Category: drama

            No, the title’s relevant. Really.  Just wait.

            Okay, so… we started with linear structure, and last week I went on for a bit about narrative structure.  This week I want to close up my extended TED talk by discussing dramatic structure.  It’s the way I weave the previous two forms together to form a killer story.

            Fair warning up front—this one’s going to be the longest, so if the others strained your patience or ate into your lunch break… hey, I told you.  Go hit the restroom, grab a snack, and pour yourself a drink. 

            What, now you’re drinking at work? Seriously? You might need to talk to someone.

            You might recall I said that linear structure is how characters experience the story and narrative structure is how the author chooses to tell the story. In that vein, dramatic structure is how my audience receives the story.  As the name implies, dramatic structure involves drama.  Not in the “how shall I make Phoebe love me” sense, but in the sense that the tension and interactions in my story should almost always be building.  Any story worth telling (well, the vast, overwhelming majority of them) are going to involve a series of challenges and an escalation of tension.  Stakes will be raised, then raised again.  More on this in a bit.  

            I hate getting really clinical with this stuff because… well, we’re talking about art. Not in that “ARRRRRTTTTT!!!” sense, but in that golden rule, we’ve-all-got-our-own-methods-of-doing-things way.  The art part of this is personal and we should all be cautious when someone starts slapping down graphs and charts of how “good” stories go together.

            But… I also think most of us here have been doing this writing thing long enough to understand that sometimes there are rules. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are some very solid guidelines that cut across the vast majority of stories. Especially the vast majority of popular, successful stories.

            That being said…

            Let me show you some graphs and charts of how good stories go together.

            No, don’t freak out.  They’re really simple, and this is the easiest way to demonstrate the points I’m trying to make.  Hell, if you’ve been following the ranty blog for any time now (or gone back and read a lot of it) you’ve probably seen them before.

            On all these graphs, X is the progression or the story from beginning to end, Y is dramatic tension, high to low.  This first graph shows nothing happening.  Absolutely nothing.  This is me getting a good night’s sleep.  From my point of view.  I didn’t even have any interesting dreams.  No highs, no lows, no moments that stand out.  It’s flat and monotone.

            Boring as hell.

            As my story progresses, I want the tension to rise.  Things need to happen.  Challenges need to appear and be confronted by my protagonists.  By halfway through, the different elements of the story should’ve made things much more difficult for my heroes.  As I close in on the end, these difficulties and stakes should be peaking.

            Check this out. Here’s a bare-bones dramatic structure.  We start small, and tension increases as time goes by.  Low at the start, high at the end.

            Mind you, these don’t need to be world-threatening challenges or huge action set pieces.   If the whole goal of my story is for Phoebe to ask Yakko to the Sadie Hawkins dance without looking like an idiot, a challenge could just be finding the right clothes or picking the right moment in the day.  But there needs to be something for my character to do to get that line higher and higher.  There’s a movie out right now called Please Stand By where the main character’s goal is traveling to Los Angeles so she can submit her amateur Star Trek script to a screenplay contest.  The challenge is that she’s kind of high on the autism spectrum, so doing something this far out of her routine is a huge deal for her.

            Make sense so far?

            Okay, now here are a few things we need to keep in mind. 

            And there are visual aids, too

            First, you may have heard that “starting with action” thing that so many gurus preach.  A lot of folks start with that line up around eight… and then they increasing tension.  This doesn’t leave a lot of room for things to develop, but we’re hitting the ground running and going until we drop.

            Thing is…when we plot this out, the line looks a lot like the one on that first graph up above.  It’s pretty much just a straight line because there isn’t anywhere for things to go.  And, as we established earlier, straight lines are pretty boring whether they’re set at one-point-five or at eleven.  They’re monotone, and monotone is dull.

            This brings me to my second point. Dramatic structure can’t be a nice, even rise like the second graph.  That’s another straight line, and straight lines are… well, you get it by this point. 

            Think back to high school physics for a minute.  We don’t feel a constant velocity.  If I’m driving a car at a nice, even speed, I can reach out and play with the radio. I can have a drink of water or soda or coffee.  I can wiggle around and take off my jacket or get my wallet out or whatever.  And it doesn’t really matter if I’m moving at 40 or 60 or even a hundred miles per hour.

            Y’see, Timmy, we don’t notice the constant, we notice the change.  That’s what grabs our attention.  When I have to hit the gas or slam on the brakes or turn fast—these are the moments that grab me. These points stand out above the constant ones.

            In a good story, there’s going to be multiple challenges and my hero isn’t always going to succeed.  No, really.  He or she will win in the end, sure, but it’s not going to be easy getting there.  There’s going to be failures, mistakes, and unexpected results.  Ups and downs.  Because that’s normal. We don’t want a character who’s good at everything and never has a problem.  So that line is going to be a series of peaks and drops.  For every success, every time we get a little higher, there’s going to be some setbacks. A new, bigger challenge that appears.

            Still making sense?

            Good.

            So, with that in mind, here’s my big graph.

             This is everything I’ve been talking about these past few weeks.  Just like above, X is narrative structure.  It’s the story progressing from page one until the end of the story.  Y is dramatic structure. We can see the plot rising and falling as the characters have successes and failures which still continue to build.  And the letters on the graph are the linear structure—we all know what order the alphabet goes in.  We’re beginning at C, but there’s also a flashback much later on that go back to A, and we understand that occurred before C even though we don’t see it until this later point..

            Pretty much every story should look like this graph if I map it out.  Not exactly peak for peak, no, but they should all be pretty close to this pattern.  They’re all going to start small and grow.  We’ll see tension rising and falling as challenges appear, advances are made, and setbacks occur.  Small at the start, increase with peaks and dips, finish big.

            That’s it.  This is the big, easy trick to dramatic structure.  No matter what my narrative is doing, it has to keep increasing the tension.

            Simple, yes?

            Keep in mind, this isn’t an automatic thing.  This is something I, as the writer, need to be aware of while I craft my story.  If I have a chapter that’s incredibly slow, it shouldn’t be near the end of my book.  If a scene has no dramatic tension in it at all, it shouldn’t be in the final pages of my screenplay.  And if it is, it means I’m doing something wrong. 

            Not to hammer the point, but this is what I’ve talked about a few times now.  There needs to be a reason for this shift to happen at this point—a reason that continues to feed the dramatic structure.  If my dramatic tension is at seven and I go into a flashback, that flashback better take it up to seven-point-five or eight.  And if it doesn’t, I shouldn’t be having a flashback right now.  Not that one, anyway.

            See, let’s take another look at that A-B flashback up above.  Even though it’s near the end of my story, it’s still pushing the story higher than everything that came before it. I’m choosing to put this information in this place in order to create a specific dramatic effect.

            Think about a lot of your favorite stories.  When the readers learn things affect the kind of stories they are. And that change affects the dramatic structure.  Because dramatic structure tells us that things in the beginning are small, things at the end are big.  Something I know at the start is automatically a minor point, but it could be a major one if it’s revealed closer to the end.

            Got all this so far?

            Don’t worry, we’re almost done.

            There’s one last cool thing I can do with dramatic structure.  It makes it easy to spot if a story is worth telling.  I don’t mean that in some snarky way.  The truth is, there are a lot of stories out there that just aren’t that interesting. We all know this. Since we know a good story should follow that ascending pattern of challenges and setbacks, it’s pretty easy for me to look at even the bare bones of a narrative and figure out if it fits the pattern.

            For example…

            I’ve read a lot of zombie books (not surprising) and seen a lot of movies.  I’ve read and watched stories set in different climates, different countries, and with different reasons behind the end of the world.  I’ve also seen many different types of survivors.    One that crops up too often is the protagonist who decides on page seven to turn their house into a survival bunker for the thinnest of reasons. They stockpile food, weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.  But twenty pages later, when the zombies finally appear out of nowhere…  damn, are they ready.  Utterly, completely ready.  There’s no mistakes, no problems, no setbacks, because they have prepared for everything.

            In other words… there’s no change.  No challenge.  The plot just drifts along from one incident straight to another, and the fully prepped, fully trained, and fully loaded hero is able to deal with each one with minimal effort.  That’s not a story worth telling, because that story is a line. 

            And I’m sure you still remember my thoughts on lines…

            On the flipside, some of the best zombie stories have people caught unawares, or finding their plans collapsing around them.  The Undead Situation has a young protagonist who suspects the end’s coming and stocks his home… with candy and pet treats.  In Fiend we find out that meth addiction makes you immune to the zombie plague… but being on meth makes it challenging to survive the zombie apocalypse.  Roads Less Traveled has the protagonist work out a meticulous zombie-survival plan with her friends… which slowly unravels as people don’t follow the rules, come up short on their requirements, and generally act like, well, people.

            Again—dramatic structure isn’t an automatic thing.  Just because I reveal something later on doesn’t guarantee it’ll be more dramatic.  But if I map out my story like this, even in my head (and be honest with myself about it), I can get a better sense of how well my story’s structured.

            And honestly… I think with that I’ve thrown enough at you.  I wish I could offer you more.  But a lot of this is going to depend on you.  While the other two forms of structure are very logical and quantifiable, dramatic structure relies more on gut feelings and empathy with my reader.  I have to understand how information’s going to be received and interpreted if I’m going to release that information in a way that builds tension.  And that’s a lot harder to teach or explain.  The best I can do is point someone in the right direction, then hope they gain some experience and figure it out for themselves.

            On which note… next time I’d like to talk about getting started.

            Until then… go write.

            Okay, it’s just going to be a quick post this week. I found out kind of last minute that I’m hosting the Writer’s Coffeehouse in San Diego on Sunday (noon at Mysterious Galaxy—stop by), so I’ve got to scribble up some notes for that.  Also, I’ve got a big Halloween party the night before, so please don’t be surprised if I show up dressed like Rick from Rick and Morty…

            Speaking of which, I think this is the first time I haven’t done a horror post on the week of Halloween.

            But let me get back to this week’s point, which is…

            One of the greatest parts of storytelling, in my opinion, is the reveal.  It’s when we find out who the murderer is, or that Phoebe isn’t really dead, or maybe how Wakko ended up with the Elder Blade, or maybe that it isn’t really the Elder Blade, or maybe that Phoebe is actually Wakko’s long-lost sister Dot and she’s had the Elder Blade all along.  Or maybe it’s something a little more mundane, but still a bit of a shock.  It might just be finding out someone died last week, or that someone actually came over to break up with you and not to make wild monkey-love, or even getting those test results back… not with the result we wanted.  On one level or another, pretty much every story is going to have a reveal of some kind.

            This is how I get information across to the reader—I reveal it.  My characters answer the phone, open a book, get a text message, pull back a curtain, step around a corner, tear open an envelope, or turn slowly to see who’s sitting in that chair by the fireplace.  Lots of reveals are minor, some are subtle, and a few carry a ton of dramatic weight because they’ve just changed how my readers are viewing the story.

            Now, there’s an important thing to remember here, and it ties back to something I’ve mentioned once or thrice in the past.  Facts we don’t know are information. Facts we do know (or could’ve very easily deduced) are noise.  Another way to think of noise is that it’s literary static–clutter on the page. 

            Since a reveal deals with information, it can’t be about facts we already know or could’ve figured out on our own.  Even if my characters don’t know it, it’s still noise to the reader.  So if I structure a paragraph or scene or chapter around a reveal that, well, isn’t really a reveal… it’s going to fall flat.
            Let’s look at an example (one I’m making up off the top of my head).

            Our first shot will be Yakko being sworn in as President of the United States.  Maybe ten or twenty pages later we’ll see him chatting at length with the White House press secretary. After that, he’ll be stepping off of Air Force One, waving to the crowds.      

            And then, finally, we’ll have him on the phone.  A black phone, one that’s still connected to a hard line.  And as Yakko tells someone on the other end “Make it happen,” our point of view pulls back to reveal he’s calling from inside… THE OVAL OFFICE!!!

            Big shocker, right?

           Okay, it’s not.  Really, it’s not a surprise at all.  All of us know where the President spends his workdays.  And, well, since I’d made it really clear Yakko was the President, none of us are surprised to see him in the Oval Office.  So my big reveal at the end of that example is supposed to carry dramatic weight, but instead it stumbles because it isn’t carrying anything except noise.

            Y’see, Timmy, a reveal should give my readers information if expect it to have some dramatic impact.  It isn’t dramatic if we already know it.  Or if we easily could’ve figured it out.  And if my writing’s all done around the idea that it is a  dramatic reveal… that’s how my manuscript ends up in the pile on the left.

            So go forth and reveal yourself in–In your writing!!!  Jeez, it’s Halloween, yeah, but there’s little kids out there…

            Next time… well, I’ll do something.

            Until then, go write.

            Or a drama king.  I don’t judge…

            When we left off, I’d just finished babbling about narrative structure, which is how my readers experience a story.  Before that was linear structure–how my characters experience a story.  This week, I want to talk about how those two structures come together within a dramatic structure to form the actual story.

            Warning you now, this is going to be kind of big and rambling, but I’ve also included a lot of pictures.  Go grab a snack now and hit the restroom.  No one will be admitted during the dreadful story dissection scene…

            Also (warning the second), the story I’m going to dissect is The Sixth Sense.  If you’ve never seen it and somehow avoided hearing about it until now, stop reading and go watch it.  Seriously, if you’ve made it this long without having someone blow it for you, you need to see that movie cold.  People love to give M. Night Shyamalan crap, but there’s a reason The Sixth Sense made him a superstar writer-director.  So go watch it and then come back.  The ranty blog will be here waiting for you when you get back.
            Seriously.  Go.  Now.

            Okay, everyone back?

            As the name implies, dramatic structure involves drama.  Not in the “how will I make Edward love me” sense, but in relation to the building interactions between the elements of the story.  In most cases, these elements will be characters, but they can also be puzzles, giant monsters, time limits, or any number of things that keep my protagonist(s) from achieving his or her goal.  Any story worth telling (well, the vast, overwhelming majority of them) are going to involve a series of challenges and an escalation of tension.  Stakes will be raised, then raised again.  More on this in a bit.  

            Now, I don’t mean to scare you, but I’ve prepared a few graphs.  Don’t worry, they’re pretty simple and straightforward.  If you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, they might even look a little familiar.

            On this first graph (and all the others I’ll be showing you) X is the progression or the story, Y is dramatic tension.  This particular graph shows nothing happening (the blue line).  It’s an average day at the office, or maybe that long commute home on the train.  It’s flat and monotone.  No highs, no lows, no moments that stand out.

            Boring as hell.

            Harsh as it may sound, this graph is a good representation of a lot of little indie art films and stories.  There are a lot of wonderful character moments, but nothing actually happens.  Tonally, the end of the story is no different than the beginning.

            As a story progresses, tension needs to rise.  Things need to happen.  Challenges need to arise and be confronted.  By halfway through, the different elements of the story should’ve made things much more difficult for my main character.  As I close in on the end, they should be peaking. 

            Mind you, these don’t need to be gigantic action set pieces or nightmarish horror moments.   If the whole goal of this story is for Wakko to ask Phoebe out without looking like an idiot, a challenge could be finding the right clothes or picking the right moment in the day.  But there needs to be something for my character to do to get that line higher and higher..

            Now, here’s the first catch…

            Some people start with the line up high.  They begin their story at eight and the action never stops (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest).  This doesn’t leave a lot of room for things to develop, but the idea is that you don’t have time to see that because we’re hitting the ground running and going until we drop.

            You might notice the line on this graph looks a lot like that first one up above.  It’s pretty much just a straight line because there isn’t anywhere for things to go.  And, as we established, straight lines are pretty boring.  They’re monotone, and monotone is dull whether the line’s set at one-point-five or at eleven.

            That’s the second catch.  Dramatic structure can’t just be a clean rise like that second graph.  That’s another straight line.  And straight lines are… well, I’m sure you get it by this point.  In a good story, there will be multiple challenges and the hero isn’t going to succeed at all of them.  He or she will win in the end, of course, but it’s not going to be easy getting there.  They’ll face mistakes, surprises, bigger challenges, and determined adversaries.  For every success, there’s going to be some setbacks.  So that blue line needs to be a series of peaks and drops. 

            If you know your physics, you know that we don’t feel a constant velocity.  Think about riding in a car.  As long as it’s a steady speed, you don’t notice.  You can drink coffee, move around, whatever.  What we feel is acceleration—the change in velocity.  Those ups and downs are when things stand out, when we know something’s happening.

            Make sense?

            So, with that in mind, here’s a big graph.

             This is everything together.  X is narrative structure.  It’s the story progressing from page one until the end of my story, novel, or screenplay.  Y is dramatic structure. We can see the plot rising and falling as the characters have successes and failures which still continue to build.  And the letters on the blue line are the linear structure.  We’re beginning at G, but there are two flashbacks in there that go back to A and D.

            Notice that D-F flashback.  Even though it’s near the end of the story, it’s got more dramatic weight than G through K.  This is the big, easy trick to dramatic structure.  No matter what my narrative is doing, it has to keep increasing the tension.

            Y’see, Timmy, this graph is what pretty much every story should look like if I map it out.  They’re all going to start small in the beginning and grow.  We’ll see tension rising and falling as challenges appear, advances are made, and setbacks occur.  They’re not going to be exactly like this, but the basic structure—an escalating, jagged line—is almost always a given.  Small at the start, increase with peaks and dips, finish big.

            Simple, yes?

            Keep in mind, this isn’t an automatic thing.  This is something I, as the writer, need to be aware of while I craft my story.  If I have a chapter that’s incredibly slow, it shouldn’t be near the end of my book.  If a scene has no dramatic tension in it at all, it shouldn’t be in the final pages of my screenplay.  And if it is, it means I’m doing something wrong.

            Now, that being said, it should be clear that where things happen within a narrative is going to effect how much weight they have.  Again, dramatic structure tells us that things in the beginning are small, things at the end are big.  Something that’s an amazing reveal at the end of the story won’t have the same impact at the beginning.

            Let me give you an example.  It’s the one I warned you about at the top.  I’d like to tell you an abridged version of The Sixth Sense.  But I’d like to tell it to you in linear order.

            Ready?

            The Sixth Sense is the story of Malcolm, a child therapist who is killed by one of his former patients in a murder-suicide.  Malcolm becomes a ghost, but doesn’t realize he’s died so he continues to “see” his patients.  Several months later, across the city, a woman becomes jealous of her new husband’s daughter, Kyra, and begins to slowly poison the girl.  It’s about this time that Malcolm meets Cole, a little boy with the power to see ghosts, and decides to take Cole on as a patient, helping him deal with the crippling fear the ghosts cause.  When Kyra finally succumbs to the poison and becomes a ghost, she finds Cole, too—inadvertently terrifying him when she does.  Malcolm suggests to Cole that helping her might help him get over his fear.  Cole helps expose Kyra’s stepmother as a murderer and also helps Malcolm come to realize his own status as one of the deceased.  And everyone lives happily ever after.  Even the dead people.

            The happily ever after is a bit of an exaggeration, granted, but it should make something else clear.  When the narrative of this story follows the linear structure, a huge amount of drama is stripped away.  It’s so timid and bland it almost reads like an after-school special rather than a horror movie.  A lot of the power of this story came from the narrative structure.  The order Shyamalan told this story in is what gave it such an amazing dramatic structure (and made him a household name).

            This is what I’ve talked about a few times with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling.  There needs to be a reason for this shift to happen at this point—a reason that continues to feed the dramatic structure.  If my dramatic tension is at seven and I go into a flashback, that flashback better take it up to seven-point-five or eight.  And if it doesn’t, I shouldn’t be having a flashback right now.  Not that one, anyway.

            For the record, this is also why spoilers suck.  See, looking up at the big graph again, E is very high up in the dramatic tension.  It’s a big moment, probably a game-changing reveal, in a flashback.  If I tell you about E before you read the story (or see the movie or watch the episode or whatever), I’ve automatically put E at the beginning–it’s now one of the first events you’ve encountered in the narrative.   And because it’s at the beginning, it’s now equal to G in dramatic tension.  Because things at the start of the story always have very low tension ratings.

            The thing is, though, E isn’t at the start of the story.  It’s near the end.  So now when I get to where E really is in the story, it isn’t that big spike anymore.  It’s down at the bottom.  The dramatic structure of the story is blown because I didn’t get that information at the right point.  It even looks wrong on the graph when the blue  line bottoms out like that.

            If you want an example of this (without giving anything away), consider Star Trek Into Darkness.  I can’t help but notice that a lot of people who were demanding to know plot and character information  months before the movie came out were also the same ones later complaining about how weak the story was.  Personally, I went out of my way to avoid spoilers and found the movie to be very entertaining.  It wasn’t the most phenomenal film of the summer, but I had a lot of fun with it

            It’s dismissed as coincidence.

            Now, here’s one last cool thing about dramatic structure.  It makes it easy to spot if a story is worth telling.  I don’t mean that in a snide, demeaning way.  The truth is, though, there are a lot of stories out there which just aren’t that interesting.  Since I know a good story should follow that ascending pattern of challenges and setbacks, it’s pretty easy for me to look at even the bare bones of a narrative and figure out if it fits the pattern.

            For example…

            By nature of my chosen genre, I tend to read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories and see a lot of those movies.  I’ve read and watched stories set in different climates, different countries, and with different reasons behind the end of the world.  I’ve also seen lots of different types of survivors.  Hands down, the least interesting ones are the uber-prepared ones.  At least a dozen times I’ve seen a main character who decides on page five to turn his or her house into a survival bunker for the thinnest of reasons, filling it with food, weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.  But twenty pages later, when the zombies finally appear…  damn, are they ready.  Utterly, completely ready.

            In other words… there’s no challenge.  There’s no mistakes, no problems, no setbacks.  The plot in most of these stories just drifts along from one incident straight to another, and the fully prepped, fully trained, and fully loaded hero is able to deal with each one with minimal effort.  That’s not a story worth telling, because that story is a line.  And I’m sure you still remember my thoughts on lines…

            On the other hand we have C Dulaney’s series, Roads Less Traveled.  The series begins with The Plan, protagonist Kasey’s careful and precise strategy for surviving the end of civilization.  But almost immediately, the plan starts to go wrong.  One of the key people doesn’t make it, a bunch of unexpected people do, and things spiral rapidly downward.  Challenges and setbacks spring up as the tension goes higher and higher.

            That sound familiar?

            And honestly… that’s all I’ve got for you.  I know I’ve spewed a lot, but I wish I could offer you more.  Y’see, Timmy (yep, it’s another double Y’see, Timmy post), while the other two forms of structure are very logical, dramatic structure relies more on gut feelings and empathy with my reader.  I have to understand how information’s going to be received and interpreted if I’m going to release that information in a way that builds tension.  And that’s a lot harder to teach or explain.  The best I can do is point someone in the right direction, let them gain some experience, and hopefully they’ll figure it out for themselves.

            So here’s a rough map of dramatic structure.  

            Head that way.

            Next week, I’ll probably blab a bit about Watson, the supercomputer.

            Until then… go write.