(If you write for the stage or screen, the actors and director interpreting your work will later conduct this analysis in reverse, drilling down through the surface meanings of your dialogue to find the subtext layered beneath.)
Typically Blocks and Desires will fully reveal themselves only over the course of your narrative. Record them in the table at their most extreme or climactic form. Their first clashes occur almost imperceptibly. Only after repeated, escalating attempts by the petitioning characters to win emotional victories over the granters do the scenes fully evoke the intentions laid out in your table. Even then, a writer working in a naturalistic literary vein will avoid having characters flagrantly quote their motivations at each other.
To return to our example, Holly won’t start her first scene with Juliette by announcing a desire to rescue her from her presumed despond. She might never even articulate her real agenda to herself that way. Instead you write their first scene as a somewhat awkward initial encounter in which each tries to establish a sense of comfort around the other but doesn’t quite get there.
In melodrama or soap opera, on the other hand, they might spell it all out, in keeping with the stylized, on-the-nose declarations typical of those genres.
This of course is just one way of getting at the nub of your drama. You may envision it all intuitively without writing anything down, find it by writing an exploratory draft, or use an alternate notation that works for the way you think and create.
If you do use this approach but with a larger cast of central characters, you will find the entries easier to format as cells on a spreadsheet. I know, I know, that sounds crazily inorganic, what with all the numbers and formulas that typically go into an Excel sheet. But really it’s just a way to create a table that can continue indefinitely, a task limited by the page layout of a word processing program like Word or OpenOffice.
Procedural Preparatory Steps
Procedurals fit together like puzzles. While dramatic pieces can gain from some advance thought, plot-driven narratives all but demand it. You can freewheel your way through a procedural: some of the best-selling writers of past potboilers certainly did. (I’m looking at you, Paul Feval, Dennis Wheatley, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.) But if you prize momentum and internal logic, the more clear, advance thought you can devote to a couple of key points, the better.
Adversary Plan
Plotting a procedural begins with two key steps, the first of which is determining your adversary’s plan of action.
Audience members must know enough about the villain’s objectives to feel hope when the heroes’ actions interfere with them, and to fear for the focus characters when the adversary scores a win.
In a quick sentence fragment, define the practical end the adversary seeks to achieve:
to capture the One Ring, enabling the final conquest of Middle Earth
to possess a legendary statuette known as the Maltese Falcon
to recapture the stolen plans for the Death Star
to protect his criminal organization
to crush the spirit of Shanghai by defeating its most prominent martial arts master
to commit murder and get away with it
to eat as many people as possible
to collect a number of Dalmatians sufficient for the making of a coat
If you can’t encapsulate the goal like this, you probably have an overly complicated premise on your hands. Look for a simpler alternative.
One sign of weak procedural plotting (often also a sign of a confused revision process or the rotating in and out of various screenwriters on the same script) is an adversary plan that changes course midway through the narrative. Having the bad guy switch to a new plan leaves viewers feeling unmoored. Worse, it makes much of the action up to that point retroactively irrelevant.
The villain’s plan must never be stupid. Stupid plans fail, so we expect the villain to fail, so we feel no great fear for the hero or for whatever the villain’s plan threatens.
Clarifying Your Adversary’s Motivation
The adversary’s reason for pursuing the goal may already be implicit. If not, spell it out. Weak procedural stories all too often feature bad guys who take action only to make the plot happen, revealing a writing process that either skipped this step, or lost track of the answer to this key question at some stage in development.
Your antagonist may be impelled by the same contradictory poles that drive dramatic characters. Genre writers in panels and workshops will often advise you to portray adversaries as complex, nuanced figures—perhaps people pursuing noble objectives in unscrupulous, callous, or violent ways.
On the other hand, terrible people in real life tend to be incomplete beings driven by an outsized will to power. These flesh-and-blood cartoon characters, whether they’re wreaking havoc at the PTA meeting or instigating genocide, do what they do in part because they lack depth, which requires empathy. We may in fact prefer redeemable, complicated villains in fiction because we so rarely see them in history.
Make of that what you will.
Whatever your answer to the question of motivation, make sure that your adversary has one, and that it remains clearly reflected in the antagonist’s actions as you build him into your story.
Suspense vs. Surprise
You can show the reader your adversary’s actions in one of two mutually exclusive ways: through suspense or surprise.
Alfred Hitchcock’s famous distinction between the two uses the example of a scene in which a bomb is placed on a bus, as in his 1936 film Sabotage. If we see the bomb placed on the bus, we experience prolonged unease during the subsequent scenes taking place inside it. If on the other hand we don’t know about the bomb until it blows up, we experience a sharp shock, without anticipation.
In suspense mode, certain scenes feature the adversary as focus character. The audience knows more about the adversary’s plans than the protagonist does. We see the adversary taking steps toward dire outcomes. This gives us reason to fear for the protagonist or other sympathetic supporting characters even in scenes they do not appear in. We know the bomb is on the bus.
Surprise seals us off from the adversary’s s point of view. Instead we encounter the plan through the perspective of the protagonists working to unravel it. The audience discovers information only when the heroes do. We become alarmed when they discover clues pointing to upcoming catastrophes the adversary plan will lead to if allowed to occur. A staple of the mystery genre, surprise invites the reader to engage in a puzzle-solving exercise and attempt to out-guess the lead investigator character. Genre satisfaction demands that you as author stay one step ahead of readers, fooling them while nonetheless leaving them feeling that you gave them all the clues necessary to work out the answer. Because readers figure things out at different rates, this balance can be tricky to strike. Also difficult: making the final Reveal as rewarding as the Question was suggestive and tantalizing. Placing heavy weight on the revelation of a mystery may reduce the reread or rewatch value of your work, if that matters to you.
Surprise becomes your only choice when you restrict yourself to the subjective viewpoint of a single lead character, a simplicity you may find constraining, liberating, or both.
Some narratives cheat the issue of suspense vs. surprise, showing the adversary’s viewpoint at certain junctures and withholding it at others. If you write with sufficient brio the audience may not notice.
Exposition Tax
You may envision a detailed series of antecedent events underlying the significance of the goal. Tolkien’s One Ring, for example, forms the core of a shadow narrative about Middle Earth’s ancient history. The more facts you need to establish about the past, or the imagined workings of science or magic in your setting, the more space you’ll devote to information beats, which slow your pacing and complicate your scene ordering. Think of such moments as ones
in which you must stop your narrative to pay an exposition toll. By requiring many such moments, you’re placing a bet that the richness of your imagined world will more than compensate for the time you must devote to revealing it.
Try to boil any backstory surrounding the villain’s plan into as small a package of information as possible. As you build out your sequence of events, you may then find a place to fit in additional evocative details in a way that speeds rather than slows your pacing—for example, by making them critical to particular obstacles the heroes face in their struggle to stop the adversary.
When you begin to construct your scene sequence, you’ll then ask yourself how far into the plan the adversary has advanced when the action begins. From there you’ll work out the first steps the adversary will undertake to complete the plan, and how these draw the hero into the narrative. Notes on that process begin in the section Building Incidents as You Map.
Pipe List
Having sketched out what you know of your adversary plan, make a bullet list of all the points of information the viewer will need to understand it. During the coming outline phase you will then find spots to place them, crossing them off your list as you go. If you write without an outline this will happen during the first draft stage.
Does that list seem long to you? You might have cooked up an unnecessarily convoluted adversary plan. Look for new connections between elements of the plan that allow you to collapse your list into fewer points of information, reducing the exposition tax you’ll have to pay when you reach the writing stage.
Disorder Rises and the Hero Responds
The second question to pose before beginning to construct a procedural narrative is:
How does the hero become aware of the adversary plan, in order to begin to take action against it?
This opening moment can be characterized as the Rise of Disorder.
An efficient and thus frequently used opening device has a minor character encounter the disorder caused by the adversary. This minor early manifestation of the adversary plan harms or destroys the minor character, creating an ominous down beat. Viewers experience a sense of unease by proxy. When the hero enters the narrative we know not only that we want broader society to be protected from the antagonist’s plan, but that the threat it poses might also bring misfortune to our hero.
In a once-standard opening, the hero receives an assignment and briefing from a superior and then goes out to investigate the first glimmerings of the adversary’s plan. A variation of this occurs in the archetypal private detective setup where a client approaches the hero to take on a case. This has lost favor because it is both visually and emotionally static: it takes place in an office and tells us why we should care instead of showing it.
Perhaps the adversary begins by directly targeting the hero or her associates. This lands best with an iconic hero we already care about.
Fans of particular iconic heroes may want you to get into the story as quickly as possible and won’t fault you so much for using a standard device to get there. But if you can craft an unusual way for the hero to learn about the disorder created by the adversary and start to come to grips with it, that can’t hurt either.
In the case of a transformational hero, the opening must establish not only the Rise of Disorder, but also the state the hero will transform from. These need not occur in a particular order. In The Lord of the Rings we meet Frodo in the bucolic environs of the Shire well before Gandalf gets down to business and issues him his ring-bearing assignment. Star Wars sets up the disorder and the villain long before we meet Luke and his restless desire to move from zero to hero—with R2-D2 acting as focus character until Luke finally appears in the narrative.
Bidirectional Plotting
After the hero meets, if not the adversary, then the outer edges of the disorder caused by his plan, a typical procedural unfolds in two directions: the antagonist takes actions to further the plan, and the hero takes actions to understand and disrupt it. You may stay focused entirely on the viewpoint of the hero, with events taken by the antagonist surfacing in the narrative only when they are discovered by your focus character(s). Or you might alternate between suspense-generating scenes of the villain advancing his agenda and those depicting the hero moving toward discovery and disruption. Either subtly or overtly, you’ll thus be plotting in two directions. In a well-wrought plot, actions undertaken by the hero and the villain both make sense in their own terms.
This is the obligatory point where I have to note that it is possible for a story told with great verve to elide its way through plot holes, as per Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which notoriously includes a murder without a possible murderer. Still, even if you’re one of the founding titans of a particular sub-genre, it’s best not to have a hole in the first place.
Arranging Seeds
The first seed of your story may have arisen in your mind as a particular scene, situation, or visual image. If you’re like me, you’ve even written the occasional story based on a compelling dream.
Often such a seed will clearly present itself to you as either the beginning or ending of a narrative. In that case, you’re set. However, it might just as easily belong somewhere in between. Note the seed on an index card, either a literal physical one, or as a component in an electronic note-keeping system.
If you’re beat mapping with software during the outline stage, generate it as a free-floating beat you’ll work into your map or outline as needed.
When seat-of-the-pantsing a first draft, stick a physical card somewhere where you can see it, and work toward a sequence of events that allows you to introduce it.
Be careful not to saddle yourself with too many free-floating moments you intend to work into a narrative. The more of these you accumulate, the more likely you are to plot by treating them as puzzle pieces. Instead of building a sequence of events that flows logically from the cause and effect of procedural storytelling or the unmet desires of drama, you wind up with a series of events contrived to connect a series of dots.
This can present a particular hazard when basing a work on an existing property.
Okay, I’m supposed to write Monopoly: the Movie, so I guess the big climax has to occur at Park Place…
…and we need a plutocrat character with a top hat…
…and somebody needs to go to jail…
…then something something Community Chest…
…utilities, we need a scene about utilities…
…maybe a shout out to the game’s origins as anti-capitalist propaganda…
…tip the hat to the crucial game designer demographic with an in-joke about how crappy the game play is…
…oh, almost forgot the Scottie dog…
You can still assemble a plot from a large collection of seeds like this—it may be a client’s requirement, even. The key here is to make note of them and then set them aside. Build your sequence of events (in outline or first draft, as your work method demands) from the adversary plan plus the hero’s response, or as the unfolding of unmet dramatic needs. As you go along, when the need for a new incident or obstacle arises, check your list and see if any of the scenes or images can be molded to fit. This could be described as plotting from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. You’re building out from a foundation rather than stringing stuff together.
5
Mapping Your Story
If you plan to free-wheel your first draft and subsequently map all or parts of it out, skip ahead to the next chapter, appropriately titled “First Draft,” and then come back here. Or you could just play along with the fiction that you’re going to outline from a beat analysis diagram and continue to read the book in order.
• • •
Now it’s time to take all the foundational work we’ve done and begin to turn it into a sequence of events, which we will render as a map, featuring beat types, a
rrows that denote emotional rhythm, and transitions between scenes.
In the case of an involved narrative with a large ensemble and/or multiple plot threads, you may also wish to create a thread map, as described under Thread Mapping.
Your Opener
Stories live and die by their opening scenes.
Whether the effect you’re aiming to exert is delicate, over-the-top, or somewhere in between, no section of your story matters more than its first:
ten minutes (in the case of a movie or stage play)
thirty seconds (television episode or short film)
thirty pages (novel)
200 words (short story)
page (comic book)
In this fleeting window you either invite the audience to immediately engage or set it adrift.
You can recover from a weak opening, but it happens more rarely than you might think. And never fully.
The audience wants to engage and expects to be oriented. They start out on your side. All you need do is give them the tools to see what you’re doing and the emotional hook that gives them a reason to care.
As quickly and economically as you can, use your opener to pose the question.
When you pose the question, you introduce an element of suspense or curiosity that touches on your core question, a protagonist’s dramatic poles, and/or your throughline.
In the case of a dramatic protagonist, you might show the character pulled toward one of her poles, while giving us reason to hope that she moves away from that state.
Likewise, you could open on your transformational hero, in a scene that shows why the starting point of her arc is unsatisfactory.
Ironically, showing our dramatic protagonist or transformational hero in a state of happy satisfaction puts the audience on edge. Instinctively if not consciously we know we’re seing a state of bliss right before everything goes to hell. We fear this and become engaged.
Beating the Story Page 11
