Category: narrative structure

Despite the pandemic, there’s still been a lot of fantastic storytelling going on. Books. Movies. TV shows. Some of it’s been fun, some of it nostalgic, some of it… well, let’s be honest, some of it was greatly delayed because of said pandemic. Regardless there’s been a lot of enjoyable stuff.

BUT…

As Uncle Ben taught us, with great storytelling comes great spoilers.

As I’m sure you know, spoilers are a matter of great contention. Is it my fault or your fault if I post spoilers to something and you see them? How much time has to pass before spoilers are acceptable? Does getting them really affect my enjoyment of the story? Do spoilers even matter?

I’ve talked about (and in some cases, argued about) all these before, here and on the wider internet. But it’s that last one I wanted to blather on about today. Specifically, a certain angle some folks take with it you may have seen. It goes something like this…

”If knowing a spoiler ruins your story… maybe your story’s not that good.”

This one always makes me grind my teeth. Partly because it’s kind of an inherently smug thing to say, but also because it shows a basic misunderstanding of storytelling. Which is why it’s doubly annoying when I see it from… well, storytellers.

So let’s talk about narrative structure for a few minutes.

I’ve talked about this before at length, so I won’t do too much here (hit that link if you want a lot more). For our immediate purposes, narrative structure’s the order I’ve decided my plot points and character elements need to follow. It’s the sequence I want my audience to receive information in so they’ll get a certain dramatic effect. Simply put, narrative structure is the way I’ve chosen to tell my story.

If I want to tell my story in a straight A-to-Z fashion, that’s my narrative choice. If I want to use a bunch of flashbacks, that’s also up to me as the storyteller. Heck, if I decide to go completely nonlinear and change timeframes every other page without any apparent rhyme or reason… I mean, that’s my call. I’m the one telling the story and I (hopefully) have solid reasons for why I’m telling it in this specific way.

But whichever way I do it—assuming I do have a reason and I’m not just skipping around wildly because I thought it’d be cool—I’ve made a specific choice for my audience to get this piece of information first, this one second, this one third, and so on and so forth up to my five hundred and fortieth piece of information.

Yes, all real novels contain exactly five hundred and forty elements. No more, no less, just as Plato said in his many treatise on storytelling.

Anyway…

Now, that order’s important because my narrative structure is one of the thing that defines my story. If I put them in a different order, it’s a different story. That makes sense, right? An example I’ve used before is The Sixth Sense. If you’ve never seen it before and somehow avoided hearing about it… well, first off, seriously, good for you. Go see it right now. Go! Now! I can’t believe you’ve made it this long. And I’m about to spoil it, so please don’t keep reading.

Did you go away?

Okay, spoiler-filled explanation…

The Sixth Sense is the skin-crawling story of child psychologist named Malcolm who’s trying to treat a little boy named Cole. Cole’s haunted by ghosts that only he can see, which leaves him constantly traumatized and in shock. Malcolm helps Cole realize the ghosts are, in their own way, equally scared and asking for help. And as Cole begins to understand that his powers are a gift, not a curse, Malcolm comes to realize that he’s a ghost—that he died over a year ago in an encounter we saw at the start of the movie.

What’s great, though, is that—like I said up above—if you watch the movie a second time (or if someone spoils the twist for you), it becomes a very different story. In fact, knowing the truth about Malcolm and the other ghosts, the story becomes less scary and much more tragic. Almost goofy at points. Now it’s a story about a kid and his ghost friends solving mysteries. It’s pretty much Paranorman.

That’s the key thing here—The Sixth Sense becomes a differentstory. Not the one Shyamalan intended for us to see. Definitely not the one he narratively structured. The audience learning the truth about Malcolm is intended to be element five hundred and nine, not element one that we knew before we even sat down. Knowing the big twist changes it into a different story.

So the whole “…maybe your story’s not that good” argument doesn’t make a lot of sense, because if I see a bunch of spoilers it means I haven’t seenyour story. I saw a different story that had all the same elements, but in a different order and thus with different dramatic weights. It had a completely different narrative structure. I got Paranorman, not The Sixth Sense. Not that there’s anything wrong with Paranorman (I love it) but… it’s not the initial experience Shyamalan was trying to create for us.

Now, there’s another, related point we can make here. By their nature, spoilers tend to be some kind of reveal. It’s a piece of unknown or unexpected information. Maybe it’s a cool twist. Maybe it’s the identity of the murderer. Maybe it’s just a little cameo/ crossover beat. And sometimes, once that information’s been revealed, we realize this story didn’t have much else going for it. Once we know who the murderer is, we realize it was our own desire to know the answer carrying us through the story, not really the story itself. The story’s not flawed, it’s just… well, also not that great in any way.

Or maybe the answer just wasn’t quite worth the build up. Maybe the murderer turns out to be… well, exactly who we thought it was. Or someone we absolutely never could have considered (“Chris? Who the hell is Chris?”). Maybe the big twist happens and it… doesn’t make a lot of sense? Maybe it doesn’t change anything or doesn’t mean anything (“Chris is actually Pat’s long lost cousin? Well who the hell is Pat?”). In these cases the story beat might land with some impact in the moment, but not so much after the fact.

And, yeah, these stories have problems. I mean, a twist by its very nature should sort of retroactively rewrite large swaths of my story. If it doesn’t do that… well, that means I screwed up. If my flashback doesn’t make linear sense within my story, then I’ve done something wrong. My reveals aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do.

But problems with something flawed doesn’t mean the principle is flawed. I can’t say narrative structure doesn’t matter because a couple stories have crappy narrative structure. That’s like saying all sushi is bad because I bought sushi at a gas station once and it made me sick. Or, y’know, that Sharknado5: Global Swarming has a dumb twist that doesn’t change anything, therefore I can give away a bunch of stuff from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

I mean, maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense…

Yes, a really good story will still work once you know the big reveal. That’s why there are books we like to re-read and movies we watch three or four times. The storytellers were very careful to make sure  their narrative would still work even when it was forced to switch tracks because we knew things. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t want us to see the original story they planned out.

I know in my own writing I love having a good twists and reveals. Things that’ll make people sit up and go “WhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAATTT???” or maybe even shriek a favorite curse word or two. And I try very, very hard to make sure my books hold up on a second reading, that you’ll catch the little clues and maybe even realize I left some things sitting out in plain sight for you to catch on your second or third read, so that other story is still a fun one for you.

(like page 115 of Paradox Bound, for example. I don’t think anyone’s caught that. Not many people, anyway)

But that’s not the story I want you to read first. There’s a reason I put these things on page one and not page fifty, those things on page one hundred and not on page one, and why I was slightly vague about that so it’d be right where it was supposed to be… but you wouldn’t register what it was until a second or third time through.  Because this is the effect I’m trying to create, not that.

And the awful thing about spoilers is they make sure someone can never read this story. It’s almost impossible to unlearn something, so that experience gets lost forever. They never get to read thisstory… only that one.

And that’s a shame.

Again, as I mentioned above, still many issues about spoilers past this one. But hopefully—for now, at least—we’ve put the “do they even matter” question to rest. And also the “maybe your story’s not that good” defense of them.

Also-also, that Plato thing about halfway through was a joke. Please put that to rest too. In fact, forget it, just to be safe. Wipe it from your mental hard drive.

Next time…

I’ve got to be honest, I’m juggling four different projects right now and (at the moment) none of them have inspired a ranty blog post. So next week may just be some random cartoons or something unless any of you has a pressing question you’d like me to blather on about.

Until then… go write.

A couple weeks ago I talked about a certain kind of opening that shows up in a lot of books and movies. It’s when that prologue or first chapter or first scene has some stuff happen (computer virus is stolen, monster lands on earth, vampire comes out of the earth, etc) and then it jumps forward in time four day, five weeks, six months, or more. It can be a problematic opening, and the fact that I feel the need to point out that time gap—how separated these events are—should usually be a sign to take a serious look at how important that opening chapter or scene really is.

Today I wanted to talk about the reverse of that opening. It’s another one you’re probably familiar with, and I’d guess it should probably be an even bigger red flag. It’s not always a sign I’m doing something wrong… but I think it’s really leaning that way.

What I’m talking about, of course, is the infamous opening scene of high action, desperate people, severe crisis, screams, shouts, gunfire, exclamations, and then—

Thirty Six Hours Earlier…

You’ve seen this, yes?

Now, on a casual first glance, this opening seems great, right? We’re diving right into the action at the start. We’ve got tension. Strong character moments. And then—usually—a following scene that shows these characters in very different circumstances, leaving us with the mystery of “how do they end up there?”

Thing is, the more we look at it, the more this opening tends to falls apart.

First, it’s dropping us deep into the action. Sounds good on the surface, but as we’ve talked about before, a lot of folks who do this misunderstand what “starting with action”  really means. By its very nature this opening is out of context, and there’s a good chance I don’t know any of the characters involved, so this “action” opening has superficial stakes at best.

Think about it. Me telling you Wakko has a knife to Dot’s throat is… bad? Good? Bad for Wakko?  Without context, there’s a drastically different way to view almost any scene any of us can imagine. Seriously. Kids on the playground, people fooling around on the couch, someone reading a book in the library—in the right context, any one of these can be funny, sexy, sinister, or right out creepy.

Ah-hah! Says random internet guy #108. That’s the whole point! Like you said above, it’s creating a sense of mystery!

Funny you should mention that…

Second, this opening’s trying to build mystery by showing me an out of context piece of my story. But, a lot like the straight action, this opening mystery is a mystery without any stakes. If I need another six or seven scenes to establish “no, it’s really weird that Wakko would have Dot at knifepoint,” well… doesn’t needing another seven scenes to explain it kind of hint my opening isn’t that powerful?

Plus… this isn’t really a mystery. It’s just withheld information. We expect things are going to be different at the end of my story. The tension level should be higher. My characters should be in a different place, on several levels. It’s sort of like if I said “Wait, he’s Spider-Man at the end of the movie, but he’s just Miles Morales at the beginning?? Whoa! How could that possibly happen?”

The point of the story, quite literally, is to tell us how we get to the end of the story.

Third, it sucks a lot of tension out of my story. One way or another, I’m telling people who makes it to the end. Nothing that happens to Wakko until then is going to be a real threat, because I know he needs to be there at the end to hold a knife to Dot’s throat. Likewise, Dot’s got to be there to be knife-helden. Anyone standing around watching this? Well, we know they’re going to make it, too. This may sound silly, but if I tell people what happens at the end of my story… they’re going to know what happens at the end of my story.

Small note—if I’m gambling on my readers/audience forgetting that opening bit and being surprised when the plot guides us back to it, well… does that sound like a great opening? One I’m hoping my readers forget?

Fourth and finally, I think when I use this kind of beginning, it’s me admitting I just don’t have a great beginning for my story.

Y’know how I’ve suggested cutting off some prologues and seeing how the story works without them? I’d bet three out of four times, if I cut this “One Week Earlier” opening off my story, I’ll find the one I’m left with is kind of weak. Nothing really happens. The characters aren’t that interesting. It kind of meanders a bit before it gets back to the plot.

Y’see, Timmy, if I’ve started my story at the wrong point, the “Two Days Earlier” opening can seem like a quick fix. It’s me pasting on a more interesting beginning. But odds are it hits a lot of those problems I just mentioned. That’s why I think it’s such a big red flag.

I should consider starting my story now instead of at the end. I’m not saying this never, ever works, but if now feels like such a lousy place to start my story… well, that might be my subconscious telling me something.

And maybe I should listen to it.

Next time, I’d like to tell you why you should delete all your dating apps and meet someone the old fashioned way.

Oh! And a shameless self-plug. NPR is doing their summer reading lists and is looking for sci-fi and fantasy books that you loved from the past ten years. And while I’d never stoop so low as telling you how to vote on such a thing, I’m not above reminding you how much you liked Paradox Bound and how it’s a wonderful stand-alone novel that would appeal to most anyone. Just something to have in mind. While you vote.

Anyway, until next time, go write…

Look, taking all the requests and granting wishes in the holiday season.

A few weeks back a friend of mine from the Burbank Writers Coffeehouse (and hey, have you bought anything from Dark Delicacies during this rough time?) asked me about when you begin a story. To use his example, if 98% of my story takes place on Mars, but we need to know just how our protagonist got to Mars… what do we do? Do we start on Mars and do flashbacks? Do we start on Earth and have a slow burn to our main story on Mars? Where does the story actually begin?

I’d been mulling over how to answer this for a few days when I sat down with my partner to watch a Christmas movie or three. And one of them had…a lot of beginnings. It had a frame story. Then an introductory story. Then we jumped ahead a couple years to (I guess) the main story. And each new beginning forced us to ask is this when the story starts…? And if so, what was all that earlier stuff for?

So, hey… let’s talk about beginnings.

First and foremost, this is all going to be kind of vague and loose. Not in a hand-wavey “don’t think about it” way, but just acknowledging the fact that every story is going to have different needs. If I (or anyone else) tried to set down a hard rule for “always begin here” we could all come up with a dozen or more well-known examples that break that rule. Every story (and every writer) is unique, which means every starting point is unique.

That said…

One of the first things we should be clear about is that “where to begin” is a structure question. We have the linear structure of the story—A to B to C to D—but we also have the narrative structure, the order I’m choosing to tell this story to my audience. A lot of the time A is an acceptable starting point, but it’s not uncommon to start at B or maybe even D. It depends on what I’m trying to do as the writer, and being able to recognize that telling a story in a different way creates a different story.

Second, there’s one or two things we can say with a lot of certainty shouldn’t be my starting point. I talked a while back about the problems a lot of prologues have, one of the big ones being that describe-and-die thing that tends to show up in a lot of B-movies. Not saying these things will never, ever work as beginnings but… wow, it’s going to be a tough hill to climb, y’know?

Third, I should really be clear when things happen in a story has a lot of bearing on how we receive those things. Doing this now looks brave, while doing it then just highlights my cowardice. Putting this here is somewhat interesting, putting it there makes people shriek with excitement. There’s probably a whole post’s worth of stuff in that to discuss, but for now I just need to consider what this starting point is (or isn’t) doing to some of these first bytes of information I’m giving my reader.

Fourth is kind of the unspoken one under all of these. I can’t really figure out  a good starting point until I’ve got a story more or less assembled. It might not be written out in full, but I should have at least a rough sense of my plot and story. Maybe it’s a rough outline or just a good set of character ideas and plot points in my head. I can’t decide where to start telling my story if I don’t have a story, right?

I think this step trips some folks up. They come up with a cool opening, or they want to mimic the structure of a cool opening they saw somewhere else, but ultimately this opening doesn’t work for the story they’re trying to tell. It might be the coolest hat ever, but it just doesn’t go with this outfit. And if I keep insisting it does, I won’t notice that my little Kangol cap would go perfectly with that tie and really help bring out some subtle colors in the jacket.

(writing tips and fashion tips!)

But all of this still leaves us trying to figure out what makes a good starting point. Again, it’s tough because our stories are all going to be unique to us. I can’t really say “do this” and think it’s going to work for… well, maybe for any of you.

So here’s two thing to try.

Thing One—look at that rough draft or outline or framework and just lop off the first chapter (or its equivalent). Whatever you were thinking of using as a starting point, go past it and start there instead. As I mentioned above, a lot of us develop bad storytelling habits because we got hit too many times with the “start with action” stick. So our gut reaction is to create an artificial starting point that has a boxing match or a car chase or a two-headed shark attack.

And a lot of the time, if I snip off that artificial opening, what I’m left with is still a very solid opening—usually a better one. It gets me right to my characters. It gives me a stronger dramatic structure. It works better for reveals. Does it always work this way? Not always, but a surprising amount of the time… maybe 83%…

Thing Two—I’ve mentioned the idea of an elevator pitch before. Lucky me, I’ve just ended up in an elevator with a high-powered Big Five (is it Big Four now?) editor. So I’ve got one, maybe two sentences tops, to tell them my story and get them interested. No run-ons or rambling. I’m going to get three breaths, tops.

Do that right now—how would you pitch me your story in one sentence? Yes, now I’m the high-powered editor. Surprise twist!

Where did you start your pitch? Did you skip over anything? And if something wasn’t important enough to mention in the big sales speech… does it need to be there? 

And in both of these, please keep in mind I’m not saying I won’t ever need these bits I’m cutting loose in my story. They might be things to come out in backstory or flashbacks. I’m just saying maybe I don’t need to start my story with them.

 So go forth and find new beginnings! Or confirm the old ones are solid. That’s cool, too. Just as long as you’ve got a great opening.

Next time…

Holy crap. Next time is Christmas Eve. I’ve got to get these last few cards in the mail. And wrap stuff.

But maybe next week, as we’re all settling down for our long winter’s nap, we could talk about something seasonal. 

Like Die Hard.

Until then, go write.