Beating the Story

by Robin D. Laws

  When writing an iconic hero, you might instead open with the rise of disorder, establishing a bad situation we hope someone (soon to be revealed as our hero) can fix.

  In many stories the true core question becomes evident a few scenes (but not too many scenes) after the opener. You might instead open by showing the protagonist facing a nascent or prefigured version of it.

  As you’ll see in the case studies presented later, an opening beat often poses the question in a manner that appears casual and offhand on first viewing, but in retrospect stands as an extremely clear introduction of the story’s central conflict or thesis.

  Weak Openings

  A huge fist-in-the face opening might jolt the audience into a state of attention, but is hard to establish emotional context for. Unless we’re already invested—for example, because we’re rejoining a serial hero we already identify with from previous installments—the audience may be more confused than intrigued. When you go big in your opener, make sure you’ve got a way to top it later.

  Don’t start with exposition.

  You may be able to write a compelling mini-story unto itself that then sets the table for the real story to come. Even if you do, you then have to start all over again. Readers will resent having the story they were first encouraged to care about taken away from them, and the effort of reengaging with the actual story. An extremely deft transition, in which the prologue story seamlessly becomes the main narrative, can fix that, but that’s more easily described than executed.

  The extended montage of establishing exposition has become a common device in films set in imagined worlds. It is almost always the sign of a script that has lost its internal coherence over multiple rewrites, and a waste of those precious moments of open attention from the audience.

  If we need information to follow your story, begin instead with a reason to care about a character or situation. Then give us the exposition, when we have an emotional reason to want it.

  Audience expectations allowed 19th century novelists to open with commentary beats, moving from an essay-like portrait of society to their characters and our hopes and fears for them.

  It is no longer the best of times or the worst of times, so think more than twice about attempting that maneuver now. It requires you to pull the reader into your essay through the sheer rhythmic verve of your writing, and then requires you to shift out of that without having solved the real problem of posing your opening question.

  Parallel Openings

  A story featuring multiple protagonists each driving separate subplots calls for multiple openings, in which a question is posed in turn for each of them.

  Moving between these parallel openers means using a bunch of Break transitions, which cost you momentum. Audiences can resent being taken out of a scene they are already invested in so they can meet an unfamiliar character or situation. Present these with as much economy as you can muster without being repetitively mechanical about it. The longer you wait to introduce a new subplot and focus character, the more readers resist the effort required to care about her.

  On the other hand, having introduced a number of apparently unrelated main characters brings with it an implicit suspense, as readers wonder just how they will all eventually intersect.

  Flourish Beats as Preludes

  You can get away with setting a mood before posing a question, if you keep it quick, or if the flourish beat is a Gratification and really freaking stunning in its own right.

  An establishing shot, or its prose equivalent, can function as mood-setting Gratification or Bringdown. The latter would be your proverbial dark and stormy night, as the author describes the wind-lashed road, then the battered coach making its way along that road, before finally introducing the young woman inside as she first lays eyes on the dread manor at the top of the hill.

  The extended Bringdown beat that comprises the credits sequence of Kubrick’s The Shining mesmerizes with its unusual distorted helicopter photography. Visually it actually does pose the film’s core question, or a version of it, about man’s ability to survive in the vast isolation of an indifferent universe.

  A jaw-dropping splash page in a comic book could function as an opening Gratification beat, undoubtedly also commenting on the universe in which the story takes place.

  In film, a delightful credits sequence with great music can excite the audience, setting the opening tone and counting as a Gratification beat.

  Case Studies: Classic Movie Openings

  With their distilled storytelling and relative easy accessibility, classic films provide ideal examples of strong, clear, opening beats. Let’s look at the openers of some classic titles and see how tightly each poses its core question.

  The first beat of Bringing Up Baby (1938) has Alice Swallow, forbidding fiancée to co-protagonist David Huxley, prevent a colleague from interrupting him while he’s thinking. A paleontologist, he poses like Rodin’s thinker on a platform next to an assembled dinosaur skeleton. Huxley’s dramatic poles are thinking vs. acting. His static pose and ossified surroundings show him stuck in the first of these two positions.

  Cat People (1942) opens with its protagonist, Irena Reed, at the zoo, sketching a jaguar. Unsatisfied with the results, she crumples up the page from her sketchpad and throws it away. She attempts to come to terms with the jaguar and fails. This is what we will see her doing throughout the movie, as her dramatic poles are woman vs. beast.

  The opening beat of Double Indemnity (1944) shows an out-of-control car veering through Los Angeles’ streets. Inside, we soon discover, is wounded insurance salesman Walter Neff, and that opening visual shows him at the latter end of his smarts vs. recklessness dramatic opposition.

  Far From Heaven (2002) begins with a bucolic credits sequence evoking the high ‘50s style of director Douglas Sirk, who Haynes will pastiche throughout. We see protagonist Cathy Whitaker get into a car and drive from an idealized main street to her home. When it concludes, her young son petitions her for permission to sleep over at a friend’s house. In this low-key dramatic scene, from which the camera distances the viewer, she ever-so-reasonably refuses him, citing his obligation to the family. This introduces the first side of her conformity vs. selfhood poles, which will go on to drive her conflict when she involves herself in adultery across the racial divide.

  I’m mostly not counting title sequences here, but the pulsing techno and vertiginous computer animation of Fight Club (1999) viscerally engages emotions and poses that film’s question. It begins with a firing synapse in the brain, then zooms rapidly out, finally exiting through the perspiring forehead of its unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton. The sequence establishes the film’s tone and energy while introducing the character’s dramatic poles: reality vs. delusion. As if that isn’t sufficiently on-the-nose on subsequent viewings, the first line of voice-over literally puts the question as a question: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.” Since he is (spoilers) Tyler Durden and the theme is self-knowledge, this opening couldn’t cut more clearly to the heart of the piece. But because we’re not oriented yet and much indirection lies before us, we lack the context to see what this really means.

  Nights of Cabiria (1957) opens on the undeveloped outskirts of Rome. A handsome man playfully chases the title character (Giulietta Masina), to her clear delight. This up beat is immediately followed by a down beat: reaching a riverbank, the man looks around to see if anyone is watching, then grabs her purse and pushes her into a river. Together the two beats present her dramatic poles: optimism vs. realism, particularly where dealings with men are concerned. If you haven’t seen that film but remember the moment, you’re recalling it in its Shirley MacLaine form, from the opening of its musical adaptation, Sweet Charity (1966).

  The very first beat of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is a sly visual pun aimed at seasoned film buffs; the Paramount logo, featuring a mountain, crossfades in
to an actual mountain. This brief Gratification beat sets the tone, for those in the know, for cinematic nostalgia. Then Indiana Jones looms into a view, striking a silhouetted pose signaling his iconic hero status. We then see him traverse a jungle, visually demonstrating his iconic ethos: he overcomes disorder with his expertise as an explorer and archaeologist.

  Stories are Like Parties—Best Arrive Late

  A strong opening not only poses a question but moves as far as possible into the story’s sequence of events without confusing the audience or leaving out crucial protagonist choices.

  This may be an issue you spot later, either after you’ve outlined for a while, or during first draft or revision. Emerging writers often start their narratives too far back in the chronology, with a series of less than energized incidents that could best be handled as backstory, revealed through information beats.

  You may notice this immediately, when you envision an opening scene and find that you can’t get it to pose your question. That’s because the story hasn’t really started yet.

  Begin when the conflict starts, and the protagonist must take action to resolve it.

  But Not Too Late

  On the other hand, if you find that your initial sequences are clogged with Reveal and Pipe beats, you may have taken the above dictum too far, launching so far into the narrative that a big chunk of it must be dredged up retroactively from the antecedent action. To fix this, search the backstory for a moment in which one of your protagonists might be faced with a compelling choice. Start there instead, identifying ways to present those prior events as engaging scenes with posed questions that activate our hopes and fears for a focus character.

  Your First Arrow

  Before moving to the mapping part, identify your very first beat’s emotional impact:

  If it leads the audience toward fear and away from hope, you will shortly be marking it with a down arrow.

  If it leads toward hope and away from fear, it’s an up arrow.

  If it does neither, your opening scene is weak and develops nothing. Rethink and come up with an opener with an emotional consequence.

  If it does both, ask yourself if your opening scene is too complicated. Ambiguity and mixed emotions lie at the heart of the most profound literature, but only after the reader has acquired the context to appreciate them. Consider a clearer starting point from which to build your emotional complexity. If the brilliance of the beat withstands this scrutiny, you will soon mark it with crossed arrows.

  And Now For the Map Part

  Having arrived at your opening beat, you are now ready to place it on the beat map.

  Various computer mapping tools allow you to create diagrams using our icons, which you can grab by heading to the Gameplaywright website, gameplaywright.net. Because technology changes over time, I won’t waste space here describing methods that may have been superseded by the time you read this text, but rather refer you to the site for our latest word on story cartography tools.

  We number the beat maps provided later in this book for ease of reference. Unless you’re planning to share the diagrams with someone else and want to refer to beats by number, you don’t need to do that. In the outline phase you’ll be changing the order of beats when you cut or interpolate new beats into your sequence, and having to recalculate the numbers becomes a big nuisance.

  Place the first beat icon on the map. This is probably a Dramatic or Procedural beat, but might be a Gratification or Bringdown. If my dire imprecations against starting with exposition have failed to sway you, the chance exists that you’re laying down a Reveal beat. The dreaded Reveal without a previous Question.

  Under the icon, place a brief phrase reminding you of the event associated with the beat.

  Now follow it with the arrow denoting its impact on emotional rhythm: up, down, crossed, or lateral.

  Let’s return to our dramatic example from “Blocked Desires” (see Blocked Desires). You’ve decided that your first beat should subtly introduce the dramatic poles of your main character, Holly Moss. Since you composed that chart, you’ve settled on her dramatic poles: healer vs. controller. Choosing an entry point into the story, you decide to show Holly and her husband, Tom, already on the way to visit his mother for the first time. This allows you to start with an oblique version of the central conflict, showing Tom’s unspoken unease over the visit. That’s the subtext. You decide that the text of their understated conflict—what they’re actually talking about—will concern her healing side. You envision her noticing a cut on Tom’s hand while he’s driving. She asks to look at it; he tries to conceal his irritation, minimizing its importance. Although by no means a histrionic scene, she’s nonetheless making a petition that he gently rebuffs.

  The beat is Dramatic (it’s a conflict over an emotional reward) and ends on a down note (we don’t know Holly and Tom that well yet, but we can sense the distance between them). So you mark it with a down arrow.

  Now let’s map the first beat of a procedural example. You’re writing an installment of the adventures of Diana Chu, teen investigator. Her iconic ethos: she keeps supernatural horrors at bay with the aid of her steely resolve and the powers she absorbed from the ghost of her dead twin sister. This first beat isn’t about her, though; you’re choosing instead to open with the Rise of Disorder. Your seed for this one is the phrase “horror in a gated community.” So you start with that: the security guard for an upscale residential neighborhood, at night, hears a strangled cry in the bushes and, flashlight in hand, heads toward them to investigate.

  That’s a Procedural beat, as it concerns an external problem (finding out what’s in the bushes) and it ends on a down arrow (marking a note of unease, as the guard’s response suggests that something has gone awry). You might break the rustling bushes into two beats: first a Question, then the guard’s response of looking at them with his flashlight as a second Procedural beat. Since you’re creating a reference for yourself, not writing an academic analysis for someone else to mark, you go with the most economical expression you will be able to recognize later.

  Building Incidents as You Map

  Mostly, when outlining using beat maps, you’ll devise plot incidents the same way you would when working with a prose outline. You envision events, follow their logical consequences, and fold in previously envisioned story seeds as you move from premise to storyline. The outline records but does not alter your original choices.

  Now and then, however, you might spot a rhythmic issue brewing and add, rearrange, or adjust beats to fix it. Too many arrows pointing in the same direction for too long points to a deadening rhythm that will cause audience members to check out.

  A cluster of down arrows might suggest that your drama has become dourer than intended. Give your character a victory, whether it means altering the tenor of an existing Dramatic scene or inserting one in which her petition can be granted without breaking from the characters’ established desires and personalities. As always, see to it that inserted scenes develop the core question in some way.

  Too many Dramatic up arrows in a row instead indicates that you’re being too easy on your protagonists, and that someone or something in your story ought to tighten the screws on them. Again, you can invent a new scene to do that, or adjust a current one.

  Clusters of crossed arrows might point to a muddle, where no one ever suffers a clear emotional win or loss. Ambiguity loses its power when overused, introducing an untethered, meandering rhythm. Lean harder on some of those beats, forcing them to land with greater decisiveness.

  On the procedural front, an abundance of consecutive down arrows suggests that your story has turned into something of a slog. Audiences expect more vicarious gratification from their procedurals than from dramas, and you don’t want them to pull away from your hero in despair, or come to question whether they’ve placed their trust in an unwise, unlucky, or incompetent hero. Thr
ow your character a bone or two before re-invoking the impossible odds she still faces.

  Too many triumphs in a row shows you where you’re losing suspense. Victories follow the law of diminishing returns when clustered together, each providing less uplift than the last. Fortunately, introducing beats that increase our hero’s problems, or simply threaten to do so, is the easiest task in procedural writing.

  Ambiguous outcomes in Procedural beats are less satisfying in drama. Instead of invoking the eternal contradictions of the human experience, they simply make the literal progress against the adversary’s plan hard for the audience to parse. Every so often the classic, “Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news?” situation can land with enjoyable irony. But it doesn’t bear much repetition.

  In either story type, keep an eye on your information beats. Where possible, avoid Reveals without preceding Questions to make us want the exposition they provide. Information thrives in your story’s setup. The further into it you go, the harder it becomes to introduce exposition without killing your momentum.

  Answer any outstanding Questions before the story’s climax begins.

  If you can’t do that, do it before it ends. Dialogue that ties up loose ends after the conflict has been resolved is always flabby and leaves you exiting on a listless, sloppy note.

  Also, restrict your story’s diet of flourish beats. Every moment you include that departs from your throughline or arises gratuitously pulls the reader out of the experience.

  Noting Transitions

  Whenever your story jumps ahead in time or switches to another locale, mark the transition type with an icon placed next to the larger beat icon, near the emotional rhythm arrow.

  The first scene shift in our procedural example occurs after an unseen creature attacks the security guard. The next scene occurs in the same location, but hours later, in daylight, where we see his head mounted on the wall that surrounds the gated community. The second scene arises as a direct consequence of the first—the guard gets attacked, and now we see what happened to him. So you mark this as an Outgrowth.