Start with a Bang, End with a Bigger Bang

Sechin Tower

@SechinTower

Sometimes my writing students ask how to end their stories. I give them my best piece of writing advice: start with an explosion and end with a bigger explosion.

I know it sounds a bit facetious, especially because the “explosion” part only works with certain genres (although, in my humble opinion, many romance novels could only be improved by the addition of a fireball or two). Even so, there’s a kernel of truth in the “explosion sandwich” writing model, because it shows that the ending (whether it contains an actual “kablooey” or not) should be connected to the beginning.

The key is to set up some kind of question in the beginning so that you can resolve it at the end. For example: how will we stop the mad bomber? Does anyone know where he’ll strike next? And why is this unmarked package ticking?

If (for some strange reason) you prefer literature with less collateral damage, you could do the same thing without explosions. Will your main character ever learn to love? How much will the mother sacrifice for her family? Where will this average Joe draw the line? Once you have the question, you know the answer is the end, and the end is the answer.

Nobody knows this better than Disney. Watch any of their classic animated movies and within the first five minutes or so you’ll see the princess singing about her heart’s true desire. To find love. To explore an unknown land. To use home-made robots to save the world from an evil scientist’s doomsday machine. Okay, maybe that last one is less Disney and more Mad Science Institute, but the basic pattern is the same, and the audience is always left asking whether— and how— the princess will ever achieve her dream.

If you know how you want your story to end, set it up that way from the beginning. If you know how you want your story to begin, think about what question you’re asking and what difficult decisions it will force your characters to make. The key is not just to ask a question, but to ask a question with no clear answer. That’s a Kobayshi Maru, to you Trekkers. Whatever you call it, your readers will keep turning those pages as long as they can’t see how things can possibly be resolved.

Of course, you shouldn’t give your characters an easy path from the beginning of the story to the end. If it’s the story about falling into a hole, don’t throw a ladder in there with them. Make them claw their way out, inch by inch. Make them fall back in, break an ankle, and end up worse off than when they started. In order to get out, they’re going to have to sacrifice something important to them, or grow in some way, or learn to live in the hole. Their choice shows character, and character is what drives the story.

If it were one of my characters in that hole, they would most likely concoct some kind of improvised explosive and launch themselves, rocket like, into the sky… before landing in an even deeper hole. Hey, look at that—another story that starts and ends with an explosion. Maybe I need a psychiatrist.

Be good, and dream crazy dreams.

Sechin Tower is a teacher, a table-top game designer, and the author of Mad Science Institute. You can read more about him and his books on SechinTower.com, Facebook, or Twitter.

Progress and Regress on Mad Science Sequel

Sechin Tower

@SechinTower

Several months ago, I completed the Mad Science Institute sequel. Then I decided to scrap it and start over. The bottom line is that I’ve now completed a superior version, with the big change being that it features only Soap’s side of the story instead of alternating with other points of view (POVs) as I had done in Mad Science Institute. It’s got 95% of the awesome stuff that my first version had, but delivers it in 65% of the pages (which works out to almost 1.5 times as much awesomeness per page!).

I’ve found that a story can potentially go in any number of directions as it’s being developed. I usually start with a roadmap for the plot, but my characters invariably grab the wheel and we end up exploring new territory together. I say that like the characters have minds of their own because sometimes it feels like they do. That’s fine with me: my characters are encouraged to guide my stories because the process reveals who they are.

Will Soap stick around on campus for her date with Brett, or will she fly to Arizona to investigate the cyborg lab? Will Dean rush in to fight the bikers working for his nemesis, or will he hang back and call his buddies at the FBI? Those are questions for the characters to answer, and it feels like only they can decide those things. I, as the writer, get to decide which questions to ask by putting the characters into situations where they have to make those decisions. I can ask a hundred different questions to tell a hundred different stories, but it’s probably best not to ask a hundred different questions in the same story. It comes down to deciding which ones need to be asked in this particular book.

In the case of the Mad Science sequel, I decided that the questions I wanted to ask about Soap and Dean didn’t mesh as well as they had in the first book. In Mad Science Institute, it’s about misfits finding a home, and they both have that in common even though they come at it from completely different directions. In the sequel, it’s about Soap venturing out into the bigger world and discovering who she is, while Dean’s portion of the story was about grappling with grief and depression. It just didn’t match up. I want to explore both those situations, but I eventually realized that they needed to be explored separately.

What will happen to the Dean portions I removed? Well, he’s still in the book and throwin’ punches at bad guys. A few of his chapters I gave to Soap, and it was amusing to see how she overcame the same obstacles in different ways. Mostly, I think I want to save Dean’s portion of the adventure—or, at least, his character arc if not the actual plot details—for a future sequel. I’m even thinking I might do other novels with different POV characters—maybe Victor, Angela, Choop, and more. But first, at least during her freshman year, the series is going to stay with Soap because she’s got the most growing up (and blowing up) to do.

So, that’s the status of the new manuscript. Unfortunately, it will be a long while yet before this book finds its way to print, because publishing makes glaciers look like cheetahs. Finishing this manuscript has also coincided with my needing to find an agent, so that introduces a few more variables. I feel like a total rookie for not having recognized the needs of the story earlier on, but at least I can honestly say I’m pleased with the final result because it’s better, faster, and deeper than the first one.

For all you writers out there: am I the only one who’s ever gotten deep into a project only to want to start over? How do you avoid or cope with that? For you readers: would you prefer lots of cool details in a novel even if they’re a bit random, or would you prefer a more focused story? I’d be interested in your opinions.

Be good, and dream crazy dreams,

Sechin Tower is a teacher, a table-top game designer, and the author of Mad Science Institute. You can read more about him and his books on SechinTower.com and his games on SiegeTowerGames.com

Is Cutting More Important than Adding?

By Jordan Dane
@JordanDane 


Today I have a guest post from Sechin Tower, author of Mad Science Institute (MSI), a highly unusual yet thoroughly entertaining young adult suspense novel. I met Sechin on Twitter. Once I saw that he was a game developer, I asked for his help to develop my next proposal, a near future YA techno thriller that involves gaming and he helped me fine tune my game world. I also downloaded his book and found a real gem. Since he’s a teacher, he incorporates science into the plot to make learning fun for young readers. I absolutely fell in love with his YA voice and his characters and am looking forward to his next book. Below is a summary of Mad Science Institute.




Sophia "Soap" Lazarcheck is a girl genius with a knack for making robots-and for making robots explode. After her talents earn her admission into a secretive university institute, she is swiftly drawn into a conspiracy more than a century in the making. Soap is pitted against murderous thugs, experimental weaponry, lizard monsters, and a nefarious doomsday device that can bring civilization to a sudden and very messy end.   



Welcome, Sechin!  

I had a professor who insisted that the best way to write a two-page paper was to write a 10 page paper, throw it all away, and then hand in pages 11 and 12. When I tell the same thing to my students, they don’t buy it. I can’t blame them: I didn’t really buy it either, not until I started writing novels.  



My professor’s point was that not all pages are created equal. Of course it takes more effort to write 10 or 12 bad pages than two bad pages, and maybe even more than two mediocre pages. But good pages require time and effort, as well as research, experimentation, structuring, restructuring, and a nearly endless amount of general fussing. At the very least, good pages require two steps: adding and cutting.  

I teach two discrete groups of students and I’ve found that each needs this advice for different reasons. One of my student groups consists of the crème-de-la-crème of our school’s scholars, students who take the most challenging courses, maintain the highest GPAs, and participate in every extracurricular activity that might sparkle on their college applications. My other group consists of at-risk kids in an alternative school program. Many of these students are extremely intelligent, but for a dizzying array of reasons none of them has had much success in school.  

The advanced students always want to build up their writing until it overflows. They do the research, they know the issues, they have the facts, and they want to pile it all in without any thought to purpose or readability. The bigger the better: if the assignment calls for two pages, then they assume 10 ought to get a better grade. If they run out of things to say, they resort to inflated words and ponderous sentences. Their writing often becomes a cluttered, colorless hallway that never leads anywhere.  

My alternative high-schoolers, on the other hand, bring a great deal of passion about anything they see as relevant to their lives. They are lively, colorful, and outspoken, but even on their favorite topics their writing is terse. For them, it’s about getting to the point. Why wade through the muck of evidence and logic when you can gallop right to the exciting conclusion? Why bother explaining anything if you feel like you already understand it?  

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I built a composite of these two groups when I wrote Mad Science Institute. I started by combining all the drive and technical know-how of the advanced students with the vitality and quirkiness of the alternative school kids. I crammed a lot into each character and just as much into the plot and setting, but in the cutting phase I eliminated everything that failed to accelerate the story or develop the characters. It meant cutting some perfectly good ideas, but that was okay: true to the mad science theme, I knew I could stitch them together and give them a new life whenever I was ready. Right then, all that mattered was pruning back and boiling down until the book became balanced and lean.  

Being a teacher helped me write a better novel, and writing a novel helped me become a better teacher. I’m not trying to teach my students to become novelists—I wouldn’t push it on them any more than a P.E. teacher would urge all of his students to aim for NFL careers—but what works for crafting a novel applies to essays, letters, and other forms of writing as well. By the end of each year, I’m gratified to see that those students who tended to add too much have learned to accomplish more with fewer words, and the ones who want to start too small learn that they need to build up before they can trim down.  

Despite what some students claim, the art of writing is nothing that can be mastered with a mere 16 or 17 years of practice. If I’m any better at it than a student, it isn’t because of what I’ve written but because of what I’ve un-written. Deleting the thousands of pages of rough drafts and practice novels was the only way I could learn what should stay and what just gets in the way, and by the time my students delete that many pages they’ll be better writers than I am.  

It seems to me that what you cut is as important as what you add, but maybe that’s just my process. I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter.  

What is your process? Are you a cutter or adder when it comes to editing?


Sechin’s website & twitter