I know this breaks the rules of the 3 plot structure but I'm writing a story about a boy trying to get back to "normalcy" after an abusive past and I was just wondering about if it's okay to lead off with what the character is trying to recover from, which would be one of the most tense scenes of the story (if not the most intense). I could write it like Boy A (or Arrow if you've never read Boy A, most probably haven't but it's a really good albeit sad story) and have two plots, the past and present building up to the conclusion but I'm A) not sure if I could do that and B ) not sure that matches my vision. So I was just wondering what anyone else thought?
Depends. Fire all your bullets in the first chapter and you'll have no ammo left for the rest of the battle.
Here's the thing. Climax is not necessarily the most tense moment of your book by traditional definitions of tension. The climax is the moment where either the protagonist faces the issue head on and either succeeds in some measure or fails. In "To Kill a Mockingbird" the most intense scene was when Scout and Jem are attacked at the end. But it's not really the climax. The climax was actually the trial where, ultimately Atticus faced against the ignorance and social norms of their society that the book was building to and failed. The rest of the story beyond that, was wrapping up all the other plot threads and driving home the most important lessons of the entire book: That even if good fails, as it often does, principles and morality are still consistent. You can't destroy those by simply defeating good. Having the most intense scene in the beginning is not bad, if that's what the conflict is going to be. I would argue it's necessary. But that climax needs to be that moment when he faces that conflict, caused by that event, head on. Now this is granted you have a resolvable conflict, which your hero may or may not succeed in resolving, but is actively working to do so. Let's take mental illness for example. A lot of people make the mistake when they're writing about mental illness to make the mental illness the entire conflict. And then the whole story is just meandering from one pointless plot point to another. And no amount of the author trying to tell you "It's a story of them coping with mental illness" is going to convince you that they have anything resembling a good story. It's just bull shit. It's just people whining about their circumstances and not doing anything about it. Good stories about mental illness like Silver Linings Playbook, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and Punch Drunk Love had all resolvable conflicts that were related to, but none the less still independent to the mental illness and could actually be tackled and dealt with. They were very clever showing where the character's circumstances and what they couldn't control ended and their personal responsibility began.
I think that in a story about recovery, what you're describing makes perfect sense. You're writing, in a way, about what comes after the climax of a different story, and including that climax for context. Yeah? However, I do think that you need a strong narrative for this story. It doesn't have to be 'intense' but it does still have to have a narrative arc with a resolution. Now, recovery is nonlinear in reality, and messy, and rarely has a clean resolution, so finding one that's satisfying could be tricky. Personally, I find misrepresentations of things like mental illness and abuse recovery as tidy and simple pretty distasteful, but stories without resolutions don't typically have widespread appeal. So, substituting another plot that's not directly about the recovery, but about something else the mc is tackling, could give you a cleaner, more satisfying resolution, with the subtext being that their recovery will continue.
Read this story: "Wild Acre" by Nathan Ballingrud. Seriously, it's what you're trying to do. Now, this is a horror short. You can find it in some Best-of's. (holy !@#, the elusive plural apostrophe! Sorry about that aside . . . I bought the Chicago Manual 17 on its first week of release. Yeah, that's who you're dealing with here.) Anyway, the story's written in a very unusual structure. Can I ruin this? I hate doing that . . . but I rather have to in this context. How do you spoiler text? I'm not sure . . . read the story first, if you must. Here's my take on it. Ballingrud is almost toying with the reader, because this is a werewolf story, which is a genre that is as overdone as a fratboy's microwave cooking and about as respected. But this time, things are different. It's the structure that makes the story so unusual. You have the buildup: a group of contractors camp out in wait for a trespasser. You of course know what the trespasser is going to be, and yeah, it slaughters them. The bloodbath is the climax of the story. Ballingrud only took the time to establish the characters (and did it extremely well) so that they could be ripped apart. The way he builds this up is exceptional. From the perspective of a horror reader/writer, it is flawless. There are no badass heroics swooping in to save the day. The MC flees the scene and the rest of the story, the vast majority of it, is the denouement. It's all about how he has been changed by these events. He just crumbles into nothing. What's so strange, is that because of the length of the aftermath, you keep expecting something to happen, and it doesn't, at least not on the supernatural level you're expecting. The tension is just ridiculous. You keep seeing this beast in the other characters, as if one of them is about to come at him, but it just doesn't happen. (which is the whole point, this is the paranoia the MC is going through.) In the last scene, the MC, now near suicidal and with rifle in hand, returns to the scene of the slaughter and calls out to the beast to come back. And then, nothing. I can't tell you how unsettling that is. The biggest danger is that if the author is weak in any area, this kind of attempt will look like a mistake. I suppose the advice would be 99 to 1 not to do this. But, in realizing the audience's expectations, an expert writer can toy with them. I think what happened in Ballingrud's story is that it started as genre (action-centered) and ended as something closer to lit-fic (character-centered). You really have to have a lot to say in those closing pages (which he did). They can't seem to be filler.
That's exactly why I want to write this story, because so many stories before this have that nice neat conclusion and it's all roses and sunshine and puppies and BS. You Don't Know Me by David Klass is one of the worst examples of this. Perfectly describes the effect abuse is having on a teenage boy... then blows the ending (don't want to spoil it but yea way too happy). Nor do I want the ending to be totally depressing (see The Chocolate War or even the aforementioned Boy A). I remember a movie... Prozac Nation maybe... where the conclusion was that the person realized that they had to TRY to get better, no amount of meds in the world would do it for them... that's the sorta of thing I want to aim for with other's helping him taking the place of meds (without copying it too much... how could I, I haven't read the book and haven't watched the movie since college). And yea what you described is exactly what I'm talking about. I think I'm just going to write it and worry about how it all fits together later. I think I could do the Boy A (/Arrow) method, and want to do that a bit anyway (the boy remembering the past while the present it taking place... just not sure where to have the past's climax), but there isn't much point worrying about it now.
