Free The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass Page B

handle this middle scene? Would you portray Rafferty's first eerie experience of seeing with second sight? Would you work from Ann's knowing point of view? Barry does neither. She portrays the reading and its aftermath in dialogue:
    "When you're ready, open your eyes."
    He opened them.
    He felt embarrassed, and completely inept. He'd totally failed.
    "Describe what you saw," Ann said.
    Rafferty didn't speak.
    "Go ahead," she said. "You can't make a mistake."
    "Well, first of all, I didn't go up, I went down."
    "All right, maybe you can make a mistake."
    "It was a ranch house," he said, trying to explain. He expected her to end the exercise right there. Or tell him to stop wasting her time. Instead she took a breath and continued.
    "What did you see when you went down the stairs?"
    "I didn't see anything," he said. "Nothing at all."

"What did this nothing at all look like?"
    "What kind of question is that?"
    "Humor me," she said.
    "It was black. No, not black, but blank. Yeah. Dark and blank," Rafferty said.
    "What did you hear?"
    "What do you mean, what did I hear?"
    "Where there any sounds? Or smells?"
    "No. ... No sounds. No smells."
    He could feel her eyes on him.
    "I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything. I kept trying to go back up the stairs. I failed Psychic 101," Raf-ferty said.
    "Maybe," Ann said. "Maybe not."
    "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "I went into the room with you," Ann said. "At least I thought I did."
    "And what did you see?
    "Nothing. It was too dark."
    "I told you," Rafferty said.
    "I heard something, though ... a word."
    "What word?"
    "Underground."
    "Underground as in hiding? Or underground as in dead?"
    Ann didn't answer. She had no idea.
    Notice that Barry keeps her dialogue short. The exchange is not rat-a-tat, but even so it's quick. There's tension between Rafferty and Ann, however rudimentary it may be. Consider, too, what this snippet of the novel has to accomplish: It has to show that Ann is a true parasensitive, while Rafferty is not, and reveal a morsel of information about the missing Angela.
    Dialogue lets Barry accomplish all that with immediacy and tension. We also do not have to believe in second sight. Barry doesn't force us to accept whether it's real or not. By remaining objective, with dialogue, she leaves the choice to us, which in a way preserves the mystery of it. More to the point, a sloggy and potentially off-putting middle scene has become taut and dramatic. Wouldn't you like all of your middle scenes to have that effect?
    We can pretty much count on thriller writer Harlan Coben for crackling dialogue. Coben never wastes words and is particularly good at speeding his middles along with tension-filled talk. In The Woods (2007), he spins another of his patented stories in which a past secret haunts his protagonist and someone who was presumed dead returns to stir things up.
    Paul "Cope" Copeland is a county prosecutor in New Jersey. His past is clouded by a summer camp tragedy in which he and a girlfriend snuck into the woods along with four others, including Paul's sister. While Paul and his girlfriend were fooling around, the four others were slashed to death. Two bodies were found; the two others (including Paul's sister) were not. Guess what happens? Yup, the dead return. Or do they? And why is suspicion now directed at Paul?
    Meanwhile, Paul is prosecuting a college frat house rape case. Thrillers (hopefully all fiction) are built on the axiom make it worse for the protagonist. This, Coben does. One obstacle he throws in Cope's way is EJ Jenrette, the father of one of the frat boys. He's rich. His friends support a cancer charity that Cope established in memory of his dead wife. Jenrette convinces these friends to back out of their commitments. There are a number of ways in which Coben could have handled this stakes-building step in his story, but he chooses a late-night phone call from Cope's brother-in-law, Bob, who runs the charity:
    "What's the matter?" I