THE WRITER’s COOKBOOK
(Part 1 of 4)

by James Lincoln Warren

I am on vacation for the next three Mondays, so during my absence I am offering The Writer’s Cookbook, which originally appeared in an earlier incarnation of The Scribbler and got lots of requests for permission to reproduce–although why anybody would ask me for permission to reproduce is still bothering me.

Part I: Thickening Plot

There are no sure-fire recipes for good stories, and taking a cookbook approach—by which I mean slavishly following step-by-step instructions without the intervention of imagination—to writing a story is likely to produce bland fare with little or no nourishment. However, as metaphor is a fiction writer’s stock in trade, there are nevertheless some useful parallels to be made between making food and telling tales.

Plot is nothing more or less than the sequence of events portrayed in a story. Plot can be so thin that it might not seem to be there at all, or it can be so thick as to be indigestible. Plot problems are of various kinds. There is the problem that a plot may not be credible. There is the problem of maintaining consistency between events, usually referred to as continuity. The biggest problems described to me by my fellow scribes, however, usually have to do with having enough plot to keep driving the action to maintain the reader’s interest.

Let’s face it: most basic plots are pretty thin and easily dispensed with. Boy meets girl. Criminal murders victim. Guy goes on long trip. Small furry-footed humanoid destroys powerful evil magic talisman in volcano. And so forth.

What we need to do here, folks, is to toss in more ingredients so that the plot thickens.

That sometimes means taking something simple and making it appear complicated. Mystery writers do this all the time by various methods. One way is to present critical information out of sequence. (In the mystery genre, we frequently call these elements clues, but the idea is the same no matter what genre you’re struggling with.) This has the effect of presenting information out of context, so the full import of the information isn’t recognized until the context is later built around it.

Another means is to introduce obstructions in the character’s path, especially during development. These obstructions can be any number of things, from characters to physical barriers. Say you’re writing a Boy meets Girl story. Some examples of obstructions are:

(a) Girl’s Dad,
(b) Girl is in Reykjavik while Boy is in Kathmandu, and
(3) Boy speaks only Pashto while Girl speaks only Quechua.

Any of them will work and give the writer hours of satisfaction trying to figure out how to work around them.

One of my favorites is to deceive the reader into thinking one thing is happening when there’s really something else going on the entire time. The reader thinks that the story is Guy Goes on a Long Trip, when in fact it’s Criminal Murders Victim, and Guy’s journey is just a means to get to the scene of the crime.

You can also teach the reader something he doesn’t know much about, for example, wristwatches and their fetishists, and intersperse the action with valuable nuggets concerning horological fetishism. (But this can be very dangerous: just don’t let the wristwatch become more important than the story itself.) This is frequently done by using an unusual setting, which is sort of the entire theory behind writing historicals or space opera.

So to review. Use a basic plot. Tell parts of it out of order. Put something in the way of your character. Fool the audience. And show them how smart you are. Just don’t get caught doing any of this—the instant a reader detects your hand in things, you’ve lost him.

But otherwise, admire how thick your plot is getting.

Next we will consider flavoring characters.