Think of this as Mark Twain’s 18 rules of writing. I’m just glad he’s not around to read my writing!
In the final installment of my plot analysis of Dracula, by Bram Stoker, we follow our heroes from the end of Act 2 to the exciting climax of this classic Gothic, horror, thriller.
It isn’t all that often that you get a glimpse into the mind of the author, especially the author of a classic like Dracula. Luckily, though, Bram Stoker was a list maker. Below is a transcription of his hand written note listing the characters in Dracula.
Although Bram Stoker’s name is nearly synonymous with the famous vampire character that he created for Dracula, the novel that I’m analyzing for the plot structure of a thriller, I’ll bet you didn’t know that he never gave up his day job.
For the several years that he performed research into eastern European folklore and mythology–and [...]
But isn’t Dracula a horror story? Oh, indeed it is. Written in 1897 by Irish author Abraham (Bram) Stoker, it is the most famous of all vampire tales, though not the first. Created in a time that had already seen a vampire craze sweeping through literature, stage, and even music, many of the key fictional elements of vampirism had been set long before Stoker took up his tale of the foreign count (the foreign count was one of the those pre-existing key elements).
So, yes, Dracula is horror. It’s also Gothic, part travelogue, an invasion tale, and even a romance. More to the point of this blog, though, it’s also a thriller. Despite the archaic speech patterns, not to mention speeches (conveyed via journal entries, letters, and news clippings), the structure of the thriller shines through.
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.
In this last part of scene-by-scene analysis of Dan Brown’s thriller Deception Point, I tally up the types of scenes used and how these change over the course of the novel. Pantsers, don’t look here.
To recap the first post of this plot analysis of Dan Brown’s Deception Point, we were off to a great start with a nice disturbance in the first scene. In Part 2, Scenes 21 through 40, we got the catalyst for the story–extraterrestrial life has been discovered in a meteorite in the Arctic.
I’m using James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure exercise of analyzing a novel, scene-by-scene, using index cards to keep track of several things in each scene: the setting, the POV character, a two-line summary of the scene, what type of scene it is, and what, if anything, makes you want to read on.
We’ve had hints that something is wrong and one of the characters has even died at this point. So, the next plot milestone that we’re looking for is Doorway 1, also known as the end of Act 1, and the scene that will propel us into the middle of the novel.
In part 1 of this analysis of Dan Brown’s thriller Deception Point, we were off to a great start with a nice disturbance in the first scene. In the first twenty scenes, there were fourteen scenes of setup, four scenes of action, one reaction, and one of deepening. That’s a lot of setup. It’s a globe trotting thriller, which takes a fair amount of setup, but I’m expecting some action soon. I’m sure DB won’t disappoint. We’ll also get the catalyst for the novel in the next twenty scenes.
I find that many books and blogs about book writing analyze movies, and not books. Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly–this is a book analysis, done as an exercise while reading James Scott Bell’s wonderful Plot & Structure. I use his index card method to break down a thriller novel, scene-by-scene, while looking for the major elements of plot: the disturbance (aka the hook), inciting incident (aka catalyst), doorway 1 (aka the first plot point, aka the climax of Act 1), pinch point 1, the world-changing mid-point, pinch point 2, doorway 2 (aka the second plot point, aka the climax of Act 2), and the climax.
|
|
|
Recent Comments