Your novel can begin and end with the exact same words. You can return to the same physical location with a character who is changed significantly. You can repeat an object, image, gesture, or situation. It can even bring back a seemingly insignificant detail from the opening and, by the final pages, reveal that it carried far more meaning than we realized. (Be sure to read my posts on motifs and theme to get this well in hand!)

In other words, bookending isn’t about repetition for repetition’s sake. It’s about creating an echo. As we looked at in the first two posts in this series, a bookend creates a relationship between the opening and closing scenes. The beginning establishes a character, situation, image, question, or theme. The story then takes us somewhere—sometimes far away—and the ending brings us back to something familiar. But because of everything that has happened in between, that familiar thing now means something entirely different.

This has been a powerful technique in fiction for decades. And when you start looking for it, you’ll see just how many forms it can take.

The Literal Full Circle

Perhaps the most obvious form of bookending is the literal loop, where the ending returns almost exactly to the beginning. S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders gives us a wonderful example. The novel opens with Ponyboy Curtis walking home from a movie theater, thinking about Paul Newman and the possibility of getting jumped on his way home. At the end, we return to essentially those same words and circumstances. But by then, we understand that what we’ve just read is actually the English assignment Ponyboy has been given: to write about something that has happened to him.

The repetition suddenly has a purpose. The ending doesn’t simply remind us of the opening; it reframes the entire novel. We’ve come full circle and realize that the story we’ve been reading is the very story Ponyboy has been compelled to tell.

James Joyce takes the concept to an extreme in Finnegans Wake, creating a circular structure in which the ending flows directly into the beginning. The final words leave the sentence unfinished, and the opening picks up the thought again. You could theoretically keep reading forever. That’s certainly not a structure most of us are going to attempt! But it demonstrates the basic appeal of the literal loop: the ending doesn’t simply close the story. It connects directly back to its beginning.

Same Place. Different Person.

A subtler, often more emotionally powerful form of bookending is to return a character to the same physical or situational place but show how profoundly that character has changed. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby does this beautifully. Nick Carraway begins the novel looking out toward the world of wealth and privilege on Long Island, still something of an outsider observing the people around him. By the end, he looks across the water toward Gatsby’s world again, but everything he witnessed has transformed his perspective.

The geography hasn’t changed nearly as much as Nick has. That is the power of this kind of bookend. You don’t have to tell readers that Nick is now a different person. Fitzgerald put him in a similar situation and allowed his behavior, thoughts, and emotional response to demonstrate the change.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men uses an even more devastating version of this technique. The novel begins in the peaceful clearing near the Salinas River where George and Lennie stop to rest. George tells Lennie once again about their dream of owning their own little farm. At the end, we return to that same clearing, and George repeats the dream to Lennie one last time before making his heartbreaking decision.

However, the setting hasn’t changed, nor their dream. But everything we know about the dream has changed. That’s a bookend doing impacting emotional work.

When the Characters Become What They Opposed

Bookending can also work through inversion. The opening establishes one relationship or power structure, and the ending returns to it with the roles reversed—or with the horrifying realization that nothing really changed at all.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm offers a chilling example. The animals begin by looking at the human oppressor who controls them. Their rebellion is meant to create a new, better society. Yet the novel ends with the animals looking through a window at the pigs dining with the humans. As they look from pig to man and man to pig, they can no longer tell the difference.

It’s not a “happy” ending. That’s an important reminder that a bookend doesn’t always have to demonstrate positive character growth. Sometimes the repetition proves failure, corruption, tragedy, or the inability to escape a destructive pattern.

When the Ending Rewrites the Beginning

Another effective variation is using the ending to send us back to the opening but with new information. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club begins in the middle of things, with the narrator in an extraordinary and dangerous situation involving a gun and a skyscraper. As the novel unfolds, we gradually discover how he arrived at that point and what is really happening inside his fractured psyche. When the story circles back to that opening situation, we understand it completely differently.

The scene hasn’t simply been repeated. Our understanding of the scene has changed. This is one of the most satisfying things a bookend can do. A detail that seemed strange or insignificant in Chapter One can become deeply meaningful when we encounter its echo in the final pages.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven connects its opening theater performance and the collapse of civilization with the story’s later reflections on that same world. The theatrical setting becomes more than a location; it becomes part of the novel’s larger meditation on art, memory, survival, and what human beings preserve when everything else disappears.

Some contemporary novels use bookending to play with the very act of storytelling itself. Hernan Diaz’s Trust uses multiple nested narratives and competing versions of events, so that what we think we understand at the beginning is radically complicated by what comes later. The structure itself becomes part of the novel’s exploration of who gets to tell a story and whose version of the truth survives.

The Small Detail That Comes Back

I mention motifs earlier (and in the first post), and this is perhaps my favorite thing about bookending. The element you choose as a motif or thematic image that returns doesn’t have to be the biggest or most obvious thing in the opening. It might be a phrase, a photograph, a particular piece of music, a location, a habit, a line of dialogue, an object sitting on a table, or a question the protagonist asks. By the time we reach the end, that little detail can carry the emotional weight of the entire novel.

Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits takes this idea into beautifully complex territory. The novel opens with the famous line about Barrabás arriving by the sea, and the story eventually returns to that same declaration at the end. But by then, we’ve traveled through generations of family history, political upheaval, love, violence, loss, memory, and trauma. The repeated line becomes more than a clever structural trick. It helps reveal the circular nature of memory and storytelling itself.

That’s what makes a great bookend feel almost magical. The writer hasn’t merely repeated something from page one. The story has changed what that thing means.

I hope you are seeing a thread here. Bookending is really all about change. And even if it seems that it’s the scenery or situation that’s changed, it’s primarily the character who’s changed. So consider how you want your character to change by the last lines of your story.

And that, really, is the heart of the technique. A bookend can be an exact repetition, a visual echo, a return to the same setting, an inversion of character roles, a recurring motif, a repeated phrase, or even a return to the title’s central idea. There are countless variations. What matters is that the reader recognizes the connection and feels the weight of everything that has happened between those two moments.

Think of the opening and closing scenes as two parentheses around your story. The opening establishes where we begin, while the ending shows us where we’ve arrived. When those two moments speak to each other, the middle of the novel—the entire journey—suddenly feels more purposeful.

That’s when a reader closes the book and gets that wonderful feeling of completion. This is exactly where the story needed to end.

Have you tried using one of these bookending techniques? Share in the comments.

Featured Photo by Faizan Ali on Unsplash

The post The Many Ways to Bookend a Novel appeared first on C. S. Lakin.

That’s the secret to writing a subplot that will work in your novel. A subplot shouldn’t simply give your protagonist or secondary characters something to do in addition to the plot goal. It should enrich, deepen, and advance the main story while creating additional complications for your characters. And ultimately, those complications need to affect your protagonist in some meaningful way.

This brings us back to one of the most important principles of novel construction: your protagonist has a goal, and your job as the novelist is to make it as difficult as possible for her to reach that goal. Conflict and high stakes are what drive the main plot forward, but the main plot isn’t the only place those obstacles can come from.

A well-designed subplot can put additional pressure on your protagonist, forcing her to deal with another problem while she is already struggling to accomplish what she wants most.

Maybe she’s trying to solve a murder while her marriage is falling apart. Maybe he’s trying to save his family business while his estranged brother suddenly returns. Maybe she’s trying to expose corruption at work while her best friend is dealing with an abusive boyfriend. Those additional problems may not be part of the central plot, but they can make your protagonist’s life much more difficult—and much more interesting.

And pressure is good for fiction because pressure forces characters to make choices. And choices reveal important facets about character.

Subplots Can Expose Character

This is one reason I love subplots. You can use your main plot to show what your protagonist does, and then use a subplot to reveal another dimension of who she is.

In the last post, I mentioned my novel A Thin Film of Lies. Fran Anders is a homicide detective. She’s competent, determined, and focused on getting to the truth. The main plot follows her investigation into a hit-and-run death that may actually be murder. But while Fran is trying to determine whether her suspect is guilty, she is also dealing with serious problems with her teenage son, Trevor.

That subplot allows us to see what lies underneath Fran’s professional exterior. She’s struggling with guilt over her husband’s disappearance, she feels disconnected from her son, and she desperately wants to be the perfect mother. She’s terrified of failing.

Those issues don’t simply sit in the background as bits of character backstory. They become active problems in her life. Trevor’s trouble at school forces Fran to confront her own assumptions about guilt and innocence, while the difficulties in their relationship bring her emotional wounds to the surface.

That’s what a good subplot should do. It should dig deeper.

Your protagonist should be dealing with more than the external problem that drives the main plot. She should have other concerns, fears, relationships, responsibilities, and desires that put pressure on her. Those things help us understand why she makes the choices she does and why the journey through the main plot affects her so deeply.

Use Subplots to Create Character Clash

Another terrific use for subplots is creating conflict between characters.

Your characters should have different goals, beliefs, fears, wounds, and agendas. Those differences create friction, and friction creates exciting scenes.

A subplot can be a wonderful vehicle for that friction. Maybe your protagonist thinks her daughter needs discipline, while her husband thinks she needs compassion. Maybe the protagonist is trying to expose a criminal while her boss is secretly helping that criminal. Maybe a secondary character believes the protagonist’s goal is wrong and actively works against her.

Now your subplot isn’t simply giving your characters something to do. It’s making them clash.

And character clash is one of the best ways to generate tension. When two characters want different things, believe different things, or interpret the same situation differently, you have the makings of a dynamic scene. Don’t manufacture conflict or have characters argue simply because you think every scene needs an argument. Their conflicting goals and attitudes will naturally create tension if you’ve constructed the subplot well.

This is also why subplots can be so useful for secondary characters. Give those characters goals and problems of their own, and then look for ways those goals and problems collide with what your protagonist wants.

Subplots Can Showcase Theme

Subplots can also be powerful tools for exploring your novel’s themes. In the last past, I explained how the subplot with Fran’s son mirrored the main plot of the man accused of a hit-and-run murder.

You can also make your subplot contrast rather than mirror the main plot.

Suppose your main story is about trust. Your protagonist may be struggling to decide whether she can trust an ally, while a secondary character is dealing with betrayal in a marriage. Or perhaps your novel explores whether people are capable of change. Your protagonist may be trying desperately to reform herself while another character stubbornly refuses to change.

I often use the example of a woman desperately trying to get pregnant, dealing with infertility, then her best friend confides that she accidentally got pregnant during a drunken one-night stand and plans to have an abortion.

Imagine the emotions flying between these two women (and it’s not just about creating highly emotional scenes). This encounter between the two friends needs to be strategic so it motivates the protagonist to act.

All kinds of developments can occur due to this subplot. The friendship can shatter, making the protagonist angry and bitter. The protagonist could convince her friend to go through with the pregnancy and have her adopt the baby. Depending on your genre, the path forward could be hopeful and inspiring … or dark and dangerous.

But it all gets more intense because the subplot sets characters at odds with each other.

Whether you go for a mirror effect or a clash, the subplot gives you a way to explore the same thematic question.

Don’t preach your theme. Dramatize it.

This is one of the great advantages of layering plots. You can explore your central themes from several different angles without making your novel feel like a lecture. Your protagonist may be learning one lesson, while a secondary character demonstrates what happens when someone refuses to learn that lesson. Or perhaps two characters face similar circumstances and make completely different choices.

The subplot gives you room to explore those possibilities.

In A Thin Film of Lies, Fran’s investigation and her problems with her son are separate situations. Trevor isn’t secretly involved in the murder investigation, and his problems at school don’t turn out to be part of the mystery. The two plotlines don’t merge into one mystery.

But the subplot affects Fran emotionally and thematically. It also parallels the main plot in important ways, particularly the question of whether someone who insists he’s innocent should be believed. That’s enough to make the subplot valuable.

In another novel, however, a subplot might become directly connected to the main plot. In one of my historical Western romance novels, Colorado Promise, the ranchers’ dangerous activities and the heroine’s brother’s involvement with them eventually have a major impact on the main romance plot. Those developments begin as a separate storyline, but eventually the subplot creates a significant obstacle to the main plot goal.

So there are different ways subplots can function. Some run parallel to the main plot. Some intersect with it. Some eventually merge with it. The important thing is that the subplot enhances the novel’s premise.

Subplots should never be filler.

If you’re considering adding a subplot, ask yourself what the novel would lose if you took it out. Would you lose an important dimension of your protagonist’s character? Would you lose thematic depth? Would you lose tension or a significant character relationship? Would the protagonist’s journey become easier? Would you lose an opportunity for an important character clash?

If the answer to all those questions is no, you may not have a subplot. You may simply have a distraction.

Remember that your readers are investing their time and emotional energy in the story you’re telling. They don’t want to be pulled away from the central story for no reason. Even if a subplot is entertaining in itself, it needs to contribute something to the overall novel.

So here’s a simple question to ask for every subplot you’re considering:

How does this make the protagonist’s journey harder, deeper, or more meaningful?

If you can’t answer that question (or come up with a great answer), keep brainstorming.

Don’t settle for a wimpy subplot just because you think you need one. Think about your secondary characters. What do they want? What problems are they facing? What secrets are they keeping? What do they believe that conflicts with what your protagonist believes?

Then look for ways those things can put pressure on your protagonist.

You may discover that the best subplot isn’t the one that seems most exciting when you brainstorm it. It may be the one that creates the most interesting complications for your protagonist. Perhaps it forces her to choose between two things she desperately wants. Perhaps it exposes a weakness she has been trying to hide. Perhaps it puts someone she loves in danger. Or perhaps it forces her to confront a truth she has been avoiding.

The best subplots interfere with the main plot. They complicate and expose your characters and reinforce your themes. They create clashes between characters and add pressure at just the moments when your protagonist is already struggling.

And sometimes they provide the very thing your protagonist needs—or the very thing that threatens to destroy everything she’s trying to accomplish.

That’s when a subplot becomes more than a side story—it becomes an essential layer of your novel.

I hope this insight into subplots has sparked ideas for your story. Have you ever written a subplot? Are you thinking about one now? Feel free to share in the comments!

Featured Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

The post The Secret Job of a Subplot: Complicate Your Story appeared first on C. S. Lakin.

In this post, we’ll continue looking at examples of effective bookends to help you think creatively about ways you might insert something similar in your story. One great thing about this technique—which can work within any genre—is you can add and reinforce it late in the writing stage.

Sure, planning from the outset to develop your themes and motifs so that you can use them to bookend is a smart strategy. But even if you’ve completed your draft, you can consider the best elements for this technique. Now that your draft is finished, you have well in hand your themes, character arc, important moments and insights your character experiences. That will give you a deep well of ideas to draw from to create your bookends.

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls provides another great bookend example—this one a “positional” echo.

The novel opens with Robert Jordan lying on the forest floor: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest …”

Jordan is on a military mission, observing the terrain and preparing for the work he has been sent to do. Near the end of the novel, after the bridge is destroyed and Jordan is badly injured, he finds himself lying on that forest floor again.

But now everything is different. He knows he cannot escape with the others, and he stays behind to give them time to get away.

The physical image has come full circle, but Jordan has been transformed by everything that has happened. It makes the ending feel complete (and, if you’re a Lost fan like me, you may recall how the series opens with Jack lying on the forest floor after having “fallen” out of the airplane, looking up through the canopy of leaves … which is the same place and posture he is in at the end of his life—not quite the last scene in the series—bringing the whole lengthy series full circle).

Bookend with Your Theme

You can also bookend your novel by bringing your central theme back into the final scene.

Perhaps your novel explores freedom. The protagonist may begin the story feeling trapped—by a marriage, a family expectation, a belief about herself, or something she has done in the past. Your opening might show that confinement without ever announcing, This is a story about freedom. By the end, you can create a scene that visually or emotionally reverses that opening.

This is what I did in my novel Conundrum. I end the book in the last lines drawing from lines and themes from the beginning.

The novel opens with my protagonist, Lisa, thinking about a conundrum (a mental puzzle that is solved by asking yes-or-no- questions): a mysterious man is sitting in a restaurant, he orders albatross, and then when he takes a bite, he says: “Thank God, I’m free.”

That opening “conundrum” becomes a thematic thread throughout the novel. The man’s search for answers and his longing for freedom become symbolic of Lisa’s own journey.

This is how the novel ends:

I looked at Jeremy, the only man I had ever loved, oh so loved, and my heart soared like a helium-filled balloon escaping into the sky. I thought of the man in the restaurant—the man who had spent the better part of his life looking for answers. Looking for truth.

Then she hears the words again: “I’m free,” he said. And Lisa mouths the words along with him.

I also grab the exact phrase—”Jeremy, the only man I had ever loved, oh so loved”—from the opening scene (used only twice), to create an echo (perhaps only subconsciously familiar to the reader) and layer the bookending effect.

The ending deliberately reaches back to the beginning, but now the meaning has shifted. The man’s declaration of freedom has become Lisa’s declaration, too.

Consider Your Title

Titles are so important, and they can be powerful in cementing your theme. It may be that after you have written your draft and finally understand the breadth of your story’s themes that you can craft the perfect title. I usually work the other way—start with a theme and title and build my story around it.

Either way, consider not only weaving your title and its associated theme(s) into your story but also using it as a bookend. Obviously, my choice of the title Conundrum was purposeful in that regard. Also Intended for Harm, as a title, implies my overarching theme of that novel: that what my characters interpret as harmful intent by others and by God turns out to be for their good, which is the lesson driven home in the Bible’s Genesis story of Jacob and Joseph, of which my novel is a modern allegory.

If your title has a strong thematic meaning, look for a natural way to bring that phrase, concept, or image into your first and final pages.

Your title might appear in a line of dialogue at the beginning and return at the end. It might be represented by an object or image. Or the protagonist may come to understand what the title means only after everything he’s experienced.

This can be particularly satisfying because readers have been carrying that title in their minds throughout the entire book. When the ending gives it greater significance, the title itself clicks into place.

You don’t want to force this. If the title is simply a catchy phrase with no deeper connection to the story, don’t shoehorn it into your final paragraph and hope it works.

Bookending vs. a Frame Structure

There’s another storytelling technique that can sound similar to bookending but is actually quite different: frame structure. This term is used frequently in screenwriting to describe a story that opens with a brief glimpse of a later, often climactic, moment.

For example, we see the protagonist in the middle of a tense situation, but we don’t yet know how she got there or what is about to happen. Then the story jumps back in time and begins earlier, eventually catching up to that opening moment. A great example is the movie Inception.

Inception opens with a mysterious scene that actually occurs much later in the story. We see the protagonist, Cobb, being pulled from the water and brought to an elderly Saito before, but we don’t yet know how Cobb got there or what happened between them. The film then jumps backward and begins telling the story that leads to that opening moment.

As the story unfolds, we learn about Cobb’s work, his relationship with Mal, and the job Saito hires him to perform. Eventually, the narrative catches up with the opening scene, but now we understand its significance.

The key distinction from bookending is that Inception’s opening isn’t primarily an echo of the ending—it’s a glimpse of the future. The frame creates the question: How did Cobb get here? The story then takes us backward to reveal the answer. Bookending, by contrast, connects the beginning and ending through an element that returns with new meaning.

So, a useful way to remember the difference is that a frame previews the story; a bookend reflects it. A frame uses chronology to create curiosity—How did we get here? A bookend uses repetition and transformation to create resonance—Look how far we’ve come.

I use the frame structure in my fantasy novel The Sands of Ethryn, book 6 in my Gates of Heaven series. Similar to the movie technique (which fiction writers can absolutely borrow), the prologue is a partial replaying of the climax scene. It only goes so far, though, setting the stage for the big, exciting moment but leaving out some key elements that are surprise reveals in the full scene. It’s a super fun structure to play around with, and it can thrill readers with the same feeling as a bookend.

I do a similar structure in the final book in my fantasy series (book 7), The Hidden Kingdom. However, in this novel I have a story within a story. My protagonist is a mother telling the story of the hidden kingdom to her young son (think: The Princess Bride or The Neverending Story). While the opening and closing scenes show brief moments with this mother and son, the various sections of the novel are broken up with additional scenes, all centered on the bedtime story she is telling her son.

So, to reiterate: there are many ways you can utilize bookending in your story, whether a novel, short story, play, or script. We’ll explore a few more examples in our next post.

Any thoughts? Can you think of other great movies that use a bookending or frame structure technique?

The post Tips to Bookend Your Novel – Part 2 appeared first on C. S. Lakin.

Sometimes we can’t even articulate exactly why an ending feels so satisfying. We just know it does. The story seems to have come full circle. Something in those final pages makes us think back to the beginning, and suddenly we realize the author has been setting up that ending all along.

One way to create that satisfying sense of completion is to bookend your novel.

You may (or may not) have heard of the term “bookending.” Just imagine actual bookends on a shelf, one on the left, the other on the right. The two bookends “hold” all the books together as a unit.

So with a novel, bookending involves intentionally connecting your opening and closing scenes so they echo each other in some way. You might return to the same setting; repeat an object, image, or line of dialogue; revisit a situation under completely different circumstances; or bring a key theme or phrase from the beginning back at the end.

The possibilities are almost endless.

And when done well, the technique is subtle enough that readers may not consciously notice what you’ve done. They simply experience that wonderful feeling of completion.

Your Opening Makes a Promise

I’ve written often about the importance of your opening scene because those first pages have a tremendous amount of work to do.

Your opening scene needs to introduce us to your protagonist and her current world. It should give us some sense of what she wants, what matters to her, what she believes about herself or the world, and what kind of story we’re about to read. It establishes tone and genre and, ideally, hints at the central problem or thematic question that will be explored throughout the novel.

In other words, your opening makes a promise.

Your ending needs to fulfill that promise.

That doesn’t mean you need to repeat everything from your opening scene. Quite the opposite. Your protagonist should have gone somewhere during the course of the story. She may have changed dramatically, or she may have stubbornly refused to change and suffered the consequences. Either way, the ending should allow us to see the result of the journey we’ve just taken with her.

This is why it can be so powerful to echo something from the beginning.

The external circumstances might look remarkably similar, but the character’s internal state has changed completely.

An Echo, Not a Copy

When I talk about bookending, I don’t mean that you should simply reproduce your opening scene at the end of your novel. The ending needs to be different because your character—and your story—have changed. Think of it as an echo rather than a copy.

Another important point: you don’t have to limit yourself to using this echo technique in only the last scene. In my novel Intended for Harm, I have an extensive section (a half-page) in the chapter prior to the ending that is verbatim—every word—of the prologue. Yet those direct thoughts in the opening are Jake’s (the father, as he carves a wooden sculpture), and the ones in the later chapter are his son Joseph’s (as he is about to perform surgery on his brother). One holds a carving tool, the other a scalpel. Also, the very first line of the novel (“The highway of holiness is a toll road”) ends that repeated section:

A glint of light catches on the metal’s edge as he turns the lightweight blade in his hand. He squints, pauses. Underlying his thoughts, machines whirr and hum, stirring like dormant creatures waking after a winter slumber—reflective of his buried emotions, so long ignored, feelings so disconnected they too rumble incoherently.

His sense of hearing is unusually heightened. The room pulses and takes on a life of its own; a clock ticking becomes a rhythmic heartbeat, causing surges of perspiration to trickle down the sides of his neck, soaking the cotton shirt as he stands, hesitates, holds the object up to study its smooth surface, finely polished, noticeably sharp.

He’d never before considered how small and innocuous this thing felt in the palm of his hand. Yet so capable of slicing through flesh with precision, severing blood vessels, separating muscles from bone, tissue from tendons, all with the slight pressure one might use in peeling an apple.

Hardly innocuous, though. For, even a surgeon’s scalpel must tear open flesh and draw blood before it can do a healing work.

Pain precedes healing. This truth has taken a lifetime to learn.

The Great Physician cannot heal until the incision is made and what is putrid and pustulant collides with air and water until thoroughly cleansed. There is a wash of relief that follows such ablution, and the soul thus rid of a lifetime’s burden of contamination becomes keenly aware of a glorious sense of freedom.

He can taste it; he is that close.

A glance at the clock tells him it is almost time. Soon will come the culmination of his story, the point to which all the variant, divergent paths of his life have unknowingly led him. All the hurtful, agonizing moments he thought were intended for harm God actually intended for good, for the saving of life.

The last lines of the novel are the exact last lines of the prologue:

It is time.

His sojourn through the wilderness is over. He turns his head toward the door. Tears fill the pools of his eyes, but through the distortion of his watery lenses he can make out the distinctive shape approaching him, carried on a bier of jubilant voices. A mirage materializing in the heat waves of time.

Joseph, my Joseph . . .

You can be creative with this echoing technique to great effect. Your reader will feel the echo, and it will work like an anchor for the story.

Bookend with a Setting

One of the simplest ways to bookend a novel is to return your character to the same physical location. When your character returns there at the end, the setting itself becomes a measuring stick for the character’s transformation.

The place hasn’t necessarily changed; the character has. A great example of this is found in The Kite Runner, when the protagonist, years later, returns to Afghanistan, his home, to find it (and he himself) fundamentally changed.

This can be especially effective when the opening and closing scenes contain similar circumstances. Put your protagonist in roughly the same physical situation and let us see how differently she responds. Think about crafting a thought, a line of dialogue, a meaningful item that can be repeated with purpose.

Bookend with an Object or Motif

Whether you return to the same setting or not, you can bring in a motif—a recurring object, image, phrase, sound, or symbol.

Let’s say your protagonist wears her mother’s old watch throughout the novel. In the opening, she constantly checks it because she’s obsessed with time and feels she is running out of it. By the ending, the watch may appear again, but its meaning has changed. Maybe she gives it to her daughter. Maybe she finally takes it off. Maybe she simply looks at it and realizes she no longer needs it to measure her worth.

The object hasn’t necessarily changed. What it means has changed. That’s the important distinction.

A motif becomes powerful when its meaning accumulates throughout the novel. Each time you bring it back, readers associate it with something more. Then, when it appears in the final scene, it carries all those associations. (To learn some masterful techniques with motifs, check out my book Masterful Microtension).

Look for something concrete that can carry an abstract idea.

You Can Echo a Line

Another wonderful way to bookend a novel is to repeat a line of dialogue or narration (as I showed in my example from Intended for Harm—which emphasizes how the exact words can mean something completely different by the time the reader reaches the end).

Consider Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. The novel begins with the sentence, “Barrabás came to us by the sea,” attributed to Clara’s writing. The last line (“It begins like this: Barrabás came to us by the sea) circles back to that same declaration, making the novel feel like the completion of the act of recording the family’s story.

The repetition isn’t merely a clever trick. It connects the beginning and ending through the family’s history, Clara’s notebooks, Alba’s role in preserving that history, and the novel’s larger meditation on memory and time.

Another terrific novel that uses a phrase to bookend the story and pack it with theme is Leif Enger’s Peace like a River. Early in the book, adult Reuben shares some of the miracles his father performed with the caveat, “Make of that what you will.” He then seals the entire narrative arc by bringing the exact phrase back in the novel’s very final paragraph.

Reuben recounts how his father commanded him to breathe after he was born dead and went without oxygen for twelve minutes, bringing him back to life. Knowing that modern, pragmatic readers will greet such a claim with skepticism, Reuben addresses the audience directly. By telling us to “make of that what you will,” he invites the reader to participate in the story.

At the climax of the book, after enduring an afterlife-like vision, a dramatic showdown, and the ultimate sacrifice of his father, Reuben’s severe asthma is permanently, miraculously cured.

Here we see not only the repetition of a phrase and its intent, but also the return to Reuben’s initial account of the miracle his father performed on him at his birth.

Bookending is a powerful tool, and just about any story can benefit from this technique. There is so much more to this topic, so watch for the next posts, which will provide more examples for you to learn from!

What are your thoughts? Have you ever crafted a bookend structure for your story? Have you read one in a novel that had a strong impact on you? Share in the comments.

Banner image: Artwork: Frederick the Literate by Charles Wysocki. Puzzle available here.

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I instinctively understood that subplots added depth to a story. But that was about as far as my understanding went. And some subplots in novels I read seemed superfluous and unrelated to the main plot. They seemed to have been included as filler—and I certainly didn’t want to do that in my novels.

Over the years, I’ve come to see subplots as one of the most useful tools a novelist has. When they’re done well, they can deepen character, reinforce theme, increase tension, create wonderful complications, and make a fictional world feel much more real.

Plot Layers That Mimic Real Life

I developed the concept of plot layers because I wanted a practical way for writers to understand how multiple storylines can coexist within a novel. I’ve written about plot layers before, and if you want to explore that idea more deeply, you can read my earlier post on layers and layers of plot here.

The basic idea is simple. Imagine the story of your own life. You probably have some large, long-term goals that occupy a lot of your thinking. Perhaps you’re trying to earn a degree, build a career, raise a family, find a spouse, start a business, or accomplish something you’ve dreamed about for years.

But you also have shorter-term goals. You need to finish a paper for a class. You need to prepare a presentation for work. You need to repair something around the house. You need to deal with a conflict with a friend.

And then there are the little daily goals that make up ordinary life.

Those goals overlap. They compete for your attention. Sometimes one affects another. Sometimes a problem in one area of your life makes it much harder to accomplish something in another.

That’s exactly what we can do with our fictional characters.

Give them more than one thing going on. But don’t give them more simply for the sake of making their lives busy. Layer in additional goals and problems that will enrich the main story. Real life is full of various layers, and while a Plot B or Plot C element in a story can also greatly enrich it, those “layers” of life don’t necessarily scream for a place in your novel as a subplot.

For example, a minor Plot C might have your character continually dealing with an irritating issue in their life: their car keeps breaking down; their teenager keeps staying out late and refusing to answer her phone; their boss at work keeps pressuring them to finish a particular project.

But here’s an important caveat: you shouldn’t add a subplot simply because you think your novel is supposed to have one. That’s an easy trap to fall into.

Yes, great “real life” added tension that can help exacerbate your character’s stress level. But not the type of story element that needs a fully developed subplot.

You’ll want to differentiate between those plot layers, which have minor bits in your story, as opposed to a subplot, which carries a lot more emotional and thematic weight (takes up more space in your story too).

Subplots Must Serve Your Story

The subplot has to serve the story (the interests of the story). What do I mean?

Every scene needs to ultimately impact your protagonist’s effort to reach his goal. Subplot scenes with parallel themes can help your protagonist make the important choices that affect that effort. And subplots can work beautifully to emphasize the character arc.

For instance, the things your protagonist learns while dealing with the subplot can move them to make a different decision than what they might have had they not dealt with the subplot.

I go into a long discussion of my novel A Thin Film of Lies in my writing craft book Layer Your Novel. Without reproducing all of that here, let me summarize:

My protagonist, Fran Anders, is a detective investigating a hit-and-run death. She believes Mike Jepson is guilty—all evidence points to that. Yet, he protests his innocence, says he’s been set up.

I decided to develop a subplot with Fran’s teenage son using that exact issue: Trevor is accused of hacking the school’s computer system to change grades. All the evidence points to his guilt, but he insists he’s been set up.

You can see how helpful this is. As Fran investigates her’s son’s situation, he challenges her default to believe he’s guilty. That affects the way she treats Jepson’s case, which leads to her helping prove he is actually innocent.

That’s what I mean about all your scenes “serving the interest of your plot.” You don’t want to throw together a clever, interesting subplot that has nothing to do with your protagonist’s goal, that doesn’t impact her in some important way as she pursues her goal.

The goal is everything in a novel! That should be one of the first lessons every aspiring novelist learns!

Okay, But Remember That Ordinary Is Boring

If we want our characters to feel like real people, shouldn’t they have some of the ordinary, everyday concerns that real people have? Of course they should. But if you put every mundane aspect of a character’s life onto the page, your novel is going to become very boring very quickly.

Your protagonist may need groceries. She may need to get her car serviced. She may have laundry piled up. She may have a dentist appointment.

That’s real life. But none of those things are necessarily good fiction. The secret is to take the meaning behind those ordinary layers of life and turn them into story.

Maybe your protagonist’s strained relationship with her son becomes a subplot because it exposes her fear of failure. Maybe a difficult relationship with her sister forces her to confront a secret she’s been hiding. Maybe a problem at work threatens her ability to accomplish her main goal or writing a devastating report on corruption.

The everyday concern becomes interesting when it creates conflict, reveals character, raises stakes, or connects to theme.

You want your subplots to earn their pages. They should make the story richer, deeper, more complicated, or more emotionally satisfying.

Subplots Can Do a Lot of Work

A good subplot can accomplish several things at once.

It can reveal a side of your protagonist that the main plot doesn’t expose. It can create conflict between characters who have different goals or beliefs. It can give a secondary character an arc of his or her own. It can mirror or contrast with the main plot. And it can provide another way to explore the themes of your novel.

Most importantly, a subplot can make your protagonist’s journey harder, and that’s a very good thing.

The more pressure you put on your protagonist, the more difficult her choices become. And when she has to make difficult choices, we get to see who she really is.

Don’t Throw in Random Subplots

Even if the subplot itself is well written, it can feel like a distraction.

And when that happens, readers may skim those pages because they want to get back to the story they actually care about.

That’s the last thing you want.

So before you add a subplot, ask yourself what purpose it serves. Does it put pressure on your protagonist? Does it reveal something important about her? Does it create character clash? Does it reinforce a theme? Does it eventually affect the main plot? Does it give you scenes that deepen the emotional journey?

If your subplot idea serves your plot well, by all means, add it in!

If you need help to understand how to structure a subplot, read the chapters on the topic in Layer Your Novel!

Featured Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.

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If you’ve read the archetype series on this blog, you’ll know just how much of an impact a good archetype can have. Susanne has already dealt with eight male archetypes and eight female archetypes, together with the mentors, rivals, and friends who accompany the hero. Those articles explain the roles a cast member plays in a story. This one introduces a different sort of set to your toolkit: the twelve archetypes most commonly referred to as Jungian. These describe something different, something a novelist needs on every page. They show what a character wants and what a character fears.

Where the Twelve Actually Come From

A little correction to save you from the know-it-alls in your comments. Carl Jung never produced a list of twelve archetypes; he spoke of archetypes as patterns we all possess, and the ones he identified sound rather odd next to the neat lists you come across online: the Persona, the Shadow, the Anima and the Animus, the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, and the Trickster. The twelve that fill most articles nowadays, the Hero, the Sage, the Rebel and their nine counterparts, came much later, from Carol Pearson’s books on heroic archetypes, and in 2001 she and Margaret Mark formalized the group in The Hero and the Outlaw, a book written for brand marketers.

It may seem like merely a matter of trivia, but it’s good news for novelists. Mark and Pearson devised a system for describing motivation since a brand has to understand what its customers long for. Each of the twelve is built on two things fiction depends on: a basic desire and a basic fear.

Desire Plus Fear Is a Plot Engine

Role archetypes answer the question of what this character does in my story; the twelve instead answer two questions: what does this character want and what would they crawl over broken glass to avoid? Desire causes a character to take action, while fear leads them to avoidance, denial, and bad decisions. Combine both forces in a single person and the scenes begin to write themselves, since now every choice involves a cost.

The Twelve at a Glance

Read the list with one of your characters in mind.

The Innocent craves safety and a world where things are done properly, and is afraid of doing anything wrong or being punished. Dorothy Gale’s only wish is to get home.

The Everyman wants to fit in and is afraid of being picked out and left out. When Bilbo Baggins starts The Hobbit, he is sure that adventures will make him late for dinner.

The Hero is determined to demonstrate their bravery and fears showing weakness more than anything else; Katniss Everdeen volunteers since it would be unimaginable to fail her sister.

The Caregiver wants to protect other people, and is afraid of their own selfishness, or of a loved one suffering while they watch. Samwise Gamgee carries the carrier.

The Explorer desires the freedom to discover who they are and is afraid of the trap of conforming. Huck Finn sets off for the Territory.

The Rebel aims at overturning what is currently wrong and is afraid of being powerless. Lisbeth Salander destroys corrupt men.

The Lover craves closeness and is afraid of being left behind; Romeo would rather die than be separated, and he does.

The Creator wishes to make something that will last and is afraid of mediocrity. Jo March writes her way out of an ordinary life.

The Jester craves joy and the next laugh and is afraid of the quiet after a joke has been told. Falstaff plays the clown to keep the dark away.

The Sage is seeking the truth and is afraid of being wrong or fooled. Hermione Granger goes to the library just as other people go to church.

The Magician wishes to turn their visions into reality and is afraid of the consequences they did not intend. Prospero causes a storm and will have to account for it.

The Ruler craves order and control and is afraid of chaos and losing their position. Instead of receiving love as a tribute, King Lear suffers the storm.

Split the Desire and the Fear

The most useful lesson I have picked up from working with these twelve every day is to avoid giving your protagonist both the desire and the fear of the same archetype; paired desires and fears result in consistent characters, and consistent characters are boring. Give them the desire of one archetype and the fear of a different one and you create contradiction, and contradiction is where behavior comes from.

Fitzgerald did exactly this with Gatsby: Gatsby embodies the Lover’s desire, since everything is aimed at Daisy, but his fear belongs to the Creator, the terror of being an ordinary James Gatz. The desire tells him to knock on her door, while the fear tells him first to become someone else entirely; five years of parties later, that contradiction has built the entire novel.

One note from the quiz side of my job: when we score people on all twelve archetypes at once, very few turn out to be a single, clear type; the two highest scores are generally close, and the interesting tension lies between them. Fictional people are constructed the same way.

Grow the Flaw from the Same Root as the Strength

A flaw seems to be bolted on whenever it has nothing to do with the character’s underlying nature. The twelve overcome this since each one fails in its own typical way. The Caregiver’s helpfulness turns into control. The Hero begins to need enemies. The Sage knows so much that deciding becomes impossible, and contempt creeps in for people who know less. The Ruler regards disagreement as treachery.

Lear is not a kind king with an anger problem added on; his flaw is his archetype with the brakes removed, a ruler who demands love as a tribute. Frankenstein is a creator whose fear of being ordinary outruns his responsibility for the creature he has made. Write one scene in which your character’s strength is the source of the damage, and the flaw will never seem merely decorative again.

Scaffolding, Not Cages

Susanne established this at the beginning of her series and it deserves repeating: archetypes serve only as a starting point, not as a fixed imprint. Use the twelve as scaffolding and take it down as the character becomes more real. Begin on a small scale: name the protagonist’s deepest desire, name the fear that opposes it, and check whether they fit the same archetype. If they do, think about giving one of them away.

What archetype is behind your present protagonist, and is their fear rooted in the same source? I’d really like to know what you think in the comments.

Ingvaras Galinskas runs Rare Personas, a quiz studio website. If you would like to find out which of the twelve archetypes is influencing you or your protagonist, you can take the free 12 archetype quiz there. The quiz takes about five minutes, and each archetype has its own page with beautiful illustrations, including its shadow side.

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What if your best years—your most creative, passionate, fulfilling years—are just beginning?

Inspired by Jenny Joseph’s iconic poem “When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple,” Take Up Space invites you to level up your next decade from mundane to marvelous. Whether you paint, dance, garden, write, or dress like an icon, art can become your path to meaning, vitality, and connection.

It’s time to stop shrinking back and start showing up. Pick up a brush, a pen, or your favorite red hat — and take up space.

We are told  by an Arts & Health Study, that just as “physical activity and nutrition is good for our health, so is regular participation in the arts. These can be experienced by receptive engagement or active participation such as watching a performance, listening to music and dancing, going to museums, attending drum circles or a painting class. The focus is on engaging in the process of arts participation rather than emphasizing the end result of the final product.”

I would just like to say that after being beaten repeatably about the head and shoulders by the ubiquitous but nutritional broccoli stalk, lumping the arts into that grim good for us prescriptive isn’t exactly inspiring.

Perhaps a better way to promote the arts is to lump art practices with pounds of chocolate and one too many martinis. (Not together). In the past, that was exactly the association, if you weren’t drunk on wine, you were high on wormwood, a key ingredient in absinthe.  What if we brought back the roots of art: transgressive artists, creatives who are banned in many states, dangerous, thought provoking.  Let’s make art that causes our children to  clutch their pearls and exclaim, “what is the older generation coming to?”

What if art is more fun than exercise and tastier than nutritious food?  I absolutely agree that practicing art will elevate your mood, decrease pain, increase feel good hormones, but the practice has been elevated to a shelf many of us can’t reach.  Art is caviar, lobster tail and organic greens from co-op farms run by enlightened former cons.

But art can also be chicken nuggets.

Art is joy, art is doing, art is practicing and getting it wrong before we get it right: political poetry, build a bear, derivative music, a sculpture of dryer lint or a video of growing broccoli.

Start an art practice that delivers not gallery-worthy products, but rather the satisfaction found exclusively in fried bread.

Here are some de-elevated ideas:

Dance/Movement 

You can join a class featuring Jazz or ballet or you can take a pole dancing class: exercise and strength training plus the heart palpitations  you inspire when you announce your new routine to the next meeting of the DAR.  Be prepared to show off the bruises on your inner thighs.

Literary Arts 

You can join a Jane Austen book club, or you can discover and/or indulge in Graphic Novels. Discover the new, new artists, and emerging ways to story tell.  An interest in graphic novels can lead to Manga which can lead to comic cons, which can lead to elaborate costumes and a trip to Tokyo.  Allow something offbeat to take you on an adventure.

Media

Not social media but video games or film shorts and quirky film festivals. Discover digital culture. Play a few popular games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox.  If you like to game, go ahead and get sucked in. No school nights for us. Be part of the movement.

Music

Go big.  Take up an instrument.  Or stay interested – concerts or a curated playlist.  Get curious.  Follow your favorite bands and collect the albums, which leads to the next logical step – seeing them live. Never been to Chicago? Then buy the Chicago stop on the band tour.  Does the band need to be approved or popular?  Nope.  Find your unique groove and enjoy a night in the company of similarly inclined crazy fans. Get the T-shirt.

Theatre/Performance 

Begin as a fan and graduate to a performer. Attend enough stand up comedy nights and you’ll believe you too can do it.  So do it. Be a regular on Karaoke night, study and watch modern dance – then find a troupe to join.   Maybe you can leverage those pole dancing skills to join the circus.

 Visual Arts 

Drag yourself to a gallery or museum. Bring a sandwich and allow for inspiration rather than overwhelm.  Like anything on the walls?  Or did you find more appealing art at the swap meet?  Like stand up, the more frequently you visit museums and swap meets, the better perspective you’ll have on your own work.  You may not be creating museum quality (whatever that means) work, but just maybe your knitted pieces would sell well at the next Christmas Craft fair.

 Practical Arts

Remember feeding people is an art.  What do you love to cook or better, what are you already skilled at creating?  Do more of that, double down on food you love. Explore the origins, the transitions, buy fresh herbs and spices.  Take an advanced class in your favorite food.  Become an expert, upgrade your equipment. Create food and drinks that are both creative and delicious.  Wine making, haute couture cocktails, smoked meats, grilled fish, pizza (build your own pizza oven).  Grow herbs. As always, you’ll need to take a trip to sample your favorite food, then take cooking lessons. Forget praying and loving, eat through Italy.

 Art and Health

Art is not good for you – it’s great for you, far more fun than choking down raw vegetables and suffering through 25 weight-lift repetitions per miserable season.

The numbers support what we all instinctively know to be true.  In a survey by  Americans for the Arts (2024), we find, unsurprisingly that:

• About 9 in 10 Americans (86%) believe “arts and culture improve my community’s quality of life and livability.”
• 69% of Americans say that taking part in the arts and culture has “a positive effect on their overall health and well-being.”
• Over 4 in 5 Americans (81%) believe the arts may “help some people deal with mental health issues such as loneliness, depression, and anxiety.”
• Arts and culture can strengthen communities and builds social cohesion. 72% of Americans believe that “arts and culture provides shared experiences with people of different races, ethnicities, ages, beliefs, and identities.”
• 63% agree that the arts “help me better understand other cultures in my community.”

We know the arts enhance and are an important economic contributor to our communities and our country.

•  79% of Americans believe the arts are “good for local businesses, the economy, and Jobs”
• 72% favor government funding of arts and culture to address job and economic development.

All that is beneficial about art shouldn’t be off-putting. Art has never served as a health-and-safety poster. Art is both edgy and ridiculous. Take the leap from the trapeze to the top of the pizza oven brandishing a blow torch. What could go wrong?

Know someone who is newly retired or an empty-nester?  Don’t know what to do with themselves? Take up Space is a how-to book to navigate the second act of life through Art.

Catharine Bramkamp is a world traveler, poet, and belly dancer. In her spare time, she serves as a writing coach and workshop facilitator. She has authored thirty fiction, nonfiction, and poetry collections and is currently exploring all kinds of art, including outlets in which she has no talent. But it’s fun. Visit Catharine at her website here.

Featured Photo by Dina Badamshina on Unsplash

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All you have to do is open such a novel, and you will see all those creative bits that make the prose sticky and engaging. A masterful writer will think creatively about every detail of her story. She’ll consider the emotional tension her characters are feeling and find ways to express that with literary devices (such as similes and metaphors), creative imagery, and unusual word choices.

After I perused dozens of novels and short stories to find examples of microtension to use in my new writing craft book, Masterful Microtension, I’m seeing so many terrific examples popping up in the novels I’m currently reading (for my enjoyment). I want to encourage you to go on the hunt for these great little bits of tension and incongruency so that you can learn the technique yourself!

One of the novels I’ve been reading is Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place (I share a brief passage from her novel in my book, but I was so enthralled with her writing that I bought a copy and have been glued to the pages). I try to read novels slowly to savor and consider how an author put their words together to evoke the emotions that spark in me when I read. I read slowly to step back and analyze just how they so creatively expressed a feeling or situation in few words.

I always teach my students and clients: the best way to learn an important fiction-writing technique is to study current best sellers in your genre. Get out your highlighters (or use Kindle’s highlighter feature) and mark up the book! I know—your mother told you never to write in books. Ignore that advice. It’s fine for your collector-quality first editions (I have a bunch of those!); please don’t mark those up! Just buy used or cheap paperback versions whenever possible and mark those up. And if you love the book, buy another clean copy to keep in your library (support that author!).

Okay, here are some great examples I found while reading O’Farrell’s book (I’m not even halfway through yet). See if you can identify which microtension pathways she is using. Ask: Are there places in my novel or short story where I can use a similar technique? That’s the ticket right there!

The woman is dead. Twenty years or more have passed. I am not going to drop myself down, like a speleologist, into those holes and caverns and start digging around. I have to focus, have to stop trembling, slow my galloping pulse.

[The next page follows with …] I have my gaze set on the road. I am treading carefully, as if the ground beneath me is not as firm and sure as it looks, as if it is riddled with underground rivers, as if at any moment a sinkhole may yawn open under my shoes. I am looking out for the lit sign of a cab. I have lost or dropped my cigarette somewhere along the way. The sensation that begins at my feet and trembles all the way through me is akin to the beginning of a seismic event.

Okay, that should be an easy microtension pathway to recognize. The author is using a motif of risky cave exploration to describe the character’s reticence to learn what happened to his ex-wife. Once you come up with a strong motif that can be used as an analogy, you can work with similes or metaphors to bring them out. O’Farrell has the sensation in Daniel’s body feel like a seismic event. The metaphor here is treacherous, unstable ground. If you were playing with these words, you might cluster them to arrive at sinkhole and cavern and riddled.

I hope you see how nicely all this imagery drives home an important (high) moment in the scene when the character has just learned of his ex-wife’s death. Note how all this is prefaced when he, after hearing a reference to her in the news in the past tense, finally works up the nerve to search the internet:

The four numbers at the biography’s end slide into me, like a cold blade. That the year of her death is, indeed, 1986 seems at once devastating and inevitable. Of course, I think, of course it was then. I knew it already, I find. Perhaps I always did.

O’Farrell uses the simile and wording of a cold blade sliding into this man’s heart upon learning the year of her death. We are not told why this is so catastrophic, but we feel it with the word pairing of devastating and inevitable. We know right away something terrible happened that year, something this man has spent twenty years burying.

Here’s a moment where the man, Daniel, stops at one of the many gates on his property, and his wife gets out to open it so they can drive through. Calvin, the baby, is watching her through the windshield.

A moment later, she reappears in the panorama of the windshield: she is walking away from the car. This triggers some preverbal synapse in the baby: his neurology tells him that the sight of his mother’s retreating back is bad news, that she may never return, that he will be left here to perish, that the company of his somewhat-scatterbrained and only occasionally present father is not sufficient to ensure his survival (he has a point). He lets out a howl of despair, a signal to the mothership: Abort mission, request immediate return.

Why is this masterful? O’Farrell uses anaphora (repetition of the first word in a sentence for lyricism (that) to compound and explain the baby’s distress (which involves imaginative hyperbole), and she uses metaphor (wife as mothership) in a fresh and vivid way. Also, the way Daniel imagines his baby perceives him as a father is amusing and informative at the same time.

Let’s take a look at one more from O’Farrell’s novel. When he first (randomly) encounters Claudette, a wildly famous actress, he doesn’t recognize her at all. She’s changing a flat tire and is very off-putting. Later, thinking about her, a flashbulb goes off in his head.

Halfway through uttering her name for the first time, something gave way. It was as if the bricks and timber of an edifice were falling all around me. I suddenly saw, I suddenly remembered where I’d seen her before. She had been a dancer. Or was it a doctor? I’d seen her as an amputee, a murderess, a detective, a nanny. I’d watched her be French, Spanish, Italian, Persian. She’d escaped death and she’d died of cancer, car accidents, pneumonia, tiger attack. She’d killed and been killed. I’d seen her be fifteen; I’d seen her be sixty. She’d fought, punched, stolen, lied, cheated, saved lives, given birth, given head, shot, swum, danced, dressed, undressed, over and over again, for all of us.

O’Farrell here, too, uses anaphora to create that lyrical flow of sentences (she’d this and that …). The long lists here drive home her prolific and diverse acting career and talent, as well as Daniel’s realization that he’s seen so many facets of her over the years. The wall of unrecognition breaks and tumbles around him (simile) as his brain connects the woman he just met with the famous one everybody knew.

Pay Attention!

When you read your next novel (maybe go back and reread ones that you recall were brilliantly written), pay attention and note what the author is doing and what microtension pathways she’s using. Think how you might do the same kind of technique in your scenes. Find those anchor moments when moods shift or understanding sparks, then try different ways of infusing microtension into the moment. It will truly take your writing to a higher level!

Featured Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash

New Release! Masterful Microtension

“I just finished studying Masterful Microtension. It’s simply breathtaking. An uninterrupted epiphany from page 1 until the end. For me, as an aspiring mystery and thriller writer, this is simply gold, something everybody who wants to engage any kind of reader should learn and master. What I can say … this is just absolutely brilliant and unique.” —Andrea Paglino

“I’ve purchased almost every craft book that C. S. Lakin has published, but I think Masterful Microtension is the most powerful thing she’s written yet. She defines the purpose of microtension as evoking a tiny spark of surprise. The thing that gives us that ‘Wait, what?’ moment. Just having a name for that is so helpful, then she goes on to show exactly how to create that moment in your manuscript. Amazing! Thank you!” —Marilyn T. Parker, author of The Struggle for Love

Learn how to masterfully craft microtension in your fiction. Microtension is the subtle but powerful element operating beneath the surface of a scene. It is created through contradiction, emotional friction, subtext, charged description, symbolism, and imaginative wordsmithing. When microtension is present, readers feel compelled to keep reading. When it’s missing, even well-plotted stories can feel flat.

Few writers have ever been taught about microtension in fiction and why it’s so important. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find any books, courses, videos, or articles on it. Yet … without it, your fiction can fall flat.

In Masterful Microtension: The Essential Element of Powerful Fiction, you’ll study how skilled fiction writers create tension at the micro level using masterful techniques such as word pairings, literary devices, motifs, and polarities.

Most books on fiction writing focus on structure, character arcs, and dramatic conflict. While those elements are crucial to a great story, they only address the big-picture elements. Microtension works at the word level, shaping the emotional energy between narrative, actions, and thoughts.

Regardless of what genre you write, Mastering Microtension will magnificently transform your prose. If you want to elevate your fiction from competent to compelling, from readable to unforgettable, microtension is the key.

Get your copy (ebook or paperback) on Amazon or any other outlet online! 

The post Master Microtension by Studying Masterful Writers appeared first on C. S. Lakin.

Actually, there are two things: plot holes and characters doing things they would never do. You know the kind of scene. A character suddenly makes a ridiculous choice simply because the author needs the plot to move in a certain direction. Or a supposedly intelligent character overlooks something obvious. Or an event occurs that feels so contrived you can almost see the author’s hand reaching into the story.

When that happens, the fictional world shatters for me.

One example that has always stayed with me is The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans. Near the end of the novel, Tom Booker, the gifted horse trainer who has helped heal both Grace and her horse, Pilgrim, falls deeply in love with Annie Graves. Annie eventually decides she wants a future with Tom. But … rather than allow her to choose between him and her estranged husband, Tom deliberately confronts a dangerous wild stallion, essentially engineering circumstances that result in his death.

Seriously? I don’t know how the publisher thought that worked. And when Robert Redford produced the movie version, he was smart enough to know viewers would have panned the film if he kept that. Instead, he created a perfectly believable ending (worth watching).

Whether readers view the act as noble, tragic, or romantic, many found it difficult to reconcile with the character the novel had spent hundreds of pages establishing. Here’s the reason: Tom is portrayed throughout the story as wise, emotionally intelligent, patient, and deeply respectful of others. Yet in the climax, he effectively makes Annie’s choice for her by removing himself from the equation. For many readers, the ending feels less like an inevitable outcome and more like a contrivance designed to create a bittersweet conclusion.

That illustrates an important principle of storytelling: readers don’t necessarily reject the improbable. They reject what feels wrong.

Believability is not about realism. It’s about emotional and narrative truth. Readers will happily accept dragons, time travel, magical powers, alien invasions, and impossible coincidences. What they won’t accept are events that violate the internal logic of the story or the established nature of the characters.

So how do you make readers believe the improbable?

1. Ground Everything in Emotional Truth

The more extraordinary the external event, the more authentic the emotional response must be. Readers may never have discovered a portal to another dimension or survived a zombie apocalypse, but they understand fear, grief, hope, love, shame, and desperation. Those emotions create the bridge between the reader and the impossible event.

Consider The Martian by Andy Weir. The premise is highly unlikely: an astronaut is accidentally left behind on Mars and must survive alone for years without hardly any food. Yet readers buy into the story because Mark Watney’s reactions feel genuine. His humor, frustration, determination, and loneliness make the impossible situation feel real (and the science is very well researched and plausible). When emotional truth is strong, readers stop questioning the premise.

2. Build a Chain of Cause and Effect

One mistake writers make is jumping directly to the improbable event. Instead, create a chain of escalating consequences in which each development naturally grows out of the one before it.

Think of it as the “Yes, But” method. Yes, this happened, but because of that, something else happened. And because of that, another consequence followed. Each step feels reasonable, even if the final destination would have seemed absurd at the beginning of the story.

Readers are far more willing to accept an unlikely outcome when they can see how each event logically led to the next. Momentum creates believability.

3. Establish the Rules Early

Readers need to understand the rules of your fictional world. If magic exists, establish it early. If advanced technology exists, establish it early. If supernatural events are possible, readers need to know that before they become essential to solving the plot.

Problems arise when writers introduce new rules only when they need them. This is one reason readers often complain about deus ex machina endings. The solution appears from nowhere because the groundwork wasn’t laid beforehand.

No matter how strange your world may be, readers will accept almost anything if the rules remain consistent. Consistency matters far more than realism.

4. Ground the Extraordinary in Consequences

A character discovers a magical artifact, but it comes with a terrible cost. A detective finds the crucial clue but now becomes the killer’s next target. A hero gains tremendous power but loses something equally valuable in return.

The improbable becomes believable when it carries consequences. Readers instinctively distrust stories in which miraculous solutions arrive without creating new problems.

5. Keep the Story Moving

Readers analyze less when they are emotionally invested. One reason thrillers often succeed despite highly improbable plots is pacing. The story moves so quickly that readers focus on what happens next rather than stopping to scrutinize every detail.

This doesn’t mean you should distract readers with nonstop action. It means maintaining narrative momentum. Questions lead to answers. Answers generate new questions. Conflict drives the story forward.

When readers are fully engaged in the outcome, they become much more willing to accept unusual circumstances.

6. Make Character Flaws Cause the Problem

One of the best ways to make unlikely events feel earned is to connect them directly to character flaws. A stubborn character refuses help. An arrogant character underestimates an opponent. A greedy character takes an unnecessary risk. A fearful character hides the truth.

The resulting disaster no longer feels random because it emerged naturally from the character’s established behavior. Readers may not believe coincidence, but they readily believe human weakness.

7. Challenge Every Unbelievable Moment

Here’s an exercise I’ve used during revision. Ask yourself: What is the single-most improbable thing that happens in my novel? Then make a list of every reason readers might not believe it.

Not one or two reasons. Ten reasons. Twenty if necessary.

When I was writing Conundrum, one scene worried me. My protagonist, Lisa, rushes to her brother’s office after learning he plans to take his own life. She arrives and ultimately talks him down. The scene felt dangerously close to a plot convenience, so I started listing objections like these:

A determined person usually isn’t persuaded by a single conversation. Someone in severe emotional distress may not even listen. Words don’t cure depression. She wouldn’t necessarily arrive at exactly the right moment. He wouldn’t instantly feel better. She wouldn’t magically know the perfect thing to say. Simply discovering a truth doesn’t erase a mental illness.

The more objections I listed, the clearer the weaknesses became.

Then I addressed them one by one. For every objection, I asked, “Usually that’s true—but in this case, why is it different?” If I couldn’t come up with a convincing answer, I knew I had a story problem. But I believe I made the scene work well because I addressed these potential problems.

That’s a difficult exercise because sometimes it reveals flaws in the premise, scene, or plot. But that’s exactly why it’s valuable. Sometimes the solution isn’t better prose. Sometimes the solution is changing the story itself.

One other super helpful thing to do in a situation in which your reader might question the believability is to have the POV character himself ask the questions and show doubt. In other words, have the character voice the reader’s doubts either out loud or in his head.

For example, I might have Lisa think, It’s stupid to think that I’ll be able to save my brother with words. And, situationally, she might think, I can’t believe I got here in time. Fate or some higher power must be on my side, because usually my timing sucks. Or maybe my brother, in his heart of hearts, hesitated because he really wanted me to stop him from killing himself.

Play around with your character’s thoughts regarding these potential issues and see if they can help make the action more believable.

Final Thoughts

Believability is one of the most important elements in fiction, and, ironically, it has very little to do with realism. Readers will believe almost anything if the story remains emotionally authentic, internally consistent, and true to character. They will accept dragons, miracles, impossible coincidences, and astonishing plot twists.

What they won’t accept is a story that breaks its own promises.

When readers stop believing, it’s usually not because the event was too improbable. It’s because the author failed to make it feel inevitable. The goal is not realism for its own sake. The goal is creating a story in which even the most extraordinary events feel as though they could not have happened any other way.

That’s believability.

Featured Photo by Markus Laanisto on Unsplash

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