From Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction
New York: Perennial, 1988.
LAST LAP
Last Lap places the character, right in the opening lines, close to the climax of a
series of events. So the story begins partway up the face of the cliff and not when your
character, Arnold, first got interested in mountain climbing.
Because Arnold is already in action, the story has immediate tension. You can
introduce memories of incidents that occurred months or years ago. Arnold’s childhood
fascination with the pitons and the carabiners in his dad’s Abercrombie & Fitch
catalogue, his childhood nightmares of his parents as angry mountains, his muddy panic
when he went out with his Pennsylvania college’s spelunking club, his fantasies of
wearing Sherpa clothing as he studied at the University of Virginia Law School library,
his continued secret reading Spiderman in his law office-all can be contained within this
shape, as he makes his way up the crevices in the rock. You have the tautness of the short
story with the latitude of longer fiction.
As mentioned in Juggling, fiction lets you slow time. A single movement
of reaching over to the next handhold can take an entire page. That slowing down of time
not only gives a sense of the action’s significance for Arnold, but allows readers to
experience the action more vividly. Cinema adopted this fictional device when it learned
to use slow motion, freeze frames, and flashbacks to give emotional resonance to
important scenes. Now, when it turns up in fiction, people tend to feel it as “cinematic.”
To generate forward movement as the character comes closer and closer to some
point, go back and fourth between the present line of action (climbing the cliff face) and
the flashbacks (the incidents that brought Arnold to doing this). The flashbacks can be a
sentence or two, a paragraph, or a little story within the story, though very long
flashbacks tend to make readers wonder what happened to Arnold dangling up there on
the cliff.
You can put your character in the midst of a bankruptcy proceeding or an apple
harvest, or at the end of a marathon. Whatever it is, certain principles seem to hold. Have
action that involves movement and effort. A story about a woman trying to spear a fish
will be more kinetic than one about a diver who spends the whole story just waiting her
turn. Make the flashbacks vivid anecdotes. Establish that the outcome is important to the
character. Suggest that there are consequences, even if the character doesn’t fully
understand them.
All kinds of surprises and ironies are possible within the Last Lap. When Arnold
gets to the top of the cliff, he feels an unaccustomed joy, and he shouts out like a child
playing Tarzan.
See Beginnings, Flashback, Immediacy, Suspense, Tension.