At long last, I’m going to fulfill a promise made weeks ago. I’m going to teach you some storytelling terminology.

As I admitted to Joshua Unruh yesterday, I tend to work off a couple different writing glossaries that use some overlapping but non-identical terms. That means when I say “plot point” in one context it might not adhere to the same strict definition I’m using when I refer to the “Plot Point One” in a three-act narrative.

For this series, though, I’m working off the glossary we’re using in my Masters program — that’s the glossary I’m learning from Deborah Chester, much of which she learned from Jack Bickham.

I’m going to start today with a discussion of questions. Questions are the fuel that drive readers through a story, and as writers we need to manage those questions on every page of the manuscript. There are several kinds of questions, and each of them works in its own context and scale.

Hooks

In storytelling terminology, “hooks” are questions that keep readers reading. Or, if we want to get really pedantic, “hooks” might be the situations that present those questions to the reader. Either way, this phrase should give a pretty clear indication what I meant about questions driving readers through the story.

From scene to scene, chapter to chapter, we always want to have the reader “hooked” on our story. That’s the point of having an incredibly compelling first line. That’s the point of cliffhanger endings. That’s much of the point of the whole scene-and-sequel setup.

Essentially, every question in a book can act as a hook. The biggest are usually, “What’s going to happen next?” and “How are they going to get out of this?” But a hook can be as simple as, “What’s with the creepy dude in the glasses?” As long as it keeps the reader turning pages to find out more, it’s an effective hook.

The problem with that definition of “hooks” is that it largely overlaps with my definition of “questions” (in the storytelling context). I’m going to talk about “plates” and “scene questions” and “story questions,” and in essence all of those do exactly what I just said hooks do.

So we refine the definition to make the phrase useful in its own context. In that more limited usage, “hooks” are the questions specifically used to bridge narrative gaps. In a TV show, it’s the big question raised right before throwing to commercial, or the cliff-hanger at the end of the season finale, meant to guarantee readers will come back in the fall to find out what happens.

In a novel, hooks are invaluable tools for closing chapters. A strong hook can tie up a scene and then hurl a reader right on into the (slower) sequel at the beginning of the next chapter and keep them reading until the next scene kicks into gear.

Hooks are also handy tools before point-of-view shifts. Let’s consider a hypothetical situation:

You’re writing an epic fantasy novel that follows a massive cast of characters as they meander through an extraordinarily convoluted plot that reaches across a whole continent. You’ve just finished four chapters following one of the protagonists–we’ll call him “Nat”–and now you’re going to switch to an important-but-less-interesting character who we’ll call “Berrin.”

Before you spend three chapters talking about…I dunno, local politics among some dirt farmers, you set up some big scary event for Nat. Show him preparing for a battle he can’t possibly win. And instead of telling the readers how it turns out, leave them with the question.

That can be an effective use of a hook. The reader will put up with your diversion because they want so badly to know what happens next.

It’s a tricky balance, though. If your hook is too strong (say, you went ahead and showed Nat leading that army into the hopeless fight before cutting away), your readers might skip on ahead in their desperate need to know more. Hitting just the right level of need requires a bit of a delicate touch, and that mostly comes from experience.

Plates

But, as I said, there are lots of ways to use questions to keep people reading. If hooks are the short-term questions that bridge readers across narrative gaps, “plates” are the medium-term questions that entertain readers within the narrative.

The term refers to a bizarre kind of juggling act you may have seen in clips from old variety shows or possibly as part of a circus act: spinning plates. From that wikipedia article:

Plate spinning is a circus manipulation art where a person spins plates, bowls and other flat objects on poles, without them falling off. Plate spinning relies on the gyroscopic effect, in the same way a top stays upright while spinning.

The challenge of it (and the part that makes it enough of a spectacle to merit a show) is to have lots of plates spinning. A juggler can get one plate spinning and rely on its gyroscopic effect to keep it up while he sets up three or four more.

Of course, eventually that effect is going to wear off and the first plate will start to wobble. A talented juggler knows just when that’s starting to happen and goes back to the first one to steady it with another little twitch, spinning it faster again and setting it right.

That’s a great metaphor for the role effective questions can play in a story. “Plates” are unresolved story issues that keep a reader interested. The trick is to get lots of them going, and to keep them all spinning until you’re ready to bring them down.

Some plates only last for a page. The question “Wait, who’s this guy?” might only need to keep someone reading down to the bottom of the page where “this guy” steps forward and introduces himself as the shady loan shark. Once that’s resolved, though, “How’s the protagonist going to pay off the loan shark?” might well become a plate that keeps the reader intrigued all the way through the story.

But the trick is to keep the plate spinning. There’s going to be so much going on in your story, that any one setup might get lost way back in the murky mists of Act I. A talented storyteller, just like a talented juggler, will know when to go back to an already-spinning plate and give it another little nudge.

Maybe the loan agent shows up again. Maybe the protagonist is looking through his wallet for a business card and comes across the loan slip. It doesn’t take much to get it going again, but that little comment can suddenly evoke a flood of questions and sympathetic concern in your readers that will keep them deeply engaged with the story.

Of course, the biggest questions don’t just drive your reader; they drive your protagonist, too. Those are the ones that describe the shape of the story’s plot: scene questions and story questions. Come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about those in detail.

Last week I half-apologized for a temporary and unexpected hiatus due to my busy schedule, and then it went and got busier. The weekend featured the first major event by my publishing-company-slash-engine-for-world-change, the Consortium.

You can read a summary of the event that I wrote for the official page, but you’ll get a clearer image if you read the description of the Consortium that Courtney put together on her blog. Either way, you’ll see evidence of an event that attracted nearly a hundred people and put on display more than thirty creative works across half a dozen media.

And I was there.

I’m not saying I made it happen. Sure, the event kept me busy, but I did little more than show up. I want to say Trish made it happen, after seeing how much work she put in, but the reality is that the Consortium made it happen. A lot of people put in a lot of time and money and effort to make that event the success it was.

And that’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the event that went on before the event. Friday night, I joined a tiny subset of the Consortium at a dance studio down on North May, and we made magic.

This subset included:

• Joshua Unruh, our Director of Marketing and generally well-connected gentleman
• Courtney Cantrell, our Vice President, novelist, painter, and photographer
• Julie and Carlos Velez, our Master photographers who also proved themselves remarkable musicians on Saturday

But, as  I said, we’re not talking about Saturday. We’re talking about Friday night, and on Friday night the Velezes were on hand as photographers. As students, really, at the feet of another master.

And me? I was there as a lurker. That’s how Joshua introduced me at the top, and I went ahead and justified that description for the rest of the evening. I lurked against a back wall (just as you’d expect me to do in a dance studio) and chatted with Joshua and occasionally with Courtney.

I suppose I should mention (at long last) that the brightly-lit, mirror-walled dance studio doubles in its off hours as a photography studio. And the man who owned it (a friend of Joshua’s) was busy capturing digital archival images of a dozen of Courtney’s paintings.

Among them was one that showed a stormy, moonlit night behind one of the most amazingly sinuous and scary dragons you’ve ever seen. On the ground before the dragon was a wizard, arms raised and spell readied, and on the back of the dragon was another wizard, this one wielding magic and a sword.

Joshua said it looked like the cover for a metal band’s album from the seventies. I said it looked like the cover for my next novel (which, of course, it was).

I’d had a couple opportunities to drool over the painting before, and I’d already spent some time worrying about the photoshoot. No matter how lovely an oil painting is, we’d have to turn it into a digital image before we could make it a book cover, and this one had me worried.

The dragon’s smooth black hide stood against an ominous black night. The wizard on the ground below was wrapped in the same dark shadows that cloaked the earth. It was a powerfully dark scene and Courtney did an amazing job painting it…but I just worried the subtle contrast would be lost in the transfer to digital.

I worried about the glossy sheen of the still-wet paint, too. I worried about the fine detail Courtney had had to cram into such a tiny canvas. I stood back against a wall lined with paintings we thought we might get to if things went well, and just secretly hoped we would have time enough in those two hours to get one really good shot of my cover.

The good news was that the man we’d hired to do this session knew his business. He’s an extraordinary photographer with lots of experience shooting all kinds of work, but digital archival photography was well within his range. And, out of the kindness of his heart, he volunteered to teach our photographers how to do it for future projects.

So Simon stepped up to the painting, explaining technical issues all the while to Julie and Carlos. He held up a light meter and did several test flashes. He stepped over behind his camera, checked the view, maybe made an adjustment or two, then snapped a shot. He invited Julie and Carlos over to see what that first shot looked like.

Then to my great surprise he sent Carlos to grab another painting while he set my cover painting carefully to one side. It was finished. It had taken maybe five minutes. When they finished shooting the next item in line Julie came over to tell me how very much they were learning, and how exciting it all was.

This is what I love about working with artists. I’ve spent twenty years now writing books (yes really), and for most of that time I was quite happy in the knowledge that writing is a lonely profession.

But in the last year I’ve learned how easy it is to recognize talent and admire mastery even in arts I couldn’t possibly pursue. I’ve learned how much we all have in common and how invigorating it is to share those experiences. And I’ve learned some small measure of the extraordinary things the people around me are capable of achieving.

Friday night was one example. Saturday was another. My whole last year has been full of them, and I’m looking forward to making a whole career out of it. Long live the Consortium!

Photo courtesy Courtney Cantrell