Free The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass

next paragraph she creates the scene's inner turning point:
    Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the "Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising" in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians
    and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. ("Fourteen-year-old lovers last longer," he'd noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents' cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires.
    Strickly speaking, it might not have been necessary to explore how cruddy Blue feels. But look again. Pessl draws a contrast between Blue's humiliation and the ease of the other students, whose parents, unlike Blue's father, have arrived to collect them. Blue longs to be like them but isn't. This sudden ache is the inner change, the surfacing recognition that she needs friends. What about outward consequences? Pessl adds that too: Immediately after this, Hannah Schneider comes along to chat with Blue and summon her to lunch on the following Sunday. Blue's life takes a fateful turn.
    This scene does a lot of work: It humbles precocious Blue, it makes her aware of her loneliness, and it introduces the agent of change. For a set-up scene, that's pretty dynamic. In many manuscripts this scene would be weak, a candidate for cutting. Pessl uses a nicely defined turning point and a well delineated inner turning point to make the scene necessary.
    Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner (2003), had a long run on best-seller lists; his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), has also gripped readers. It's the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and their friendship and mutual suffering through several decades. The story spans the Soviet occupation years, the Taliban era, and beyond. In addition to portraying the condition of Afghan women, Hosseini also wants to convey some of the magnificence of Afghanistan's history.
    Uh-oh. Portraying the majestic sweep of history is, for many writers, a recipe for lengthy self-indulgence and low tension. Hosseini, however, is too skilled for that. In the novel's second section he switches point of view from unhappily married Mariam to young Laila,daughter of a neighboring couple. Laila has a best friend, Tariq, for whom in adolescence she develops more powerful feelings. Hosseini needs to portray the evolution of this friendship to something deeper. He wants to simultaneously include Afghan history.
    In chapter twenty-one of A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini sends Laila, Tariq, and Laila's father, Babi, on an excursion to see Shahr-e-Zohak, the Red City, and the enormous twin Buddhas at Bamiyan (later dynamited by the Taliban) carved into a cliffside. On their way from Kabul, Hosseini signals the era by having Tariq shout taunts at passing Soviet tanks. Later, they see remnants of many invasions. Their driver remarks:
    "And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another," the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. "Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn't that the truth, badar?"
    "Indeed it is," said Babi.
    Many writers would let it go at that, but Hosseini knows that travelogue and story are not the same. At Bamiyan, Laila, Tariq, and Babi climb to the top of the statues. The view of the Afghan countryside provokes Babi to reveal to Laila why he married her now-sour mother and how much he misses Laila's two dead brothers. He then shocks her with an admission: "As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it." That adds an element of tension to the day and to the