Category: structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong again, Timmy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then, go write.

So, as we’re getting into the season of all things eerie and mysterious, I thought I’d babble on about a little problem I’ve seen once or thrice. The nice thing about it is, like many things, it’s pretty easy to avoid once you notice it.

Just like you can have false drama, it’s also possible to have false mysteries. These stories are boring and frustrating more than interesting. I’ve come across them a lot in genre stories and scripts, and once or thrice in political thrillers.

A quick recap…

A mystery is when the main character(or characters) and the audience are aware that an important fact has been hidden from them, and the story usually involves the search for that unknown fact. Who killed Mr. Boddy? What room did they kill him in? What did they use to do the deed? And why does that reanimated mummy want that old Egyptian coin? At it’s simplest, a mystery is a question someone in your story is asking and trying to find the answer to.

In a good mystery the answers always exist. There are people to ask, clues to examine, deductions to make, and so forth. There’s always someone who knows the answer. It might be the murderer, a cult member, the retired beat cop, anyone. But someone has the answers the characters–and by extension, the readers– are looking for.

Now, here’s where some folks go wrong.

In an attempt to make their main character seem skilled or clever, I’ve seen many fledgling writers solve the mystery in the opening pages of their story. The solution is revealed to the main character right up front and then the rest of the narrative becomes all about keeping this information from the audience. The mystery’s solved, the answer just isn’t being given out until the end.

For example, I read one book recently that was a take on the Grail myth. Two parallel characters– one during the Crusades, the other in modern times– are on quests to find the secret of the Holy Grail. However, the first character gets taken aside by her father less than 1/5 into the book and–I kid you not–it essentially goes like this…

***

“Come, daughter. I must tell you a story.”

He talked long into the night and into the morning. His mouth went dry several times. As the sun broke over the hills, he finished.

“This is amazing,” she finally said. “You’ve known this all along?”

“Yes, and now you must keep this fantastic secret, too, until you pass it on to your child.”

***

I’m not exaggerating. That’s almost word for word what the author has on the page.

So, the story then covers another 300 pages during which Phoebe (not her real name) risks the lives of her friends and makes seemingly-irrational decisions to protect a secret she’s really just hiding from the readers. In the end, we don’t even get the answer from Phoebe. The author abandons the whole Crusades-era thread with Phoebe cornered by her enemies and just has someone else tell the modern-era character what happened to her. “Ah, the story of Phoebe? A sad tale, really. You see, when she was cornered by her enemies she…”

That was it. One person has the answers for the whole story, dies “off camera,” and someone else just walks in to read the answer out of a book. No, seriously. The modern character finds this historian and he actually reads her the answer out of a book.

This is not a mystery. Sure you can pitch it as the mystery of the grail, but it’s not. It’s just withheld information. A successful mystery has certain key elements which I’ve mentioned before. The reason this sort of story structure fails is that it violates two of these minimum requirements.

The first of these is that a mystery needs to have a resolution. The characters are searching for that hidden piece of information and they must find it for the mystery to work. The problem here is that the answer was found early in the story. So… mystery solved. In the example above, we were searching for the secret of the Grail and found it on page 81. The rest of the story is unnecessary.

The second element is that in a good mystery we like the protagonists and can relate to them. In any good piece of storytelling–whatever the genre–the characters should mirror the audience. It’s important to them that the answer is found, thus it’s important to us that the answer is found. We want to stick with them until they find those solutions and resolve things.

Y’see, Timmy, the main character can’t be the person holding the answers. In order to do that, they have to hide those facts from the reader (like Phoebe did). Now Phoebe isn’t mirroring the audience, she’s keeping them at arm’s length. The moment she starts concealing things, our protagonist has just alienated the reader.

For the record, this also holds for any Mr. X/ femme fatale type characters who make vague statements or drop cryptic hints. If they’re only here for a page or two, great. But these people can’t be following the main character around for two hundred pages or else they become protagonists, too. And, as I just mentioned above, they’ll be protagonists we don’t like.

If you want to put a mystery in your story, that’s great. Mysteries rock and great mysteries get remembered forever. Just make sure it’s a real mystery, with all the necessary elements it needs to work.

Next time, it being the season and all, I’d like to talk with you about horror.

Until then, go write.

Every now and then I get to do some really cool stuff for my job at Creative Screenwriting. Part of this is pitching ideas for articles or interviews and the little thrill when someone says yes to a wilder one. What’s really cool, though, is when you pitch a complete long-shot idea and the screenwriter said idea centers around says “sure, let’s grab a coffee or something.”

Do you want to be a writer? YES / NO

Continue to the next paragraph.

One thing I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before is flow. It’s one of those elements of writing that we’re all instinctively aware of but it rarely gets a consistent name put to it. I first heard it referred to as flow years back by a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell. It was such a perfect term I’ve used it myself ever since.

Flow is how well the reader can move through your writing. It’s the way every line of dialogue rolls off the tongue, how each paragraph and chapter draws the reader into the next one. Like the flow of a river or the flow of traffic on a freeway. When the flow of writing is going well, you love it.

We can also define what makes for bad flow. When the river or the freeway aren’t going so well you get rapids, bottlenecks, gridlock, and so on. More to the point, you get frustrated and angry. A story that makes you stumble a lot doesn’t flow well at all. Clumsy, wooden dialogue and poor characterization don’t work either. Whenever a reader pauses to scratch their head or roll their eyes over the latest “twist,” that’s another speedbump in the proverbial road. If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked. You’ll read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s not a bad thing to shock the reader once or twice with a bit of unexpected action, a clever reveal, or something else that jars them out of complacency.. It’s important, though, to remember that those shocks are the exception, not the rule. If a story is nothing but flashbacks or “gotcha” moments one after another, it degenerates into nonsense and frustration.

Readers keep reading material with good flow because it’s easier to keep reading than to put it down. Stephen King writes books with great flow. So do Lee Child and Clive Cussler. They’re all famous for it, in fact. Shane Black’s screenplays are notoriously fun to read. It’s also a big part of the reason all these people keep selling their work for high sums of money.

Now, for the record, flow is another one of those things I believe you can’t easily work on and develop in your writing. It’s one of those X-factors, where you can manipulate each of the variables but still not affect the final outcome. You just have to keep writing and keep writing and eventually one day it will all come together.

For example, in Goju-ryu, one of the original three forms of karate developed on Okinawa, there’s a kata called senchin (no, trust me, this is another one of those brilliant metaphors). The moves for senchin are often taught to the white belt novices. The instructors know that by the time the novices become black belts, they’ll have an understanding of how all the moves go together and can start to work on the form itself. The Okinawan masters understand that working on parts doesn’t always help you master the whole. One day, it just all comes together.

I’ve mentioned most of these before (often in greater detail), but here are a few easy tips that can help the flow of a story. I’m not saying doing these guarantees great flow, but if you’re going out of your way not to do them… well…

Keep it interesting– Easiest way in the world to keep readers from getting bored is not to be boring. A story that drags on and on before getting to the point doesn’t have good flow. If you’re telling a story, get to the story. If it’s a murder mystery, give me a body. If it’s sci fi, show me something amazing. If it’s a love story, show me passion on some level.

Keep it honest– Nothing will kill a story’s flow faster than something that reads as inherently false. People don’t give long speeches about love, honor, or duty in real life. Most of us stopped with the silly, mushy, giggly, fluttering eyelids in ninth grade. And it takes a lot for someone to stay angry for days, let alone years. Fake emotions and actions comes from fake people. Fake people are boring. See above for tips on boring your reader.

Keep it simple— If a writer tries to cram fifteen supporting characters, eight subplots, and the setup for four sequels into a 110 page screenplay, there’s not going to be a lot of room for a coherent story. If said writer decides to alternate each chapter, scene, or spoken line of dialogue between one of ten different time frames it’s going to keep knocking the reader out of the story as they try to keep track of what’s happening where and when to who. Don’t forget the basic goal of writing is to make the reader go on to the next page, not to baffle and confuse them.

Keep it smooth — If you’re picking obscure, awkward, or overly-long words just to show off your vocabulary, there’s a good chance you’re disrupting the flow of your own writing. It’s very impressive that you can picture what a titian-haired female with atramentous works of muted ink inlaid in her flesh looks like, but it’s much smoother, easier, and just as visual to tell us she’s a tattoed redhead.

Keep it relevant–One thing that pretty much always causes a stumble is when the writer adds in something completely irrelevant. Not when this character makes an odd movie reference or a cat walks by for no reason. No, the stumbling point is when the writer spends a paragraph or a page or more on something that has no bearing on the story whatsoever. When there’s an exacting description of the bus driver, a monologue about the morality of Israel vs. Palestine, or a flashback to fourth grade art class, odds are the flow has just been dammed up for no reason.

Watch your dialogue– You can get away with one character who talks like a robot and uses all those obscure, overly-long words I was just talking about. Possibly another who keeps slipping into a foreign language. Too much unnatural, stylized, or just plain bad dialogue brings the story (and the reader) to a screeching halt, though. Mechanics talk like mechanics. Investment bankers talk like investment bankers. Heavily armored mutants from Skaros talk like heavily… well, you get the point.

Have characters act in character.— On the same panel where she talked about flow, Drusilla Campbell commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener is also when most people remember they have laundry they should be folding. Master snipers who can’t hit what they’re aiming at. Genius investigators who miss obvious clues. High school students who talk and act like 35-year-old investment bankers. If you’re not very, very careful, these are the characters who get books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

Take it seriously– So, everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension. But you should never be winking at the audience. Even if you’re doing camp or comedy, you need to be approaching your material as a sincere and honest effort on your own part. If you’re not, the reader will know and they won’t take you seriously. Not being taken seriously gets your manuscript put down in the left hand pile. After all, if the reader thinks the events in your writing don’t mean all that much to you, why should they care about them?

Eight tips for all of us to follow. Especially you. Yeah, you.

Next week’s little rant comes with an important message, so please be here.

Until then, go write.