Free Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell

recoup the investment and make a little profit besides?
    Be ruthless in your evaluation. Does an eight-hundred-page fictional rendition of a few years of your life hold much interest for a circle wider than your immediate family? It may, but tell your investor-self why.
    Are you entranced by the romance of fish gutting? Explain this to your investor-self.
    And do a little market research. You ought to subscribe to
Publishers Weekly
and keep up with the business. What is being published? Each issue of
Publishers Weekly
lists “Forecasts,” short reviews of upcoming books. Ask yourself what the publisher sees in these plots.
    Don’t copy. Just be aware that much of the potential of a published work is in the author’s original voice and vision.
    Note, too, that your assessment of potential need not be with the largest possible audience in mind. Genre writers know they are limiting themselves to a distinct group of potential readers. Even within genres, there are subgroups. Many science fiction writers, for example, are not writing “hard” science fiction, but rather books about deeply held philosophical ideas. They know that such novels appeal to some sci-fi readers and not to others. That’s fine. They are motivated by
passion
, which we’ve already discussed.
    Looking at potential, then, is just a tool to help you make a decision. It is not a “rule.” As with any tool, use it wisely.
Precision
    Finally, be precise in your plot goals. If you are passionate about your idea and reasonably certain about the potential it has to reach readers, trim away anything that is not in line with that potential. If the plot is going to be for a suspense audience, aim it there. Don’t anticipate using anything else that will distract from that goal.
THE CASE OF
MIDNIGHT
    I have used Dean Koontz’s 1989 thriller,
Midnight
, in my suspense writing class because it was a runaway bestseller (Koontz’s first No. 1 hardcover on the
New York Times
list), and it uses many of the techniques discussed. I’ll tell you what you need to know about the novel, but if you want the full benefit I suggest you get yourself a copy and read it through at some point.
    Since this chapter is about getting ideas, you might ask yourself how Koontz got the idea for
Midnight
. We can only speculate, but here are some distinct possibilities. More than one may have played a part:
Predicting a trend. Koontz often uses the abuse of new technologies in his books. In 1989, he anticipated nanotechnology (tiny, biologically implanted computer chips) and expanded on it brilliantly.
Villain. The villain, Thomas Shadduck, has one of the more bizarre and startling introductions in
Midnight
. He is a supervillain, humanized. The plot could have been written around him. Alfred Hitchcock once said that the strength of a suspense story is equal to the strength of the villain. Perhaps Koontz started with Shadduck and wrote the plot from his machinations.
Title. The word “midnight” conjures up all sorts of images, usually of the dark and sinister variety. In fact, the novel takes place mostly at night, during a short period of time, and midnight is also the time when something very bad is going to be triggered. All of this may have occurred to Koontz based on the title alone.
A great prologue. Many page-turners begin with a mysterious, shocking, or otherwise gripping prologue. The
Midnight
prologue introduces a character who is jogging at night and who is killed by a mysterious beast at the end of the prologue. We never see her again. But we are left wondering about the cause of her death (as, indeed, are the lead characters). Koontz may have just written this prologue off the top of his head, and only later figured out what to do with it.
Stealing a plot. This is my nominee for most likely device Koontz used to come up with the plot for
Midnight
. Reading it, I was struck that here we had a mixture of two classic plots