Category: narrative

September 19, 2013

Once Upon a Time…

…there was an aspiring writer. And he lived in a beautiful world of wild dreams and deep denial…

But let’s not talk about that guy.

Last week I talked about basic linear structure. This week I want to talk about narrative structure. Narrative structure relates to—big surprise—my narrative. It’s about how I’ve chosen to tell my particular story. While events unfold in a linear fashion for the characters, how I decide to relay these events to my audience can change how the story’s received and interpreted (more on that in a bit). So linear is how the characters experiences the story, narrative is how the reader experiences the story.

One quick note before I dive in. Within a story there might be a device or point of view, like a first person narrator, which gives the appearance of “telling” the story. For the purposes of our discussion here, though, if I talk about the narration I’m talking about the writer.

That being said… here we go.

In a large chunk of the stories any of us will encounter, the linear structure and narrative structure are going to be the same thing. The story starts with Wakko on Monday, follows him to Tuesday, through Wednesday and Thursday, and concludes on Friday. It’s simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. My own book, 14, fits in this category. It’s loaded with twists and reveals, but the linear structure parallels the narrative.

There are also a fair number of stories, though, where the narrative doesn’t follow the timeline of the story. Sometimes the writer does this with flashbacks, where a story is mostly linear with a few small divergences. Other times, the story may be broken up into several sections and the reader needs to follow clues as to where these sections line up. These are often called non-linear stories, or you may have heard it as non-linear storytelling (it was the hip new thing for a while there).

A great example of a non-linear story is Christopher Nolan’s early film Memento, where the story is actually told in reverse order, starting at the end and moving to the beginning. My own Ex-Heroes series employs numerous flashbacks (although it’s worth mentioning that the flashbacks are all in linear order). There was also a brilliant Marvel Comics miniseries by Roger Stern and John Byrne called The Lost Generation, which involved a time traveler moving back through history to see a forgotten superhero team, get wiped out as they saved the world, then moving forward (for the traveler) to see how the group formed and the origins of the heroes. The issues were even numbered in reverse order.

Now, there’s more to narrative structure than just wanting to switch around my story elements so I can look all cutting-edge. If I’ve chosen to jump around a bit (or a lot) in my narrative, there’s a few things I have to keep in mind. Be warned, we’re moving into an area that requires a little more skill and practice.

First off, putting things in a new narrative order can’t change the linear logic of my story. As I mentioned above, the week goes Monday through Friday, and this is true even if the first thing I do is tell you what happened on Thursday. Monday was still three days earlier, and the characters and events in my story have to reflect that. I can’t start my book with everyone on Thursday baffled who the murderer is, then roll the story back to Monday were everyone witnesses the killing and sees the murderer. If they knew then, why don’t they know now? There’s no logic to it (barring a case of mass amnesia). If I have Phoebe act surprised that she owns a cat on Friday and then have the narrative jump to her finding the cat in an alley on Tuesday, I’m going to look like an idiot while my linear structure collapses.

These are very broad, simplistic examples, yes, but it’s amazing how many times I’ve seen this problem crop up. Writers want to switch stuff up, but ignore the fact that the logic of their story collapses when the narrative elements are put in linear order. This is an easy one to fix, it just requires a little time and work. And sometimes a bit of rewriting.

The other big issue with having narrative and linear structures so far apart is that people need to be able to follow my plot. I can have tons of fancy word choices and beautiful language in my story, but readers are still going to put it down if they can’t figure out what’s going on.

For example…

Think about when a little kid tells you a story about Iron Man and Batman and Snuffleupagus and there’s a moon base and they had a spaceship that Iron Man made before they fought the werewolf and the werewolf hates only getting to go out on Halloween so he decided when he was a little kid because only Snuffleupagus liked him and the rest of the time he has to get shaved because it’s too hot so he decided to go to the Moon so he could be a werewolf all the time and no one would make fun of him cause he didn’t know there were aliens on the moon but Batman saw the wolfman spaceship and tried to stop it and asked Iron Man to help and they fought the werewolf and Batman knew the werewolf when they were kids before he was Batman so he decided to help him move to the moon because they broke his spaceship but Iron Man had another spaceship he built after the Avengers movie and it looks like a big Iron Man and the werewolf had promised Snuffleupagus when they were little that he could come and so they got him out of the broken ship and you kind of tune it out and start mentally skimming. I mean, you just skimmed a lot of that, right? It jumps around so much that after a point it just becomes noise.

Y’see, Timmy, the problem with chopping up my narrative too much is that people are automatically going to try to put it in linear order. As I mentioned last week, we all do this almost automatically because it’s how our brains are set up. The harder the narrative makes it for someone to reorganize the linear story, the less likely it is they’ll be able to follow it. Which means the more likely it is that they’ll put it down.

I talked about the idea of a detective at a crime scene last week. If you’ve read a few mystery stories—or watched a few crime shows—you know a standard part of the mystery formula is the hero going through the events of the story and putting them in linear order for the other characters and the audience. And how many are there? Eight or nine, usually? Call it ten elements that are out of order and the writer’s admitting it might be kind of tough to keep up at this point.

There was a movie that came out about eight or nine years ago (I’ll be polite and not name it) that was a non-linear mess. I don’t think there were two scenes in it that followed each other. So we’re talking about well over a hundred scenes that were all scrambled and out of order. Maybe as many as two hundred. The actors were fantastic, but the story was impossible to keep up with. It didn’t help that certain events repeated in the story. Again, to be polite and protect the innocent, let’s say one of the characters was in a serious car crash and then was in another serious car crash two years later. The audience was getting random scenes of burning cars, ambulances, emergency surgeries, recovery, and physical therapy… from two car crashes. So we’re left trying to figure out which car crash the character was experiencing/recovering from at various points–once it was clear there’d been two car crashes–and then figuring where this scene fit in relation to all the other scenes. The audience had to spend their time trying to decipher the movie rather than watching it.

So non-linear structure can be overdone and become a detriment if I’m not careful. This can be really hard to spot and fix, because it’s going to depend a lot on my ability to put myself in the reader’s shoes. Since I know the whole linear story from the moment I sit down, the narrative is always going to make a lot more sense to me, even though for someone coming in cold it might be an illogical pile. This is one of those times where I need to be harsh and honest with myself, because if I don’t my story’s going to be incomprehensible.

That’s narrative structure in a nutshell. Maybe more of a coconut-shell. However I decide to tell my story, it still needs to have a linear structure, it still needs to be logical, and it still needs to be understandable.

Next time, I want to explain how linear structure and narrative structure combine via dramatic structure to tell a good story.

Until then… go write.

14 Byrne flashbacks flow mystery narrative nolan Stern structure

April 12, 2013

Flash!! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!

Pop culture reference.

You godless heathens.

So, one thing I’ve heard from a fair number of writing gurus—both for books and screenwriting—is to never, ever use flashbacks. Which seems a bit odd, because there are plenty of well-known novels and films that use them. Yet folks keep saying it again and again. Don’t use flashbacks. Don’t use flashbacks.

The thing is, it’s actually quite easy to do great, fully functional flashbacks. The kind that make your readers get a thrill rather than leave them scratching their heads. It takes a basic understanding of story structure and a bit of thought, but that’s it. They’re something I wanted to go over in that big structure series I keep promising to revisit, but… well, we’re all here now.

So… flashbacks.

And this is kind of big and sprawling, so I apologize now. But it makes up for missing last week.

For our purposes, the term flashback can cover a lot of things. It can be an element within the story like a recalled memory, dream sequence, letter or journal entry. Sometimes, like in my own Ex-Heroesseries, it’s just part of the way the narrative has been structured. Whatever the flashback is, however, it’s going to need to follow certain rules in order to work.

When someone says a flashback doesn’t work, it’s almost always because it inherently has one of four major flaws (I say “almost” because there’s always some bold, daring folks who will find very unique ways to make something not work). And it’s interesting to note that these four common flaws also pretty much define a successful flashback. Once I understand the flaws, I’ll understand how to do fantastic flashbacks.

So, first big helpful hint. I cannot start a story with a flashback. Never. This is the first of those four flaws, and it’s a simple logic/labeling problem so it’s pretty easy to deal with.

Why is starting with a flashback illogical? By its very nature, a flashback implies we’re going to a point in time that’s before now. This means we need a now before we can flash back to anything else.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade does not begin with a flashback. It begins in the “present” of 1912, when Indy’s just a teenage kid trying to stop a group of treasure hunters. Again, this isn’t a flashback, it’s just a different setting. The story then moves forward thirty years to a new setting where Indy is an adult and reclaiming that same bit of treasure for his museum.

Calling this sort of thing a flashback (especially in a screenplay) is just going to get my story labeled on page one as something by a rookie who doesn’t understand basic structure. Personally, that’s not a first impression I want to make.

All clear?

Okay, moving on…

Now, I can use a flashback anywhere in my narrative (except at the very start, as I just said), but this switch in the linear structure can’t affect the dramatic structure. If I’m going to drop linear point D between R and S in my narrative, it has to keep the story moving forward. D has to keep advancing the plot. It also needs to keep building tension. If it doesn’t, there was no point to this flashback.

A lot of writers use flashbacks as infodumps. The flashbacks are seen as a chance to show how Wakko met Phoebe, how Phoebe became a ninja, why Wakko hates snakes, and so on. The mistaken belief is that if I do this in a flashback, I’m not affecting the structure of the present storyline because these events aren’t happening now—they’re happening in the past.

When I do this, I’m confusing linear structure with narrative structure. This is the second major mistake. As I mentioned above—and have mentioned before—the narrative needs to keep moving forward. Just like a shark, if the story I’m writing (or reading) stops moving forward, it dies.

So when I have a flashback, it has to keep moving the story forward. It has to tell me something new and relevant. It doesn’t matter where the events fall in the linear structure of the story, but wherever I’m using them they have to fit into the dramatic structure.

For example… here’s a flashback failure from a book I read last year. Some names and situations have been changed to protect those I wanted to pummel senseless a third of the way into the book…

A man’s family dies when they eat tainted meat (he’s off banging his mistress, so he survives—no guilt there). The narrative then flashes back a few months and spends three chapters in the boardroom of the meat-packing company’s parent corporation. They’ve just found out the meat is tainted. Should they shut down the plant? Announce the problem? Should they do a recall? Realistically, how much would they spend on lawsuits? Maybe it’s better just to let it go and roll the dice.

So the plot was put on hold for three chapters (three long, full chapters) so we could see the board reach a decision we already knew they made—to let the meat be sold. One could make the argument that we find out their exact motivation in these chapters. Thing is, their motivation is exactly what most of us would expect from a bunch of corporate executives. In this tainted meat scenario, what’s the most likely reason the executives would decide not to issue a recall? Money, of course.

This flashback served no purpose at all. It gave us a resolution we already knew, with a motivation nine out of ten people automatically assumed. It did nothing except bring the narrative to a dead halt. There’s a good argument to be made that it actually made the narrative go backwards.

Now, the reverse of this problem is also an issue. It’s the third one, as a matter of fact. This is when the writer confuses the narrative story with the linear story. This is very similar to a problem I’ve mentioned before, being clear on the first time something happens in a story. When this problem arises with flashbacks, instead of destroying all possible tension, as mentioned above, it destroys logic.

Let’s say I’m telling a murder mystery. On page 75 of my story, the lead character has no idea who the murderer is. Then, on page 125, I flash back two weeks to something that happened “off camera” earlier. Here I reveal that my heroine learned the identity of the killer because of a clue she spotted near the mellonballer.

In a rough, quick way, this makes sense. On page 75 she doesn’t know. On page 125 she does. Except once I put these story elements in linear order… well, now they don’t make any sense. While it makes sense that this is a new bit of information for the reader on page 125, it’s not new to my heroine. She’s known all along. Which makes her actions and dialogue for the last hundred pages complete nonsense.

A quick story. One I’ve told before…

I worked on the really, really bad sequel to a fairly clever murder mystery film, one which was far more famous for Denise Richards making out with Neve Campbell in a pool then it was for its cleverness. At the end of the original film, there are a series of flashbacks that show how the various characters were intertwined and involved, and also how the various twists were pulled off. The film I worked on had these flashbacks at the end, too, but with one major difference…

When you put these flashbacks in place within the linear story, they didn’t make a bit of sense. Either they added absolutely nothing to the story or else suddenly people had conflicting motivations, plot points became bizarre twists, and once-clear twists became muddled nonsense. The writers were simply seeing this as “new information” and not considering that, within the linear structure, it was all actually old information that needed to match up with the rest of the film.

One of the best ways to test this is to take a narrative apart and put it back together in linear order. Are motivations still clear? Do plot twists still make sense? That’s a good sign the flashback is solid.

At least, solid in this respect.

There’s one last way flashbacks tend to frustrate readers. The fourth way. By the very nature of a flashback being out of sequence, the readers or audience have effectively seen the future. If my character is alive at story point S, flashing back to show her in a life threatening situation at D doesn’t really accomplish anything.

For example…

Let’s say I’m writing a story where Yakko and Dot are writing up their mission reports at Monster Slayer HQ after killing the Great Vampire. And then they remember that they still owe a report on the mummy outbreak in Cairo. So they start scribbling their report and I write a big dramatic flashback scene that ends the chapter with the two of them backed against a wall, outnumbered and surrounded by a dozen mummies and the avatar of a very pissed-off Egyptian god.

Thing is… there really isn’t any tension in this cliffhanger, is there? Because the moment the reader pauses, even for an instant (like, say, at this chapter break), they’ll remember Yakko and Dot are sitting back at HQ writing up this report. Alive and well. No missing limbs or sensory organs. Not even any notable scars. Heck, we know they’ve gone on another mission since this one (killing the Great Vampire) and survived that one, too. So in this case, the flashback actually hurts the story because it’s sucking all the tension out and killing forward momentum.

While it wasn’t really a flashback (because, again, it wasn’t flashing back fromanything), this was one of the huge flaws with the Star Wars prequels. By peppering the story with characters whose future we already knew, Lucas effectively tied his own hands and sabotaged any attempt at tension. He could threaten young Obi Wan Kenobi with all sorts of things, but at the end of the day we all know he survives to become old Ben Kenobi. And old Ben had all his major limbs, all his fingers, both eyes… He was in great shape.

So, four basic rules.

1) A flashback needs to flash back from somewhere.

2) It needs to work within the dramatic structure.

3) It needs to work within the linear structure.

4) It can’t create tension that undermines the present.

Now, I’m going to suggest a movie to demonstrate a fantastic series of flashbacks, and you may laugh a bit. Resident Evil. Yep, it’s corny fun and the series has degenerated into near-nonsense that just showcases Milla Jovovich’s figure, but—credit where credit is due—the first film has a fairly tight story and uses flashbacks very, very well. There are three major flashbacks (each one a slightly more detailed account of a past event as Alice’s memories come back), and they’re a perfect fit for those four rules I just mentioned. Go grab it from Netflix and check it out.

Next time, I’d like to talk to you about some events from last week…

No, wait… next time I wanted to talk about good genre stories.

Until then, go write.

flashbacks Milla narrative Raiders relevance Star Wars structure

September 15, 2012 / 4 Comments

This AND That

Sorry for the delay. I was out of town all of yesterday and a lot of today’s been spent playing catch up. Of course, if I’d been thinking ahead, that wouldn’t’ve happened. And I’d have that post about thinking ahead done.

Instead, let me give you a quick tip. This one’s inspired by a book I just finished reading. It frustrated me on several levels…

One of the joys of being an author is finding clever ways to influence the reader. When I know I’ve guided the reader down one path of assumptions—or maybe away from the correct set—that’s a great feeling. There’s a lot of ways we can do this, but the most common one is formatting. After all, the way the words sit on the page affects how the reader takes them in, and if I’ve got a good grasp of how said reader will interpret that layout, it lets me manipulate them a little more.

The catch here is that I can’t use the same formatting trick for multiple things. If we were watching a movie and I told you all the people dressed in red were robots, and then the movie introduced a dozen characters in red who were aliens, there’d be some serious problems with my interpretation of the movie. If I establish that every scene with blurry edges is a flashback, I can’t also use blurry edges to mean a character is having a clairvoyant vision.

For example…

In Ex-Heroes the character of Zzzap always speaks in italics without quotation marks. Like I mentioned above, it’s a visual trick to show that, in his energy form, he doesn’t sound or talk quite like a normal person. His voice has a buzz, an edge, that separates it from normal dialogue.

The catch is that it means I have to be very, very careful about using italics anywhere else. A lot of authors use them to indicate a character’s thoughts, but that was right out for me. It’d get too confusing—especially in any scenes Zzzap was in. And confusion is one of those things that breaks the flow of a story.

The same with emphasis. It’s common to use italics when you really want to accent something. But I had to be careful using them in Ex-Heroesbecause if I led off a sentence with italics it’d look like Zzzap was speaking. And if that causes a moment or two of confusion, well… there goes the flow again.

In the book I just finished, the author used quotes for dialogue, but he also used them for character’s thoughts. So more than once there were paragraphs like this…

“Okay, nobody move!” shouted Phoebe. “The shock of me yelling should keep them off guard for a few moments,” she thought. “Put your hands behind your heads and get on your knees,” she continued out loud.

See the problem there? There were maybe a dozen points in the book that shook me for a moment, and at least half a dozen where it broke the narrative and I had to look back to figure out if that last bit had been spoken or thought. That’s almost twenty chances for me to put the book down in frustration.

If I want to do something different in your manuscript, format-wise, that’s fantastic. Hell, Cormac McCarthy has pretty much built a career of it. But I need to be consistent. I can’t say that all dialogue will be in quotes and also have thoughts in quotes. I can’t tell you that writing in all caps means text messages but also have it indicate telepathy two pages later.

Make sense?

“Make sense?”

MAKE SENSE!?!?

Thinking ahead to next time, I’ll have that post about keeping ahead done by then.

Until then, go write something.

And be consistent about it.

dialogue grammar narrative punctuation

March 4, 2011

Stuctural Integrity Fields

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.

Ex-Heroes flashbacks flow frames narrative structure

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