Category: linear structure

July 17, 2014 / 3 Comments

How I Learned to Stop Worrying…

            Classic movie reference.  Come on, broaden your horizons.  Watch something made before 1976.
           Anyway, I’d like to start today by telling a story or two.  They’re examples of a problem I see crop up now and then, and one I just finished wrestling with myself.  It’s one of those issues where it’s easy to either write myself into a corner or (worse yet) write something where characters are acting in an unbelievable way.
            Oh, and by the way, before I forget, there’s a thermonuclear warhead in the apartment next door.  Something like ten megatons, if I read the specs right.  Armed and everything.  Just thought you should know.
            Anyway, let me tell you the first story.
            In my often-referenced novel The Suffering Map (unpublished, for good reason), one of the main antagonists is Uncle Louis.  Louis is an old-school mobster with a legendary temper, and he’s rather upset that someone (we’ll call him Rob) threatened his niece (who’s in her late fifties).  He sends a man to rough Rob up a bit, and that man ends up dead with his body horribly mutilated.  So Louis sends two men to kill Rob.  They both end up dead and mutilated.  And when this news reaches Louis he decides…
            Well, actually, he decided to wait for three days and then go after Rob.
            See, I had this whole structure of days worked out, and it turned into kind of a vicious circle.  I needed three days to pass, so Louis had to wait.  Which meant I needed to come up with stuff for everyone else to be doing.  By the time I abandoned that structure, though, I’d grown kind of fond of the reveals and character moments I’d created.  Now Louis had to wait so I’d have room for those bits, no matter how strange and out of character it seemed.  It wasn’t until my fifth draft that I realized this was just dragging things and creating a huge lag in the plot.
            Though not as huge as that bomb sitting next door.  I looked it up.  That’s almost fifty times the size of the bomb they dropped on Nagasaki.  Think about that.  I mean, I think it’s small compared to some missiles and such, but right here in the middle of Los Angeles that could still kill a lot of people.  Millions, easy.
            Anyway, back on track.
            Here’s another example of what I wanted to talk about today.
            A few years back a woman I knew wrote an urban fantasy story and asked me to look at it.  A single mom activates a portal and she and her kids are transferred to a mystical realm.  There’s some magic, some disobeyed instructions, and all three kids vanish.  Invisible?  Teleported?  Dead?  We don’t know, and Phoebe, our heroine, was desperate to find out.
            Well… until she ran into the handsome barbarian chieftain, anyway.  Then Phoebe became aware of just how shredded and torn her clothes were after coming through the portal… and how much skin they exposed… and how much skin the chieftain was showing.  Tight, tanned, well-muscled skin, and Phoebe started wondering if there was a Mrs. Chieftain, and if not… just how prudish were people in this semi-medieval world?
            Speaking of kids…  Hmmmm.  Sounds like one of the little kids next door is hitting the warhead with something.  Maybe a hammer.  Yeah, there are kids next door, too.  Didn’t I mention that before?  I guess one’s technically an infant and the little girl’s a toddler, but they third one is seven or eight.  He’s hammer-competent.
            Well, probably can’t do anything about it.  At best, he might turn on the timer.  If he hasn’t already.
            But I’m wandering away from the point again…
            Or am I…?
            Y’see, Timmy, there are some threats that are just too huge for me to ignore.  Either as physical threats or emotional ones.  One of my children vanishing.  A man in a hockey mask stalking toward me through the forest.  An armed nuclear bomb. 
            Once I know about these things… that’s that.  I can’t establish a huge threat and then ignore it.  If I tell you there’s a nuclear bomb next door, that has to be the priority.  Not being polite.  Not property laws.  Not getting a good night’s sleep and dealing with it in the morning. 
            In my new book, the characters found out about an immediate global threat.  Not a ten years down the road thing—this time tomorrow half the planet will be dead and by the weekend all of it will be.  And it put me in an awkward spot when they did, because at that point nothing else could matter.  Nothing.  Once they realized how big that threat was, they couldn’t be thinking about anything except taking care of it.  Yeah, they could have little asides or chuckles, but nothing that distracted them. 
            It forced me to restructure the end of my story.  But it also made the end much stronger.  And nobody’s standing around wondering about that bomb next door.
            Alas, I’m going to miss next week because of the San Diego ComicCon.  Please swing by the Random House area (technically the Crown/Broadway booth) on Friday after 2:00, say “hullo,” and call me a talentless hack in front of important people.
            When I come back, odds are I’m going to be very fatigued.
            Until then, go write.
linear structuremotivespacingSuffering Maptime
September 12, 2013

Structural Engineering 101

            The first chapter is titled “Zefram Cochrane.”
            Geek reference.
            Anyway…
            Well, for a couple months now I’ve promised that I’d blather on about structure.  I’ve actually got a bit of time now, so let’s do it.  I’ll warn you all right up front, this is probably going to be spread over two or three posts because it’s a big topic.  I also may be using terms a bit loosely and in ways your MFA professor may not approve of.  But I’ll do my best to make it easy to understand, despite that.
            When we’re talking about structure in stories, it really means the same thing it does when we’re talking about architecture or biochemistry or auto engineering.  It’s the underlying framework that helps us figure out how things go together.  Different structures work for different projects, so just because something worked when we were building One World Trade Center doesn’t mean we should use it when we’re building a house.  Or a motorcycle.
            Now, there are three types of structure in stories, and they all interact and work with each other.  Just like a house or a skyscraper, if two elements are strong and one is weak, a story won’t be able to support itself. So it’s important to have a good grasp of all three and understand how they work.
            First up, the one we’re going to deal with this week, is linear structure.  Simply put, the linear structure of a story is the chronological timeline the characters experience.  There’s a Russian literary term for this called fabula. I’ll prattle on more about this in just a bit.
            Next isnarrative structure.  This is the manner and order my story is told in.  Put another way, it’s the way my audience experiences the story.  A flashback is part of the narrative structure, as are prologues, epilogues, and “ten years later…”  Again, if you studied (or over-studied) this sort of stuff in college, you professor may have used the term syuzhet.  I’ll talk more about this one next week.
            Last but not least, there’s dramatic structure.  This is the way linear and narrative structures work together to form a coherent, enjoyable story.  Dramatic structure is why tension builds, why mysteries intrigue us, and why twists and reveals surprise us.  I’ll talk a little more about this on the 26th, if all goes well.
            For now, though… linear structure.
            As I mentioned a few moments ago, linear structure is the order your characters experience the story in.   Another term you may have heard for this is continuity, or maybe cause and effect.  Day comes before night, which leads to another day.  People start young and then get old (Benjamin Button and Doctor Who excepted).  Turning a key in the ignition starts my car.  Or, sometimes, sets off a bomb.
            Now… check out this list

            Yakko dies peacefully in his sleep.
            Yakko celebrates his fifth birthday.
            Yakko gets married.
            Yakko is born.
            Yakko witnesses the birth of his grandchild.

            These are five random events from a life.  Now, despite the fact that I started the list with Yakko’s death, we all inherently understand this is not the first event in his life.  In fact, I’m betting most of you reading this can put that list in linear order in just a few seconds.  That’s because linear order is the most natural structure for all of us—it’s the one we experience all the time, every day.
            This is also why linear structure is so important.  Most of us are experts on it.  We’ll notice when effect comes before cause, even if we’re getting them out of order like I just gave them to you.  A good way to think of linear structure, as I mentioned above, is a timeline.  When you see detectives breaking down the clues of a crime, them may discover them out of order, but it doesn’t change the order they actually happened in.  If I’m writing a story—even if I’m telling the story in a non-linear fashion—there still needs to be a linear structure. 
            A good way to test the linear structure of my story (a method I’ve mentioned before) is to pull everything apart and then arrange all the flashbacks, flash-forwards, recollections, frames, and so on in chronological order.  They should still make logical sense like this, even if they’ve lost some of their dramatic weight this way (again, more on this later).  If my story elements don’t work like this (if cause doesn’t come before effect, or if the same thing is happening multiple times), I’ve done something wrong.
             Which brings us to time travel.
            Time travel stories depend a lot on linear structure.  If I don’t have a clear then and now, before and after, then time travel means nothing.  I need to be able to see that linear structure so I can see how my traveler’s timeline moves back and forth along the world’s.
            Check out this little diagram.  Here’s a pair of timelines featuring two characters from Doctor Who—the Doctor himself and his friend, Jack Harkness.  There’s kind of a big spoiler in here (or not, depending on which fan theories you subscribe to) which I’ll try to avoid, but if it makes things too confusing just say so.
            Jack’s life is pretty straightforward, for our purposes here.  A is when young Jack first meets the Ninth Doctor and decides to travel with him for a while.  B is when he later encounters the Tenth Doctor, and C is when they briefly meet again to stop the Daleks.  They meet again (D) much, much later in Jack’s life.  And E is when Jack finally dies at the ripe old age of about five billion or so (no, seriously).  All in all, this personal timeline isn’t much different than the one I showed for Yakko up above.
            Now… look at the Doctor’s timeline.  This the linear structure of the show because we (the audience) are following the Doctor around.  He travels in time a lot, so he actually meets Jack in kind of an odd order.  But it’s still a logical order for the Doctor—he’s still living on his own timeline A-B-C-D-E, just like Jack.  A and B are the Ninth Doctor, C through E are the Tenth.
            In fact, this linear order creates a big twist for the Doctor (and the viewers, since we’re following him).  He doesn’t realize the person he first meets at D is the same person he later meets at A (as I mentioned, a lot of time passes for Jack).  But this isn’t a twist for Jack because he’s following his own linear story.  That’s why he can address the (somewhat confused) Doctor as “my old friend.” 
            Make sense?
            Y’see, Timmy, no matter what order I tell things in, the characters are experiencing the story in linear order.  If halfway through my book one of my character flashes back to what happened a week ago, this isn’t new information for him or her—it happened a week ago.  So all of their actions and reactions up until the flashback should take that into account.
            It sounds pretty straightforward and it really is.  Linear structure is going to be the easiest of the three forms I blab about over the next few weeks because overall it’s logical and objective.  But, alas, people still mess it up all the time.  And the mistakes are usually because of narrative structure.
            But we’ll talk about that next week.

            Until then, go write.
flashbackslinear structurestructureWho

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