I just published Jackdaw, an everyday tale of lost love, betrayal, murder, walking on air, justice, vengeance, doomed escape, and heroes and villains swapping places till you don’t know which way’s up.

Author Angel Martinez documented her reactions to the book thus:

Gah!
Ack!
Nonononono!
Oh…dear.
Oh, that’s what that was about.
*flail*
*more flail*
*sniff*
restresthappyrestrest
Nonononono!
What? Ack!
Hooray!
*sigh*

I’m not actually going to plot this as a graph because I’m not (quite) that nerdy. However it did make me think about book shapes.

By ‘book shape’ I do not mean ‘page-sized rectangle’. I mean the ups and downs of a plot that give a satisfying overall structure. Jackdaw, as you see, starts on a low point, goes on an upward trajectory to a peak, plummets off a cliff, and then rises again to the end. It’s basically a N shape: low to high to low to high.

Ups and downs are crucial. A story where the heroes meet, fall in love, and move along a steady path up to happiness is very nice for them, but it’s not going to be a compelling read. (That doesn’t mean books have to have horrendous angst, of course. In Emma, one of the lowest moments is when the heroine makes a mildly bitchy comment; in other books you get the same effect by blowing up a planet.) But a straight line is not interesting, whether it’s a straight line high on the graph (‘we’re just more and more in love!’) or low (‘oh hey, more torture’).

This can be hard to see in your own work. In the first draft of my just-finished MS, A Fashionable Indulgence, I had a steady upward trajectory bringing the heroes together over several chapters with no downs at all. My beta reader pointed out that I needed pushback. It was, effectively, all *flail* and no *nonono*, and that didn’t challenge the characters or the readers. I needed to introduce conflict. Not for its own sake: that’s always unsatisfying. But I put in a scene that gives a first hint of the conflict points that arise later in the book, and now the opening chapters have more drama, the groundwork for the problems is laid much better, and that part of the book has a varied shape—not a straight line.

I’m on the opposite side of this with my current WIP. This is a story which will have a lot of low points (the characters start off OK and are promptly plunged into a pretty terrible situation from which the only way is down…at least till they find a way through, because I’m not a complete jerk). It would be easy to write this as an elongated U shape: start high, then just go for the long slide into the mire. But that would be a monotonous reading experience and, frankly, a miserable one. So the trick is going to be to make the *flail* balance the *nonono*. Seek out the nuggets of gold in the mire for the reader and characters to treasure together; let love and hope stand against the all-going-wrong. Vary the shape.

Even a sunny book needs shadows; even the darkest book needs stars. Otherwise your structure is nothing but a straight line, and those are, by definition, one-dimensional.

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KJ Charles writes about writing on her blog and chats on Twitter.

Jackdaw is out now.