Free The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass Page A

novel, and is the scene's turning point for Laila. Her future now could be extremely different, possibly in a different land.
    Hosseini also knows that every outer turning point has an inner counterpart. That occurs at the end of the chapter. Babi's revelation triggers a realization in Laila:
    There was something she hadn't told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one important way, she was glad they couldn't go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-facedearnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning around. But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four weeks without Tariq when he had gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How could she ever cope with his permanent absence?
    Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her.
    Hosseini thus accomplishes several things at once: He conveys Laila's inner turning point, sets a larger conflict, and connects the violent history of Afghanistan directly to the lives of his characters. Not bad for a scene that began as a sightseeing trip. The scene advances the story but does so not through the mild action ofvisiting an historic site but by using that site as a springboard for twin turning points.
    What about your scenes? Does every scene of travel, arrival, aftermath, investigation, meeting—all the business of getting your characters from beginning to end—capture a sharply defined turning point and reveal its inner meaning? Are you sure? What if you were to do a scene draft of your novel? Suppose that you broke down every discrete unit of the story, pinned down its turning point, and measured in words the change it brings to each scene's point-of-view character? Would your story get stronger?
    I suspect so. You might even find that a scene you considered cutting is now vital to the progression of the plot.
    DIALOGUE
    A common downfall of many scenes is dialogue. The characters talk, talk, talk, but scenes spin in circles and don't travel much of anywhere. Plenty of dialogue in manuscripts also is hard to follow. Choked with incidentalaction, broken into fragments, and strewn over the length of a page, it can take almost archaeological skill to piece together an exchange.
    Dialogue not only needs to do its own work, it also can bring clarity to middle scenes that would otherwise be muddy and inactive. Dialogue is strong (or can be). The process of stripping it down and finding the tension in it can be revealing. It can help define the purpose of a scene.
    Brunonia Barry's best-selling debut novel, The Lace Reader (2008), spins a story of the present-day denizens of Salem, Massachusetts, in particular the eccentric clan of Whitney women, who have the ability to "read" people by holding pieces of lace in front of their faces. The novel initially is narrated by Towner Whitney, another in the army of unreliable narrators who crowd the pages of contemporary fiction. Towner is called home to Salem when her mother, Eva, an often-arrested rescuer of battered and abused women, goes missing and later is found dead.
    Deeper in, The Lace Reader switches to other points of view, principally John Rafferty, another in contemporary fiction's army of wounded big city cops who've retreated to small towns. It falls to Rafferty to investigate Eva's death, and thereby dig up Salem's dirt. Salem has a bona fide witch in Ann Chase, a contemporary ofTowner's, to whom Rafferty turns for help. When a teenage runaway named Angela also goes missing, Rafferty asks Ann to do a reading on Angela using Angela's toothbrush as a focal object. Ann won't do the reading but offers to guide Rafferty in doing a reading himself.
    Now, how would you