Category: art

Okay, we’re in the middle of a big discussion/ lecture/ infodump about story structure. To be more exact, the different types of story structure, because there are a bunch of them and they all serve a different purpose. That’s what I blathered on about last week. Well, that and linear structure. So if you skipped last week, you might want to jump back (look, a handy link) and read that first. Or maybe re-read it as sort of a refresher before we dive into this week’s little rant.

Now I want to talk about narrative structure. As I mentioned last time, these things have a few different names, depending on who’s talking or teaching, so maybe your stuffy literature professor called this syuzhet or something like that. But for now (and because it’s what I’ve done in the past) I’m going to call this narrative structure.

Remember how I said linear structure is how the characters experience the story? The narrative structure is how I, the author, decide to tell the story. It’s the order and style and viewpoint I choose for how things are going to unfold. It’s me saying I want to start with a prologue or ten minutes before the finale and then jump back to the beginning. Or that every third or fourth chapter will be a flashback. Or that I’m going to tell the whole thing from the point of view of the sidekick instead of the superhero. Or maybe, somehow, all of these things in one story. All of these are narrative decisions.

Actually, that’s a good before-we-go-any-further thing. My story might use a point of view or a device (say, a journal or epistolary form) that gives the appearance of “telling” the story. For our purposes here, though, if I talk about the narration I’m talking about me, the writer, and the choices I make. Watsonian vs Doylistic, remember? Because that first-person narrator or journal scribbler doesn’t say or do anything I don’t want them to. No I don’t care what that one other writer says about the characters having a life of their own and telling the writer what they want. I’m in charge. I’m God in the world of the story.

So, now that we’ve got our weekly blasphemy out of the way…

In a good number of stories we encounter, the linear structure and narrative structure are identical. They’re linear stories. Things start with Phoebe on Monday, follows her to Tuesday, and conclude on Wednesday. Simple, straightforward, very common. These books may shift point of view or format, but the narrative pretty much just goes forward hour by hour, day by day. My book, Dead Moon, fits in this category. It’s got a bunch of twists and reveals, but the narrative is pretty much a straight line from the beginning to the end. No flashbacks or frames or anything.

I’m not going to talk about this type of narrative too much because… well, I already did. If my narrative matches my linear structure, any narrative issues I might have are also going to be linear ones. And we talked about those last week (here’s another handy link in case you missed the last one).

Our focus right now is going to be stories where the narrative doesn’t follow the linear structure of the story. Sometimes the story has flashbacks or a frame, where it’s mostly linear with a few small divergences. Others might split the story between multiple timeframes, with one thread taking place in the present and one in, say, the 1950s. Or maybe the story’s broken up into lots sections and the reader needs to keep track of how they all line up—these are called non-linear stories, or you may have heard it as non-linear storytelling. It was the hip new thing for a while there. My book, The Broken Room, has a large flashback section where Natalie talks about her past, and it’s worth noting that her extended flashback/ retelling is all linear within its own subset of the book (she’s very precise about that sort of thing).

It’s important to understand narrative structure is more than just switching around my story elements. It means I need to start actively thinking about how all these structures interact. So here’s a few things I need to keep in mind when I start playing with my narrative structure.

First off, putting things in a new narrative order doesn’t change the linear structure of my story. As I mentioned above, the week goes Monday through Friday, and this is true even if the first thing I tell you about is what happened on Thursday. Monday was still three days earlier, and the characters and events in my story have to acknowledge that. I can’t start my book with everyone on Thursday baffled who stole the painting, then roll the story back to Monday where everyone was a witnesses who saw the thief’s face.

That’s a kinda stupid, overly-simple example, yeah, but you’d be surprised how often I’ve seen this problem crop up. Sometimes in really simple ways like this. Storytellers want to switch stuff around, but then they ignore the fact that just because they told us about Thursday before Wednesday doesn’t mean Thursday happened first. Again, the story collapses when the narrative elements are put in linear order. This is a really easy problem to avoid, it just requires a little more time and work.

Yeah, weird, I know. Telling a story in a more complex way is more work. Go figure.

The second thing to keep in mind when experimenting with narrative structure is… why? Seriously, why am I breaking up my story instead of telling it in order? I mean, yeah, all that non-linear stuff was edgy and bold for a while, and a lot of folks still do it, but… what’s the point of it in my story? Why am I starting five years ago instead of today? Why do I have this flashback at that point?

As an aside, I know some people hate “why is it happening now” as a story critique, and in a Watsonian way, I kind of get that. Sometimes things happen just because they happen. That’s how life works. I think sometimes things can work this way. I think sometimes they can’t.

But remember, we’re not talking about the Watsonian view of the story, we’re talking about the Doylist one. So why did I, the author, arrange these events in this way in the story? What effects am I trying to create? How is the narrative improved by shaping it this way?

And if I can’t explain how the narrative’s improved by shaping it this way—or if it plainly isn’t improved—again, what’s the point?

The third and final issue with a complex narrative structure is a little more subjective.

Last week I mentioned that we all try to put things in linear order because it’s natural for us. It’s pretty much an automatic function of our brains. This flashback took place before that one. That’s a flash forward. This flashback’s showing us something we saw earlier, but from a different point of view. Our brains latch onto the little details (or sometimes the big headers) and sort things accordingly.

But our brains have limits. There’s only so much we can keep track of and—let’s be honest—only so much we’re willing to keep track of. if I give you four or five numbers or letters and ask you to put them in order, it’s not a big deal. G X B N. See? You did that without too much effort.

On the other hand, if I throw a deck of cards on the floor and ask you to put them all in order… well, now this is a task. Heck, first you’ve got to find all the cards. And are they all supposed to be in numerical order or should you be doing them by suits? Are aces high or low? And if this is all in order, where do we put the jokers?

Point is, there’s a point where I’ve tweaked my story so much, my audience is going to spend less time reading it and more time analyzing it. Diagramming it like some photo-and-yarn covered conspiracy board. When somebody hits the ninth flashback done in a third tense from a fifth point of view… there’s a good chance they’ll need to pause to reorganize or re-analyze things in their head. And every time they have to pause, it’s breaking the flow. It’s knocking them out of the narrative when I want them to be sinking deeper into it.

And once I break the flow, that’s when people set my book aside to go have a glass of wine and watch gardening shows. I can say whatever I want about art or attention spans or readers putting in some effort, but at the end of it people can’t get invested in my story if they can’t figure out my story. And if they’re not invested… that’s on me.

Y’see, Timmy, narrative structure can be overdone if I’m not careful. I know some of the examples above sound a little extreme, but the truth is… they’re not. I’ve seen manuscripts where writers tossed linear order out the window and jumped tenses and povs and timeframes a dozen times. And some of them did all of that in the first fifty pages. Seriously.

This is something that can be tough to spot and fix, because it’s going to depend a lot on my ability to put myself in the reader’s shoes. Since I know the whole linear story from the moment I sit down, the narrative is always going to make a lot more sense to me, but for someone just picking up my story… this might be a bit of a trainwreck.

That’s narrative structure. However I decide to tell my story, it still needs to have a linear structure. Maybe even more important, it still needs to be understandable.

Next time, I’ll try to explain how linear structure and narrative structure combine to (hopefully) form a powerful dramatic structure.

Until then… go write.

If you’re reading this, it probably won’t come as a shock to you, but… people love stories. Literally, since the start of recorded history. They love reading them. Hearing them. Watching them. They love having their emotions played with and their expectations subverted, and they also love comfortable, familiar tales and they can sink abck . They love made up people and places and event that never happened.

Believe it or not, some people also love telling stories. Pulling people and places and moments out of their head and presenting them to an audience. They love the act of stringing these specific words together in this specific order and knowing it’s going to get that response.

Another thing people love is, well, easy solutions. If there’s a way we can get around doing some work, we’ll usually do it. Yeah, this takes sixteen steps, but is there a way I could do it in fifteen? Or maybe eight? Could I skip over the first dozen steps and maybe just do those last four?

But sometimes we just can’t cut corners. For complexity reasons or safety reasons or just because, look, this is how long it takes to do this. As much as we want ease and simplicity, there are some things in life that take time and effort.

So, with that in mind, let’s talk about the Warren Commission.

A week after the assassination of JFK in 1969, newly sworn-in President Johnson ordered Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the killings. Warren assembled a group of congressmen and specialists to gather evidence and quash all the conspiracy theories that were already starting to run wild throughout the country.

The Commission’s final report, alas, didn’t really help calm fears there was a big cover-up going on. One of the more controversial declarations it made was that a single shot caused all of the non-fatal wounds to both President Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally, a shot that changed directions multiple times during its flight. Even more amazing, said bullet was miraculously found on the floor in Connally’s emergency room, having supposedly fallen out of his bloody thigh, completely clean and not even deformed…

The popular term we got from this report, which you’ve probably heard before, was the magic bullet. A small, simple thing which defies every bit of common sense to produce borderline-miraculous results. Some might even say… magical results.

Some folks think to be a successful writer, it’s just a matter of finding a magic bullet. I mean, all these folks talk about spending years trying to “hone their craft” but it can’t actually be that difficult, right? Surely there’s a trick that’ll let me skip to the front of the line—an easy way to bypass all those early, boring stages—and get to the point where people are fighting over my manuscript.

So let’s talk about some of the magic bullets folks spend time looking for..

The magic word
Back when I read contest screenplays for food, a common thing to see was scripts entered into a very niche contest with clearly minor additions to make them fit the requirements of said niche contest. I saw countless stage plays that had a few camera directions sprinkled on them. More than a few token minorities and painted-on sexualities. My favorite, however, had to be the sex comedy that showed up in the pile for a faith-based, prayer-centric screenplay contest, where the protagonist desperately prayed to God oh please, please Lord, let me get this woman out of her clothes!

Storytelling doesn’t work this way, either with audiences or publishers. I can’t expect that using this word or that one (or this phrase or that label) is going to be an instant key to success. I definitely shouldn’t expect that it’ll make people overlook certain other glaring issues my work may have.

The magic genre
Pretty sure since the dawn of storytelling there’ve been folks trying to jump on the hot market bandwagon. Thag gets all the applause for his mammoth-hunting story? Well, Bron have mammoth hunting story, too! Two mammoths! With lasers mounted on skulls!

With the desire to make a sale, some folks try to follow the “hot” markets. Right now young adult science fiction is hot? Guess I’ll write YA sci-fi. Historical romance is hot? Did I mention my YA sci-fi is a time travel story with a historical romance element (mammoths in love)? What’s that? Horror adventure is hot? Guess I better dump the YA and start over

The issue here is timing. Even if I lunge at that hot new genre, there’s simply no way to get a manuscript done, polished, and in front of someone before the trend’s passed. Seriously, none. Especially when you consider most publishers are already working a year or so ahead of the current market.

Worth noting there are folks who write very timely books and they write them very fast, but a lot of them almost inherently don’t have much of a shelf life. They sell really well for a brief window and then usually never again. I need to decide if I’m okay with that. Assuming I even have the ability to do it

Don’t try to follow a market trend. Just write the horror/ romance/ faith-based/ mystery/ sci-fi story you want to tell and make sure it’s the absolute best one anyone’s ever read. That’s what’ll catch people’s attention and make hundreds of others rush to hop on my bandwagon.

The magic aesthetic
More than a few folks think the secret to success—real, worthy success—is to create art. Actual literature which will be recognized immediately for its inherent worth and my inherent genius. That deep, overwritten sort of art that makes grad students start to feel warm in the middle of intellectual discussions.

This one’s a double edged sword, because a lot of the folks going for this bullet end up taking it in the chest (I believe the gentleman ordered a metaphor, mixed over ice?). It’s my firm belief that attempts to create art usually lead to forced scenes, painful dialogue, and unbelievable characters. Plus, that same art then becomes a blanket excuse to let the writer brush off any comment or criticism their work may get. After all, only the sophisticated and intelligent people are going to understand art. If they don’t understand, it just proves they’re not intelligent and thus not qualified to judge it, right?

As I’ve said many times before—don’t try to create art. I just want to tell the best story I can the best way I can tell it. Let somebody else worry about if it’s high art or if it’s just some pedestrian, pop-culture crap that’s going to sell a million copies and get a movie deal.

The magic message
Close behind the above bullet is the belief a story needs to have a deep, powerful meaning. Every element should be loaded with subtext. Each page should make the audience rethink their beliefs.

While it’s great to have subtext, a writer shouldn’t be fighting to force it into their story. Likewise, if I’ve come up with a clever metaphor which applies to the catchphrase/ scandal/ fashion of the moment, much like the special genre above, odds are that ship will have sailed loooooong before anyone ever sees my work.

If I feel like my work has to have a greater meaning… maybe I should ask myself a few questions. Do I think it does, or am I trying to live up to someone else’s expectations? Will it still be relevant six months from now, or six years from now? Most importantly, does this greater meaning serve my story? Or is my story bending to this greater meaning?

The magic contact
One of the more common magic bullets you’ll see is networking. My writing’s irrelevant compared to knowing the right people who have the right jobs. For a long time it was (incorrectly) touted as the only way to succeed in Hollywood, and I think that belief spilled into prose writing as well. Some folks spend more time hunting down “contacts” than they do working on their writing.

Alas, active networking is dead. Any seminar, website, or app that promises me tons of networking opportunities will not offer a single useful one. I’m a big believer that the best networking only ever really happens by accident, and trying to do it defeats it immediately.

The people I want to make connections with are… well, the people around me. The folks I’m already talking to and hanging out with because I like them. And they like me because I’m not basing these relationships on a personal agenda, just on a shared interest of movies or toys or gardening or games or just weird shared life experiences. They’re the folks I’m more likely to help later on. And they’re going to be more likely to help me.

The magic software
I’ve talked once or thrice before about becoming too reliant on technology. There’s nothing wrong with using a spell-checker to double-check my work, but I shouldn’t be relying on it to actually know how to spell for me. Or to know which word I meant to use. Or to know what that word means vs what I think it means. Because… well, it can’t do that. Any any of that.

Seriously, how often have you had spellcheck tell you something’s wrong just because the word’s not in its vocabulary banks? Maybe it’s just a word that particular dictionary didn’t adapt yet. Maybe it’s an alternate but still widely -accepted spelling.

And now there’s also grammar checkers and style checkers and you may have even heard there are some fancy futuristic lines of code out there that’ll write the whole story for you. But the sad truth is, none of this stuff actually works. No, it doesn’t. They all understand “writing” in the same basic-competency way a second-grader does. They barely understand the rules, and they definitely don’t understand when and how to break the rules. They don’t understand context or subtext or nuance or, yeah, even basic vocabulary.

So anything these systems do for me, I’m pretty much going to have to double and triple check from every angle (if I actually care about it being good). I’ll need to actually know the spelling and the grammar and the style I’m going for, and I’ll need the patience to do it all line by line, rewriting as I go to make sure there’s consistency.

Which really means… I’m doing all the work anyway. So, y’know, maybe I could just cut out that legally/ ethically/ artistically questionable step and just start learning to do this stuff.

Y’see, Timmy, as I’ve mentioned once or thrice, there’s really no trick to writing (the Y’see Timmy means this is or big overall windup, for those of you who are new here). No secret words or key phrases or handshakes you need to know to get past the doorman. It’s just about being willing to put in the time and effort to become better at something. Some folks are. Some folks aren’t. Guess which ones tend to succeed more? Believe me, I say this standing with thirty years of literary garbage swirling in the wind behind me. The most terrible, derivative fanfic. Some truly God-awful sci-fi and fantasy tinged with high school angst and college melodrama. Heck, look back far enough and you’ll see three completely different versions of that long-lost American classic Lizard Men From the Center of the Earth.

So, there you have it. A handful of things you shouldn’t be spending time looking for. I mean, seriously, who spends their time trying to get hit by bullets?

Next time (assuming you survived all those bullets) I’d like to talk about baseball and Lindsay Lohan.

Unless you’ve got a better idea…?

Until then, go write.

I’ve mentioned once or thrice here that one of the toughest lessons for a writer to learn is that something I wrote just might not be that good. I spent time writing, some more time editing it (hopefully), and now on my third or fourth pass I’m forced to admit it’s just… not good. Maybe it doesn’t really work with the character or this particular moment in the story. Maybe it’s really good but it just doesn’t fit in this book.

But also, let’s be honest. Sometimes… it’s just bad. We wrote something that’s crap. It happens.

When this happens, it’s tough, but we usually need to start cutting. Lines of dialogue. Whole paragraphs. Whole chapters. Subplots. Hell, I’ve cut whole characters out of a book and then stitched everything together again around their sudden absence.

And this is a rough thing, to let go of something that we invested time and effort into. I think that’s why people will fight so hard to keep some things. To rationalize why we don’t need to get rid of it. To rewrite and twist and push and try to find a way that makes it work.

Now, there’s two aspects of this I want to address.

First, like I said, the gut reaction is to fight against pulling stuff out of my work. I know I did for years. But as I kept trying to do this, I realized something. This was a natural part of editing. Things are going to go away. If we can accept that we might need to snip a word or three, then it makes sense we might need to snip ten or twenty. Or a hundred.

This is going to sound weird to a few folks, I know, but sometimes you’ve got to write something out to find out you don’t need it. It’s that thing I’ve mentioned once or thrice, that you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. And part of fixing something is realizing I don’t need that funny character bit or the flashback chapter or maybe the whole romance subplot. They’re ruining the pacing or changing the tone or breaking the flow.

And again, yeah, sometimes they’re just bad.

So we cut it. Tear it out. Delete it. Good riddance!

Well, hang on.

This is the second aspect of tearing things out. Yeah, some of this can go and we can never think of it again. Like blocking someone on social media. Hit the keys, gone, everything’s better. Again, there’s a chance it’s just bad and not worth the effort of trying to make it good.

I spent an afternoon two weeks back trying to structure a chapter for this funny character bit (oh ho, that sounds familiar) and ultimately realized it just wasn’t going to work. It didn’t make sense for at least one of the characters involved. And it ultimately wasn’t even that funny. Definitely not so much that it was worth all this effort. So… gone. No worries.

But some of this stuff… look, maybe we can seal this in virtual tupperware and stick it in the fridge for a bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like I mentioned above, that romance subplot might be good, just not good for this book. So why not hang onto it in case the right book comes around?

And this is where, I think, some folks have issues. Because if we’re talking about art, weren’t these words put together for this purpose? Didn’t I artisanally craft this dialogue to come from the mouths of these characters? I mean, if it’s that easy for me to just pull something from one story and toss it into another… well, maybe I’m just some kind of hack. Maybe I don’t care about art at all?

But this just isn’t true. I mean, it’s true that I can’t take that romantic subplot and stick it into another story unaltered. Hell, if nothing else, I’d probably need to change the names. And probably some speech patterns. And possibly references to where/when this is happening. But really that’s just, y’know, writing. If I was creating the scene from scratch, I’d still have to take all these things into consideration.

Also, if I’ve got something I pulled from a manuscript five or six years ago—like any leftovers that’ve been sitting around for a while—I may want to be extra-sure it’s still good. Dialogue shifts, styles change, pop-culture and tech references can get outdated fast. I’m not saying I should toss anything that’s X years old, just that it might need a little more attention before I offer it to anyone.

Y’see, Timmy, sometimes we write bad stuff. No question, everyone does it. But sometimes, we’re just writing good stuff in the wrong book. And when that happens, there’s no shame in packing it up and saving it for later.

But seriously… you’re never going to eat those noodles on the bottom shelf of the fridge. They’re three weeks old now. And they’re furry! Just throw those out.

Next time, I think I’d like to lighten things up a bit and talk about AI and the assassination of JFK.

Until then, go write.

Okay, so…

I’ve been fascinated with ancient Egypt since I was very little. Not sure what sparked it, but by the time I was ten I could rattle off the names of a dozen Egyptian gods and their relationship to one another. My fifth grade science fair project was a model pyramid with numerous “reconstructed” tools and a chart of heiroglyphs.

Many years back I was dating a woman and maybe a month into our relationship she mentioned she was going to Egypt in a few months. Would I want to come along? Spend a few weeks traveling Egypt with her?

I tried not to seem too desperate when I said yes.

As someone who grew up in New England, I was used to the idea of having history around you. Not just grandpa’s history or old family history, but serious history. Lots of buildings and landmarks in my hometown in Maine date back to the early 1700s, and the town’s history goes back even further.

But wow… getting to Egypt? There is HISTORY there. Thousands of years of it. I wasn’t ready for the crushing awe of it. And the scale of it. It’s one thing to read about how big some of these monuments are, to see them on television, but you honestly can’t grasp the size of them until you’re right there. Or in some cases, until you realize what you’re seeing in the distance.

I was very lucky that we had no set schedule, so we could go somewhere and just… spend the day. We traveled from Cairo down to Aswan. Stopped for several days in Luxor. I’d just stare at temple walls, statues, and sometimes tombs. One time I just sat for an hour or so on a small cliff above the Valley of Kings and watched boats on the Nile.

Anyway, another thing I saw a lot of in Egypt was folks who spent a lot of time… well, today we’d probably say “taking selfies.” They’d pose in front of this or that, stand with this guide or that guard or hey, look, a camel! And then they’d race off to find the next thing to take a picture with.

It took me a while to realize these folks weren’t really interested in seeing Egypt. They were more interested in telling people they’d been to Egypt. They wanted to show off the photos and tell stories. For them, it was more about the secondary aspects of taking the trip. The after-effects, if you were.

So, while I’m sure this is incredibly fascinating to some of you, I’m sure far more are wondering what all this has to do with writing?

When we talk about writing, I think one thing that gets skimmed over a lot is what our actual goals are. What do we want out of this? Our endgame, so to speak. And this is important because if I don’t know what my real objective is—or I’m not being honest with myself about it—it’s going to be tough to find the right path to reach it.

Like, I’m willing to bet at least one of you reading this has thought “the goal is to get published.” Okay, cool. But what does that actually mean? Do I just want to be able to say someone paid me for a story and it saw print? That’s cool. I think for some folks there’s a degree of validation that comes with getting published, and maybe that’s all they need.

Maybe I just want to tell stories. That’s all that matters. Getting these ideas and situations and conversations out of my head and down on paper (down on electromagnetic bubble? Down on flash drive?) and sharing it with the world somehow. Or not sharing it. Maybe I just write because it’s what I do and it’s therapeutic on some level. Maybe I write a ton of stuff that nobody will ever see, and I’m totally cool with that. Nothing wrong with that.

Or am I hoping to maybe make money? Nothing wrong with that, either. More than a few folks write as a sort of side job. They’ve got their full-time career and writing’s what they do on weekends or the occasional late night, selling a short story or novella or even a full book. Or maybe the goal is to make writing itself the full-time career. To make enough money stringing words together that I can pay my bills, live in semi-comfort, and don’t need to do anything else.

But maybe the money’s irrelevant, and so’s publication. What I really want is for people to recognize that I’m good at this. Very good. Masterclass good. Maybe I want the accolades and the starred reviews and the numerous awards where I get to stand in front of people who understand how talented I am.

Or look, maybe I just want to be a writer because I want to be part of the club. That group gathered at the bar at the con. Those people online making clever comments to each other. I want to be in with them, and maybe I want people to look at me the way they look at those folks. It might sound a little silly but there are clearly people who only want to be writers for this… the same way those folks only wanted to say they’d been in Egypt. The want the destination, not the journey.

(yes, this may be me talking about a current hot topic)

Y’see, Timmy, there’s a ton of different reasons I may want to write. And whichever one is my reason… that’s fantastic. But I think it’s important to be aware of why I’m doing this. Because there are a lot of paths open to writers these days, and I don’t want to spend time and energy on a path that’s taking me away from what I really want.

So be honest. With other folks and yourself. What do you want?

Next time…

Actually, before I talk about next time, I wanted to bounce something off you. How many of you use the “categories” there on the side (also sometimes called tag or labels or…)? I was thinking of paring the list down a bit to make it easier to use. None of the tags will actually go away, they just won’t be in that list anymore. I was thinking I’d snip out all the proper names—nice easy way to lose twenty or thirty lines, and it’ s probably one of the least-used ways to search for things, yes?

Anyway…next time I’d like to talk a little bit about the devil. Specifically, the one in the details.

Until then, go write.