Category: Ex-Heroes

Warp core breach! Warp core breach!

Is it just me or does Starfleet build really shoddy warp cores? “Oh my God, Ensign Lefler spilled her coffee! We have an imminent warp core breach…”

Anyway, I’ve blathered on about linear structure and then about narrative structure. Now I want to talk about how they interact and tie together. It isn’t really that complicated an idea, but I’m going to use a few examples to make things extra-clear.

As I mentioned before, narrative structure and linear structure are two very different things. The narrative structure is the story the audience is experiencing while the linear structure is what the characters are experiencing. Today I’d like to talk about how they work together, but to do that I need to talk about a third part, and that’s dramatic structure.

Dramatic structure stands a bit off from the other two. It’s an inherent quality of the story that comes about when the linear and narrative work together correctly. Probably the best way to look at it is that this story needs to be told this way to have the impact the storyteller was going for.

For example…

Spoilers, by the way, but if you don’t know this one by now… c’mon, seriously.

The Sixth Sense is the story of Bruce Willis, the ghost of a child psychologist who’s helping a little boy come to terms with the fact that he can see ghosts.

Hmmmm… Well that’s kind of lame when you tell it like that, isn’t it? Sound like some kind of Hallmark/ Lifetime/ Afterschool Special sort of story. And to be blunt, it is. If The Sixth Sense was structured that way, telling you everything up front, it would be a very different story, even with all the same events and dialogue.

In fact, that’s probably the best way to look at it. Dramatic structure is why spoilers are cool in a story, but kind of lame when your friends blurt them out or you read them on websites (sorry, AICN). It’s why a lot of screenwriters and directors don’t like to talk too much about some story elements ahead of time, and why they get frustrated with publicists who do.

So… that being said, what I’d like to do now is show you a graph. I don’t really believe in graphs and charts and page counts when it comes to storytelling. I do believe they can make a handy visual aide now and then, though.

This one cost IBM seven-point-six million dollars. It’s the real reason they built Watson. The whole Jeopardy thing was just a fortunate side-effect.

On this chart, the horizontal axis is the narrative. It’s the book from page one to page five hundred, or the movie from opening shot to closing credits. The vertical line is, to coin a phrase, tension. It can represent kickass action scenes or romantic conflicts or scariness or just tension built from suspense.

Very, very simply put, this is dramatic structure. Going from the norm to the extreme. Starting at calm and relaxed only to end at DefCon5. Even if it’s just an emotional/ spiritual DefCon5.

A good story is a series of waves or peaks on this chart. Each one represents a different challenge your characters encounter. The high points are triumphs and peaks of action. The low points are setbacks they suffer between, or perhaps because of, each success.

This first chart is an average day in anyone’s life. To be honest, it’s my life. You can pick out me getting woken up out of a dream by my cats. There I am on the treadmill. That’s where I discovered we were out of Diet Pepsi and the Britta filter was empty. For a good chunk of it I’m sitting here at my desk writing. There’s watching Chuck and making dinner with my lovely lady and catching the end of that Castle two-parter with the dirty bomb. As you can see, nothing horrible, but nothing life-changing, either.

For the record, everyday life is dull. This may have come up here before. It’s boring because we all see it every day. No matter how perfectly or beautifully or eloquently that everyday life is copied to paper or movie screen, it’s still boring. The chart proves it. Ordinary life is pretty darn close to a straight line.

Now, here’s something else important to keep in mind. If your characters never suffer any setbacks (and you’d be amazed how many stories and scripts I’ve seen with this problem) you don’t have waves, you have another line. Likewise, if your story is nothing but an ongoing string of defeats and failures (which tends to go with “artistic” writing), that’s just another straight line, too. And let’s face it, lines are flat and boring. It’s the same thing as having nothing but “cool” dialogue. It gets monotonous fast.

This brings me to the next part of good dramatic structure. As the story progresses, those waves and peaks should be getting taller, every one a little more than the last. They are, in fact, building on each other, just like a good story should. Likewise, the troughs between them should get deeper and deeper. The height of the waves is a good measure of the tension level the characters are facing. The troughs are the level of failure or setback they’re encountering.

Going back to our very expensive graph, there’s a reason dramatic structure works this way. If my story’s waves are always five up and five down, they cancel each other out. The all winning/ all losing lines are boring, yes, but you really don’t want that line to be at zero. Each victory should lift the hero (and the reader) a little higher and a little further, just as each setback should send them reeling a bit harder.

Because of this, you shouldn’t have two peaks which are the same height, especially not right next to each other. If this challenge is equal to that challenge, then the writer hasn’t built anything up in the pages between them. When you see two peaks that carry the same emotional/ action/ suspense/ horror weight, you should stop and think. One of them either doesn’t need to be there or it needs to be lessened/ increased a bit. Again, when things are the same, it’s monotonous.

It’s also worth mentioning that these all need to be valid challenges. A writer can’t fabricate an unmotivated conflict or three just so the character has a challenge. Pirate attacks are cool. Pirates who attack out of nowhere just to create an action sequence are not, no matter how much the writer tries to convince readers the attack is a vital, integral part of the story. This is a common flaw you can spot in a lot of old pulp writing, because the format required multiple cliffhangers, each at a regimented spot in the story. The story would be going along and suddenly the hero or heroine would encounters a wild animal or a booby trap or find him/herself at gunpoint. There was no logic to it, it just had to happen because we’re on page 42.

So, keeping all of this in mind, I’m going to go for the big one… This is the one would-be writers mess up all the time. It’s not going to be easy, but hey… if it was, everyone’d be doing it.

Dramatic structure always wins in the end. No matter what the linear structure of your story is, no matter which narrative structure you’re using, the dramatic structure of a story should always be escalating. You can have setbacks, but all the motion has to be forward and the net gain has to be positive (positive meaning building on itself, not necessarily happy and cheerful). As I’ve said many, many times before, telling the story has to be a writer’s first priority. The narrative structure must match the dramatic structure.

However…

You may have caught up above, the linear structure doesn’t have to follow this pattern of escalation. In fact, it’s very powerful when it doesn’t. Well, when it doesn’t and you’re doing everything else right… Linear structure can start huge and then decline for the rest of the story. It can have a high point in the middle or the biggest low right in the beginning.

Let’s use The Sixth Sense again so I don’t have to spoil anything else. Bruce Willis’s death is a major emotional moment. If we were to plot it out, it’d be pretty high on our chart. It also comes very early in the linear structure. However, it’s revealed very late in the narrative structure. So his death comes at the correct point in the dramatic structure and fits the above pattern.

With me so far?

How about this. Let me be arrogant and use my own book. Ex-Heroes has nine major flashbacks in it, each one a full chapter long. However, each one follows the same dramatic structure. The flashbacks are increasing in tension even as the present day “Now” plot is increasing in tension.

See, here’s the rough linear structure of Ex-Heroes. It begins with the rise of the heroes, followed by the rise of the zombies. About halfway through, you can see the peak of the outbreak where humanity falls and Stealth and St. George found the Mount. The narrative begins on page one of the book and around L on the graph. Once you look at these two sections (past and present) at the same time, with all the flashbacks happening where they do in the story, you see that the entire narrative fits the dramatic structure. I told a story with the linear structure I needed for the narrative structure I wanted to use, which gave me a solid dramatic structure.

Make sense?

Let’s take a look at another chart. Yeah, IBM paid all that money, we should keep using them. This one’s where things go wrong, though.

It’s that exact same linear A through T story from up above, but now I’ve decided to tell it with a flash-forward near the beginning and a flashback just before the big climax. Look carefully– it’s all the same points, just in a new order.

See, in this example, all the structures are fighting each other. This is a story where the linear structure already matched the dramatic structure, so this new narrative structure doesn’t work. The dramatic structure’s broken, and this usually means the writer has broken the story’s flow. And we all know that’s bad.

When you look at it like this, it’s easy to see why too many frames and flashbacks start to make a jumbled mess of things when they get overused. Suppose my linear structure is that standard A though T again, which means my dramatic structure is, too. Look what happens when randomly rearrange these story points into something like our now-classic Mnbv Cxzlkjhgf Dsapoiuy Trewq order. The dramatic waves become a jagged, roller-coaster mess of different highs and lows that’s impossible to keep track of.

To be more specific, the whole thing becomes static.

And static’s just another word for noise we all ignore.

Y’see, Timmy, this is why so many would-be gurus take the easy route and say never to use flashbacks or any other narrative devices. Far too many writers will throw in a flashback (or two or three or five or…) that explains something in the story but doesn’t fit the dramatic structure. The fact gets out, but the story grinds to a halt in the process. Heck, sometimes you don’t even get a vital fact, just a bunch of random over-description that’s supposed to pass as character stuff. So gurus and other “experts” will tell you to avoid frames and flashbacks because it’s easier to say “don’t” then to explain how to use them correctly.

Which, hopefully, I just did. For free, no less. Even with all those high-end graphs.

Next time… well, after all this, I need to relax a bit. I’ll probably just harp on spelling again or something like that.

Until then, go write.

If you don’t get this week’s title, don’t worry. No one does. One of those lost gems of animation.

Anyway, last week was all about linear structure, so this week I wanted to explain narrative structure. Linear structure is all about the characters, but narrative structure is about the audience, be they readers or listeners or movie-goers.

By the way…

Minbv Cyxzlkjhguf Dosap Trewq

Try to remember that. It’s going to be important.

I mentioned last week that a story always needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, they don’t always need to come in that order. Ex-Heroes and the upcoming Ex-Patriots each have almost a dozen major flashbacks to a period before the beginning of each respective novel. A Princess of Mars begins with the frame story of Edgar Rice Burroughs inheriting a manuscript from his recently-deceased uncle, John Carter, and the film Inception starts with the frame of a battered and ragged Cobb washing up on the shore of an old man’s private island. Clive Barker’s Sacrament dives into an extended flashback that dominates the middle of the book, as does the classic film Casablanca. Everyone remembers Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for its wonderful non-linear story and he also loaded the Kill Bill movies with flashbacks. Heck, the film Memento actually runs its story backwards.

By the way, don’t get confused by my talk of linear structure and non-linear stories. You can still get french fries even though you’re not in France, and you still need linear structure even though you’re telling a non-linear story.

Now, there are some important things to remember with narrative structure.

First off, if narrative structure and linear structure aren’t going to match up in a story, there should be a real reason why the story’s being told that way. Is there no way this information could come out except in a flashback? Is there a purpose to cutting back and forth between past, present, and future? Is this structure advancing the story or bogging it down with unnecessary segues?

There was a passable Denzel Washington movie a while back called Fallen. In all fairness, it was a great movie that got dragged down because the lead actor kept doing a Denzel Washington impression through the whole thing. I’m about to spoil the ending, so if you haven’t seen it and have any interest… skip down a paragraph or two.

Fallen begins with Denzel in his death throes. He’s thrashing around in the snow and clawing the air. His voice over tells us (paraphrasing a bit)…

“Lemme tell you about the time I almost died. Actually let me start a little before that…”

At which point the film leaps back in time about a week to Detective Denzel attending the execution of a serial killer. A serial killer who, it turns out, is actually possessed by a demon. And by the end of the film, said demon has possessed Denzel. The frame sets up the audience for a twist— it hasn’t been the detective narrating, and it wasn’t him dying. It’s the demon, trapped by the detective’s final act. Without the frame, there’s no twist.

In my book, Ex-Heroes, every third or fourth chapter is a flashback. This serves two purposes. One, since it’s already a shift in the narrative, it also let me shift the viewpoint to first person. It also lets me tell another aspect of the story. While the main plot of Ex-Heroes is about living in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, it’s also important to know how this all came about. So shifting into the past let me develop a few key characters and it let me see some important events through their eyes.

A bit more on that next week.

The narrative also has to be readable. That sounds kind of common-sense, I know, but one problem that crops up a lot is writers taking that non-linear inch and running a few miles with it. Since I can go a bit non-linear, I can push the envelope and go a little more, and then a little more, and then…

Remember that sentence up above I told you to remember? Do you know what it means? Well, it’s not a sentence, it’s just the alphabet out of order. But it kind of looks like a sentence, and I’m willing to bet a few of you spent a moment trying to decode it (is it backwards writing? Serbian? Roman numerals?) without much luck.

Y’see, Timmy, there comes a point when a writer has broken up the narrative with so many flashbacks, recollections, and frames-within-frames that they’ve just got gibberish. Oh, sure, if you spent twenty minutes or so studying that first example you would’ve all eventually figured out it was the alphabet. I don’t doubt that at all. The same could be said about any number of non-linear books or screenplays. Given enough time, a spreadsheet program, and a bottle of rum, most of us can make sense of just about any story.

But no one wants to read a story like that. I don’t think any of you read this ongoing series of rants with the hope that someday you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You read it because you want to understand something now, not for me to show off by giving you an incomprehensible puzzle of verbs and nouns to work out over the next week or so. So while it’s okay to mix a story up a bit, at the end of the day your audience has to be able to follow the story. Flashbacks and frames are great, but, like so many things, need to be used responsibly and with moderation.

I got to interview Bruce Joel Rubin, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, a while back. During our talk, he made the keen observation that stories, especially film stories, are experienced through the gut, not through the mind. The moment your audience has to go into their head to understand a story–you’ve lost them. It shatters the flow and brings them out of experiencing the story and into, on some level, analyzing it. So the last thing you want is so many non-linear elements that the reader has to stop for each one and figure out how it relates to the last twenty or thirty.

And really, this is what I’m going to talk about next week. Linear and narrative structure need to work together, not fight each other.

So, until then, go write something.

Hopefully you know the answer to that one. It’s kind of relevant.

Structure is how a story is put together. It’s the underlying shape and order that everything else hangs on. I know that sounds obvious, but every now and then you need to point out the obvious stuff. If you don’t have structure, all you have is a pile. Even something as amazing as the Guggenheim follows a lot of the basics of building construction.

Which is a great example. Much like the physical architecture of buildings, there are certain rules a writer needs to follow with the structure of their story. A very skilled person can bend or tweak these rules to accomplish a clever effect, but ignoring the rules often means the story (or building) will just collapse. At the least, it’ll end up so ugly and misshapen nobody will want anything to do with it.

As I have in the past, I may use a few terms here in slightly different ways than they get used in other places. I’m mostly doing it to keep things as clear as possible, so try to think of the ideas and concepts I’m tossing about more than the label I slap on them for this little rant.

There are two types of story structure I want to blather on about. One is linear structure. The other is narrative structure. They’re two separate things. If the writer is doing things correctly, they tie together in the same smooth, effortless way character and dialogue tie together.

First up is linear structure. This is how the characters in a story perceive events. Unless you’re writing a story from the point of view of Doctor Manhattan, your characters are going to experience the story in a linear fashion. Morning will be followed by afternoon, then evening. Thursday comes before Friday, which is the start of the weekend. People begin life young and then grow old. Another good way to think of linear structure is continuity. A before B. Cause before effect.

The other half is narrative structure. This is how your audience experiences the story, and it can come in a number of forms–many of which we’ll deal with next week. I just wanted you to have both terms in your forebrain right now.

So, a term some of you may have heard before is three-act structure. It gets tossed around in screenwriting a lot, but it shows up in most forms of storytelling and showmanship. Despite attempts to define it as something much more rigid and page-dependent, three act structure really just means that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning happens first, then the middle, then the end.

Again… every now and then you have to point out the obvious stuff.

Now, it’s key to note they may not always come in that order, but they do always need to be there. We’re going to get into that in a little bit (again, probably next week). For now, the key thing to remember is that even if these events are presented to the reader out of order, the characters are still experiencing them in order.

One easy way you can check a non-linear story is to cut it up and put the bits in chronological order, like a timetable. This is the order the characters and the world are experiencing the story (as opposed to the reader). Does effect still follow cause? Are the actions and dialogue still motivated? If everything’s right, there should be a clear chain of continuity. If it starts to get fuzzy or questionable, that’s not a good sign.

Now, I’m sure the question some of you are asking is “why?” Since so many tales involve flashbacks and frames and non-linear storytelling, why does a linear structure matter? It should only matter in straightforward stories like 24, right?

Wrong again, Timmy.

As I mentioned above, linear structure is how the characters experience the story. And as I’ve said many, many times, characters are key. If they’re not grounded in a linear structure, they end up tripping over themselves. They know things they shouldn’t know yet or bear the scars of events that haven’t happened. Once it starts with characters, these flaws and oddities ripple out into the plot and there’s a notable lack of continuity. Suddenly effect is coming before cause, and B comes before A, with D between them.

A quick note for genre fans. Time travel stories get called on continuity a lot. Not in the altering history sense, just in the who-knows-what-when sense. Just remember that time travel isn’t going to affect a character’s personal linear timeline. My day four can be your day one. In the handy diagram here (developed with a $25,000,000 grant from NASA), you can see that our time traveler (in blue) has a coherent, linear story–even though it seems at odds with the story of the mundane non-time traveler (in black) who also has a linear story (no one said time travel was easy). One of the best things I can suggest for this is the third season of Doctor Who. It deals with this idea in the first episode and in two different arcs that span the entire season. Plus it’s really fun and Freema Agyeman is gorgeous, so win-win all around.

My novel, Ex-Heroes, has almost a dozen major flashbacks in it to a period before the beginning of the novel. But if you were to rip all of those chapters out and rearrange them in chronological order (go ahead, buy an extra copy just to tear it up), you’d see that the story still makes sense. The heroes appear. The zombies appear. Society collapses. The heroes try to salvage what they can and rebuild society (which is where the book begins). A new threat appears. The story itself is linear, even though it’s presented in a non-linear way.

On the flipside, I once worked on the straight-to-DVD sequel to a very popular murder mystery/ Hitchcock-style thriller (which was, in all fairness, mostly popular because Denise Richards and Neve Campbell get topless and make out in a pool). When you took many of the “hidden scenes” at the end of the sequel and put them in order, the story actually made less sense than it did without them. This film, needless to say, had horrible linear structure. The writers were just throwing down “cool” moments with no regard to where and how they actually fit into the story.

One more general note for you. When you look at the linear structure of a story, it should be very straightforward. A-B-C-D-E- and so on. If you’re looking over this and suddenly hit 4-5-6 somewhere… well, there’s a reason that looks odd there. It’s falling outside the scope of the plot. An example I’ve used before is the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Doctor Jones gives a speech about Masada to the two government agents. Don’t remember that scene? Yeah, well, that’s because it has nothing to do with the story so they didn’t put it in the movie. Linear structure is a great place to see if there are extra things hanging on a story that don’t need to be there.

So that’s linear structure in a somewhat large nutshell. Next time I’ll babble on about narrative structure and, if I’m doing it right, this will all start to make sense.

Until then, go write.

So, two weeks back I mentioned an online conversation I had with a friend of mine. At least, the first half of it. I wanted to ramble on a bit now about the second half of that conversation and expand on some of the thoughts and ideas it sparked.

The topic is, what do you write?

There’s two ways to read that question. One could be reworded to that ever-popular, where do you get your ideas? I’m sure most of you reading this have heard a few of the punchier answers to that query. Some people want to sit down and write, but have no idea what to write about, while other people polish off a new screenplay over a long weekend.

There’s one very important thing any writer needs to understand if they want to be successful. Ideas are cheap. Ridiculously cheap. They’re a dime a dozen. I would guess on an average day I have at least ten ideas for books, short stories, screenplays, or television episodes. Last year one blogger (and for the life of me I can’t recall who) posted an idea on her page every day for the entire year, just to demonstrate how simple and cheap ideas are.

Now, from where I’m sitting, there are two issues beginning writers often hit when it comes to ideas, and they’re really two flipsides of the same problem.

Some folks lament that they never have good ideas. Yeah, they have a couple clever thoughts, but none of them are on that high level like Jurassic Park or American Gods or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The ideas these people come up with are… well, kind of pedestrian. They’re not worth writing about, so these folks don’t write. They hold off and wait for the good ideas to strike.

The second group has too many ideas. They’re barely done writing their fourth screenplay this month when they get an idea for a series of epic novels. And they’re only on the second one of those when they think up a hit television series (which, naturally, leads back to a movie franchise).

Both of these groups are suffering from the same misconception. They think anything that goes on the page has to be pure, award-winning gold. The difference is that the first group won’t put anything down because they know it isn’t gold, and the other folks are assuming it must be gold because they got it on the page. Make sense?

The catch, of course, is that most of the stuff that you put down isn’t going to be gold. It’s going to be rewritten and edited down and polished. Don’t think of story ideas as gold, think of them as diamonds. When a diamond first gets discovered, it’s a black, crusty, misshapen thing. Its got potential value, but not much past that. Diamonds need to be cut and recut, measured and examined, cut one more time, polished, and placed in a setting. Then they’re worth something.

The first group is tossing out all those black, coarse stones because none of them look like engagement rings. The second group is sticking the little lumps on gold bands and asking three months salary for them. Hopefully it’s easy to see why neither of these is the right approach.

So, once you’ve got an idea, it needs work. It’s not ready to go as is. Which brings us to the back half of this week’s rant.

The second way to read “what do you write?” is to ask which of these ideas do you pursue? If you have three or four solid ideas, which one do you start working on? How do you pick the idea you start with?

Well, first you need to keep in mind that one idea all on its own rarely translates to a story. “Some kids go to a haunted house,” is an idea, yes, but there’s not really a bestselling novel there. Likewise, you can’t do much if all you’ve got is “a girl who wants to build a time machine.” Just like cooking, you can’t make a story with only one ingredient. An egg on its own is an egg. An egg with cheese (and maybe a little turkey and a dash of pepper) is an omelette.

Once you understand this, then it just comes down to writing. How do the kids going to the haunted house and the girl who wants to build a time machine intersect and overlap? Is the girl one of the kids? Is the haunted house her secret lab? Is she going to rescue them? Is she hiding there after being made fun of and they’re coming to save her? Is anyone going to die in this house? Will anyone make it out? Is it just part of a plan cooked up by Mr. Haversham, the carnival owner?

Is that a hand in the back? Ahhh, yes. The question is, but what if the idea leads to a dead end? How do you know it’s a good idea until you actually sit down and write it? This one’s easy to answer.

You don’t.

Again, this kind of thinking goes back to that “it has to be gold” mentality. Sometimes you work your way through a hundred pages and discover there’s just nothing there. You wrote a chapter (or a bunch of chapters) that don’t work for one reason or another. Maybe more than one reason. Sure you could cheat a bit, tweak a few things, maybe toss out a deus ex machina or three, but in the end it doesn’t work because it doesn’t work. There’s no clever phrase or substituted word that’s going to change it.

I know a lot of people have trouble accepting this, even though it’s something we’ve all seen in other jobs. Chefs come up with recipes they never use. Architects design buildings that are never constructed. Hell, how much money does the auto industry spend on concept cars each year?

Consider this…

Once or thrice here I’ve mentioned a rule Stephen King talks about in his phenomenal book On Writing (there’s a link to it in that carousel at the bottom of the page). Said rule is–

Second Draft = First Draft – 10%

You remember that one, yes?

Well, if Mr. King follows his own rule–and we’ll assume he’s not a hypocrite–lets do a little math. The final version of Under The Dome is 1072 typeset pages. Even if we say there weren’t any other cuts in later drafts, that implies he cut just over 119 pages from his first draft. In standard manuscript format (Courier, double-spaced), that’s closer to 240 pages. Heck, that’s almost half of Ex-Patriots. It’s almost 2/3 of Ex-Heroes. Think about that. He typed up 240 pages of character and plot and description… and then tossed all that work.

Y’see, Timmy, almost every writer puts out a fair degree of material that’s never going to be seen by anyone. Again, don’t get paralyzed wondering if the next words on the page are going to be gold. Odds are they aren’t. But you will find some diamonds in the rough, and once you know how to spot them it’ll be an easier (and quicker) process to find them.

For now… take what you’ve got and work with that. There’s a good chance there’s a diamond or two in there somewhere. If you really put the work into it.

Next time, on a somewhat related note… well, contest season is lapping at my ankles. Which means more bad scripts to read. So we’ll talk about some of those.

Until then… go write.