Staying on the Beam

A novel is such a grand enterprise, like a Newport mansion where we can stick our heads in so many rooms and marvel at all their trappings. A writer wedded to the organic approach, allowing the book to unfold as it will, can compose truly marvelous scenes, filled with character descriptions and thoughts that engross the reader. This process can go on swimmingly for months. 

Through every house, however, run girders that underpin the rooms—or scenes, if you will. Depending on how much your book relies on plot development, the exuberance of creation needs to remain aligned with these overall supports. If one of your suspects, say, is a politician involved with a Blackwater-style operation, any scene between the pol and a Blackwater member can feature as much swagger and macho sneering as you like. Yet if a Blackwater crew killed an annoying evangelist, the scene better tell the reader: the politician either ordered the murder or at the very least has a motive to cover it up. That was the whole point of the scene in the first place: to implicate the politician.

The reason authors often stray from the point is they don’t really know what their plot is. That is filled out only after the first draft is completed. Again, consider the enterprise you’re engaged in. If the book is a suspense novel, it needs to deliver building suspense. You build any plot by a series of interlocking plot events that increasingly show the extent of the evil at work. But if you don’t actually know what those events are before you start writing a scene, you’ll find the story is going around in circles rather than taking the next step forward.

If you create a plot chart before you start, or at an early point in the draft, you will be able to see the framing of your house before all the wonderful details are filled in. That’s what best-selling authors do, usually to a fiendish extent. Knowing which plot point you have to cover does not stifle creativity. A plot scheme merely channels it. Think of it this way: how much of any scene is needed to deliver the next clue? Think of all of the rest of that scene that is not involved in clue laying. That’s a large proportion of any novel.

Exercise: Before you start a new scene, check all of the previous scenes that include the characters you’ll be featuring. What has each person learned up to that time? They would have that knowledge in the forefront of their thoughts. If Ellen, for instance, knows that a ransom note writer is left-handed, she would think of that if the scene uncovers any evidence related to something done by hand. By building in these mental (or verbal) references to the past, each new scene will build on what came before.

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” —Anton Chekhov

Copyright @ 2026, John Paine