I was reworking the Centre Pompidou scene and trying to decide what I really wanted to share about Hergé and his Tintin albums. That, and pulling excerpts for my Japanese translator to proof/revise from the last book, and a few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn, and I realized I’d missed something big.
I have the elements; I talked about this when I was advancing the concept of “James Bond Plotting.” Go to a place, find a clue, have an adventure. That’s in the books.
But I keep thinking there’s not enough action/conflict obstacles in the books. The current book particularly bugs me because there is a puzzle that acts like the mainstay to the plot; go to scenic Paris location, puzzle out the clue that is there, lather, rinse, repeat. I’m fumbling around thinking I need more conflict going on — in all my books — and that is probably true.
But then I look at all the struggles Penny goes through; her multi-chapter infiltration and sneaking around the Transcendence HQ in A Fox’s Wedding, her epic underground exploration in Fox and Hounds. The current book — Sometimes a Fox — is a bit the “breather episode,” intentionally spending a lot of time sitting around in cafés talking about art so I am okay if there is less conflict and struggle. But there is still the contest with the rival group, and of course the challenge right from Page One to unravel the clues in Major Huxley’s memoirs.
So here is the trick I missed: The parts aren’t connected.
This is another of those Life v. Art things. Take as an example the (infamous?) gondola chase from Moonraker.
Bond learned at Drax’s factory in California of mysterious glass vials being made in Venice. He goes there, is chased down a canal, infiltrates a lab and finds shipping labels for Rio, and throws a guy out of St. Mark’s. The clues are a thin lead, but that’s not what’s important here. The point is that he “earned” these clues via the fisticuffs and hover-gondola escapades.
The gunmen came out of nowhere. There was no reason for them to attack at that moment and they weren’t physically between him and the clue. But they were temporally between his arrival in Exotic Location de jour and finding the next clue, and they were emotionally placed — using that tension-relax structure, the fast-scene, slow-scene system — to make finding the clue a payoff for the effort of defeating them.
The reboot Tomb Raider series makes this very obvious. Lara would climb and sometimes shoot to get to a remote location, pick up the next plot coupon there, then get an arena battle on her way out. Struggle to get to the clue, fight to survive and bring it home. Which is why it takes her hours of climbing cliffs and navigating spike traps to get there, but the moment she has the artifact in her hands, the bad guys rappel in through the roof!
I’ve hit it a few times. But missed it as many. In The Fox Knows Many Things, Penny’s entire flight from Germany is just conflict without resolution. She learns something about herself in the epic swim — it advances the B plot — but she doesn’t learn anything about the mystery.
When she confronts Satz and has a fistfight in a ruin (more like a flailing slap fight), she earns his admission about the role of Outis and the Athena Sherd. So that’s doing it right.
In Fox and Hounds, during the Battersea infiltration she finds out Cephrin was the shooter — but that happens about half-way through, meaning there’s no payoff to the final push to the White Room. When she sword-fights with Guy at the Globe, he makes a damaging admission — but I whiffed that one, too, because she doesn’t acknowledge what she has learned until half-way into the next scene.
In A Fox’s Wedding I hit it right with almost everything in the second half of the book (I seem to, generally, do better with the second half of books!) The epic climbing wall completes with Deacon inviting her to what she keeps calling the “Embassy Ball” — the final step of the Tokyo part of her infiltration of his organization. The charity event was a little whiffed but I recap in the following “downtime” scene that they’ve gained enough plot coupons to advance to the next stage of the game.
Question is, though; now that I recognize this structure, can I apply it properly to Sometimes a Fox? The first chapter at Sacre-Couer has been bugging me constantly and I was never quite happy with it to begin with. Now, finally, I think I see why.
Because to switch to a different model, it isn’t about the clue itself. The clue can be fun, but especially in an Indiana Jones sort of thing, after finally getting to the place where the clue is, he studies a faded inscription and announces, “It says here Gilgamesh traveled to Ugarit, so we need to go to Syria to find the Golden Bull.”
That is; figuring out the clue is just a thing the protagonist does. The tension-release is all in the things that get in the way of getting to the clue (or getting back out alive.)
As much as I had fun with Huxley’s doggerel, that isn’t the accomplishment. Figuring them out is never something that feels earned — not the way some physical or emotional obstacle would. Hell, I seemed to realize this subconsciously; when given, A sinister turn, a whiff of grapeshot, sombre Triumph of writer and poet, Penny immediately says “Turn left on the Champs-Ellyses.”
(Incidentally, I’ve been reading up on the software Atticus and otherwise trying to find formatting options to see if I can set Huxley’s words out in something other than italics. The last book, Linnet’s diary was always read aloud, or described in dialogue/narration. This book, I have complete excerpts and I want a formatting that better suits a more epistolary form.)
And I am doing clean-up work on A Fox’s Wedding this week — why I hired my Japanese translator to check my work. I have been concerned about the slow beginning on that one, and maybe, just maybe, it is worth trying to figure out how I can put more of that structure of struggle-clue, tension-release into it.
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