Story Structures

Most of the writing advice I have seen on plot and the writing process offers one of two solutions. The first is that you should have the entire plot mapped out before hand, or at least sketched and outlined, so that you know where your characters are going, and why. This is the minority opinion, I believe. Most other writing books offer an alternative, “intuitive” account of the writing process. Writers should just “start writing” and let the book form itself. There are many variations of this intuitive model. One popular variation is the character driven model, which claims that all a story needs is well formed characters. While helpful, this method has also led to the propagation of the active character fallacy. Another is the claim that writers should write pieces of the story, whatever parts they want to, and only later go back and try to sew those pieces up into a cohesive plotline.

This is an unfortunate distinction, and one which I do not believe exists. In fact, no one can write anything relying on only one of these two methods, but I personally believe a lot of harm has been done by those teachers who push the intuitive model on their students. It isn’t that intuition and creativity aren’t vitally important to storytelling; the problem is that writers forget, or never learn in the first place, how to structure their ideas in a coherent, meaningful way. But how do we approach this question then? My advice is to rely on story structures.

Scene Endings

What happens through the bulk of a scene is not really something which can be easily taught, because, as I mentioned earlier, the bulk of a scene relies heavily on other aspects of writing. However, there is one aspect of a scene which belongs in its own category, which is how the scene ends. You might think that how a scene ends is just as difficult to generalize as what happens in the scene, but in fact there are only four possible ways for a scene to end, all in relation to a character’s goals in the scene. The four results are: “Yes”, “Yes, but…”, “No”, and “No, and furthermore…”.

Essentially, there four possibilities depend on two aspects of the scene. The first is whether or not the characters achieve their goals. Obviously, if they do, then the scene ends in a “Yes” or “Yes, but…”, and if the don’t, then the scene ends with a “No”, or “No, and furthermore…”. However, there is another difference between these endings, depending on whether or not the characters actions have resulted in some other consequence which they must now react to. If the characters are not forced to react, then the answer is a straight “Yes” or “No”, and if something occurs which the characters must respond to, the scene ending is a “Yes, but…” or “No, and furthermore…”.

Plot

Plot is the companion to the timeline, which I discussed here. As a brief reminder, I introduced timelines as the part of story which connects the temporal events of the story together. However, we also ran into some problems with timelines. In particular, we found that it was difficult to connect events together in ways other than direct temporal cause and effect. In addition, we found that it was difficult to create adequate suspense without introducing some element beyond events themselves. This element, is the plot.

In some ways, plot works directly against its counterpart. Whereas the timeline is attempting to put events into a temporal order, plot works to suspend that temporality, in order to connect events in other ways. A plot can generate many other types of relevance, in particular character driven cause and effect. While all types of cause and effect have to occur in a specific timeframe, there is no limit on how large that timeframe might be for those types which are dictated by plot. For example, I used as an example a timeline of the Civil War with an extra event tacked on, marking 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. This event isn’t temporally relevant to the Civil War; however, there is no reason why it couldn’t be casually relevant within the story. Suppose that the story was tracing the path of a young black woman who had escaped from the South, and the Declaration of Independence inspired her to return in order to work for the Underground Railroad. Now the event is crucial for the plot of the story, if not the timeline.

Two Sentence Stories

This is another excellent tip that I am stealing from Jim Butcher. The essential premise, is that every story can be broken down and summarized into two sentence, even the longest, most complicated works. The basic format looks like this, with the words in brackets being replaced by parts of the story.

[When something happens],[the protagonist(s)][pursues the overarching goal of the plot]. But will he/she/they succeed when [the antagonist(s)][pursues a goal contrary to the protagonist’s goal]?

The most notable feature of this structure is that the final sentence is completed with a question mark. Why a question mark? Because it simulates the basic suspense of the timeline and plot which will keep your readers turning the pages until the very end of the story. There should always be doubt that your protagonists will overcome the antagonists in the end. In some stories the protagonists are actually defeated (Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a fine example).

Happy NaNoWriMo!

For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is National Novel Writing Month, also known as what writers do to torture themselves throughout the month of November. The goal? Write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. That’s only 1,667 words a day, not too bad, right? If you want to join in, head over to nanowrimo.org to sign up. It’s free, and if you finish, you’ll get a certificate, and who knows what else. However, you won’t get your life back, but who needs it?

For those of you just getting started, but not sure what to write, this is one of the few times (perhaps the only time) I will prime your creativity. The exercise that follows is called person, place, and plot, and as far as I know, I invented it. I like it because it works. Right now, write down three numbers between one and ten, repeats are allowed. Now look at the columns below, and you will find that you have a random character, plot device, and setting. Now just find some way to fit all of those together, and start writing. I know this won’t work for all of you, but if it works for me, I bet it can work for you too. If you don’t like leaving things to chance, you can just find three things on the list that interest you. However, it’s more fun if the three prompts have some distance between one another.

As a final note, all of these are “mainstream” figures, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative and move them into a fantasy world. In fact, I would love to see someone write about a construction worker in a castle. Maybe its magical, or haunted? Maybe his daughter’s missing, I don’t know. (3,4,7)

Emotional Reactions

The emotional reaction is the first part of the sequel, which I introduced here. I want to go over some good questions to ask yourself about this part as you are revising. I would suggest that you avoid thinking about these questions until you start revising, because there are few ways of derailing your writing faster than getting ahead of yourself and allowing your critic to come out too soon.

How emotionally invested was the main character in the previous scene? – The answer to this question affects not only the type of emotion your character feels, but also how long you will spend on their emotions in general. It is possible to skip over a character’s emotional reaction entirely, but beware: if you ignore your character’s emotions without good reason, you risk readers believing that your character is a heartless bastard. Most characters will feel something, even those not directly involved in a scene. Just a mention of exhaustion of some kind is often enough. However, what doesn’t make sense is for a character with little at risk in a scene to then respond with some incredibly powerful emotion, like grief or fury. If you want to get your character that worked up, you have to invest them emotionally in the outcome.

Pressure

When I discussed motivation here, I brought up the idea of pressure. I wanted to take a moment and expand on that, and in particular, what it means in terms of character development. There are two kinds of pressure. The first is internal pressure, and the second is external. This distinction is probably fairly obvious, but I’ll elaborate on it a little. Internal pressure arises from the character’s own desires. When a character wants something, and because of that want is motivated to pursue a goal, then they are feeling internal pressure, and are internally motivated. When a character is forced to take action because of outside forces, then they are feeling external pressure, and are externally motivated. The line that divides these is pretty clear, but that isn’t to say that a character can’t be motivated by both pressures at the same time. However, there isn’t really an example of pressure which is both internal and external in and of itself.

What, then, does this have to do with characters? Most of you have probably heard of active and passive characters before, with active characters being motivated actors, and passive characters being acted upon. A better way to define this distinction is to be aware that active characters always have internal motivation, while passive characters always have external motivation. This avoids some of the negativity that has been unfairly heaped on passive characters in the past, because passive characters are just as necessary in a good story as active characters.

Timelines

Writing a story is often a balancing act. Good writers are always aware of these balances, so that they can use them actively. One such balance I have examined is between scene and sequel. Another balance that I want to turn to now lies between timeline and plot. I want to start with the more basic of these notions, the timeline.

Some of what I will be recounting is taken from E. M. Forster’s excellent lectures which are complied in his work, Aspects of the Novel (you can find a mostly complete copy here), which I am currently reading. However, he calls what I will be talking about “the story”. Because I like to use that word in a more general sense, and because I think the word timeline suits my purposes here better, I will use it instead. The timeline is simply the sequence of events that occur in the story. I mean this as literally as possible, simply the different things that happen, connected by an “and then” all the way to the final scene. For example, “Anna got up, then she took a shower, then she ate breakfast, she went to the store, she came home, played with her dog…” and so on and so forth.

Sequels

I want to start with something basic, but something which many writers invariably don’t know about, and that is the sequel. For this I am indebted to Jim Butcher, and his blog here. I would suggest reading the whole thing, but I have a few notions I want to develop sequels differently than he does, although this post is mostly repetition.

All stories can be thought of as a line of bricks, which have been mortared together. The bricks are scenes (which you’ll hear me talk about often) and the mortar between two bricks is a sequel. Thus, quite obviously, sequels are the transition between two scenes in a story. However, simply calling them a transition, which I have seen people do before, doesn’t do sequels justice. In fact, I don’t particularly like the brick and mortar analogy, because in some works, the sequels are actually longer than the scenes are, but it will do for our purposes now.