Beating the Story Page 5

  a transformational arc (transformative hero story)

  or an iconic ethos (iconic hero story)

  Male writers, particularly but not exclusively young ones, can profit by asking themselves if they have conceived female leads as protagonists, or mere foils. If they exist merely to bring about a change in the male lead, or, worse, give him advice that doesn’t change him, or worse still, serve as a reward for the hero’s pursuit of his goal, the character will come across as underwritten. Fix this by giving them the relevant missing ingredient from the bullet points above: have women resolving internal conflicts, undergoing transformations as they achieve procedural goals, or bringing order back to a disordered world by imposing their elemental selfhood onto it.

  Perhaps because we take it for granted that men possess agency and autonomy, far fewer underwritten male characters appear in narratives written or driven by women. One might argue that women should get to write men as barely limned foils for the next half-century or so in order to even out the balance sheet. But if your story as outlined does have that rarer problem, it too will become richer if you elevate a frequently occurring foil to full protagonist status.

  Transformational Supporting Characters

  Relatively minor characters can undergo dramatic arcs.

  This can add a sense of dimensionality to your fictional world, suggesting that even the minor figures who populate its fringes lead full, complicated lives. Each is the leading character in her own rich narrative, which you happen not to be focusing on.

  Arcs For Parallel Foils

  A minor character’s arc can reverse that of a main character, making that character a parallel foil.

  You sometimes see iconic procedurals in which minor characters undergo dramatic arcs. Typically a non-recurring character moves from a negative to a positive state as a consequence of the iconic hero’s order-restoring actions.

  A broken-down former colleague or friend of the protagonist steps onto the path to recovery.

  A scared and isolated kid gains a sense of community.

  A criminal goes straight.

  A victim learns to fight back.

  This pattern lends your conclusion a feeling of conclusive transformation, without pushing your iconic hero away from her defining ethos.

  Thematic Opposition

  Your throughline might well serve as the theme for your story.

  However, you might have a more complicated thesis you’d like to put forward, or contradiction you intend to explore. For example, your throughline might be war vs. peace, but you want to say more about this than that these two opposite forces exist and put people through changes.

  In that case, make a note of it, energizing it by expressing it in the form of a conflict or a question with at least two possible answers. This becomes your thematic opposition.

  The throughline peace vs. war can be elaborated into any number of more specific thematic oppositions, a few of which include:

  Is there such a thing as a just war, or is it all just war?

  Can we celebrate battlefield heroism without celebrating destruction and violence?

  Can war remake us, or just dehumanize us?

  Can redemption occur amid war’s evils and terrors?

  Can greed steer us away from war, or only toward it?

  You will refer to your thematic opposition when determining whether a scene belongs in your story or could stand to be trimmed. In some cases you will see that although a moment isn’t working, it does express something essential about your theme. When that happens, you don’t eliminate the moment, but find some other way to fix it.

  Genre and Expectation

  This last item is not a choice per se, but rather a factor that will operate on you as you make the other choices in this section. If you don’t consciously address it, your piece will be unconsciously informed by it. This might be a good thing if you prefer pure instinct over analysis, but if that’s the case you probably stopped reading this book long before now.

  The very first spark of inspiration you had before answering the questions in this section undoubtedly implies a genre.

  If you think you are not writing a genre work, you probably mean to say you are writing literary fiction. Although it contains more outwardly disparate sub-genres than commercial fiction, its readers nonetheless fit a broad social profile and bring to your work a set of expectations for style, characterization, plotting, mood, and even political leaning. To identify these, head to your local brick-and-mortar bookstore and look at the cover images, graphic designs, and back cover copy of its lit-fic titles. You’ll soon spot the recurring patterns that make up the key lit-fic sub-genres, such as the serious historical, minimal realist, coming of age, academic satire, the immigrant experience narrative, to the experimental, the familial reckoning, and the novel of sociopolitical identity.

  Having said that, one of the conceits of literary fiction is that it must appear to exist outside of mere genre. Among the reader’s expectations is that the work will not visibly concern itself with reader expectations. This paradox may best go unexamined. You may well produce more satisfying, deeply personal work by embracing the conceit and forgetting I ever said anything.

  Still reading this section? You must have identified your genre, perhaps slicing it down even further to a sub-genre or particular set of works you wish to tip your hat to.

  You may have chosen your genre because either:

  you are already heavily invested in it as a reader and creator

  or the genre best fits your chosen narrative elements

  Your challenge in coming to terms with genre depends on which category you fall into.

  Seeking Variation

  Experienced genre hands, you’ll most benefit by stepping back a bit from your genre, from appreciation to analysis. You know what the audience expects from a story of this type: to interact with its telltale tropes, archetypes, situations, and images—and perhaps also to enter into a dialogue with the classics of the genre’s past. The trick with any set of audience expectations, especially those associated with genre, is to present those familiar elements in a refreshingly unfamiliar way. Ask yourself what angle you can find on your genre to separate your story from others of its type. With an audience hungry for more of the genre you’re dishing out, the difference need not be huge.

  This is a detective novel, but it’s set in my home city, which few other crime writers have explored.

  This is a horror story in the body snatchers sub-genre, but told from the point of view of the entirely sympathetic possessing beings.

  This is a war novel, but featuring a protagonist you rarely see in this genre.

  Particularly in tightly defined genres, originality may be more important to consider than fully achieve. Novelty is fleeting, after all. By the time you finish your first draft you may discover six other sympathetic body snatchers stories, one of them written by a Nebula-winning writer in 1958. But along the way you undoubtedly found a new variation or two.

  Seeking a Grounding

  If you’re approaching a genre you don’t know all that well, ground yourself in it before proceeding. Your audience will bring a set of expectations to your work, wanting you to play with at least some of the genre’s established storehouse of tropes, archetypes, situations, and images. Read or watch some of the genre’s classics and also its most noteworthy, popular, or discussed recent examples. Many people read only one genre, but do so exhaustively. Particularly on the page, that means their reading experience encompasses only the range of prose styles typical to that section of the bookstore. Buy me a drink sometime and I’ll tell you what happens when you apply the present tense, absolutely widespread in literary fiction, to a fantasy novel.

  Coming at the genre from the outside, your take on it might already add a new and distinctive element t
o the mix. If so, you’re good to go.

  However, it’s also possible that, through independent creative evolution, you’ll hit upon the very oldest tricks and tropes this unfamiliar genre has to offer. This happens surprisingly often when talented writers branch out into genres they have not previously written in. When this occurs, the same question as above lies before you: what new angle can you find to adjust your story for novelty?

  Stance

  Stories adopt various perspectives on their chosen genres. Let’s call these choices stances.

  Validatory

  The Validatory stance finds the writer simply telling a story to meet genre expectations in a surprising way, without commenting on it or bending it out of shape. This is the default choice. If this whole section seems beside the point to you, you’re almost certainly writing in Validatory mode and don’t particularly need to make a note of it.

  Revivalist

  When recreating, evoking, or nodding to the style or particulars of older or classic pieces in this genre, you’re working in the Revivalist mode. It expects the reader to identify your references, responding to the work both on its own emotional terms and as part of an implicit intellectual dialogue with the genre’s history.

  Comedic

  The Comedic stance takes a serious genre and makes it funny. You may also introduce core tropes of the comedy form, for example a conclusion that ends in a union of opposites—often literally a wedding.

  Parodic

  The Parodic stance combines the Comedic with the Revivalist. You intend the piece to be funny, but much of the comedy arises not from the interactions of the characters but from your exaggerated spoof of past entries in your genre.

  (Should you wish to impress your lit professor, a parody designed to show the writer’s disdain for the genre is correctly termed a travesty. Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is a parody of horror films, but his later film Spaceballs is a travesty of space opera flicks. Discuss.)

  Satirical

  The Satirical stance uses black comedy to present scathing political or social critique. Its distance from the subject matter, and sometimes its lack of empathy, can make it difficult to generate the emotional up notes discussed under Ups and Downs. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove pulls off the remarkable feat of generating the suspense associated with its techno-thriller genre, even as its bitter satire treats its characters as the broadest of cartoons. We shouldn’t care about them, but we do—perhaps more than the people in most Kubrick movies, come to think of it.

  Revisionist

  Though serious in tone, a Revisionist piece seeks to critique or undermine the assumptions of the genre. Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Long Goodbye modernizes Raymond Chandler’s noir world in order to portray his white knight nobility as a ridiculous sham. Little Big Man treats the Indian wars sub-genre of the Western, and America’s myth of itself, as a con job. Revisionism had its heyday in the disillusioned ‘70s, but could stage a comeback whenever the stories we love congeal into propagandistic justifications of a sclerotic social order.

  Meta-fictional

  Here your story acts as a comment on the genre and narrative, calling upon the reader not only to spot the references but remain aware of the process of engaging with fiction. Exercises in meta-fiction range from Milan Kundera’s literary novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the episode of Supernatural where the monster-hunting heroes encounter a high school drama group staging a musical about them.

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  The Building Blocks of Narrative

  The beat system considers three elements to be the basic units from which stories are constructed:

  up and down notes, which when viewed together comprise your story’s emotional rhythm

  beats, the story moments whose outcomes give rise to the up and down notes

  transitions, the connections between scenes

  Emotional Rhythm

  Stories affect us by generating a vicarious connection with their characters. Readers empathize with your fictional creations and follow your narrative to find out what happens to them.

  Particularly compelling stories not only excite our emotions, but do so in an unpredictable, varying way.

  A story in which the hero overcomes every obstacle, or gets what she wants from people whenever she seeks it, quickly loses interest and suspense. In fact, the thought of such a story rings so absurdly that you probably can’t think of an example, outside the slush piles in which the works of very green or completely unpublishable writers languish.

  You may be able to think of novels and movies in which the hero fails without relent and is constantly rebuffed when seeking emotional connection. This structure accurately portrays the struggle with clinical depression from the inside. Although perhaps instructive, the film and literature of unrelenting nihilism provides a poor model for gripping narrative.

  Extremely cerebral experimental meta-fiction likewise offers an exception that tests the rule.

  Nonetheless, the rule is this: compelling stories keep our attention by moving readers between two polar emotional states: hope and fear.

  Hope and Fear

  Any fictional situation we as audience members identify with at all hangs between hope and fear. Any story moment, here called a beat, holds us in suspense between two possible outcomes: one we want to see happen, and another we don’t.

  A girl teeters on a tight rope.

  We hope she makes it to the other side.

  We fear that she won’t.

  A man yearns for love.

  We hope he finds the partner he seeks.

  We fear that he’ll wind up alone.

  A woman seeks independence from her prattling chauvinist of a husband.

  We hope she’ll escape from him into a happier situation.

  We fear that the social constraints of Victorian Sweden will leave her trapped in an unhappy life.

  An activist tries to bring murderous government officials to justice.

  We hope to see them brought to trial, tried, and convicted.

  We fear that they’ll get away with their crimes.

  A courtier tricks a general into thinking his wife has cheated on him.

  We hope the general figures it out and restrains his jealousy.

  We fear that he’ll kill her.

  Although few of us have to worry about the insecurities of Moorish generals, we react to situations in our own life with the same paired impulses toward hope and fear.

  That’s the connection that makes storytelling a universal part of the human experience, one that crosses gulfs of culture and time.

  We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an outcome.

  Sometimes the storyteller gives it to us, sometimes not. Along the way we oscillate between nervousness and confidence, anxiety and relaxation, despair to joy, cortisol to dopamine.

  Ups and Downs

  When a moment in a story increases our fear, we can mark that in our analysis of the story as a down beat:

  When it moves us toward hope, we mark it as an up beat:

  Finding fresh, innovative, and surprising ways to register up and down beats is the essence of narrative.

  Sometimes we secretly—or, if you read the Internet comments, maybe not so secretly—want the reassuring pleasures of familiar tropes and patterns. We need an unpredictable rhythm of ups and downs for that, too.

  In fact, if you manage the interplay of ups and downs well enough, the familiar becomes the fresh, an interaction with the eternal myths and verities underlying the storytelling impulse.

  Or maybe you just need to bang out another episode of that thing you can’t even see anymore before tomorrow morning. This works for that, too.

  Laterals

  Very rarely, you’ll include a key story m
oment that doesn’t particularly engage the audience’s hopes or fears one way or the other, but that needs to be there for some other reason. In this unusual instance, you’ll mark it on your story map with a lateral arrow:

  If you find yourself including more than a few laterals in your story map, one of two situations might pertain:

  You’re doing something experimental in a way this book can’t help you with.

  You’ve included a lot of dull moments that need punching up.

  Crossed Arrows

  Infinitely more interesting than the lateral arrow is the crossed arrow, marking an outcome with a mixed or ambiguous outcome. This marks a situation where you intend for the reader to be pulled in two ways. Often this occurs when the viewer’s rooting interest diverges from the character’s desires.

  Catherine loves the caddish Morris Townsend. She pleads with him to stay with her and wins him back, at least for the moment. She got what she wanted, which would normally be an up arrow, since she’s the character we identify with. But we know in the long run she’d be better off if the inevitable heartbreak occurred sooner than later, giving her at least a chance of moving on to a happier existence. So that’s also a down arrow. Up plus down equals crossed arrows:

  Beats

  The arrows in beat analysis mark the outcome of any significant story moment.

  As a writer or editor using the beat analysis system, you get to decide what “significant” means to you in this context.

  A new beat starts when something happens that reorients the audience’s anticipation of hope and fear. The old beat has been resolved in one way or another, pulling us deeper into the story.

  As you begin to look at stories in beat analysis terms, you’ll get an intuitive sense for how finely you want to slice things.

  You might consider only the most notable turns in your story to be worthy of beats.