A Conversation with Author, Coach, Editor, and Teacher C.S. Lakin
C.S. Lakin is an author, coach, editor, teacher, and more, and on March 24, she’ll be presenting “10 Key Scenes That Frame Up Your Novel” at Book Passage, a workshop for the California Writers Club Marin. (Find out more and register at cwcmarin.com.)
Earlier this week, I spoke with her on the phone — she lives in Morgan Hill — to learn more her about her writing and her workshops.
When she answered the phone, she said, “This is Susanne.”
Q: I assume Susanne is the “S” in C.S. How did you come to be called C.S. when you so enthusiastically call yourself “Susanne.”
I started writing fantasy and used a pen name because many fantasy fans are male and most of my protagonists are male. I wonder if J.K. Rowling would have been as successful if she wrote under the name Joanne.
Q: My first question, well, my second one now, is about you — your journey to becoming a writer, editor, teacher. How did you come to focus on structure?
First of all, I’m very excited about doing this workshop. I look forward to meeting you all.
I’ve been writing for 30 years — it took me 23 years to get my first book contract. As for what got me started, well, I always loved editing. When I started doing that professionally, about 14 years ago, I got all riled up because I had clients who wanted me to polish their novels, but so many of them were structured poorly. The premises didn’t hold up. The characters didn’t ring true. All those important foundational elements were subpar. I was being asked to put frosting on a bad cake.
I began focusing on critiquing — not line editing. I’m interested in story. Novels have an expected structure, very much based on five turning points. Most writers know them intuitively, but they don’t necessarily think about them.
I encourage writers to take a different approach — what I call a layering method. We start with your first ten important scenes, then layer in the next ten.
Q: Can you give a sneak preview of one of the ten scenes you’ll be talking about?
Most writers know you have five turning points — an inciting incident, midpoint, dark night of the soul, climax, resolution. We’re going beyond that.
Michael Hauge, a Hollywood story consultant, says that modern stories are simple: they’re about one character pursuing a short-term goal. Every movie and every book has this same basic structure. You start with the setup, and then you go to your inciting incident, which triggers the story, moves the character out of what they were doing. If it’s a mystery, that’s when the dead body shows up.
Unfortunately, all too often, beginning writers spend half the book doing backstory.
Q: How do writers harness the formula without making it too formulaic? We’ve all read books or watched movies where the formula is too obvious.
People love formula. If you write Harlequin romances, there’s a strict formula. The danger is trying to be too original and rejecting the formula. Readers expect structure. They get antsy if it’s not there. They know intuitively there should be an inciting incident early on.
I used to buck the whole idea of structure. I wanted to be original. I didn’t understand structure is not only necessary but desirable. Think about a building. If you follow engineering principles — foundation, shear walls, and so on, you can create a basic structure that could turn into a fancy house, a restaurant, a museum. How you style it is what makes them different. But they all have that solid foundation.
Screenwriting is extremely precise — if you’re writing a two-hour movie, it’s 120 pages. A page a minute. When you turn to page 60, the midpoint must be there. When we watch movies, we’re so trained, we expect the midpoint right at that moment.
I’ve become a firm believer in structure after critiquing hundreds of novels.
Q: What are you writing these days?
I’m writing a sci-fi thriller called Lightning Man, so I’ve been reading and diagramming books. Best sellers.
I wrote a summary of each of six books, mapped out each scene. Across the top, I wrote scene 1, scene 2, scene 3, and so on. And then a scene synopsis for each book. I could see that what happened in all six books was the same. Usually, the first scene was high action that highlighted the protagonist, showcased their skills, abilities. Then the next scene something happened that changed everything, kicked us into the story.
The twist in Lightning Man is that the protagonist, who has been struck by lightning many times, has suffered memory loss, and he doesn’t know, until the end, that early in his life, he killed his 9-year-old brother while out on a boat. He thinks he’s an only child. He is angry at his parents for splitting up, but he doesn’t understand why. Meanwhile, I’m dropping hints along the way that tell another story. Other people know about what happened with his brother, but he doesn’t. Until he does.
Q: One last question. You’ve written dozens of books. You’re a writing coach and editor and blogger. You teach workshops. When do you sleep?
I sleep plenty. I also write fast. A lot of times I’ll write a novel in two or three months. I pick up an index card and write the scene. That’s because I’ve already mapped out the structure.
As important as structure is, I would add that there are two equally important things you need. One is an amazing concept. Something unique. If I tell you my elevator pitch, you should say “wow.”
I recently wrote a dark comedy The Menopause Murders. The protagonist is a woman suffering from menopause, and when she kills people, it relieves her symptoms. Her husband is the lead detective assigned to catch The Tacoma Terror. That’s a wow premise. He knows it’s her. She knows he knows. It’s a comedy. I have a co-writer, a very funny man. The book has publication offers, and you can see a sneak peak at themenopausemurders.com.
The other thing you need is a twist. Something surprising at the end of the story.
Like The Sixth Sense. Like The Planet of the Apes, where Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty in the sand, and we learn that the planet of the apes is really Earth.
You want to have this I-didn’t-see-that-coming moment.
Q: Like Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent?
That’s exactly what I was thinking of. A great twist that’s at the heart of the book. Something that the reader does not suspect but almost seems inevitable once you see it.
Q: But how do you create that twist? I’m thinking about the novel I’ve just about finished, which has a strong premise, but no twist as dramatic as Presumed Innocent.
The trick is how can you make things seem different than they really are.
A great example is Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. The premise is that the parents have a young girl with leukemia, and they have another baby for only one reason — to be a donor for the older sister.
The story starts with the younger sister suing her parents. There’s a high-stakes legal battle. In the prologue, we’ve seen this younger sister, Anna, thinking about how she might kill her older sister. We think Anna hates her sister. The twist is that the older sister, fighting leukemia, has begged Anna, please kill me. But Anna doesn’t want to. The beginning is misleading, on purpose. You think the whole book through that she hates her sister, because she’s thinking about killing her at the beginning. But the author misleads the reader, so the twist is surprising. That’s what I’m aiming for in Lightning Man.
To fool your reader, you might make a list of things readers assume. What can you make readers think it’s true, when it’s not?
—
[Register for “10 Key Scenes That Frame Up Your Novel” here.]
How Memorable Setting Can Advance Plot, Reveal Character, Echo Theme, and More
[This post is distilled from a November 2018 CWC-Marin workshop I led at Book Passage in Corte Madera.]
Flash Flood
In my first novel—Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher—my protagonist, Tomas Zamara, the mayor of Albuquerque, is going for a hike with his new woman, the radiant and volatile Tory Singer, who came came to New Mexico for a retreat in the desert because she wanted to start a new life.
It’s 2008, and Tomas has just begun his new role as New Mexico chair of the John McCain for president campaign. Five years earlier, the mayor’s wife Vera disappeared. A lawyer, she had represented some ruthless people connected to the Mexican drug cartel, and the speculation was that she was murdered because of that connection.
For most of that five years, Tomas held on to hope that she was still alive, and even though he was handsome and charismatic, he had remained celibate and had not even gone on a date with another woman. But as the novel starts, he meets Tory, and they have intense chemistry. But Tomas is reserved—they’ve kissed, but no sex yet.
He takes her on a hike to one of his favorite places—Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico—a dramatic series of narrow slot canyons in bright red and gold and orange. They’ve turned onto a side trail where it’s narrow enough they can almost touch both canyon walls at the same time. A little creek runs beside the trail.
It’s a gorgeous day. They’re gabbing, laughing, teasing. Suddenly, the blue sky disappears behind storm clouds, then comes thunder and lightning, then rain, then hail, then a flash flood.
First the water is around their ankles, then higher, and they run, and Tory trips and falls in the churning water, and she’s frightened and immobile and Tomas has to be a hero. He makes her climb up the steep canyon wall to higher ground. They make it to a ledge above the flooding canyon, but it’s raining hard and they’re freezing. The temperature has plummeted. They find their way into an old cave, where the native Pueblo people used to live, and they’re shivering, and Tomas, a boy scout, knows that one way to warm up if you have hypothermia is to take their wet clothes off and get their bodies close. They end up making love on the floor of the cave.
The dramatic events of the environment do double duty to reveal their characters. Tory is frightened and Tomas has to take charge in order to save them. Later, in the cave, she is the one who initiates the lovemaking and he is resistant at first, but as she says to him, your body is not resisting.
So we have a dramatic scene that could only happen in this setting, this slot canyon. The lovemaking advances their relationship to a new level. Already, the setting is doing a lot of work pushing the story forward.
Then, a chapter later, bones of Tomas’ disappeared wife are discovered in a wash— that’s where the book title, Bones in the Wash, comes from. The same flash flood that Tomas and Tory escaped from washed up a skeleton fifty miles away.
Now the slot canyon setting and the flash flood have also jumpstarted the plot. Now comes an investigation and, as the husband, Tomas is a prime suspect.
It’s unusual to be able do this much with your setting—to reveal characters, advance the relationship, and introduce a murder mystery to the story. I’ve tried to replicate this kind of chapter, and haven’t been able to. It’s an excellent example of a “setting that works.”
What is Setting?
The most memorable and effective setting is more than a pretty, or gritty description. It’s lean and strong because it’s working hard. Doing two or more jobs. Not just showing the reader where the story is taking place, but also advancing your plot, unifying various elements of your story, revealing character, echoing theme, setting mood, and more.
The primary job of setting, of course, is still most important—to immerse readers in the scene. So they can visualize it, feel it, smell it. They are there with your characters.
There are going to be times when the setting does nothing more and that’s fine. But as often as possible, you want your setting to be doing more than one job.
Eight “Jobs” Setting Can Do
1. SETTING ADVANCES STORY.
(a) The setting is an obstacle the protagonist needs to overcome.
In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Alec Leamus and Liz Gold plan to escape East Berlin by climbing over the Berlin Wall. The wall is present throughout the book—it’s part of the zeitgeist of the Cold War—and, at the end of the book, they have to climb over it to escape.
In Grapes of Wrath, the Joads, a poor family of farmers leaves drought-stricken Dust Bowl Oklahoma for new opportunities in sunny California, only to find low wages, an oversupply of labor, and exploited workers.
(b) A change in setting creates danger—and creates new plot development.
In the Bones in the Wash example above, first the flash flood in the slot canyon threatens Tomas Zamara and Tory Singer, and he saves her life by lifting her to higher ground. Then that same flash flood washes up the bones of Tomas’ long-disappeared wife, creating a new plot development.
(c) The ticking clock builds suspense.
Whether a political campaign, a bomb in downtown L.A., or an upcoming wedding, the ticking clock create tension. An effective, though often overused, technique.
In Failsafe, U.S. planes armed with nuclear weapons have flown past the fail-safe point and are headed toward Moscow. As the bombers cross the Bering Sea, the president and his advisors huddle in a bomb shelter under the White House to try and stop a nuclear war.
2. SETTING DRIVES THE STORY.
The setting itself is the story. It’s what the protagonist must face and overcome.
A Perfect Storm is a classic man-against-the-sea story, where the crew of the Andrea Gail is lost at sea during a storm in the North Atlantic. The men’s fight to survive in the treacherous conditions in the North Atlantic is the central story.
Other examples are Moby Dick, Jurassic Park, The Martian, and Life of Pi.
3. SETTING DEFINES CHARACTER, CHANGES CHARACTER.
The characters are so defined by the setting, they couldn’t exist elsewhere.
In Lonesome Dove, two retired Texas Rangers and their fellow cowboys drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana, facing bandits, Indians, disease, and the harshness of the landscape. The challenges of the Old West breed a certain kind of character—a loner, macho, self-reliant, independent.
In Bonfire of the Vanities, bond trader Sherman McCoy gets himself into trouble in racially charged 1980s New York City.
Informing or revealing character is one of the simplest second jobs for setting to take on, because place is always filtered through character viewpoints and emotions. What characters see and hear tells us who they are. They might be walking down the same street and one notices people’s shoes, and another is looking up at the dark clouds and worrying that she doesn’t have an umbrella.
One strategy is to show how your character adapts when the setting changes or moves. Another is when the setting has not changed, but the character notices or responds to something new.
Setting often provides an opportunity to trigger an emotion in characters.
4. SETTING ESTABLISHES THE RULES OF YOUR UNIVERSE.
For historical fiction or sci-fi/fantasy, the writer needs to describe the rules.
In The Martian, a dust storm on Mars forces the crew of astronauts to evacuate and they leave behind Mark Watney, thinking he had died. But he’s alive, and now stranded and alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive.
Danger: Sometimes too much of the reader’s attention is devoted to figuring out the rules. Not enough emotion or character development.
5. SETTING UNIFIES THE STORY.
Some books have multiple storylines that are connected by a common backdrop.
In Hotel, Arthur Hailey weaves together stories from a variety of characters who are staying in a New Orleans hotel.
Another common way setting can unify a story is by establishing a place, like a bell tower in the town’s central square, that pops in a number of times during the book. Ideally, it will also play a role in advancing the plot or revealing character.
6. SETTING CONVEYS MOOD AND TONE.
Weather is often used to unify story by conveying mood and tone.
All the characters experience the same weather.
In The English Patient, the desert setting and the hot winds evoke mood, character, tension, theme, story.
“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East.”
7. SETTING ECHOES THEME.
In All the King’s Men, one of Robert Penn Warren’s themes is how the past impacts the present. And yet, on the first page, he describes how when there are crashes on the Louisiana highways, they put a cross along the side of the road with a skull and crossbones to warn drivers, but then the kudzu vines cover up the crosses. We don’t learn from the past.
8. SETTING AS METAPHOR.
In The Great Gatsby, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents Gatsby’s hope and dreams for the future, a guiding light to lead him to his goal.
Gatsby also includes, as part of the setting, a billboard of eyes without a face — the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an optometrist.
The eyes of God? Or, for Nick Carroway, the impartial observer he cannot be.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.
Another example is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the Mississippi River is a apt metaphor.
Setting Doing More Than One Job
In case I haven’t hammered you over the head with this enough, the best setting does more than immerse your reader in the scene. It can also advance plot, reveal character, unify disparate stories. Sometimes it can do several of those jobs at once.
Here’s a screenshot from my slide deck that includes all eight ways I’ve talked about above. (There are even more, but these are the main ones.)
Carefree Writing, Deliberate Editing
While I was pulling this workshop together, I was also editing my novel-in-progress, a family drama about euthanasia, and, lo and behold, there were many places where I had written setting that was not working second or third jobs. Now I’m on the lookout for such passages, and I’m either cutting them or making them better.
It’s hard to be so deliberate about setting when writing a first draft. I know that sometimes I end up echoing theme in my setting without being aware of what I’m doing. My subconscious is doing the work during my more carefree writing of my first draft.
Editing is the place to examine setting more closely and figure out whether you need it or not. There are exceptions, of course, but the rule I’m trying to follow and I urge you to try as well is that if it’s not doing any more than describing your backdrop, take it out. Or give it another job.
The best setting is more than a pretty, or gritty description. It’s lean and strong, because it’s working two or more jobs—pushing your story along, helping us get to know your protagonist better. Join us for Setting That Works on November 11.
Thank you to the participants, presenters, and organizers of the Marin Writers Conference for an inspiring and stimulating day at Book Passage.
Here are a few takeaways from the presentations and discussions yesterday. (Note to participants: Please add your takeaways in the comments section below or send them to me at marincwc@gmail.com and I’ll add them.)
Use Beta Readers as Your Street Team
David Kudler, author Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale, co-presented “The Promise (and Peril) of Self-Publishing” along with Ruth Schwartz, and told the story of how he used beta readers to become his street team to promote his book.
Through GoodReads, he recruited 60 beta readers, promising them each a $10 Amazon gift certificate. They not only gave him valuable feedback on his book, as well as data that helped him market the book, but once he launched his book and reached out to them again, many of them recommended it to their friends and circles.
“These readers,” he said, “were lots better than Facebook friends. They were committed to reading the book and got the word out to people I wouldn’t have been able to reach on my own.”
Here’s a link to Ruth and David’s presentation. They are members of Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), which meets the second Saturday of each month in Novato. For more see baipa.org.
Humor Helps Sell Books
Michael Larsen’s entertaining keynote presentation covered a lot of ground, from how today is the best time ever to be a writer even though there’s a book published every 25 seconds (and the average sale of an ebook is 200 copies) to how forgiving writing is. Only the last draft counts.
He also talked about the importance of humor and entertaining your readers, and modeled that by peppering his talk with jokes from the New Yorker cartoon and elsewhere. Here are some I liked best.
Henny Youngman: “I read about the evils of drinking. So I gave up reading.”
Elmore Leonard: “What kind of writing makes the most money? Ransom notes.”
Al Capone: “Anyone who sleeps in the trunk of a car deserves to be shot.”
Carrie Fisher: “The trouble with instant gratification is it takes too long.”
One criminal in bar to another: “I tried victimless crime. But I’m a people person.”
Start Your Scenes and Chapters (and Book) as Late as Possible
Editor Mary Rakow led a brilliant workshop on “Making Your First Pages Shine,” where, together, we edited nine one- to two-page submissions. (Well, she did most of it.)
One recurring element she focused on was how the narrator can show empathy and tenderness for the character, and how important it is to make the book tender. How much of the world we create comes from tone and compassion. Which brings in the reader.
She also urged readers to jump into scenes. To start the chapters, and the book, as late as possible.
Another interesting element that came with several of the submissions was how during the most urgent parts of our story, you don’t want details like the color of the coat to intrude. “I pull my coat in closer” is stronger than “I pull my black coat in closer.”
She also mentioned how often we have a tendency to say something beautifully in dialogue, then say it again, as if we aren’t confident the reader will get it. Best to take that second phrase out.
The last part of the day was the pitching to agents, and we started with introductions from the four agents and tips on how to pitch and query. We heard from Kimberly Cameron, Dorian Maffei, Jennifer March Soloway, and Carlisle Webber.
Carlisle Webber from Fuse Literary Agency said you want your pitch to lead up to the “oh shit” moment. She used the story of The Martian as an example. The Mars expedition is on Mars and there’s a fierce windstorm that forces crew to flee back to the ship and they have to leave behind one crew members who has clearly died in the storm. After they take off, he wakes up. Oh shit!
She also counseled patience because it often takes several months for agents to respond to queries. “I need to read 50 pages to know if it’s good, but I only need one to know it’s bad.”
At our September 24 meeting, David Corbett packed a book’s worth of insightful advice on developing characters who will drive your story. As a matter of fact, he’s written that book, The Art of Character, which Elizabeth Brundage calls “a writer’s bible.”
He covered far too much to distill into this summary, so here are just a few highlights. You can read his book for more. (He’s a frequent speaker in the Bay Area and he’ll be at Book Passage again on October 8.)
Every character doesn’t need to change, but most do. Usually, protagonists are faced by a series of challenges that force them to do something they might not otherwise have done. They change. Like Rick in Casablanca, who has a wound curdling into a flaw that he corrects.(Some characters never change. Think Homer Simpson. In almost every episode, Homer has some brilliant idea, then he falls on his face, and the next episode he’s back where he started. The situation changes, but the character does not.)
Corbett identifies four characteristics that we need to identify for our important characters — lack, yearning, resistance, and desire.
Lack — something is missing from their life. A connection with their father. Material success. Love.
Yearning is the deep-seated need the character has. What kind of person do they want to be? In every scene, the character is trying to move to satisfy that yearning. (Of course, they are usually thwarted.)Yearning is tricky because there’s this concern that if you name it too specifically, you kill it. Sometimes a symbol is better, like the green light on Daisy’s dock in the Great Gatsby. It represents his hopes and dreams for the future.Usually the yearning comes first and the lack comes from not satisfying that yearning.But the lack can come first as well. We all experience some of that growing up, especially if we have younger siblings. As a baby, we’re fed all the time, we’re at the center of our parents’ universe, then along comes another baby and we’re not so special anymore.
The big question for most protagonists is, if they’re yearning for something, why aren’t you doing it?Which brings us to resistance.
Resistance can come in a variety of forms — weakness (laziness, cynicism, lack of confidence), wounds (broken heart, death of a parent), limitations (too young, too poor), opposition (strict father, cultural norms), and/or flaws (lack of courage, inability to tell the truth).
The strongest characters have external goals tied to their internal yearning. They have to defuse the bomb about the destroy Sausalito and prove to themselves and their loved ones that they’re courageous.Lots of characters in thrillers face daunting challenges. The challenge for the author is to answer why they persevere? Why not just clock out and leave it for the next shift?
How do you make the stakes matter? It needs to be more than just defusing the bomb. Maybe the characters can’t live with themselves if they fail. That’s not who they are.
How much back story does your story need and where do you put it? Ideally, backstory is behavior. Your characters acts in particular ways because of what happened in the past. If possible, show that past in a scene instead of explaining it.
End your book in a way that is both inevitable and surprising. (Easier said than done, right?)
All characters have to polar impulses — to pursue the promise of life, and to avoid the pain of life.If you’ve gotten your ass kicked too many times, you decide avoiding pain is the path you want to follow.
Here are some questions you might ask for all your main characters? When were they most afraid? What was their moment of greatest sorrow? How about their moment of greatest forgiveness? When was their golden moment, their greatest success? Was anyone else there?
These short takeaways don’t do justice to the wealth of valuable insights Corbett shared. I have read and studied his book and I recommend it. He has helped me make my characters richer and more compelling.
Next month, I’ll be presenting When Plots Collide — Create Suspense by Weaving Multiple Storylines.
This workshop will be more focused on mapping out plot, but of course, as Corbett would say, what happens in the story has to organically grow out of the character’s yearnings and wounds and passions. If you create a plot that doesn’t honor the characters, it won’t ring true.
Here are a few highlights of Tanya Egan GIbson’s presentation to the California Writers Club–Marin on Sunday, January 22. Tanya is author of How to Buy a Love of Reading, a developmental and line editor, and former CWC-Marin board member.
“Show versus tell is on my mind a lot,” Tanya says at the start. As an editor, she says, she reads a lot of manuscripts that get the show and tell mix wrong. For example, the author shows dalmatians because she likes dalmatians, but the book is about flowers. Or the author tells about someone thinking about their dead parent — by telling, the author leaves the reader cold. Showing that in scene allows for more emotional richness.
Extraordinary moments need to be shown, she says, ordinary moments do not. One of the best ways to bore your reader is a step-by-step showing of ordinary moments.
She walked up the steps, put her keys in the door, walked into her foyer.
Unless something unusual is going to happen, like a yeti eating her when she opens the door, or the door is unlocked and it’s supposed to be locked, we don’t need to see those details.
She reminds us that readers have read a lot of books already, and they know that when you’re showing something, it’s going to be meaningful. Or should be.
This is especially true with dialogue. No one wants to hear your boring conversation. Dialogue stands in for a longer conversation. You show the highlights, the nugget, not the whole thing.
Tanya edits romance novels, and editing sex has taught her a great deal about show versus tell. The general rule in contemporary romance is that the good stuff is shown.
People are reading these romance books because they want to see the erotic parts. But how much do you show? “I hate repetition,” Tanya says. She doesn’t want to read the same sex scene five times. So there has to be variation. “In romances, people do it many, many times in one night, but you don’t want to show all of that to the reader.”
That’s where telling come in. Here’s an example: “Last night had been everything she’d hoped.” And then you segue back into now and show what happens in the morning.
Another mistake authors make is showing scenes that happen to peripheral characters. It’s not that you can’t do it, but the act of showing elevates the scene’s importance, telegraphs that is going to come to something.
She led us in some writing exercises, where we wrote about mundane activities like taking out the garbage. That’s when I stopped taking notes.
— Our next meeting, on February 26, features Amelia Beamer, author of the Loving Dead — one of Barnes & Noble’s top ten zombie novels of the past decade — speaking on “Creating Narrative Tension.” Hope you can join us.
C.S. Lakin is an author, coach, editor, teacher, and more, and on March 24, she’ll be presenting “10 Key Scenes That Frame Up Your Novel” at Book Passage, a workshop for the California Writers Club Marin. (Find out more and register at cwcmarin.com.)
In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Alec Leamus and Liz Gold plan to escape East Berlin by climbing over the Berlin Wall. The wall is present throughout the book—it’s part of the zeitgeist of the Cold War—and, at the end of the book, they have to climb over it to escape.
In Grapes of Wrath, the Joads, a poor family of farmers leaves drought-stricken Dust Bowl Oklahoma for new opportunities in sunny California, only to find low wages, an oversupply of labor, and exploited workers.
In the Bones in the Wash example above, first the flash flood in the slot canyon threatens Tomas Zamara and Tory Singer, and he saves her life by lifting her to higher ground. Then that same flash flood washes up the bones of Tomas’ long-disappeared wife, creating a new plot development.
In Failsafe, U.S. planes armed with nuclear weapons have flown past the fail-safe point and are headed toward Moscow. As the bombers cross the Bering Sea, the president and his advisors huddle in a bomb shelter under the White House to try and stop a nuclear war.
A Perfect Storm is a classic man-against-the-sea story, where the crew of the Andrea Gail is lost at sea during a storm in the North Atlantic. The men’s fight to survive in the treacherous conditions in the North Atlantic is the central story.
In Lonesome Dove, two retired Texas Rangers and their fellow cowboys drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana, facing bandits, Indians, disease, and the harshness of the landscape. The challenges of the Old West breed a certain kind of character—a loner, macho, self-reliant, independent.
In Bonfire of the Vanities, bond trader Sherman McCoy gets himself into trouble in racially charged 1980s New York City. 
In The Martian, a dust storm on Mars forces the crew of astronauts to evacuate and they leave behind Mark Watney, thinking he had died. But he’s alive, and now stranded and alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive.
In Hotel, Arthur Hailey weaves together stories from a variety of characters who are staying in a New Orleans hotel.
In The English Patient, the desert setting and the hot winds evoke mood, character, tension, theme, story.
In All the King’s Men, one of Robert Penn Warren’s themes is how the past impacts the present. And yet, on the first page, he describes how when there are crashes on the Louisiana highways, they put a cross along the side of the road with a skull and crossbones to warn drivers, but then the kudzu vines cover up the crosses. We don’t learn from the past.
In The Great Gatsby, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock represents Gatsby’s hope and dreams for the future, a guiding light to lead him to his goal.
David Kudler, author 
Editor Mary Rakow led a brilliant workshop on “Making Your First Pages Shine,” where, together, we edited nine one- to two-page submissions. (Well, she did most of it.) 
“Show versus tell is on my mind a lot,” Tanya says at the start. As an editor, she says, she reads a lot of manuscripts that get the show and tell mix wrong. For example, the author shows dalmatians because she likes dalmatians, but the book is about flowers. Or the author tells about someone thinking about their dead parent — by telling, the author leaves the reader cold. Showing that in scene allows for more emotional richness. 
People are reading these romance books because they want to see the erotic parts. But how much do you show? “I hate repetition,” Tanya says. She doesn’t want to read the same sex scene five times. So there has to be variation. “In romances, people do it many, many times in one night, but you don’t want to show all of that to the reader.”