Beating the Story Read online

  Is it for the validation?

  If that’s your primary aim, research the science of happiness and ask yourself if externally measured success in writing, whatever that is, has anything to do with that.

  Also, make sure you’re the extremely rare sort of person who remembers triumphant moments of genuine recognition with greater vividness and satisfaction than thoughtless put-downs from random Internet presences hovering in the electronic ether.

  The writing life is kinder to thick-skinned, stubborn souls who follow their own compasses than it is for seekers of outside approval.

  Is it for the lifestyle?

  Lots of folks who haven’t yet written for some reason imagine it as an easy job, when it is anything but.

  Some days the words will flow like pure inspiration from an Arcadian spring. At least as often you’ll struggle to extract them from a muzzy, unyielding brain. At the end of the day you may be unable to distinguish the magically written words from those produced by awful struggle. The more experience and skill you gain, the harder it may become to satisfy your own standards.

  Writing is less a path to happiness than it is the exercise of a perhaps unfortunate compulsion.

  Like the header says, if you can see yourself doing something else with your life, do that. Anyone who can be discouraged from a writing career, should be.

  Seriously, Sit Your Ass in the Chair and Write

  If after all that you still want to give it a go, the sixth tip is the same as the first.

  Write, and write, and write.

  And maybe take a shortcut or two by using the ideas in this book.

  • • •

  Making This Book Work For You

  The practitioner must approach all writing theory with caution. Mine included.

  Any statement about writing requires heavy qualification. Works of profound and shocking originality become so by breaking the rules. Beating the Story describes how most successful stories operate, most of the time. If you see how to write something masterful that ignores all of its precepts, go to it. You may have the defining work of our era on your hands. Or maybe both of us are wrong.

  A rule of writing tells us that qualifiers weaken prose and should be avoided. Ergo, please read any statement in this book that you find to be overly proscriptive as including an invisible “maybe,” “perhaps,” or “except for the exceptions.”

  I have never seen a book of writing advice I agreed with in its entirety. Especially when it expresses itself with cultic certitude. Defining your objections to theories of the process may be as valuable to your growth as a writer as mining them for usable techniques.

  To lurch for an obvious metaphor, treat these ideas as tools in a box. Use the ones that do the job for you. Let the others sink to the bottom with that weird set of pliers and the leftover IKEA brackets.

  Any statement about what works in fiction prompts the question: hey, how much of this theory is just you generalizing your personal tastes? Although I have my favored devices and hated bugaboos in current fictional practice just as you, the reader, do, I have striven to maintain a neutral tone toward techniques outside of the book’s basic thesis. Despite this effort you may still be able to read between the lines on such matters as expository montages, extended nature descriptions, or flash-forwards in teaser sequences.

  An effort to identify the core elements of narrative and render them as units on a diagram by definition threatens the reader with an experience as dry as it is daunting. In an effort to leaven the heavy-duty analysis I have adopted a conversational tone, with maybe a wisecrack or seven. We’re just writers talking shop here.

  This book addresses itself to both emerging and seasoned writers. Experienced hands will spot sections they can confidently skip. If you’ve published or produced you don’t need this book to tell you what a foil is, or how an ensemble drama works.

  Style Notes

  You may be writing for readers, viewers, or perhaps even listeners. For the sake of variety, this book uses the following terms interchangeably:

  “reader” and “viewer”

  “readers,” “viewers,” and “audience”

  Unless stated otherwise, treat a sentence about keeping your audience engaged as applying to any form of narrative media, not just television, theater, and film. Likewise a reference to readers should be read as applying beyond the written word.

  Many storytelling examples given here come from classic works you will immediately recognize. Others I made up, to best express the point at hand. If you don’t recognize an example, don’t knock yourself out trying to figure out where it’s from.

  Does This Sound Eerily Familiar?

  The system of story analysis presented here first appeared in my previous Gameplaywright book, Hamlet’s Hit Points. It applies them to the collaborative storytelling world of tabletop roleplaying games. If you know what a d12 is, you might enjoy it, too.

  To play a story game based on these principles, check out Hillfolk, also by me, available from Pelgrane Press.

  1

  Conceiving Your Story

  As already mentioned, ideas have no value until you execute them. In this section we’ll examine techniques and analytical tools that can help you take the elements that inspired your idea and begin to break them out into a coherent, compelling story.

  Authors are often asked where they get their ideas. We usually duck this common question because the process is both hard to pin down and boring to talk about. The kernel of an idea can germinate in any number of ways:

  a common trope you want to put a new spin on

  a conflict between people

  a genre conceit you don’t think anyone has done yet

  a historical anecdote or situation

  a real person’s story you want to use as the basis for a fictional account

  a thesis you want to advance about life, politics, faith, or philosophy

  a visual image that unfolds itself into a story

  an assignment to write a piece based on an existing property or premise

  an image or situation from a dream

  an issue you are conflicted about and whose contradictions you wish to explore through fiction

  from a character you suddenly envision and become fascinated with, perhaps unbidden, perhaps from seeing someone on the street

  from a moment in an existing work that sends your thoughts spinning in another direction

  from elements you randomly combine as a creativity exercise

  something that happened to you

  There are so many ways to conceive ideas that I may well have left yours off this list. They range from the completely intuitive to the systematic and mechanical.

  If you are reading this without a particular idea in mind, find the document where you compile all of your ideas and pick one you’d like to explore.

  You don’t keep a file of all of your ideas? You should do that. In today’s smartphone and Google Docs world, you have less excuse than ever to let an idea come to you and then fade away into the well of memory.

  If you have no premise whatsoever at hand, use the idea springboard in the insert section below to bring one to mind. Then skip to the next section.

  The Random Actor Method: An Idea Springboard

  This random inspiration-triggering method will spark an idea that you can then use to think through the steps and techniques we’re about to outline.

  Fire up your web browser and go to www.imdb.com/random/name. This will redirect you to the Internet Movie Database page of a randomly selected currently popular actor.

  Return to that URL a second time. You will have to re-enter it, rather than hitting refresh, as the latter will keep you on the original page.

  You may have to do this a number of times before you have two performers y
ou recognize. One or both might have passed away already, but that’s not a problem. You’re not literally writing a piece for them and will likely move a long way from their personae by the time you’re finished.

  Next, choose a genre you like and prefer to work in. Character-driven literary fiction counts as a genre.

  Now ask yourself what relationship characters that might be played by those two performers might have to one another: parent and child, lovers, spouses, mentor and student, work rivals, sworn enemies, whatever first springs to mind.

  Finally, within the range of settings and situations suggested by your chosen genre, imagine a conflict that might arise between them.

  Your result might look something like this:

  Rachel McAdams + Anjelica Huston + character-driven fiction: academic marries the son of her famously reclusive literary idol and attempts to pull her from her spiral of quiet self-destruction.

  Jackie Earle Haley + Tom Cruise + crime drama: hunter becomes hunted when an inventively murderous hit man escapes from jail and comes after the former undercover cop who put him away.

  Ron Perlman + James Marsden + science fiction: after a troubling medical diagnosis, a man seeks out the estranged bioscientist father who, unknown to him, grew him as an artificial being.

  Rebel Wilson + Haley Joel Osment + comedy: brash life coach volunteers to transform the style and confidence of an introverted tech genius as he struggles to keep his fast-growing company out of the hands of corporate weasels.

  None of these will have agents pounding down your door to look at your latest pages, but it will give you an example to keep in mind as we run down the techniques in this book. If you keep doing this, perhaps before bedtime or before going on a solitary walk, you might every so often hit on something worth jotting down in your ideas file.

  You’ll find many other idea springboarding methods online. If you have one you prefer, use it instead.

  Turning Inspiration Into Premise

  Not for the last time in this book, I will now take a broad term used in writing and define it more specifically for our purposes.

  The premise is a set of tightly interrelated elements you need to assemble before outlining, writing, or editing using the beat analysis system.

  Described below, these elements are your:

  throughline (see Throughline)

  core question (see Core Question)

  protagonist(s) (see Protagonist Type)

  supporting characters (see Supporting Characters)

  thematic opposition (see Thematic Opposition)

  genre (see Genre and Expectation)

  stance, if relevant (see Stance)

  You can tackle these in any order. Codifying one element of your premise informs later decisions you’ll make about others. Your throughline and thematic opposition key off of one another, and also affect the way you define your protagonists. Start with the item on this list you have the clearest answer to, and then continue filling them, from most to least certain, until you have completed all of them.

  You might jot these all down in the format of your choice, or make use of the Inspiration to Premise Worksheet in the Appendix.

  Throughline

  Whether it sticks to straightforward chronology or moves around in time, any story unfolds as a movement from one state to another. Classic throughlines include:

  innocence to experience

  selfishness to altruism

  disorder to order

  sin to redemption

  crisis to disintegration

  obscurity to fame

  rags to riches

  riches to rags

  majesty to tragedy

  omen to apocalypse

  danger to safety

  sanity to madness

  blindness to sight

  crime to vengeance

  crime to expiation

  bondage to freedom

  safely ignorant to destroyed by knowledge

  lonely to loved

  solitude to belonging

  zero to hero

  naiveté to wisdom

  cynicism to belief

  recklessness to responsibility

  broken to whole

  estrangement to reconciliation

  ennui to engagement

  restless boredom to safe boredom

  The movement need not occur predictably or at a steady rate. Sometimes the characters may seem able to resist movement toward a negative end point, or unable to progress toward a positive end point. With few exceptions, you want the end state to appear inevitable after the fact, yet always in question while your readers are experiencing your story.

  Your story may use a circular structure in which the character moves from the status quo to its opposite and back again:

  rags to riches to rags

  belonging to solitude to belonging

  freedom to bondage to freedom

  Core Question

  Any story that introduces any degree of narrative suspense—which is to say, nearly any story—can be expressed as a question regarding its outcome. This is your core question. The viewer’s full understanding of the core question may change over the course of the story, as you reveal more about it. The core question evokes the throughline, but unlike the throughline, is specific to the details of your plot line. Famous core questions include:

  Will Ilsa wind up with Rick, or with Laszlo?

  Will Frodo get the ring to Mount Doom?

  Will Travis Bickle do something terrible?

  Will Hamlet wreak the vengeance his father’s ghost demands?

  Will Aminata survive the horrors of slavery?

  Will Don Lockwood save his career and still get to be with Kathy?

  Will Anne find life and family at Green Gables?

  Which of these soldiers will survive the war they’re about to enter, and in what state?

  Will Odysseus make it home, and by the time he gets back, will it still be a home?

  Same question, but for Dorothy.

  Will Oliver Twist escape his wretchedness?

  Will society strike back against Becky Sharp’s excesses?

  Some narratives telegraph the outcome, changing the question from what will happen to how it will happen.

  How will we understand Willy Loman’s foreordained doom?

  How did Joe Gillis wind up floating in that pool?

  How did Holden come to be hospitalized?

  Some stories radically shift directions, changing the core question midway through. When you do this you are choosing to destabilize viewers and counting on your ability to win them back under wildly altered circumstances.

  The Boil-Down

  Now restate your story once again, this time in the form of a single sentence beginning with the phrase “This is the story of...”

  This sentence becomes your boil-down. It mentions your central character (or ensemble of characters) and either describes or alludes to the theme and ultimate core question.

  This is the story of a man forced to choose between doing the right thing and being happy.

  This is the story of a man who must save the world by resisting the temptations of power.

  This is the story of a man who seeks human connection through redemptive bloodshed.

  This is the story of a contemplative man called upon to perform an act of vengeance.

  This is the story of a woman who asserts selfhood in a world that regards her as a commodity.

  This is the story of a man who must rethink everything when history threatens to render him obsolete.

  This is a story of an orphan who finds family and belonging.

  This is the story of men thrown into war’s deh
umanizing meat-grinder.

  This is the story of a man trying to get home.

  This is the story of a girl who finds her home boring, until chance sweeps her into a wondrous world of beauty and danger.

  This is the story of an orphan struggling to survive in a world indifferent to his poverty.

  This is the story of a woman who rises through society by flouting its rules.

  Unlike the core question, your boil-down never changes in midstream.

  Knowing the boil-down and keeping it firmly in mind helps you preserve narrative unity. During the outlining and rewriting phases, or when editing or commenting on pieces written by others, you’ll remind yourself of the boil-down when trying to decide whether a scene, sequence, or moment actually fits your narrative, or represents a tangent belonging to some other story.

  Subsidiary Questions

  Ensemble narratives in which the contrasting fates of multiple true protagonists are interwoven typically pose a collective question:

  Who will rise, who will fall, and who will keep on going as before?

  Within that overarching question, you can also pose a subsidiary question for each member of the cast.

  Protagonist Type

  When you first begin to think about your story, the first few characters you envision—or perhaps only the first character—are in all probability your protagonist or protagonists.

  Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.

  Again, I’m narrowing the definition of the word protagonist for the purpose of beat analysis. Some writing guides argue, for example, that the protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets the story in motion. This may or may not be what the viewer thinks of as the main character. For beat analysis what matters is the character’s a) centrality to the narrative and b) our concern for her success or failure.