Category: structure

            I got this title from a fun little article I read the other day.  The writer was pointing out a flaw in a particular television show (not the one you’d think) and it made me think about a somewhat common issue I see pop up a lot of the time.

            A long ways back I mentioned the idea of a limited concept story.  It’s when the entire plot can be summed up as A to B.  I’m here, but I want to be there.  I want to get off the island.  I want to stop the bad guy.  I want a date with the cheerleader.  A limited concept is based around achieving a specific goal, and once I’ve reached that goal the story is over.  

            Now, sometimes, a story will be a limited concept, but for whatever reason it keeps going.  Perhaps the network renewed the show for two more seasons.  Maybe the publisher wanted more books in the series.  Could be the movie did so phenomenally at the box office that it suddenly became the first in a trilogy.  And sometimes… it’s just because the writer doesn’t have enough story to fill the space they’re trying to fill.

            Whatever the reason, artificially extending a story tends to fall flat really quick.  Especially in an A to B story.  When my characters have one overriding goal, it’s very hard for them to not achieve it.

            Alas, I see this structure again and again in books, comics, and television shows.  The name I’ve hung on it (feel free to use your own)  is “the obvious problem.”  It’s when there’s something stopping the progression from A to B that just… well, it shouldn’t be there.  Not because it doesn’t fit the world or the story, but because it’s hard to believe the characters would allow it to stop them.

            It’s kind of a silly comparison, but a limited concept is like Gilligan’s Island.  The whole point of the show—their single overriding goal—is to get off the island.  Getting shipwrecked was A, getting rescued is B.  And I can’t keep having stupid things keep them from getting off the island again and again and again or it’s going to look… well, stupid.  The professor builds a shortwave radio out of coconuts and Gilligan accidentally smashes it with an oar.  Gilligan discovers a natural superglue that could repair the Minnow, but forgets to mention it only lasts a few hours and wrecks the boat even worse.  They build a raft from bamboo and coconuts, and Gilligan lets the wild boy escape on it.

            The thing is, we can buy this sort of mistake.  Once.  Maybe, if we’re generous, twice.  But let’s face it… after two weeks on the island, the other castaways would’ve tied Gilligan to a tree so he’d stop screwing things up for the rest of them.  He’s the obvious problem in all their escape plans, and it’s tough to believe they’d keep including him.  Let’s be honest—in a darker version of the story, they might’ve even killed him for the good of their small community.

            This is why we all though Gilligan’s Island was high art when we were six, but got frustrated with it when we were older. We couldn’t buy it anymore.  There’s just no way to believe the survivors of the Minnow wouldn’t deal with the obvious problem that kept stopping their attempts to get off the island.

            If the one thing Wakko wants above all others is to date the cheerleader, there’s only so many times he can spill a drink in his lap, get stopped by her friends, or threatened by the football team.  If that’s what he wants, he has to achieve it.  That’s basic A to B storytelling. 

            If he doesn’t achieve it… well, what was the point of this story?  It’s A to nothing. That’s not a plot.  It’s a plot point. 

            And nobody reads plot points.  They read stories.

            Next time, sticking with our island theme, I’d like to talk to you about what’s in this bottle that just washed up on shore.  Don’t expect much… it’s got to fit in a bottle.

            Eventually it all comes down to this, doesn’t it?  I’ve crafted a character with a detailed backstory, some wonderful nuances and habits, and even believable speech patternsthat stand out in a crowd scene.  It’s a character every reader can picture in their minds and relate to on a personal level.

            And it’s time to put a bullet in their head.

            Killing people in a story is a delicate thing.  I don’t mean this in some artsy, poetic way.  I mean it more in a “cutting the wires without disturbing the mercury detonator” way.  It’s something that has to work precisely on several levels for it to be effective.  And just like that detonator, if I’m going to do a half-assed job with it… well, I’m really wasting everyone’s time.

            But probably not for long.

            Here’s a couple of loose guidelines for killing someone… and getting away with it.

            Firstoff, if I’m going to kill a character… well, it means I need a character, right?  A real character.  I can’t expect there to be a lot of emotional impact from the death of a tissue-thin stereotype.  Killing cardboard cutouts is fine to drive a body count, but it’s not going to drive a plot and it’s not going to motivate anyone on a personal level.  It’s not going to affect the reader, either.  If I say Joe, Tom, or Mary just died in a car crash, that really doesn’t mean anything to any of us.  I can’t create Wakko on page fifty, kill him on page fifty-one, and think it’s going to have any emotional weight—either with the other characters or with my readers.

            Second, this character’s death needs to drive the plot forward.  That’s what good story elements do, right?  They keep the narrative moving—not necessarily upward or into positive place, but forward.  Killing a character who’s well-developed but has no connection at all to the plot doesn’t accomplish anything.

            I’ve seen a couple writers fall back on this sort of thing in an attempt to build tension.  The plot will be rolling on and then we’ll pause to meet Phoebe.  She’s thirty-one, blonde, likes to wear combat boots with everything from jeans to her little black dress to her bikini on the way to the beach.  She’s been seeing a great guy for a couple of months now and she thinks on this upcoming ski trip he might even get down on one knee—OH, she’s dead.  The bad guy got her.  Or the zombies.  Or the giant spiders.  Now let’s go back to the plot for a few chapters before I take a moment to introduce you to Yakko.  He’s a college dropout who went to work for the park service.  He’s also been seeing a great guy for a couple of months now (not the same one as Phoebe) and he thinks on this upcoming ski trip he might even get down on one knee—OH, the spiders got Yakko, too.

            This kind of thing works once.  Maybe twice.  But it gets old quick because it doesn’t really build any tension.  When my story is about Wakko and Dot hunting the spider queen in Brazil, telling the reader that two unconnected strangers were killed by giant spiders in San Diego doesn’t have much effect on my plot .

            If I’m going to kill a character, I want it to inspire my other characters.  It needs to motivate them one way or another to strive for their goals.  Alternately, this death needs to become a major challenge in reaching those goals.  If my partner Wakko is one of the only people who knows the spider queen’s vulnerable point and he just took a talon to the head… well, crap.  Where does that leave me?

            Thirdis that this death needs to fit structurally within my story.  As I’ve mentioned before, the dramatic structure of a story needs to be a series of ups and downs.  There need to be slowly increasing challenges, which require greater efforts for my characters to overcome, and help build tension.  If I’m going to kill someone off, their death needs to fit within this general structure.

            To go back to the example I just gave, if Wakko’s one of the only people who knows the spider queen’s weak point and he’s killed by the guards just outside her nest… that’s awful.  In a very good way.  I’ve just created a major stumbling block, because I’m out in the middle of the Amazon, at the center of the web with no one around for miles, and I’ve got no idea how to stop the queen before she fills her egg sac with ten thousand giant spider eggs.

            If my partner Wakko dies in the first fifty pages, though…  Well, it’s a big spike at the start of the story, which means everything after it is either going to be lower, or it’s all going to be just as high and my story’s going to stay at the same level for ages.  Plus, there’s no real tension here.  If Wakko dies on page forty-eight but there’s four hundred pages left in the book… well, odds are my characters have time to find someone else who knows those weak spots.

            Now, all that being said…

            Some writers push a school of thought that says killing characters is no big deal.  These folks almost brag about it, that they end lives randomly.  This is more artistic, after all, more like real life.  Absolutely no one is safe in their books.

            I find this to be a rather stupid approach.  For a few reasons.

            One is that we’re not talking about real life, we’re talking about fiction. Real life is chaotic and structureless and people often die for no reasons at extremely inconvenient times.  In my stories, though, I’m God.  Nothing happens without a reason.  Everything in the world of my story is part of my master plan, and if it isn’t… well, why is it in my story?

            Which brings me to reason two.  If my characters are dying at random in ways that don’t advance any element of the story, then it means my story has no structure.  A death is a big setback (especially for the person who died), and odds are if there’s no spot for that big setback in the narrative structure I’m going to mess up my flow.  Plus, if I’m a hundred pages in and Phoebe, my main character, has an unknown aneurism burst in her forebrain so she dies instantly… well, what happens now?  Is the story over?  Does Wakko take over as the main character?  If I was going to have him as the main character (in this world, I am God, after all), why did I spend a hundred pages on Phoebe?

            And that’s the third reason this view isn’t too smart.  Odds are a random death means failure.  One way or another, Phoebe has dropped the ball big time—even if it’s not her fault.  She stepped off a curb without looking, ate an egg without cooking it all the way, or just stood up a little too tall while on that away mission.   She’s failed to reach her goals (she had goals because she was a real character, right…?), and that means we just spent a hundred pages identifying with and investing in someone who didn’t win.  On any level.  We’ve been identifying with a loser with crap luck (she must have crap luck—she just died randomly, yes?).  I don’t know about any of you, but that isn’t going to make me happy.

            So, a good death (if there is such a thing) is going to have real characters.  Their death is going to help drive the plot (one way or another).  And it’s going to happen at a point in the narrative that makes structural sense.  If I’ve got two out of three of those, I’m probably in good shape.  One out of three… maybe not so much.

            And if I honestly don’t know if I’ve hit two or three of those points… well, maybe we should stay the execution.  Just until we can confirm what the governor said in that last phone call…

            This time next week I’ll be up in Seattle for Crypticon, so I’m going to try to get this post up Wednesday night before I leave (assuming I don’t cut things too close). 

            And if you’re in the north-west neighborhood next weekend, please stop by and say hullo.

            Until then, go write.

            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.

            Is there nothing they couldn’t do…?

            Back when I was in college, I submitted a story to a magazine.  It was loosely based on the myth of the Wandering Jew, and I’d had a character passing through time at a couple key events in history.  I later incorporated it into my college novel, The Trinity, which none of you have ever read.  For good reason.

            The story was rejected.  Not really a surprise, in retrospect, but the editor did send back a personalized response.  He congratulated me on my language, my characters, my dialogue, and my descriptions.  “However,” he said (paraphrasing a bit), “there isn’t much of a story here.  It’s a really neat magical mystery tour, but that’s it.”

            That term threw me a bit at first.  Wasn’t much of a story?  I’d written about an immortal passing down through the ages.  He was there for the Crucifixion.  The fall of Rome.  Magellan’s voyage around the world.  The Boston Tea Party.  How could this editor say there wasn’t a story?  Well, college-age me grumbled a bit and moved on, but I eventually figured out what that editor was talking about.

            Let me give you a few quick examples…

            (and these are just titles to get the point across—don’t read too much into them)

            Sometimes the tour might be the Non-Stop Laughs Roadshow.  We’ve all read these stories or seen these films, where every single line pushes for another laugh.  There’s never a pause to breathe, not even a moment.  Sight gags, puns, fart jokes, awkward pauses, absurd segues, funny voices.  Characters, plot, tone—nothing matters but getting the next laugh.

            Another version could be Merlin’s Wondrous Mobile Fae Emporium.  Every page has something else magical or supernatural to remind us what a magical and supernatural world this is.  I introduce the reader to ancient gods, spirits, supernatural creatures, and arcane mailmen.  Magical weapons, armor, jewelry, and household utensils.  Everything is magical.  Everything is from the dawn of recorded history. Except maybe the bathmat.

            No, sorry, the bathmat was woven on the loom of Fate with the silk of astral spiders.  But the washcloth is pretty mundane.

            The High-Tech Pan-Galactic Tour is sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi.  Because in the future or alien world that I’ve created, everything is different.  People wear clothes for different reasons.  They have robots that aren’t reallyrobots.  Things are powered in an entirely different way.  Transportation, food, the internet, entertainment… it’s all very alien and unrelatable.  Don’t even ask about sex.  In the future it’s so different you wouldn’t’ believe it.

            We could also call the tour, say, Captain Spaulding’s Traveling Horror Show.  It’s when people die one after another in horrible ways, usually after witnessing the gruesome death of the last poor bastard.  There’s blood and gore and some really nauseating dietary choices and a few nightmarish torture scenes.  Running someone feet-first through a meat grinder is tame compared to what happens in the horror show.

            In my case, it was the Historical Talent Show and Social Mixer.  If my story is set in the 1960s, my character will run into every single person you’ve ever heard of from that decade.  Fidel Castro, Andy Warhol, the Apollo 11 crew, the cast of Star Trek, Ed Sullivan, Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut, Kennedy, Nixon, Hendrix, Elvis, and (of course) the Beatles.  Most of them won’t do anything, but they’ll pass through and offer a few words here and there.  Maybe one of them will offer a helpful tip, but odds are they’re just there to get recognized.

            Y’see, Timmy, the mistake I made—one I still see lots of people make—is the assumption that a pile of plot points is the same thing as a story.  This is kind of like saying a pile of lumber is the same thing as a house, or there’s no difference between a palette of oil paints and the Mona Lisa.

            A lot of the time these stories will end up with a very episodic feel to them.  In the case of comedies, it’ll be a constant stream of setup-joke-setup-joke-setup-joke.  In horror stories, it’s victim-death-victim-death-victim-death.  The magical mystery tour almost always feels episodic because I’m using it to show you one thing after another with very little connection between them.  Oh, look, it’s the Crucifixion.  Oh, look, it’s Magellan.  Oh, look, it’s Paul Revere.

            All of these things I’ve listed above are great elements, no question about it.  If they’re not doing anything to advance the plot or the story, though, they’re just distractions.  There’s a point that this kind of thing is rich detail and there’s a point that it’s just padding.  And that’s the kind of detail that just slows down my story.

            Assuming I’ve even got a story.

            Any time you feel the need to drop a detail like this into your manuscript, stop for a minute and think.  This may absolutely be the greatest take on werewolves anyone’s ever put on paper, but if the werewolf’s only in the story to show this take… maybe I should save it for something else.  I may have scribbled the most elaborate death scene ever, but if absolutely nothing changes in the story when I swap out those six pages with “And then Phoebe killed Wakko,” maybe I should reconsider those six pages.

            And if I can just pull them out altogether without changing the story…  Well, I’ve got to wonder what they were doing there in the first place.

            Next time, I want to talk about your but for a little bit.  Especially yours.

            Yours… not quite so much.

            Until then, go write.