroom, I don’t accomplish much before some character in my head pulls me away. It’s almost automatic. Yeah. Don’t look under my bed.

It’s easy to shut the bedroom door and dance my way back to the computer with a clever line floating in my head.

Try it. Use your worst chore to your advantage. When that blank screen is haunting you, smile and head off to do whatever it is you hate. Trust me. You’ll be back to the computer in no time.

Bringing a first kiss into your writing

Jan, 2012

When I think of romance, I can’t help but think of the universal bliss of that first kiss –

Whether the first day of a new relationship or the fiftieth, and whether you are young or not, the rush can’t be matched by anything. The wings of excitement flutter in your stomach, tingles shoot up your arms and into your face, the lump of anticipation fixed so snugly in your throat, you’re afraid it’ll explode once you’re finally within centimeters of that tantalizing lip-to-lip experience–your first kiss!

Decade after decade, the wanna-be-kissed fantasize about it for weeks, months, and sometimes – let me die if it don’t happen soon–years before the big K. Even though each first kiss is magically unique, the excitement is universal. It doesn’t matter if it happens discreetly behind the garage, during a game of truth or dare, under the mistletoe at a dance, or in the park where you always meet up with that special someone–your palms sweat, your heart races, and you worry your breath might stink and wonder if your deodorant is still working.

But once you feel the magic, like a leaf turning from green to orange, you know you’ll never be the same.

A kiss of bliss – LB and I had walked uphill eight blocks, the shortest route to JK’s house, laughing and crunching our way through fallen leaves. A few diehard red and gold still hung in clusters from the trees, but most of them blanketed the ground and made me feel we were walking through a photograph.  Except it was real life. I could taste the brisk October air and crumble dead leaves in my hands. When LB tried to stuff the red and gold discards under the back of my jacket, I swung around and laughed. I tried to attack him with a handful, too, but he grabbed my arms and held them straight out like wings as he stepped closer to me, his chin almost touching my forehead. My stomach muscles tensed and my breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t get my smile to relax and worried he might kiss my teeth. With his face leaning toward mine, his warm breath shot currents of excitement through me. Was I standing still or shivering?

It didn’t happen.

He whispered, “I’m going to let go now, but don’t drop your arms.” My face must have shown confusion, because he said, “Do you trust me?” I nodded. His fingers released mine and, before I knew it, he grabbed more leaves and stuffed them under the neck of my shirt.  We laughed the rest of the way to JK’s house.

There, we stepped down the wooden stairs through the backyard entrance to the basement. Just inside the door, before we took the first step down to meet JK, LB steered my chin toward his, and my knees went weak. The weightlessness of being underwater flushed through me as he pressed his lips to mine. Maybe only five seconds went by, maybe five minutes, but that sensation stayed with me throughout my life. Sometimes I loan the feeling to my characters. That’s how it happened in The Curse of Zorphan Island.

I kept hearing, “You know what happened with Tara Foster’s first kiss? Yeah, um, you gotta check it out. It happened at the lake.”

How could I not explore it further?

How was your first kiss?