Recently the First Reader and I had a mini-Nevil Shute festival with one of our favorite books, No Highway. First he re-read the book, then we decided to watch the movie, then (of course) I had to re-read the book. And while I consider Shute one of the lesser gods of storytelling, this time I’d been thinking about my own plot problems and I couldn’t help but notice a problem with this story: the high point of the story occurs not near the end of the book, but halfway through.
And I don’t see any way the problem can be avoided.
The first half of the story ends with our hero, who has poor people skills but extremely good math and physics, deliberately wrecking an airplane at a remote stopover because his research has convinced him that allowing it to continue flying past 1400 hours will result in its failure from metal fatigue – and it has already put in just over 1400 hours – and the deaths of crew and passengers. The second half of the story is about the gradual accumulation of evidence supporting his research and eventually vindicating him.
Obviously the vindication has to come after the action; otherwise there’d be no risk in his wrecking the plane. Heck, he probably wouldn’t even need to go to such lengths.
But for tension, you simply can’t compare “This airplane is crossing the Atlantic and it may crash at any moment with no warning,” with, “The guy who wrecked the plane might get fired unless he can scrape together evidence supporting his theory, and if we can’t figure this out it could destroy the British aviation industry.”
What do you do?
I don’t know, but I’m very glad Mr. Shute didn’t simply give up on the idea and move on to some other story. This book may have its flaws, but I’d rather have it than not have it.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “When the story shape won’t cooperate”
The WIP has two climaxes. The obvious one, and one that slid in out of left field and grabbed me a year or so ago. In some ways, there’s the action peak, and the emotional peak. Which makes it really hard to get a decent denouement into this thing!
I wonder if that was what Shute was aiming for?
I get why he had to do it that way. While the tension would have been higher, if the plane had landed safely it would have removed all the urgency, and broken the main character.
I remember a critique of Casablanca, that Rick showed his emotion too early, and for optimal movie timing should have show it in front of Ilsa, yet if he had shown it then, it would have broken the character, so by showing it early, the audience knew he was experiencing it when he tells Ilsa to go with Laslo.
Sometimes you have to bend the perfect form to tell the story that needs to be told. I suspect life would be boring if we ever got too perfext.
How about: If it’s a good story don’t worry about the climax coming early. Another book like that is Thackery’s Vanity Fair. The climax is the battle of Waterloo. It comes early in the book and the two-thirds that follows is anticlimax. And yet it’s still a great book.
For tension in a story you maybe can’t compare those two situations, but in real life — the situation you want to be true is the one where the plane does not crash. Further, people have a tendency to ignore the actual real life situation of, “maybe the plane will crash because its time is up.” I’m looking at you, Oceangate. And Titanic, for that matter. And that pedestrian bridge in Florida that fell down when it was tested (and killed people because no-one was taking the test seriously).
I haven’t read the book though I’m going to go looking for it, but the way you describe it, a lot of people would benefit from reading it and thinking about avoiding excitement. What if we had avoided WWII? Would anyone believe the extent of the disaster that was avoided? I guess a really interesting point is whether fiction can come to grips with this particular question….
I just went and looked on Amazon. The book is 99 cents on Kindle right now.
Also, I remembered that a plane did fall out of the sky over New Germany, Maryland, in 1964. It actually had a nuclear bomb on board AND it seems to have crashed because the tail fell off, and this was a known risk of that particular model of plane at the time.
In point of fact, No Highway did mirror a real life series of accidents (the de Havilland Comet, which started crashing in 1954 due, they eventually figured out, to metal fatigue exacerbated by the square-window design it had — which is why your jetliner windows are oval-ish now), but that was due to Shute being an aircraft engineer who, having witnessed any number of bad designs and other aircraft failures, speculated quite accurately that metal fatigue could be a problem that had not yet been foreseen.
Actually, there were a number of crashes due to metal fatigue in the 30’s. Although No Highway, published in 1948, does somewhat feel like a prescient view of the notorious De Havilland Comet disaster in the 50’s. What the heck – if you told me Nevil Shute could see into the future, I’d believe you. I just hope he couldn’t see far enough to find out what Australia has become in the last decade.
I mean, he had, what, two or three novels centered around seeing into the future or the past? In The Wet, An Old Captivity, and… Ordeal? So, maybe he did, but in his time, Australia was considerably more free than GB or the US, so it suited him. 🙂
The FIU (Florida International University) pedestrian bridge story seems like Greek tragedy. Hubris, meet Nemesis.
It started when FIU came up with a concept for a really innovative pedestrian bridge, with decorative elements and a fairly new technology. They also wanted to showcase their accelerated construction technique.
The MC was a world-renowned bridge designer, who saw a pedestrian bridge. No big deal. Unfortunately, a mistake was made (either by him or a subordinate) that was not caught. Warning signs showed up, but were not paid much attention.
The bridge section was put in place, and the warning signs went from a murmur to a shout. A Meeting Was Held, and the MC and others went along with an attempted fix. (Temporary braces were used for installation, then loosened for the final. They decided to retighten the braces.) Because of the accelerated construction, It Would Look Bad to close the road during the work. Cue disaster.
The MC lost his engineering license, the company he worked for was barred from federal work for a decade, and the contractor went bankrupt. I stopped following the story, but I’m sure the lawyers have been busy.
Sadly, there were no heros in this one. Some people saw stuff, tried to complain, but were ignored or concerns dismissed until far too late.
People don’t love story shapes, or plot points. They don’t love spacing, or denouement. They love stories themselves, not the structures we model to explain the commonality of what we love.
The map is not the territory. If the story deviates from the three-act structure, that doesn’t mean it’s ipso facto bad.
Deviating from the map is full of risks… but sometimes, it’s also full of rewards. Like No Highway In The Sky.
Proof of this: one my favorite Diana Wynne Jones books is Deep Secret, which is a complete mess of a book structure wise. The events in the second half replicate the first…. almost. Not quite. It’s from another POV. And it makes a complete difference, and gives you what’s going on behind the events.
So– yeah. It’s not the structure. It’s the story. The structure just needs to work with the story, not be perfect.
Oh, that’s a great example! I’d forgotten about Deep Secret.
Recapping is a story structure. The entire Book of Revelation is a series of recaps, arguably, but it is plenty exciting.
Nevil Shute seemed to like tension-releasing quiet endings — several of his books do not rise-to-tension and then fall off a cliff in the current fashion. The endings are often quiet emotional closures, and not necessarily for the main character. It strikes me as a version of There and Back Again, where the “Back Again” gets significant weight.
Examples:
No Highway in the Sky
The Trustee from the Toolroom
A Town Like Alice
Three of my favorites. Add Round the Bend, Ruined City and Pied Piper, all of which also have relatively low-key endings.
I won’t quibble about putting Nevil Shute in the lower pantheon of storytelling, tempted though I am.
I will note, however, that his use of story structure was, after his first few books, deeply informed by his day job as an aircraft engineer, which lead to some very odd (but nevertheless enjoyable) books.
Once you get to his 1938 novel Ruined City (also printed sometimes as Kindling), he knows how to make stories work, and rarely do they function along conventional lines. Ruined City makes its protagonist something that in the 1930s would normally be a villain, a venture capitalist. And it follows him step by step as he commits deliberate fraud, and shows why he’s actually the good guy.
An Old Captivity is ostensibly about a three-person scientific expedition to Greenland, and the first two-thirds or so of the book are devoted to the minutiae of preparing and carrying out the expedition. Then one of the three gets sick, and… well, what the book is really about surfaces and, while I can’t say the book works, I defy anyone to read it and suggest a better structure for the story.
Pied Piper, one of Shute’s very best, has the elements of a cracking wartime thriller: an elderly British gentleman in France in 1939 finds himself as the sole guardian of two children, without transportation, trying to get all three of them back to Britain as the war breaks out all around them. But Shute is less interested in cheap thrills than in character and drama, so he frames the story by having the elderly gentleman tell what happened to a friend in a London club as the Blitz is happening around them, so the reader knows he came through all right (and is content to let a bomb take him out without taking shelter, if that be his fate).
The Chequer Board, another excellent tale, follows a man who knows his days are numbered due to inoperable shrapnel in his skull, and what he chooses to do with the time left to him, as well as showing in flashback why he reaches those choices. The structure, again, is somewhat unconventional, but works perfectly for the story, right down to the gut punch final scene (no, the protagonist is still alive at the end of the book).
As Shute himself observed, for most of his career as a writer, he was busy during the day designing airplanes, and busy during the evenings writing his novels, so he didn’t have time to read anyone else’s work. Without the influence of literary fashions or academic theories to distract him, this lead to him simply looking at his stories in the same way as the other engineering problems he dealt with, and arriving at some wonderfully unusual story structures, without ever succumbing to the temptation of doing odd story structure just to show off.
John Hemry did something similar in his Paul Sinclair series, which always ended in a court martial.
Let this be a lesson, writers:
Obey the Laws of Story Structure, or get court martialed!!!
😛
Shute’s In the Wet has a very conventional story structure — foreshadowing, tension, climax, denouement — embedded in a frame of a delirious dying man and his doctor. If the frame adds anything to the story, it’s not apparent to me. That could just be my own ignorance, but I always wondered whether Shute couldn’t bring himself to write true SF, set in the future, and used the frame to anchor his SF story in the present, albeit as a dream of the future.
Snobbery against SF is an American thing, not British, where H.G. Wells was considered a “real” writer from the start, and so was John Wyndham.
More likely, Shute thought the story had some resonance to the present, and so included the frame as a way to point to that for the contemporary reader. It’s been twenty years since I read that one, so I would have to re-read to see if I can come to a better explanation.
Story structure? I’m sure I have one, but it seems to change quite often. Sometimes in the middle of the book.
I’m not really making up a narrative, per se. I’m following people around and watching them do something. They do what seems practical at the time, and they keep going until the thing is done properly.
Then they have a party at the end. ~:D
As long as everybody’s having fun!
In my life anyway, stupid/dangerous problems get taken care of as quick and dirty as possible so I can get back to my regular routine of enjoying life.
Stories where the MC is on some kind of crusade, they strain my credulity at times. Can that guy really maintain that level of outrage through a whole book? Is he really going to attempt [really dangerous thing] just because he’s angry? No weekends off to put the feet up and chill? Even in war guys chill as much as they possibly can.
This can be a problem for me, because I have to think of ways to get them up off their asses. ~:D
Example, I just finished my little short story for promoting next book. MC is hunting zombies and suffering a bad life because of it.
Why is she doing it?! Who would go through that voluntarily? It seems unlikely, right? So I had to find a reason for her to bother. In this case, self preservation. Whack the zombie before it whacks you.
If it was important to Shute to end on a conventional denouement, maybe he would have interspersed the post-plane-destruction parts with the buildup to the plane destruction. He probably felt this way was more accessible.