The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life

I've read quite a few books on writing while on my journey to writing my own book. Sometimes I read them because I get sick of my story, get a bad case of writer's block, and look to these books for inspiration to get me back on track. Sometimes I just want to develop my abilities, or I just read them for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a nerd).

This is one of the most amazing books I've found on developing your plot, and I'm convinced there isn't one to parallel it as far as character goes. The first three chapters are spent focusing on developing your characters. And if you answer all those questions (literally 50 pages of them) you will know your character as well as yourself. Possibly better. They will have depth, quirks, a history, a detailed physical description, a medical history, spiritual/religious beliefs and philosophies (or lack thereof), an employment background and a transcript of the grades they have gotten in every class. You know what's important to them, how they would react to any situation. If you created a very caustic character, you now know why your character is that way (beyond the boring "oh well someone broke his/her heart and now he/she hates the world), exactly how much he/she is that way, and where his or her one and only weakness might lie that lets you get through those walls. It makes you pause: "I never thought about that!" My characters grew from decent, with some depth and reality, to completely full fleshed, so that I know them better than I know most of my friends and family.

After the first two chapters of questions, there is one explaining how to apply the characterization into the plot and make the story better. Chapters on "the journey," suspense, conflict, and context are unbelievable valuable and full of good advice and ideas you might not have thought of before. The final chapter, on transcendency, helps you learn to create a book that can better stand the test of time.

I found myself getting more and more excited as I read this book, about writing my own. And while there were exercises that I sometimes stopped to do, often I was so into it that I couldn't put it down (cliche, yes, and pretty sad since it is a how-to guidebook, but I think that says something). There are exercises in each chapter helping you learn to apply principles and ideas the author has brought up and outlined, and there are examples from popular literature and movies. My only qualm with the book is that it often doesn't explain the example, just mentions the title of the movie or book. However, when it does explain the example, it does so very well, and the places where it doesn't explain them, it didn't necessarily need an example in the first place. It's like a little bonus chocolate chip in your cookie. And i'm not going to take off points because the chocolate chip wasn't big enough.

Overall, an absolutely amazing book, and I highly recommend it to all potential future novelists.

The plot thickens when the solution to a problem in a story plunges the reader deeper into the problem. The subtitle, 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, does just what it claims. This is where the author works his magic, by revealing to the reader just how you thicken the plot.

The author starts with a discussion of the characters' outer life, taking obvious life qualities and situations that involve what we do in life and has us craft characters embodying those qualities. He proceeds to relate these to character developments to turns in the plot to bring out meaningful interactions. The inner life delves into those things that motivate characters. These require more than the obvious clarifying the characters' beliefs, values and concerns. Thus thickening the characters. He describes inner-outer life discrepancies putting together a composite that does its job. This thickens the character soup still more.

The narrative involves a different bag of tricks. The author uses a clever example from the Godfather to show how the narrative may be used to establish personality. This works well while developing difficult moments and suffering. Realization works to carry mood in the story as well. These aspects of narrative technique serve to thicken the spirit that narrative generates.

Suspense and conflict provide another avenue of story development opportunity that drive the plot into a thicken state, consequently further captivating the reader. Creating suspense and raising the stakes the characters face are part of the larger scheme to drive the conflict. Consequently, the conflict sets up the initiative for suspense.

At the end, he gives us transcendency--the ability to carry an idea forward in time, making a story immortal like Romeo and Juliet or Indiana Jones.

The goal of the each segment is to illustrate ways in which an author can further develop a story, thus thickening the plot. He does this by embroidering various aspects of a character's inner and out life, laced with a strong, evolving narrative. When suspense and conflict are added, it's not hard to see how the author achieves his end.

Noah Lukeman, The Plot Thickens: Eight Ways to Bring Fiction to Life (St. Martin's, 2002)

One would probably pick this book up thinking that it's about plot. And it is, to an extent; Lukeman's belief (which I agree with) is that plot stems naturally from characters, so in actuality this is a book about character development. And that is a good thing. I've read a whole lot of novels over the years, and static characters have always been one of my complaints. Lukeman here attempts to engage budding (and established, perhaps) writers to break out of the static-character mold. Once your characters are living, breathing beings, he posits, your books will come alive on their own.

As with Lukeman's other how-to-write books, The Plot Thickens is structured as exercise and explanation, but it's much, much heavier on the exercise this time around; fully a third of the book is nothing more than Lukeman firing questions at you. And given the length of the book, this should give you an idea of how thoroughly he wants you to know your characters. He comes up with questions I'm not sure anyone's thought to ask the people they know, let alone characters in a novel. And that's Noah Lukeman's strong point: he gets you to think, not just to follow along. I have to say that I liked this one even better than The First Five Pages. If you're an aspiring writer, Noah Lukeman is a goft; use him wisely. ****

There are many books available that tell you how to write a book according to a formula. This is not one of those books. Rather than providing aspiring writers with a template for writing a formulaic, but average, novel, Noah Lukeman discusses the characteristics of great fiction and instructs his readers on how to use these characteristics to organically create their own "masterpiece". Topics of discussion include: creating realistic, 3-dimensional characters and using them to generate plot ideas; creating compelling story arcs (physical and spiritual journeys for your characters); suspense; conflict; context; and transcendency (the art of writing a "classic" novel that will stay with your reader after he or she has finished reading).

This book is very different from any writing books that I have ever seen and one which I find myself constantly returning to. Although Lukeman preaches against the "master plot" theory (that is that there is a finite number of "classic" plots and all stories can be constructed from this), I actually find that this book complements "20 Master Plots" (another of my favourite writing books) very well. When I am trying to come up with a novel idea, I find that the best situation for me is to have both of these books on the desk in front of me. One book is about writing within a framework, the other is about writing outside the framework and the combined effect is somewhere in between (which is a pretty good place to be, in my opinion). I highly recommend both of these books to all aspiring writers.

I'm only on page 24 and I'm put off by the guy's misogynist attitude. "I use 'he' predominantly and 'she' in instances where the facet is particular to a woman." Okay, so I'll just pretend most fictional characters are male...? So then he reverts to "she" when he discusses a character's "grooming" and "body language". Or "Romance: Does the ex-wife want to get back at her former husband?... Is she a prostitute trying to change her ways?" Boy, female characters sure are pathetic. It's subtle, but I can't help feeling he doesn't think highly of women, fictional or otherwise. I do like his idea that character begets plot, so I'll finish the book, but I'm disgusted and skimming it.