August 26, 2005
What makes for a good story? Great characters? Yeah, hard to argue. Memorable characters are hard to find. What's the female main character in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code?" Beats me, but the main character's name is Robert Langston, right? What's the names of the main characters of any of Dan's other books? Beats me. I enjoyed the hell out of those books, but the characters aren't all that memorable. So that's important. You could probably argue that the main character in "The Da Vinci Code" is actually Jesus, or perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, but let's not go there today.

I've been thinking about plotting and the most valuable lesson I learned about plotting came from a conversation I had with my brother while standing waist-high in Brevort Lake in Northern Michigan while we were keeping an eye on our kids. We were talking about "The Lord of the Rings," both the movies and the books, and Pete said something along the lines of, "I was reading the book to Dylan and I realized just how often the characters are thrwarted."

And having watched the movies about 50 times and read the books a few times, upon really paying attention to how Tolkein plots, you can learn most of what you need to know about plotting, whether you're writing fantasy, thrillers, mysteries, romances, or so-called mainstream fiction, whatever that is.

Example. After leaving Rivendell, the Fellowship plans to head toward Mordor along some mountain pass, I don't remember which one. This plan is thwarted when they discover that Saruman is carefully watching that pass and has his "spies," the birds, looking for them. Gandalf then heads up and over the mountains. This time Saruman thwarts this attempt by causing a winter storm that nearly kills everybody on the mountainside. With great reluctance because he knows the dangers there, Gandalf leads them to the mines of Moria, where they will take tunnels and caverns and tunnels underneath the mountains. Only they are initially thwarted when they don't know how to get past the magic entrance. Having figured that out ("Speak friend and enter"), they really, REALLY want to get out, find the local pub and knock back a few before dropping the ring in a FedEx envelope and mailing it to Sauron, because the mines have been turned into a crypt, all the dwarves slaughtered by goblin orcs. They rush for the entrance only to have a tentacled monster attack them and destroy the entrance. Thwarted yet again. Further in the mines they get lost. Further still they arouse the interest of the orcs. They battle a cave troll (Great line: "They've got a cave troll!") and orcs and narrowly escape (and Frodo nearly dies) only to be cornered by goblins in a great amphitheater. Yikes, thwarted again. Only the orcs suddenly flee and they're faced with an even worse enemy, the Balrog, a demon of shadow and flame. Thwarted! Fleeing the Balrog, they nearly topple to their deaths on the bridge of Barad Dur--thwarted--but make the crossing only, horrors! Gandalf battles the Balrog and falls to his death.

The point here is to notice how often Tolkein does this during the entire series of the books, and how Peter Jackson exploits it in the films. If you have the director's cut versions of the films and you pay attention to the extra scenes, you'll notice that in general they were more cases of the heroes being thrwarted--Aragorn's apparent failure to recruit the Army of the Dead, the avalanche of skulls, escaping to realize they were too late to take on the Corsairs...

My earlier unpublished mysteries had a lot of flaws, but none of them were more serious than my taking it too easy on my hero. A crime was committed and they followed clues to solve the case. There weren't enough red herrings. My characters didn't get pinned into corners that apparently they couldn't get out from. In effect, they weren't thwarted enough. I've learned my lesson.

Just yesterday in the novel in progress I wrote a chapter in which the main character and the woman he's commandeered (or rescued) into helping him, are caught in the crawlspace between the main floor and the upper level on a catwalk. Below them are armed terrorists hunting for them. An explosion has seriously weakened the infrastructure they're on, the hero has been wounded, the space is filled with dust, and they discover that their planned route out has been boobytrapped with plastic explosives. And the clock is ticking before other hostages get killed.

Meaning, basically, that I'm trying to paint my characters into a corner. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get them out. Hopefully the reader won't be sure either. And hopefully I'll come up with something creative, unexpected and satisfying to get there.

It doesn't have to be this dramatic either. In a mainstream novel, the heroine can have a child with Down syndrome, a sleezy boss who wants sexual favors in exchange for career advancement, an ex-husband who keeps asking for money and showing up during her dinner dates with the man she thinks she loves...

Just don't make it too easy on your characters.

Best,
Mark Terry