Fractal geometry

We all know how to write a book, yes?

You start off with some kind of incomplete and dissatisfying status quo. Then something – an inciting incident – comes along to shatter that status quo, and our protagonist is tumbled into motion.

Then – well, stuff happens. Conflict. Turbulence. Ups and downs.

Then we have a good old crisis. Everything is lost. Bond and Lizzie Bennet have lost. Goldfinger is triumphant. Darcy no longer cares for this foolish girl. Then, goodness gracious me, we have a glorious resolution, Bond defuses the bomb, and Lizzie Bennet gets a good old snog from Darcy, Goldfinger is cursing the gods or being carried off in chains, and various cads, bounders and fools all get the fates they entirely deserve.

While we’re busy setting bold styling here, there and everywhere, let’s also note that these excellent plots are powered by Big Questions. Will Lizzie ever find Mr Right? Will Bond manage to save the world?

Fractal geometry says that all these rules apply to scene construction too. That’s something I spoke about yesterday in my Build A Book webinar on scene-building, but I want to pick up on some of that webinar-goodness right now as well.

So it’s sort of obvious when you have a big showdown scene – a No, I Am Your Father type showstopper – you need a properly constructed drama. When you’ve got your protagonist wrestling with the black-cloaked antagonist on a sketchy metal platform above a seemingly bottomless pit, the reader has every right to expect conflict, crisis, resolution – the whole malarkey.

But – you need to deliver the whole malarkey with almost every scene you write.

Here, by way of example, is a short and basically trivial scene from a Fiona book. Fiona has found a mentally ill woman (Shirley) walking the streets and brings her back to psychiatric care. Here’s what happens:

I’ve not been to the Llanrwst Unit before, thank God, so need to be told the way. Shirley accompanies me peacefully enough. Glass doors seal the unit we need access to and we have to be buzzed in by a tough, but friendly looking ward sister, Joan Fredericks. She’s about my age and doesn’t know me.

She summons someone to take Shirley off wherever she needs to be. I say good-bye. She starts to mutter a good-bye, some reflex of politeness buried amidst the scatter of her thoughts.

Then, abruptly, ‘Look after Kath [Shirley’s sister]. You’ll do that, won’t you? Kath. She’s not in the system, you see. But sorry, sorry, I mustn’t . . .’

Her mind tangles up again, lost in its briars. But for that one moment, there was clarity. Blue eyes, unblinking. A steady gaze. Even her hand, I think, lost its micro-tremble.

I say, ‘Yes, Shirley, I’ll do that. I’ll be happy to.’

Off she goes. Thick black shoes on hospital vinyl.

To Fredericks, I say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her sister is there?’

‘Don’t you worry about nobody. We look after everything.’

That’s not quite an answer, but I don’t pursue it. Just nod at Shirley’s retreating back and ask, ‘What’s the diagnosis?’

Fredericks gives me the kind of stare that’s challenging my right to ask. But I’m a copper and I brought back her patient, so she says, ‘Schizophreniform condition. Formal thought disorders and all this.’ She shrugs. She’s trying to be obstructive, but she’s given me exactly the information I wanted.

‘And she’s in and out, is she? She’s not always cared for here?’

The answer’s yes and no, respectively. Shirley’s on a CTO, a Community Treatment Order, which means she’ll mostly receive care in the community. Sheltered housing. I take a note of her address.

‘Who’s her case officer?’

Fredericks folds her arms across her bosom in a way that only looks right if you’ve got one of those big, black, Jamaican bosoms, which I definitely don’t and she definitely does.

‘Thank you for returning Shirley, but I’m afraid I’m not able to divulge confidential information about patients in our care.’

I like that, actually. Like it a lot. You always worry, as a crazy person, that the people taking care of you are going to neglect your rights and, all too often, you’re right to worry. All the same, I push my warrant card at Fredericks.

‘If you involve the police, the police are involved,’ I say. A statement which gains its logical force from Leibniz’s Law, the identity of indiscernibles.

Fredericks glowers, as if Leibniz is an old enemy of hers. But she unfolds her arms and gives me a name. Mike Wiggins, a psychiatric nurse.

I say, ‘OK, thanks,’ and leave.

We’ve got no sketchy metal platforms, no bottomless pits, no sword fights, no Lords of Evil. The fate of the universe does not rest on the outcome of this encounter.

But there is a Big Question, right? Fiona wants some information. Fredericks is reluctant to give it. So the question is: will Fiona get what she wants?

The status quo (basically tranquil, but somehow dissatisfying) is there too:

Shirley accompanies me peacefully enough … [we are] buzzed in by a tough, but friendly looking ward sister, Joan Fredericks.

That’s a very status-quo-y sort of introduction. It’s peaceful, but there’s a force (the tough Joan Fredericks) which is going to prevent things flowing the way Fiona may want.

That status quo holds for a while, but Shirley’s rambling nudges Fiona to make demands of that immovable object. The nudge is this:

 ‘Look after Kath [Shirley’s sister]. You’ll do that, won’t you? Kath. She’s not in the system, you see. But sorry, sorry, I mustn’t . . .’

Her mind tangles up again, lost in its briars. But for that one moment, there was clarity. Blue eyes, unblinking. A steady gaze. Even her hand, I think, lost its micro-tremble.

I say, ‘Yes, Shirley, I’ll do that. I’ll be happy to.’

That is: Shirley asks Fiona to make her a promise and her muddled mind finds a brief but real clarity in the moment she asks. Fiona says yes and she’s now committed to what follows – this is our inciting incident.

What follows entails conflict and turbulence. This is very low level, of course. This is an early stage of the book. The only drama is a conversation between a police officer (pushy) and a nurse (resistant) where no one is even impolite.

Fiona asks for a diagnosis. Fredericks gives her something, but aims to be as unhelpful as possible. Fiona then asks for a minor follow-up and gets what she wants.

So far, the conflict is exceedingly minor – barely detectable, in fact.

But soon enough, that conflict escalates from resistance to outright refusal, in the form of a ‘big, black Jamaican bosom’ and:

‘Thank you for returning Shirley, but I’m afraid I’m not able to divulge confidential information about patients in our care.’

Woah! In the context of our scene, that’s a crisis. Remember that the Big Question propelling this scene is whether Fiona will get the information she wants, and the answer here seems to be no. That’s the Tiny Scene equivalent of Bond being lasered by Goldfinger, Lizzie being ditched by Darcy.

But – this is a perfect little story, remember, so for every crisis, we have a resolution. Which, in our case, involves the tactical deployment of a seventeenth century mathematician, who got into fights with Newton:

‘If you involve the police, the police are involved,’ I say. A statement which gains its logical force from Leibniz’s Law, the identity of indiscernibles.

Fredericks glowers, as if Leibniz is an old enemy of hers. But she unfolds her arms and gives me a name.

Now, as it happens, the resolution here is a happy one, but it doesn’t have to be. In Tiny Scene land, it doesn’t matter too much if the resolution is or is not happy: your book will have plenty of both outcomes.

There are other differences too.

The inciting incident isn’t fully delivered until 160 words into a 460-word scene: that’s far too slow if you were to stretch things out to novel-length.

Also, the tone here is gently comedic: Jamaican boobs and long-dead Germans. Those things are more or less the opposite of the swordfight-on-the-edge-of-a-precipice type scenes.

But that’s OK too. You can have a tone that’s perfectly Tiny Scene appropriate but which wouldn’t be Whole Novel appropriate. As a matter of fact, if you tell a dark crime story (like this one), then including scenes with a gentle comedy adds a light and diversity that’s probably helpful.

But really, what I want to talk about here is the fractal geometry. How all scenes – not just the Skywalker Meets Darth Vader type ones – follow the basic architecture of story.

If you’re re-reading your book and finding that something doesn’t quite feel right – that the pace feels sludgy, the book seems to be treading water – it’s possible that your Tiny Scene architecture has just collapsed.

What’s always astonishing to me is that readers are fantastically sensitive to these failures. If you have even one scene that fails to deliver on this basic architecture, the reader will feel it. If you have a section of the book that has two or three such failures, you’ll permanently injure the reader’s relationship with the book.

So check your scenes. Do they obey (in miniature) the rules of story? If they do, they’re good to go. If not, then fix them. I honestly doubt if I can find a single coherent scene in one of my Fiona books that doesn’t basically follow the rules I’ve sketched out here. That’s how much it matters.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Your Tiny Scene

OK, same as our Build Your Book Month session yesterday, I want you to find a Tiny Scene in your book – maximum of 6-700 words in total, but the shorter and more inconsequential the better. (It’s fine to choose a longer scene, and to cut it down, just for the purposes of Feedback Friday.) Post it in Townhouse here.

Then explain to us what the Big Question in your scene is.

Then paste the whole of your Tiny Scene, but explain the story architecture by inserting these bold headings into your text:

Status Quo

Inciting Incident

Conflict & Turbulence

Crisis

Resolution

What we want to see is that you have a beautifully intact story in place, even in a scene that’s small and apparently unimportant.

Got that? Of course you have.

Crisis? There’s no crisis. Only the sweet, sweet balm of resolution.

Til soon.

Harry