Posts
C is for C.A.R.
If ...
If you need a good story for your novel. Do you need a good story?
Of course you do. All authors do.
Well, get a car ...
C ..... conflict
A ..... action
R ..... resolution.
Duh! Right. All novels need those three ingredients.
1.) But sometimes the simple principles are the most profound. And C.A.R. is one of those.
You see, it's just not your novel as a whole that needs Conflict, Action, and Resolution. Each of your chapters needs them as well.
And to carry the locomotion analogy a bit further, each chapter must end with a hook, leading the reader anxiously to the next.
Think of the teeth in the sprocket wheel of a bicycle : each tooth must seamlessly fit into the next link in the bicycle chain to propel the bike forward. So, too, must each chapter in your novel do the same.
Example :
In the chapter, BLACK MIRROR, SURE DEATH,
in my WIP of the next Victor Standish novel :
Victor, his ghoul friend, Alice, and the ghost of President John Adams have escaped the ice palace of the revenant Theodora. They did so by entering her cursed Black Mirror which led them to an endless, lifeless cemetery world ...
one with seemingly no exit.
Just as they discover that, Alice's stomach starts to growl badly and her voice becomes the gravel it does only when she is ravenous.
And Victor's is the only human flesh in that entire dimension.
Alice turns towards Victor, a growl deep in her throat and her fingers outstretched.
End of chapter.
Makes you want to jump to the next one, doesn't it?
2.) Your novel is much like a onion, too.
Each layer of your novel must bring tears and spice to your reader's mind.
Conflict. Action. Resolution. All three must be contained, as much as you can arrange it, on each page. Impossible?
It better not be ... because one page is sometimes all you are going to have to entice your prospective reader in a bookstore.
3.) You must think of your novel as a microscope :
The throbbing life of conflict, action, and resolution must resonate in each sentence as much as you can craft it to be ... especially the first sentence of your novel and each following chapter.
{Hurricane Katrina lashed the French Quarter as the sobbing mother sat on the curb, cradling her dying baby.
In that one sentence, you have painted locale, time, conflict, action, and a hope within the reader for a rescuing resolution.}
All in the first sentence.
{General Eisenhower walked angrily to the prison cell of Adolp Hitler.
In that one short sentence, you have painted locale, time, genre (alternate history obviously) with conflict, action, and a question of what kind of resolution could there possibly be to this scenario.}
4.) Your first sentence is all the introduction to your agent you're probably going to get.
Conflict, action, and resolution must resonate like a tuning fork in that one important paragraph. In the thirty seconds it takes to read the first sentence, first paragraph is the length of time most agents take to make up their mind.
5.) C.A.R. not only lets you know what to include but ...
what to exclude :
everything that does not pertain to the conflict, the action, and the resolution in each paragraph, page, chapter, and final whole of the novel.
No matter how beautiful the prose or how insightful the character study, if it does not propel the story forward using C.A.R. --
then it has to go. Ouch.
Suffering not only builds character, but it builds a good story, too.
***
