Ever wonder what elements in storytelling make a book catch fire?
What makes a book impossible to put down?
Flaming Chainsaws
I found this gem of an essay on storytelling with an unlikely title, The Dance of the Flaming Chainsaws, by Benjamin Percy and wanted to pass it along to my readers.
Percy wanted to understand how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is 672 pages long, was so compulsively readable, so he read the book a second time with a pen and legal tablet, outlining its structure.
Percy says:
I paid particular attention to trouble. Emotional, physical, financial, familial, professional trouble. Mikael Blomkvist’s reputation has been slandered—he’s experiencing legal and financial issues—he’s sleeping with a married woman—he’s on the rocks with his daughter—he’s battling isolation and the elements on a cold northern island—he’s chasing down a labyrinthine mystery—his life is in danger—and on and on. His point of view is balanced out by Lisbeth Salendar’s. She is weighed down with troubles of her own and eventually their storylines thread together when they become lovers, partners.
I began to color code the major problems the characters faced—blue, black, red, green, yellow, pink, purple—and to track page numbers. Larson would introduce a blue problem on page 25, return to it on 78, 169, 240, 381, and so on, each time ratcheting up the tension and complicating things further. Interspliced with the blue problems were red problems, pink problems, a kaleidoscope of trouble, ever-changing
I have come to call these flaming chainsaws. Your success as a storyteller has to do with your ability to juggle them. Every time the flaming chainsaws pass through your hands, they gain speed, become more perilous, until at last they are extinguished.
The more characters you have, the bigger the book, the more flaming chainsaws you need. And if you don’t have flaming chainsaws in your story, you should definitely throw in a few.
The job of the author is to keep all the chainsaws in the air.
You can read Percy’s essay in its entirety at The Dance of the Flaming Chainsaws.
Now, whenever a scene feels flat, I ask myself: Which chainsaw just hit the floor?
That one question has made me think differently about every story I’ve written since.