Excavation Plot Analysis

My previous analysis of Dan Brown’s thriller, Deception Point, took 4 posts and 50 scenes to show the plot evolving from the opening, proceeding through the initial disturbance, the story’s catalyst and on to the end of Act 1 (aka Doorway 1).  As a complete contrast, this analysis of James Rollins’ thriller, Excavation, shows the same thing, but in 1 post and 9 scenes.

Analyzing for Plot

In James Scott Bell’s wonderful Plot & Structure, he asks his readers to do an exercise and break down several books of their choice, scene by scene, and identify several things for each scene: the POV character, the setting, the type of scene (action, reaction, setup, deepening), a two-line summary of the scene, and a note about why you’re reading on (or not).

In general, my note about why I’m reading on is phrased as a question–the one the scene has made me ask, so I have to read on to discover the answer.

Excavation

As an archaeologist and a thriller writer, how could I not analyze this book?

By the way, it should be obvious but let me say it anyway–spoiler alert. Don’t read this exercise if you haven’t read the book. Also, if you haven’t read the book, my two sentence summaries may not mean much. That said, I will not be posting the entire book.  Instead, I’ll show my analysis up to Doorway 1 (the end of Act 1).

The Milestones

As we go through the scenes, we’ll be looking for the major milestones of plot: the disturbance (aka the hook), inciting incident (aka catalyst), and doorway 1 (aka the first plot point, aka the climax of Act 1).  Were we to go further, we’d also be looking for pinch point 1, the world-changing midpoint, pinch point 2, doorway 2 (aka the second plot point, aka the climax of Act 2), and the climax of the novel.  Even though I’m not going to show the scene-by-scene breakdown after Act 1, I will show where the major milestones fall at the end of this post.

Scenes 1 through 9

Scene: 1
Setting: Peru, 1538 AD
POV: Friar
Scene type: Action
Summary: A young Dominican friar is being hunted in the jungle. He is scheduled to be executed, the bloodletting already done, and he’s also had chicha (fermented corn beer).  He crosses a rope bridge, cuts it behind him, climbs to a mountain top, on top of an altar, and kisses his cross. He has to make sure his captors don’t get it, so he slits his own throat.
Read on?  Why does he have to kill himself?

(Bell would call this scene the “disturbance” and it’s also been called the “Oh No! moment” or “the hook“. I liked the disturbance in the first scene, just as Dan Brown had done in Deception Point. I’m not a fan of prologues but I’m willing to go with it here, since it’s several centuries in the past and this is archaeology after all.)

Scene: 2
Setting: Johns Hopkins
POV: Henry
Scene type: Action
Summary: Professor Henry Conklin unwraps a mummy from Peru, with a reporter and scientists looking on.  Joan estimates the age of the mummy.  They find the cross and reason that this non-Incan was mummified–because he died at a sacred site, which is also why the Inca didn’t take his cross.  They do a medical scan and the mummy explodes, spewing gold.
Read on?  What’s up with the mummy?

(Now we know why the friar killed himself–so he’d be mummified with the cross.  In a way, this is a second disturbance of sorts, one for the modern timeline–the only timeline from this point on.)

Scene: 3
Setting: Peru
POV: Sam
Scene type: Action
Summary: Sam Conklin and Norman Fields are in the jungle at a newly discovered site in the mountains.  Sam is Henry’s nephew.  As night approaches, they worry about looters.  Gil is the security guard for the site.  Ralph, a fellow grad student, has found a sealed door underground.  They go down.  Maggie is cleaning the door.  Denal, a 13 year old Quechan translator is there.  Also we meet Philip, the grad student in charge.  As they clean the door, they find the image of a crucifix.
Read on?  Why is there a crucifix on an Incan door?

Scene: 4
Setting: Peru
POV: Gil
Scene type: Action
Summary: Gill is outside with his rifle.  He is conferring with fellow looters.  They’ll wait for night to do their looting.
Read on?  The site and the crew are in peril.

(Notice that I put the site first. That’s an archaeologist for you.)

Scene: 5
Setting: Peru
POV: Maggie
Scene type: Action
Summary: Maggie, who is Irish, reads a latin inscription with a magnifying glass.  The students discuss how the etchings got there and what they mean.  They realize it’s a message to ward people off and are excited the door could be intact.  They video conference with Henry.  He tells them to open the door in the morning.  He then tells Sam privately that they’re actually at the tip of a Moche pyramid.
Read on?  Can they get inside the pyramid?

(The underground pyramid and the presence of the cross are the catalyst for the book, the point of the story, and the point around which the various sub-plots revolve.)

Scene: 6
Setting: Peru
POV: Gil
Scene type: Action
Summary: Gil and fellow looters open the sealed door and find tons of gold, but it’s all booby-trapped.
Read on?  Will the traps kill them?

(Well, it smacks a bit of Raiders, but at least it’s a movie I like.)

Scene: 7
Setting: Peru
POV: Sam
Scene type: Action
Summary: Maggie wakes Sam up to talk about the etchings in the door.  She wants him to use some special technique of his to clean the door.  The birds in the jungle all take flight and it’s too quiet. They join the rest of the students at the entrance, head in, and hear screaming.
Read on?  Will they survive the traps?

Scene: 8
Setting: Peru
POV: Gil
Scene type: Action
Summary: Gil figures out the booby-trap, steals a couple of things, and then decides to blow it up in order to seal it until he can bring a crew back.  He barely escapes with a gold goblet.
Read on?  Will the crew die?

Scene: 9
Setting: Peru
POV: Maggie
Scene type: Action
Summary: Maggie hears Gil running toward them, so they hide.  He runs by and she sees the grenade he’s carrying and tells the crew they need to get out.  She feels as though she’s going to have a seizure. Gil drops the grenade.  Maggie pushes everyone into a side chamber to escape the blast.  The explosion traps them and Maggie has a seizure.
Read on?  Can they escape?  What’s wrong with Maggie?

(It’s come up quickly, but there you have it, the end of Act 1.  This scene is what Bell might call Doorway 1, that milestone in the plot of the book that sends the reader through into Act 2.  It’s a plot doorway that the characters must go through and it’s a one-way-only door. I’d say this scene meets those criteria.)

The Major Plot Milestones

The Hook - Scene 1; a friar kills himself on an Incan altar.

The Catalyst - Scene 5; they are excavating a buried Moche pyramid.

Doorway 1 - Scene 9; they are trapped inside the mountain.

Pinch 1 – Scene 18; the looters kill runners sent for help (in Peru).

Mid-point Crisis – Scene 26; the cross, in the US, is made of an unknown substance; Henry and Joan are kidnapped and taken to Peru.  We eventually find out who is behind their kidnapping and why, changing the arc of the story and bringing the sub-plots together.

Pinch 2 – Scene 38; the students who have survived, escape the caverns of the mountain, only to find themselves in an ancient Inca village.

Doorway 2 – Scene 51; Henry and Joan are brought by their kidnappers to the village where the students are.

Climax – Scene 57; the cataclysmic battle.

Denouement 1 – Scene 58; survivors leave from the airport in Cuzco.

Epilogue – Scene 61; the miraculous substance has survived in the US.

For the Uber-Plotters

I cannot resist!

I’ve split the 61 scenes of the novel into equal “parts” of twenty scenes each, except for Part 3, which had 21 scenes.

Wow, this book essentially started with a bang and never let up.  A full 80% of the scenes are action scenes. Where character and emotion might be deepened, there was also reaction, such that no scene seemed dedicated to deepening.  Likewise, Rollins does little to set up the non-stop action in the book. The conclusion of one scene virtually always leads into more action for the next scene.

In terms of major plot milestones, we have the following:

This fast-paced story launches into the middle of the book early, only 15% of the way through. Although it might seem like a short book, because it has 61 scenes compared to Deception Point‘s 137, Amazon lists it at 438 pages long in a mass market paperback format (I read the e-book).  At that length, it is (very) roughly equivalent in word count to Deception Point–about 120,000 words. Deception Point developed much more slowly (Doorway 1 at 36%), had no mid-point crisis, and peaked late (Climax at 97%).  In many ways, Excavation seems to break down, plot-wise, into something more expected.  Both, however, were successful in building tension and both used extraordinary, if not implausible, physical circumstances to generate the excitement.

Take Away

As James Scott Bell had promised, the results of doing this exercise have been fabulous, especially for a plotter. Although I haven’t presented the tallies for the POV data–how the scenes divide up between the different characters–the lack of deepening and setup scenes in Excavation (as interpreted by me) lead me to believe that the two authors might have had very different goals. Even so, as widely disparate as Excavation and Deception Point are at first glance, their underlying plot milestones are not that different.  I would guess that most fiction, likely most commercial fiction at any rate, adheres to the basics of plot and structure, as explicated by writing mentors. Otherwise, it would not only violate reader expectations but also the basic three act structure that’s been around since the Greeks invented it.

I’ve enjoyed reading and analyzing both books, but I think the real benefit of the exercise doesn’t come from my geeky number crunching.  Instead, I have more of a sense of the timing of a thriller, and what works for me as a reader.  As I accrue my analyses, I’m steeping myself in the mechanics of books in a genre I enjoy, hopefully to the point where I can manage the same thing in my own writing, without the calculations.