How do you plot a page-turner?
Spoiler warning
(and why I think you should read the post anyway):
I’m going to reveal most of the key plot points of The Last Thing He Told Me in this post, so bookmark this page to come back to if you want to read the book first. However, there’s much more to this book than just plot, and knowing what’s coming ahead of time will teach you even more about how Laura Dave works her magic.
In previous posts on Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, I examined how the opening pulls us in with the savvy use of dramatic irony and how Dave maximizes the impact of surprises in her scenes. In this post, I want to step back and examine the overall architecture of the novel to find out how Dave handles plotting and pacing to produce a bonafide page-turner.
As I discussed in my analysis of Tana French’s The Searcher, most novels do not match up exactly with any of the popular story structure outlines—and this is true of The Last Thing He Told Me as well. Dave discusses her process in the author interview included at the end of the novel:
For each of my novels, The Last Thing He Told Me included, I don’t write with an outline or any involved beat sheet. This means that writing for me is a process of rewriting. I utilize the first draft to find the characters and plumb the questions I want them to grapple with. The next draft is where I begin to solidify theme and motivations. It’s usually somewhere around draft eighteen—I wish that were an exaggeration—that I find my way to the ending. Because The Last Thing He Told Me involves such intricate plotting, this process of writing and rewriting was even more involved than my other novels. And when I found my way to the heart of the story (and its ending), it was so rewarding.
Having examined the novel closely, I’m not surprised it took Dave eighteen drafts to find her ending because it feels so completely earned. When the pieces settle into place at the end, they feel inevitable—we know this is where the characters have been pointing all along.
How does Dave pull it off? Part of the magic is in her plot: she offers up plenty of active puzzles for readers to try to solve alongside her protagonist. But a big piece of the magic is in her use of backstory, which she strategically stitches into the story in small, subtle patches and then bigger, showier pieces.
Let’s look in more detail at how the structure of the novel works.
Plot structure of The Last Thing He Told Me.
Backstory scenes in light blue.
Intensity coded from pale yellow, least intense, up to red, most intense.
Three-Act Structure
One classic story structure Dave does follow is to organize the plot in three acts, clearly signaled by her part breaks. Using a three-act structure allows a storyteller to provide cathartic stopping places for the story arcs. A part break signals to readers that one part of the story has concluded or resolved, and that it’s going to continue on in a different way on the other side of that brief pause of the blank page.
Dave uses three-act structure in exactly this way. Part 1 begins with a shock—Hannah’s husband disappears, leaving her only with a note telling her to protect her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Bailey, with whom she has a fragile relationship. (See my post about the opening of the novel for more about how it pulls readers into the story.) Part 1 ends with Hannah deciding that she and Bailey need to travel to Austin, Texas, following a hunch that they will learn something important about Owen’s past that will tell them where he might be now.
Part 2 begins with the two of them on the airplane and then plunges them right into their quest, following Bailey’s hazy childhood memories around the city. Dave steers them into seeming dead ends before they finally find the right track. At this point, the end of Part 2, Dave raises the stakes significantly: Hannah and Bailey realize they are close to finding the truth when a man named Charlie Smith reacts violently to being shown a photo of Owen and addresses Bailey as “Kristin”—a name she later admits to Hannah she now remembers having been called. Hannah learns that Owen changed his and Bailey’s identities after his wife was murdered. Owen believed his father-in-law’s mob clients were responsible for the murder, so he turned over evidence that eventually landed his father-in-law and several of his clients in jail. At this point, before Hannah can even tell her what she’s learned, Bailey disappears, ending Part 2 on a cliff-hanger.
Part 3, following the classic principles of three-act structure, is all about finding resolution and restoring the story world to some kind of order. At this point, Hannah must make a crucial decision: Should she follow the advice of the US Marshal, Grady Bradford, who has been advising Owen since his original identity change, and accept new identities for herself and Bailey, which could someday allow them to be reunited with Owen? Or does she fight to protect Bailey’s still emerging self-identity, believing that’s what Owen would want, and sacrifice any chance of seeing him again? It’s a classic best bad choice scenario, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Hannah ultimately chooses the second option, venturing into the heavily guarded estate of Owen’s ex-father-in-law, Nicholas, to broker a deal that would allow her and Bailey to continue living their current lives, protected from mob retribution, in exchange for Bailey’s grandfather having contact with her again. Nicholas is adamant, however, that there will be no forgiveness or amnesty for Owen—either from him or his mob associates. The work of the end of Part 3 is to show us this was the right choice. In the end, Dave shows us, the story we were reading was about the relationship between Hannah and Bailey all along.
One thing I want to call attention to is that Dave directs us to new story questions in each of these three acts:
Act 1: Why did Owen disappear? Where has he gone? Is he guilty? How will Hannah and Bailey react?
Act 2: What was Owen hiding about his past? Who or what was he running from?
Act 3: Will Hannah and Bailey be safe? Should they change their identities? Will they ever be reunited with Owen?
Notice how those questions shift? At the beginning of Act 1, we think Owen’s disappearance is related to the fraud charges against the startup he works for. But the importance of that aspect of the plot recedes quickly, and by the time we get to Act 2 the questions we are asking are all about Owen’s (and Bailey’s) distant past. Then in Act 3, the questions focus more on Hannah and Bailey and their future.
No matter what structure your novel follows, take some time to think about what questions you want to be uppermost in your readers’ minds as they move through the story. Where and how do you want those questions to shift? You can look to Last Thing to see how Dave makes us ask those questions, but one key is interiority—readers will naturally mirror the questions that are most important to the protagonist at any given moment. If you can show us what your point-of-view character is asking, we’ll know what we should be asking as well.
Backstory Chapters
Let’s look now at an area where Dave departs a bit from standard storytelling approaches. Every novel has its own specific problem to solve, which is precisely why a single beat sheet or story structure can’t work for all novels. Dave’s problem, as I touched on in my post about the opening of the novel, is that she must make us believe in Owen’s integrity and in the truth and depth of his relationships with both Hannah and Bailey. How can she achieve this in a novel whose hook and inciting incident is the character’s disappearance?
Dave finds an answer in backstory, which she weaves in liberally throughout the novel. Hannah sifts through her memories of Owen in many scenes, both internally and in dialogue with Bailey and other characters, as they search for clues to his disappearance.
However, Dave also punctuates the novel with chapters that are entirely backstory. These are the chapters colored light blue in the graphic above, and you’ll see that they occur at regular intervals. They are all short chapters, so Dave doesn’t keep us too long from the “front story,” and note, too, how often they come right before or after a particularly intense scene. These choices are part of what makes the book a page-turner. Compare, for example, the way Ann Patchett handles backstory and story chronology in The Dutch House, a novel that asks readers to linger rather than hurry forward.
These backstory chapters have different functions in different parts of the novel. The initial backstory chapters do two things: First, they show us the closeness of the relationship between Hannah and Owen, making us believe in their love and share Hannah’s fundamental trust in Owen.
Second, they provide little clues for readers to gather up and use to speculate about what has happened to Owen. Because Last Thing only has one narrator, Dave can’t easily make use of dramatic irony—when readers know something the protagonist does not—except in these backstory chapters. For example, in Part 2 we see a scene eight months before Owen’s disappearance in which someone recognizes him as a high school classmate—except that high school was in Texas, not in Massachusetts, where Owen claimed to grow up. The reader waits for Hannah to remember this encounter and add it to her small store of clues.
Then, just before we find out Owen’s true identity and start coming to terms with the fallout from what he’s done, we get two backstory scenes that reaffirm that his relationship with Hannah was true and real. One is a tender scene at the end of their wedding dinner; the other is an intense conversation on the flight that represents Hannah’s move from NYC to California to live with Owen and Bailey. We need the reassurance and emotional ballast of these two scenes to carry us through the tense final act.
In that final act, the backstory chapters shift again, to focus on Bailey and her relationships with both Owen and Hannah, mirroring the shift in the story questions in this part. The two backstory scenes show us that Hannah can be the parent Bailey is going to need her to be in Owen’s absence, and they confirm Hannah’s belief that she is making the choice Owen would have wanted for Bailey—even if it means he can’t be part of her life.
Maintaining Intensity
Finally, I want you to notice the high overall level of intensity of Last Thing, which I’ve charted in a very subjective way in the graphic above. Dave starts the novel with shock after shock (see my earlier post about how she structures scenes around those shocks), pulling us almost a third of the way into the novel before she lowers the intensity for any stretch of time.
Even in Part 2, which has a slower build, Dave makes sure to deliver a high-intensity scene about a third of the way through. Hannah and Bailey’s trip to Austin is motivated by the suspicion that Owen was hiding something in his past, but the news that he and Bailey must have had entirely different identities at some point still comes as a shock.
Note, also, that Dave turns up the intensity dial highest right around the break between Part 2 and Part 3, forcing us to hurry over that blank page to find out what’s going to happen next. Part 3 has a classic falling-action structure, with the intense climax (Hannah’s confrontation with Nicholas) positioned in the middle of the act and then followed by lower intensity scenes as we move toward resolution.
Returning briefly to the backstory chapters, notice how Dave moves them further and further back in time. The first one is twenty-four hours before Owen’s disappearance, and they move steadily back in time until the last one, two years and four months earlier—the night Hannah and Owen met. When she asks him if there is one thing that defines him, he tells her this: there is nothing he wouldn’t do for his daughter. Those words echo through the bittersweet resolution of the plot.
Takeaways:
Use beat sheets and story structure outlines for inspiration or to diagnose plot problems or gaps; don’t feel you need to follow them exactly. Instead, pay attention to the questions and problems specific to your characters and plot.
Offer readers new story questions as your novel unfolds. If your story is organized in three acts, the primary story questions should change for each act.
One way to use backstory is to give readers access to information the point-of-view character might not remember, creating dramatic irony.
If you aim to write a page-turner, consider whether the intensity pattern of The Last Thing He Told Me would work for your plot: a high-intensity start, a slow-build second act, a dramatic cliff-hanger between acts two and three, and an intense climax positioned midway through the third act.