• Morrell is a developmental editor
• Three main elements to fiction
• Balanced: the action is interspersed, not all in the beginning or end. There is a mix of description and action and dialogue. the protagonist has a starring role.
• look at published authors to look at their ratios:
• backstory
• tightness of dialogue
• when the first action scene happens
• Cohesive: written by one person, with a cohesive voice, and flows well. unified, polished sense.
• often we work on a story over a long period of time, and we change over time. or we get feedback from a critique group, and end up writing by committee. we end up with a patchwork.
• Good fiction is intimate. Readers want fictional friends. 
• we feel like we are living in that world.
• we move in and unpack our suitcase.
• we know what that world smells like, what the bed feels like.
• when the story ends, the reader feels lost, they don’t want to leave the characters behind.
• even if writing in another century or another planet, the reader still have to feel intimate. we need to prove the reality of the setting and the story, so that when the big stuff happens, the villain breaks into with a machinegun, we’ll believe in the story more if we are anchored by lifelike characters and settings.
• Character traits
• What do the characters stand for?
• Their traits must be put to the test by the story.
• The antagonist too.
• Something dramatic has to happen early: the brick being thrown through the glass window.
• an inciting incident.
• the world and the character have to be thrown off balance, and they struggle to right to the world.
• from that incident, the character has to make decisions and have goals.
• they are reluctant to enter the action, and are forced into it.
• even if they might be: a detective is hired for a case, thinking it is insurance fraud [willing], but it is actually a murder coverup [reluctant].
• plot points: one way gates that the character enters, and once they do, they can’t go back.
• in a movie it happens in the first 5 minutes.
• in a book, it happens in the first 10 to 50 pages.
• In the midpoint of your story, you will have a major reversal.
• Reversal of fortune. 
• the characters are heading in one direction, and then something happens, and they are heading in a totally different direction.
• example: the titantic. the start is intertwined stories and two families, and a romance. in the second half, the ship is sinking, and now they are fighting for their lives.
• Learn to notice this in the stories you read.
• Sensory:
• write for all the senses: smells, light, shadows, sounds, weather.
• we react a lot to weather and light.
• and set up the senses ahead of time: if a car chase has skidding on wet pavement, there should have been a rainstorm in a scene sometime ahead.
• in the story “stand by me”: look at how they use all the senses to engage
• Subplots:
• You need about 3 subplots for a novel.
• Without subplots, you aren’t writing a novel, you are writing a short story.
• Subplots need to have a beginning, middle, and end. But not all subplots need to be resolved within the story.
• But they shouldn’t take over the story.
• Subplots create resonance.
• there should be lots of echos.
• in metaphors, in subplots, in themes.
• Main subplot involves your main character.
• You can have one or two subplots about secondary characters.
• Story about Stephanie Plum series from Janet Evanovich
• Plum has this idea that she’s going to become a bounty hunter
• She has to bring in guys on the lam.
• She doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time. She’s always in over her head.
• She’s always getting sucked into something bigger than she is.
• As the series go along, she’s putting more and more people into danger besides herself: criminals show up at her parents house, or blow up her apartment.
• But in the meantime…
• She has a sidekick named Lola who used to be a prostitute.
• She’s always taking Stephanie into more danger.
• There’s also a subplot about Lola’s lovelife.
• There’s a subplot about her love life: Joe Morelli and Ranger. One is a policeman, and one is a sexy ex-Marine.
• In every book she either gets closer to Joe or closer to Ranger.
• The romance subplot creates suspense and fun. It complicates the characters’ lives.
• If you are trying to choose between the good guy and the dangerous guy, it’s creating a distraction for the character.
• Subplots
• Not random events or details.
• Specific path of events that tell a story in their own right.
• Some can stem from the backstory, but mostly take place all within the main story
• They are connected to the primary storyline. They can’t be disconnected.
• Before the climax we have the “dark night of the soul”.
• It’s some point where the characters don’t seem like they are going to make it out alive.
• The subplots get resolved before the climax.
• Some of the subplots get smaller and smaller.
• The A subplot is going to start early, maybe even start the overall story, and it is going to get resolved.
• The B, C, D subplots are going to start later (but not too late), and they don’t all have to be resolved. By the midpoint, some of the subplots are getting resolved. 
• They don’t alter the main storyline, but they can complicate it or more it harder to achieve.
• When the main character is involved in the subplot, then it reveals additional information about how they handle stress, or additional character traits.
• Examples: someone’s job is on the line, someone is going through divorce, or has partial custody of their kid, or their mother is dying. You want to reveal other characteristics that aren’t going to show up “on the job”. 
• A character will have contrasting traits:
• they may be brave, and a fighter, but then they may cry when they are with their kids.
• we want to have something to surprise the reader with.
• Titanic: The first plot point is when Rose is standing on the bow of the ship and deciding whether to live or die.
• she’s marrying this rich guy that she’s not only not in love with, but he is also abusive.
• her relationship with her mother is another subplot.
• by the end of the story, when she is in the water, floating among the ice: because she chooses to hide from her mother and her fiance.
• At the end…
• she’s come back from being suicidal.
• she’s come alive again.
• Now the love of her life, poor Jack (who is blue and looking frozen in the water), is dying.
• What will she choose? will she choose life again?
• The best subplots, like flashlights, cast an illuminating light on the main storyline.
• Flashback are scenes that happen in the past. Most stories have 3 or 4 scenes that introduce the past. If we don’t see that, then the characters don’t come to life.
• One flashback isn’t enough. It’s a sore thumb that sticks out.
• No or few flashbacks towards the end of the book.
• Get your flashbacks over early.
• What do they show that the main storyline can’t show?
• At least one of the subplots show be showcasing characters emotional needs, in addition to the main storyline.
• Themes 
• Themes tie your book and subplots together.
• The theme of jurassic park is greed: they are trying to exploit the dinosaurs. the subplots all involve greed as well…. They may even be counter to the theme: e.g. in jurassic park, there is a father figure who is protecting the kids, showing that children/family are more important than money.
• As you start writing the story, you may not know your theme, but it will emerge.
• The Accidental Tourist is about grief. the main character is comfortable in his grief [because of his son’s death by murder], and his greatest fear is to love again, to trust people and to let them into his life. he travels without experiencing anything. he goes to england and eats at mcdonalds.
• What people are most afraid to try next is exactly what you need to throw back at them.
• A woman whose husband dies in Iraq isn’t going to marry an accountant. she might struggle in a relationship with one, but she’s going to fall in love with someone who is another risk-taker, a firefighter or a policeman, causing her to have to face the fear of losing someone all over again.
• the subplot will share the dream of the main plot.
• Read To Kill A Mockingbird – great examples of themes woven in by subplots.
• Other examples
• Harry Potter: 
• all the romances 
• the dersley’s
• everything happening at the school
• Stieg Larson series
• what’s going on at the magazine, the fate of it.
• the family that’s come to solve the mystery
• lizbeth’s experiences
• from a series standpoint: the subplot of lizbeth’s life in the first book becomes the main story in the second book.
• in action stories and thrillers, the subplots will affect the main story line more than in a literary story.
• Subplots can manipulate the energy level of the story:
• You can lower the temperature if there’s too much stress in the main story.
• You can raise the temperature if the main story is at a slow point.
• You can vary the locales, and bring more details in.
• Subplots can create little delays in relying key information, creating suspense for the main story line.
• We need layers of worry that are rolled in. the reader can’t just worry about the main character and main issues.
• And things don’t happen in a vacuum in real life
• Ingredients of Subplots
• Keep your tense. Can’t change it.
• Essential character; main or secondary.
• Central goal:
• Conflict: between characters and other.
• Resolution: most of them will have resolution, but not necessarily all of them. Main subplots must get tied off, the smaller they are, the more they can dangle.
• Questions
• Thrillers?
• For thrillers, one way to work things in is to have things break. Then the character has to fix them. We get to learn about their skills, their past.
• Thrillers can have 10 to 20% backstory, without a problem.
• You need to establish forward momentum and stakes early on.
• You need to have characters off balanced and under stress early on.
• Are themes an emotion?
• Some themes are revenge, some loyalty. It’s about humanity, but it doesn’t have to be about emotion. It’s some aspect of human nature.
• How do I cut? I have 130,000 words.
• Can you combine some characters? Do we need six best friends?
• If they are just adding color, get rid of them.
• If they don’t reflect on your themes, get rid of them.
• Does it reinforce the dominant traits?
• Go after it word by word:
• Get your words tighter.
• Write in the active voice.
• Get rid of your modifiers.
• People clump prepositional phrases together. Don’t do that, especially in action scenes.

• Poll of audience: 
• half from out of town
• 20% for the first time
• 90% writing fiction
• Written 5 books for writers
• Both fiction and memoirs need action and narrative
• Good writing simmers and brims on the page, slips into the readers brain, involves readers emotionally
• No emotion in the story, they won’t connect to the characters
• We don’t want happy readers, we want nervous readers. Threats to characters. The reader keeps turning the page.
• Take someone out of their comfort zone, and force them to act.
• Readers want:
• People read to escape. Some people are looking for positive social changes — especially science fiction. Talks about society, morals, etc. A way to vision the world in a more positive way. People read for laughs and wit, or for the intellectual challenge, or for puzzles. 
• Some people read because they want a predictable, safe world that they can return to again and again. Comfortable predictability.
• People want happy endings because real life doesn’t provide enough happy endings.
• People want to be surprised, or to see aspects of human life they have never seen before.
• Suspense, and the arousal that comes with it.
• People looking for real visible characters and settings.
• Because society has become so visual, from TV to high def movies to computers, readers need more visual elements in their writing. There should be something on every page.
• Writers need to be careful not to preach their agends.
• Connecting to characters
• It’s safe.
• It’s a pleasure to connect with them.
• We want to empathize 
• We have fictional friends as kids, characters are extensions of that as adults.
• The way characters see the world, the way their hearts open up, this is what makes characters rich.
• Anecdotal story about a boy in a small town who goes to the library. He goes to the kids section, sits at a table, and starts reading. Hours later the library closes, but no one notices him,. The boy is missing, and they search the town for him. Hours later, they think to check the library, and the boy is still there reading at the table. 
• Fiction has power to give meaning to meaningless lives.
• In fiction, there is cause and effect. There is no randomness, the way there is in real-life.
• Everything that happens in the story has a cause, some of it is in the backstory, the characters lives before the story.
• Characters choices and decisions should be made in scenes: they are too important to overlook.
• choices and decisions affect things. What is the event that makes things happen – that kicks off the whole story? e.g. the story
• as characters make choices, they are also being threatened. these threats and also different agenda are forces on the character.
• The most important things happen to characters in action scenes.
• Most characters will have a single defining moment. These most often happen in an action scene.
• in screen writing, action is always a physical action: a punch, a gunfight, etc.
• In fiction, it is less necessary to have physical action, but there needs to be tremendous threat.
• In the movie Saving Private Ryan… there is the opening action scene where they storm the beach. That’s one form of action. Later in the movie, there is another scene, late in the movie, where the characters are in a village, and one character needs to bring ammunition up the staircase to the rest of his team, or they will die, and he struggles to go up the stairs. it’s an emotional action scene.
• good action scenes provoke your flight or fight response. your heart should race faster, get your adrenaline pumping, and feel vibrantly alive. 
• fictional characters are vulnerable: in the kitchen scene in jurassic park, there is a velociraptor against a bunch of kids, who should have been safe.
• when you are writing action scenes, you are slowing down time. it’s like being in a car accident, where things slow down.
• but it can’t slow down so much that characters are thinking about the grocery shopping list.
• the higher the action, the less time characters should have for thoughts, for either introspection or flashbacks.
• a scene brings characters to a new place. we write in scenes as much as we can, we don’t just summarize. scenes have tension and mood.
• what in the story is going to have the most dramatic potention?
• for stories that are around 80k to 90k words…
• you’ll have at least six big action scenes. sometimes called set pieces.
• everything is building for a while, setting things up for the set piece.
• dominant traits that your character has are going to be showcased in the set piece. a risk taker will step over the edge too far, a brave guy will have fights thrown at him. 
• somewhere in the first 50 pages of your manuscript, there has to be a scene which is a point of no return, and it needs to be showcased.
• because we’re writers and not directors, we have a bigger challenge to write action scenes. we can’t have stunning visuals and sound effects… we need to do it all with written words.
• scene: a unit of conflict that is lived through by the character and the reader
• the character wants something
• something else stands in their way
• the character will win or lose
• most scenes end in disaster
• sequel: a unit of transition that links scenes. it’s what happens after the big fight, as the characters come to terms with what has happened. their unsaid words. new goals that form as a result of the action. new decisions that result from the action.
• if possible, there should be 3 reasons for every scene:
• show protagonist feelings
• introduce or develop a character
• add romance or threat to the story
• always: develop the character, push the story forward.
• [like permaculture, everything should have 3 purposes]
• if it doesn’t move the story forward, it doesn’t belong.
• your protagonist is going to change…
• the antagonist is the push that forces the protganist to change. they don’t have to be a villain to do that. 
• the protagonist wants something. a goal is not a goal until it is concrete and meaningful enough for the character to take action to get it.
• conflict: engine of fiction. stories without conflict are not stories.
• goal choice + conflict = character must take action and make decisions.
• disasters are at the ends of scenes because they are hooks.
• they intrigue our imagination. “what’s going to happen next? how is that going to affect so and so?”
• and you can have a reverse disaster: “and alice knew that everything was so perfect, nothing bad could ever happen again.”
• structure of scenes
• made up of action and reaction
• can have only one character: climbing a mountain.
• if you have a lot of scenes with one character thinking about things, that’s not a scene, it’s an introspection.
• you need to mix it up. as much as possible have more than one character in a scene, especially action scenes.
• there are limited countered examples: the character has to cut off their arm to survive, the movie castaway.
• love-making is an action scene.
• you need to set things up ahead of time:
• if it is going to rain in a scene, there should be clouds ahead of time.
• don’t summarize. stay in the moment.
• develop character or advance the plot.
• suspense and tension are not the same thing:
• tension is like really bad humidity. it penetrates everything and frays your nerves. it’s an undercurrent of unease. you try to get tension in all your scenes, especially action scenes.
• suspense is knowing something is going to happen, and waiting for it to happen. we create suspense by delaying answers.
• an action scene is a release of suspense: it’s a catharsis.
• if they are too fast-paced, the reader gets lost.
• too slow, the reader gets bored.
• too over the top, and it’s not believable. 
• Hollywood action scenes are not good examples for books: they are just visual, over the top eye candy, and the viewer doesn’t have time to think about the unplausibility.
• But when writing, the reader has time to think about the details: “But wait! I don’t think they can jump 40 feet across buildings!”
• Everything you write in the action scene has to have an emotional purpose. It can’t have details just for the sake of details: we don’t need to know she is wearing a pink shirt, unless later that shirt is going to be stained in blood.
• the stakes have to justify the action.
• if the heroine knows judo, we have to know way ahead of time that they know judo: an earlier scene shows her coming out of judo class.
• if characters have a lot of skills, and they don’t use them, that has to be justified.
• pacing
• if the action scene is really fast paced, then the scenes below should be slower, and connect us more to the character, to create more of a rollercoaster ride.
• the writing itself should get tighter and tighter, even working with sentence fragments if needed
• ticking timebombs are important in fiction. e.g. the villain is killing girls at certain intervals, and it is a race against time to find him.
• in action scenes, we don’t channel surf. we stick with one viewpoint.
• choreographer:
• the number of bullets in the clip, where the gun lands when it gets knocked out of their hand, everything has to be thought through. 
• there’s not a lot of internal dialogue.
• external dialogue can’t be speeches.
• it can be interrupted.
• action to break up dialogue, and dialogue to break up action.
• the shorter the segments are, the faster the perceived pace.
• don’t interrupt the action: there’s no introspection on where the perfume was made in the middle of a love scene.
• real people get tired. sword fighters get tired. they can’t go on for pages and pages of sword fighting. even in the princess bride, they get tired and take a break.
• you can’t have too many action scenes all squished together. they need to be interspersed with character building and discovery.
• all the action scenes have to matter: they serve a greater purpose than other scenes.
• when possible, use humor: characters have witty little barbs, it helps break up the tension, keeps the action more enjoyable.
• action can be non-violent.
• In workshop exercise:
• write a prompt for an action scene. example: man gets lost in cave.
• then fill in worksheet:
• scene purpose: what prompted the action, why do you need the scene
• scene goal: what is the protagonist is trying to achieve
• scene action: who, what stands in protagonist’s path
• internal response: key emotions, emotional reversal within protagonist
• how the scene develops character or pushes the plot forward
• result: what has changed or learned by the action in the scene. what were the consequences.
• Q & A:
• I have a demon with a really different viewpoint. How do I handle it?
• Don’t do it in the action scene. Do it before. Maybe even an excerpt in italics to differentiate it.
• How to do a car chase?
• Make it realistic. It can’t go on and on.
• Lots of verbs, but don’t repeat verbs,
• Besides the chase itself, make sure there are other barriers: the apple carts, wet pavement, and babystroller across the street.
• Character has to make moral chase: do they run down the baby?
• short paragraphs!

Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse and How to Survive a Robot Uprising spoke in Portland, Oregon at the monthly meeting of Willamette Writers. Wilson’s novel Robopocalypse is being made into a film by Steven Spielberg.