Chapters and Stories
I’ve been kind of stuck for the last week or so, and I just figured out why, bringing me back to Richard Stark’s Parker novels.
When you read genre fiction, in my experience, the function of chapters is to break up the narrative into digestible blocks. In some cases, as in much contemporary fantasy, this is emphasized by shifts in POV: Chapter 1 is Archer Ardala’s tale, and 2 Bron the Brute’s, etc. In some cases, there might be six or eight such perspectives, rotating around, and unless the author is very slick, readers may have trouble following: by the time Ardala has come back to center-stage, we’ve forgotten what her deal was. The fact is, keeping so many balls in the air requires considerable skill.
Now one reader pointed to this habit in modern fantasy as a great thing about The Deeping Well—as in, I don’t do it: I’ve got one POV, tight around Cagtlan, and that’s all. As an author, the reason I didn’t shift perspectives in that book was that I didn’t see the point. This stuff is always a tradeoff: lots of POVs means easy expansion to an epic scale, but it makes the book trickier to focus, and thus harder for readers to follow. That means you’ve got to have really tight control of structure, and so on.
If you have a very limited POV set—just one or two, let’s say—then you have a different problem when it comes to chopping things up, namely, why stop? Why not just keep the narration running? At a distance, it’s clear that without breaks, the narrative can become bogged down in pure quantity, but if we just arbitrarily chop blocks of text, the pauses tend to jar. What to do?
Stark, in his devious way, does both of these—single POV and multiple—masterfully. Here I’m not going to talk about how he leaps from POV to POV in part 3 (sometimes part 2) of a Parker novel; I’ve talked about that before, and besides, it’s not the issue here. Instead, my problem came up while keeping very tight to my principal protagonist’s POV. So what does Stark do?
Example: In The Score, Parker needs to acquire some machine guns. Back then, you couldn’t buy those at every sporting goods store, so he’s got to deal on the black market. He goes to this hobby shop, where you buy plastic train and tank and plane models, and in the back room there’s this half-mad blind man who’s got all these guns, broken down into main assemblies, hidden in model boxes. They dicker back and forth, Parker trying just to do business and clear out, the old guy being increasingly bizarre but finally capitulating. Parker leaves with the guns.
Example: In The Outfit, Parker needs a clean car that the cops can’t trace and won’t pick up as problematic. He goes to a kind of rural farm thing with a workshop in the barn. He consults with a car guy, they come to general agreement, and the guy takes off to get the car from a stock he keeps nearby. While Parker’s waiting, the guy’s wife comes on to him, and he rebuffs her. When the guy comes back with the car, the wife says that Parker attacked her. Parker’s isn’t interested in convincing anyone: he figures the guy will make up his mind one way or another regardless, and either Parker gets the car and leaves, or he’ll kill the guy (and possibly the wife) and take the car. Whatever. Eventually, the guy decides he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he’s backing down, because he can argue with his wife but Parker doesn’t seem like a good argument person. Parker leaves with the car.
We never hear about these people or places again. The guns are guns, the car’s a car. What Stark has done is to take a plot stage—Parker needs X—and turn it into a short story. It has context, because we know (sort of) why he needs X, and we’re pretty sure Parker’s going to get X (at least, he’s not going to die), but it’s fundamentally isolated.
Once you spot this, you realize that this is also something Stark plays with throughout the series. In the late novel Backflash, an early sequence—Parker arranges clean ID, but when he comes to get it, there’s a killer trying to waste the forger, so Parker kills a bunch of people, takes his clean ID, and drives away—has repercussions many chapters later. Because we’ve been reading Parker, we don’t expect that: when he does some little heist to raise cash, or when he gets the guns or car along the way, we get a stand-alone story and move on to the next phase. If it’s not central plot, it’s literally incidental. But now there’s gunmen after Parker and he hasn’t a clue who or why they want him, and lo and behold, he gets shot, bad. Which sets the scene for the final section, because Parker is badly hurt, and there are killers after him, and a smart local cop is wondering just who the heck this guy is and why gunmen are after him, and all of this is completely irrelevant to Parker’s intended job. One way or another, he’s going to have to get out from under this, because we know Parker is never, ever going to let go of that job. (Not because he’ll never walk away, but because this one is about revenge, and Parker is always utterly implacable.)
For me, this realization solved a number of problems, because it gave me a way to plan out a chapter, where my drafts had just rambled and had to be scrapped.
1. I know where things stand. I know what’s got to happen, plot-wise. I know where this chapter has to end.
2. I know who’s involved. I could bring someone in (the old blind man, the awful couple, the ID forger), but it’s sure to get in the way.
3. I know what’s at stake for the various characters. So how do those things cut across the job, i.e., the ostensible plot?
Once I wrote a couple of thousand words of notes about each character’s issues and stakes, I realized what the problem was: I had all these ideas about what was going on in people’s heads, but because of the narrow POV, I’d never spelled it out, or not much. Realizing that, semi-consciously, I wanted to string out the narrative to get it all aired, but there was no point, no focus to any of it. Instead, the point of the chapter had to be in itself to air the issues.
I constructed the chapter/story such that Ghildor (the Parker-parallel) knows that there’s potential trouble within the string, for several reasons. He’s not dumb. The seemingly right thing to do when there’s this much mess is to walk away, but he doesn’t want to. So he has conversations with each person, drawing them out. Then he tells each of them that they’re right but should go easy with so-and-so because such-and-such. We know, because we’re largely inside his head, that he’s doing this simply to make the job work, soothing people’s irritated feelings and whatnot. We know, too, that he thinks it’s all idiotic, because what kind of useless fool lets personal feelings get in the way of doing the job efficiently? Remember, he doesn’t have actual empathy, because he’s more or less a sociopath, but he understands in a vaguely clinical way how to identify and deal with such problems. (For Parker readers, cf. the setup to the job in The Rare Coin Score, with the driver and the muscle/arsonist.) By the end of the chapter, we think we know the plan of the job, and what everyone’s individual tasks will be, and what everyone’s wound up about. We’re ready for the job to begin.
Of course, the trick is that the job takes place in Part 3, where each chapter is a different POV. At that point, we will come to realize that these people are a lot more complicated and screwed-up (and perhaps devious) than we’d thought. Leaving Ghildor, in Part 4, to pick up the mess.
In addition, since I’ve been noticing that my writing has been running short of my projected word-counts, I now can go back and think about where and how to add material that suggests these underlying tensions and pressures. That way, when we get to this chapter where everything (seemingly) gets spelled out, we’re not surprised and the whole thing feels like air-clearing, which is after all what Ghildor intends.
Of course, it won’t work, because where’s the fun in a noir heist tale if it all works?