Category: Who

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.

A long-overdue pop culture reference for the title, just to get us moving.

It’s always interesting to me when I try to figure out what next week’s blog will be about, for that little teaser at the end of this week’s blog. This week’s started off when I was passing quick notes back and forth with a friend who’s doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. He had a clever idea for one of his upcoming chapters, about midway though his work-in-progress, and I… well, I was advising against it. Then someone brought up the same issue on a publisher’s message board I frequent. A few days later, I was reading scripts for a contest and found one where said issue had become one of the problems crippling the screenplay.

What is said problem, you ask?

Well, the first time I ever saw Doctor Who was halfway through a very trippy story arc called “The Deadly Assassin” (which has finally become available on DVD). It was probably the worst set of episodes to try to start watching the show on, because the Doctor spent a good chunk of it in the mind-twisting reality of the Matrix (yes, Doctor Who had a Matrix decades before Keanu Reeves did). A few months later I tried again and WGBH (which only had so many episodes) had circled back around to “Robot,” which was the first Tom Baker story, also featuring the lovely Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane. And that’s how I became a Doctor Who fan, and have remained one for most of my life.

What the heck does that have to do with any of this?

Well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? Suddenly bam I’ve gone from the usual rant to some senile doddering about my childhood without any sort of transition.

Ahhhh-haaaahhhhhh…

Transitions are what I wanted to rant about this week. That moment your story goes from this to something else. It can be a shift in character, person, location, or time. Every time you switch, you’re asking your audience to take a moment to readjust. The bigger the shift, the bigger the time of adjustment. Most of us could make it past either a six inch step or a three foot drop, but one’s going to take a lot more effort than the other.

As a writer, you don’t want the audience to think about that adjustment. If everything’s done right, the transitions will be as invisible as the word “said.” If there are too many transitions, though, going in too many different directions, it’s too much like driving on a road covered with speed bumps. You’re asking the reader to pause again and again and again and again. If a manuscript has too many transitions, or too many extreme ones, it’s going to go into that large pile on the left. What would you do if a manuscript made you pause half a dozen times in the first ten pages? Would you keep reading or get back to folding laundry?

I mentioned my friend who started all this off (and who most likely is reading this). Let me be blunt and hope he forgives me. In the middle of his superhero action-intrigue story, he wanted to do an entire chapter in verse. Chaucer-style, Canterbury Tales verse. Why isn’t important for our purposes, just that he was going to do it. He had a very solid reason for it, and I have no doubt he could’ve pulled it off.

The thing was, he’d actually had several point of view shifts in his novel already. Some of them were basic shifts– we’d go from third person focused on him to third person on him. Then there would be jumps to first person narratives. And epistolary chapters. And flashbacks. Plus a frame that was a flash-forward. So it wasn’t just that he wanted to do a chapter in verse, it’s that he wanted to do a chapter in verse on top of everything else. All fine and good on their own, but as they begin to pile up…

As a brief but relevant segue, let me talk about Dean Koontz for a moment, author of (among many, many others) Watchers, Dark Rivers of the Heart, and the Fear Nothing series (which I really hope he goes back to some day). Early in his career, Koontz wrote a great little book called How To Write Best Selling Fiction It’s gone out of print, and the author himself has said he’s got no interest in seeing it re-issued. I think a lot of the reasons for both are political, because in this book young Koontz did say a lot of blunt, rather unkind things about publishing, gurus, and wannabe writers. Now, in all fairness, many of these things were completely true, and still are today. They’re not what people want to hear or admit, but, as a friend of mine once told our boss, if you wanted a cheerleader you should’ve hired one. If you can find a copy– grab it (they go for big bucks on eBay). If you can find it online, download it, memorize it, and delete it. Than write an angry letter to Writers Digest Books telling them how they’ve forced you to resort to piracy.

Back on track, though.

One thing Koontz stresses, and you can see it in his work, is to never shift viewpoints within a chapter. Use the chapter break itself as the big pause and try to have as few little ones within it as possible. Now, I’d never go as far to say you should never switch within a chapter, but I also think Koontz has a solid track record backing him up.

So, a few quick tips for transitions…

Fewer – This is the easiest one. The simplest way to avoid troubling shifts is… well, avoid them. Look at the transitions in your writing and figure out how many of them can be trimmed out or consolidated. Is it harder to tell a story with fewer transitions? A bit, yes, but far from impossible. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope doesn’t have one transition in it. It’s a single continuous film narrative from start to finish. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe only has two in the entire novel. It switches to an epistolary journal for a few dozen pages and then back to the regular narrative. There aren’t even chapter breaks.

Smaller – As I mentioned above, it’s easier to go down a six inch step than a three foot drop. It’s easy for a reader to go from third person, past- tense to another third person, past tense. It’s a bit harder to start in third person, past tense and jump to second person, future tense section and then back… or to a first person, present. Likewise, jumping between the thoughts of a Harvard professor and a golden retriever is going to be a bit jarring. Bigger jumps mean bigger pauses to adjust, and also more of a disruption in the flow of your story.

Smoother – One way to lessen the impact between sections is to make the transition as organic as possible. A common way of doing this is by creating parallel structure in text or dialogue to keep up a certain rhythym. Another is to do continuations, where, for example, a question gets asked in the first part but the answer is given after the transition.

Make Them Have Purpose – Is there a real reason the story’s going from this point of view to that one? If so, your readers will be more willing to accept the change. If not, it’s just going to frustrate them more. Much like when I prattled on about structure, if the shift doesn’t accomplish something in the story, you shouldn’t be doing it. Make sure the story as a whole is focused, and that there’s a real reason we’re suddenly spending a page with Wakko, the wannabe actor who’s working as a waiter on weekends and about to serve a drink to the main character.

Now, there is sort of a halfbreed flipside to this. A common problem, especially in screenplays, is a complete lack of transitions. Gurus and how-to books tell people to cut description, cut words, cut everything. So fledgling writers take that advice and cut… well, everything.

The problem with that approach is, while it sounds wise on the surface, what it really does is leave you with nothing on the page and nothing between scenes. Suddenly, we’re in a house with Jane. What kind of house? Old? Modern? Is it the present day? Are we in the kitchen at lunchtime? The bedroom at midnight? And while I’m still reeling trying to figure out where we are and why Jane is yelling at George, suddenly we’re in an office. A newspaper office? A telemarketing office? Is it real office or a field of cubicles? Too late, now we’re with George in his car…

I’ve set down a lot of scripts like this while I was reading for contests. None of them went in the pile on the right.

So, there’s my random musings on transitions. Hopefully not too random.

By the way, the reason “The Deadly Assassin” was so hard to follow as an introductory episode was because it took place across a virtual landscape formed from the stored memories of the Time Lords. In other words, it was a mish-mash of settings with no transitions between them. It would’ve been so much smoother if I’d said that up front, yes…?

Next week we’re getting into the holidays, so I won’t take up too much of your time. I may talk about it, though.

Until then, go write.

While doing about a dozen articles for Creative Screenwriting and waiting for the release of Ex-Heroes, I’ve been poking at another clever idea for a novel (I hope) which jumped into my head one night while driving past a graveyard. One of the biggest elements is coming up with a believable moon base for the 23rd century. Sure, it would be easy to scribble out pages about oxygen generators and gravity plates and all that, but I like to make things as believable as possible. I also firmly believe in the plusses and minuses of capitalism, and how I predict they’ll affect space travel in the future.

About the same time, while skimming through piles of astronomy books, I noticed something on a message board I frequent. One of the semi-regular readers here (a whopping 10% of you, by all available numbers) who also posts there was asking questions about a location she wanted to use in a story she was working on.

As a wise man once said… link up here, link up there.

So, hey, let’s talk a bit about settings.

The setting is the when and where your story takes place. Simple, right? Some folks would argue it’s almost a character in its own right, because where you set your story can have a great effect on how the story is told. I’d agree, to the extent I think you should put at least as much thought into a story’s location as you would into one of your single-name supporting characters.

For all our intents and purposes, there are three types of settings.

A historical setting is one which takes place somewhere in the recorded past. It is limited to the world as it existed at that given time period, despite what the author may know happened later. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is a tale with a historical setting, as is The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Braveheart was set against the backdrop of history, and so were Titanic and Public Enemies. If you’ve got premium cable, Deadwood and Mad Men are two series that used a historical setting.

Note that a historical setting doesn’t mean this has to be a 100% true story. More than half the tales I listed above are fictional or heavily fictionalized. There weren’t really two star-crossed lovers with a huge emerald sailing on the Titanic, but it was still set entirely in its respective time period and was true to that period.

A modern setting is set in the real world, usually within the past ten or fifteen years. It uses modern technology, terminology, and so on. Most television shows are set in the modern world for the simple reason it’s cheaper to film. Stephen King puts most of his stories in a modern setting, as do Thomas Harris, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, and countless others.

Again, a modern setting is not always a true, factual story. Castle Rock, Maine is not a real place. Stars Hollow, Connecticut does not exist. There also isn’t an occult library over the SoHo coffee shop in San Diego. However all of these places confirm to the rules (well, the overwhelming majority of the rules) of the world we see them in.

An imaginary setting is one which involves imagined locations, usually in an entirely imagined world. It’s anything the writer has to create mostly from the ground up—sci-fi, fantasy, future, and so on. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry is imaginary, as are Miskatonic University and Starfleet Academy. The worlds of Perth, Gallifrey, Vulcan, and Caprica were all created by their respective writers. While there are numerous uncharted islands in the South Pacific, I feel safe saying none of them are home to numerous ghosts and dueling Egyptian gods.

This is one of the hardest settings to pull off, as the writer needs to create an entire believable reality. You need to be able to answer questions which may not ever come up in your story and also come up with consistent ways for things to work under the new rules of this new world. Even an imaginary world needs boundaries and limits, after all. Can magic really do anything? Has mankind actually reached another galaxy in just five hundred years? Did Abraham Lincoln or JFK surviving change the world that much?

That brings up another point about the imaginary setting. It’s even tougher, sometimes, deciding what doesn’t need to be changed or created. What parts can you just leave the same as the real world? Measurements? Currency? This strange thing called love?

Now, one other little note before we move on. As important as the setting is, it’s still just the backdrop. It isn’t always directly connected to what’s happening in front of it. We can still write fantasy stories set in the real world. That’s why aliens can help build the pyramids in a historical setting. But note there’s a big difference between a world where aliens help build the pyramids as intergalactic trail markers and a world where these aliens are fought off by the combined magical might of sorcerers from Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.

So, how do you make a solid setting, of any type? Pretty much the same way you’d make a character. You just make it as believable as possible.

If you’re using a modern or historical setting, actually know the place you’re talking about. Spend time there if you can (it’s no coincidence most of my stories are set in Los Angeles, San Diego, or New England). If you can’t travel there, read every book you can. Look at every picture. Every place is unique, and it will be your job as a writer to learn those little (and not so little) tics that make them what, where, and when they are. 21st century London is very different from 15th century London, after all. Los Angeles and Boston each have their own unique vibes. Romeo & Juliet and West Side Story line up point for point, but the setting makes them two very different stories. When you get these points right, the millions of people who live in–or know of–these locations will commend you for it and raise their estimate of your story a few notches.

That also ties to the biggest danger with a modern or historical setting– people will know if you get things wrong. Lots of people. Your potential audience lives in the real world, so they’ll catch on if you’ve got characters sitting on a beach in Maine watching the sunset across the water. They’ll cry foul if you claim it’s a forty minute drive from London to Cardiff. And they’ll call shenanigans if you say the taxicabs in Cairo are bright yellow (they’re black and white—blue and white in Luxor, and all white in Aswan).

And then they’ll toss your work into that large pile on the left and go get lunch.

Even imaginary settings should be unique. The world of Barsoom is very different from the world of Hoth. The future of Rendezvous with Rama is not the future of Terminator: Salvation, and neither of them resembles the future world Buck Rogers found himself in.

Once you know your world, you have to be consistent with it. We can’t have Army grunts one minute and the highly advanced U.S. laser battledroid squadron the next (or first—I’m pointing at you, George Lucas). Magic shouldn’t be something extremely rare until it conveniently starts flowing like water. Alien invaders who can build interstellar starships shouldn’t be baffled by doorknobs and stairs. In the same way it’s annoying when characters randomly act out of character, it can frustrate a reader when the entire world suddenly bends to suit the momentary needs of the story–or for no real reason at all.

And there you have it. Some random musings on story settings.

Next week… well, we all have to deal with it sometime. We’re going to talk about the end.

But keep writing until then.

My apologies to all of you regular readers of the ranty blog out there (I think there’s ten of you now). Many deadlines at the magazine these past two weeks, plus apparently I turned old last weekend. These things happen, and I thank you for waiting semi-patiently. Unless something goes horribly wrong, we’ll be back on a regular Thursday schedule for the foreseeable future.

Enough of my lame excuses, though. That’s not what any of us are here for…

So, if you’ve been playing around in the creative fields for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard people talk about concepts. A concept is really just a fancy way of talking about an idea. Alas, it’s now become the standard term in many story-related industries, and you’ll hear far more people talking about concepts than ideas. From a filmmaking point of view, there’s a solid argument to be made that many development people talk about concepts because they don’t have any actual ideas…

But I digress.

Pretty much every story starts with an idea. Stephen King talks about the “What if…” question some writers ask. Hollywood talks about “high concept” ideas where just a few words sum up your whole movie. Not all ideas are good ones, though, and not all ideas work for all types of stories. One problem I’ve seen from many fledgling storytellers is that they don’t understand what kind of idea they have, and this inability to distinguish often leads them down the wrong path.

There are, in my experience, really two kinds of concepts. Unlimited ones and limited ones. You may also have heard them referred to as open and closed stories.

Allow me to explain.

An unlimited concept generally has a very broad scope. The crew of the starship Enterprise is exploring space. The old house up on the hill is haunted. Doctor Who travels through time in his TARDIS. Spider-Man and Batman fight crime to make up for the death of their loved ones. James Bond is a kick-ass secret agent who fights enemies of the British Crown. These ideas are unlimited because you can just keep going and going with them. There are always more idiot college student to wander into the haunted house and more villains to fight Spidey, Batman, Bond, and the Doctor.

However, an unlimited concept is almost never a story. While they can be parts of a story, they tend to be traits for characters or key points about settings. A lot of time when I hear people say “I have a great idea for a story,” they’ve usually come up with an interesting unlimited concept. But there needs to be more to it past that. Which brings us to…

A limited concept. By its very nature, a limited concept can only go so far. It is a bare-bones story, though (more on that below). Richard Kimble wants to find the one-armed man who killed his wife. Robinson Crusoe wants to be rescued from his tropical island, as do the passengers of flight Oceanic 815. Atticus Finch wants to keep his client out of jail, and possibly from a lynch mob. The crew of Voyager wants to find a way across the galaxy and back to the Alpha quadrant.

All of these have straightforward, distinct goals, and once said goal is reached, the story is over. That’s the limiting factor–attaining the specific goal. It doesn’t mean Atticus Finch never tries another case or the Voyager crew doesn’t go into space again, but those would be different stories that have nothing to do with the limited concept we’ve started with.

There are a few common problems with limited concepts. One is when people try to keep pushing the goal away artificially to extend the story (for example, when Dr. Kimble catches the one-armed man only to discover he really needed to find the one-legged man…). Another is when a writer piles on the limited concepts in a single story, creating dozens of goals that need to be achieved. Often this is to make up for a lack of interesting characters or because none of these goals are that challenging. You also see it a lot in genre pieces, where many fledgling writers take the kitchen sink approach to their storyline.

It’s tough for either of these, the unlimited and limited concepts, to work alone. When you can combine these two, though, that’s when you get a solid story. It’s a bit like when I prattled on about horror stories a few months back. You can have a big overall story, but you can still focus on this particular, contained part of it.

–Bond is a kick-ass secret agent (unlimited) who is currently trying to stop the terrorist banker known as LeChiffre (limited).

–The old Marsden Mansion had been haunted for decades (unlimited), and the six people locked inside somehow have to survive until sunrise (limited).

–Batman fights criminals (unlimited) and right now Rhas Al Ghul is threatening to destroy Gotham City with a fear-inducing gas (limited).

Look over all those story ideas you’ve got jotted down (you know you do) and figure out if they’re limited or unlimited. Then figure out which ones work best together. You may have a great short story, screenplay, or novel sitting there, waiting to be noticed. Dissect some of your older work and see what the ideas at the core are.

And then come back here next week, when I shall teach all of you how to dodge bullets. Seriously. Because if you can’t do that… well… you’re not really taking this seriously.

Until then, though, get back to writing.