Beating the Story

by Robin D. Laws

  altering the tactic the petitioner uses in attempting to persuade the granter

  increasing the severity of the consequences (the stakes) for the petitioner if the granter does not accede to the request

  having the granter rebuff the petitioner with greater emotional force

  having the granter come closer toward the petitioner emotionally without quite granting the request

  You’ve no doubt noted that the above assumes that the similar outcome of the two beats was the rebuff of the petitioner.

  That’s because you will never need to show the granter saying yes to the same request twice. When you do find that, you’ll spot it as an error and remove it without having to think about it.

  Reviewing your dramatic piece’s map, you see that you have two separate scenes in which Tom asks his mother to be a little nicer to his wife, to which his mother responds by deflecting his request. You decide that it suits the piece’s desired sense of emotional realism for him to ask twice. It doesn’t make sense for him to give up completely after one failed try. You could vary this in a number of ways:

  Tom could shift tactics—this time, instead of asking diplomatically, he can couch the request as a demand. The new scene will play as an escalation rather than repetition.

  A new prior scene in which Holly issues an ultimatum to Tom before he talks to Juliette raises the stakes for him, giving it higher stakes than the previous try.

  Juliette could react more vehemently to the repeated request, this time telling Tom she thinks his marriage is doomed, and she’ll be popping champagne when the divorce papers appear.

  Juliette could refuse him in a more conciliatory way, saying she’ll try but can’t make any promises, because Holly’s asking for too much from her.

  Reviewing your options, you reject 2, because it undercuts sympathy for Holly too much at this point. Option 3 raises the same problem, but for Juliette, so you drop that from consideration too. Although either of the remaining two would work, you immediately start seeing some funny exchanges for 1. That’s the one that captures your imagination, so you go with that.

  Spotting and Fixing Procedural Repetition

  The much rarer procedural repetition occurs when you find two beats that:

  feature the same character

  facing a similar obstacle

  using the same method against it

  to the same result

  Although you might be able to drop a procedural obstacle entirely, chances are that you’ll need to alter or substitute another beat that accomplishes the same pacing goal.

  As the above list implies, you can remove the repetition by altering any of its elements. For added points, reconceive more than one of them.

  when you have more than one protagonist, another character can tackle the obstacle

  you can introduce an entirely different obstacle

  you can keep the obstacle but change the means of overcoming it

  the outcome might differ

  You see that through bleary oversight you put the same key beat, where the hero overcomes a villain by destroying his metal breathing mask, in two different places in your map.

  The map has helped you to find a problem. Now to ponder a solution.

  Although you can certainly swap out the breathing mask business for something else entirely, you realize that this gives you the opportunity for a fun reversal. The original beat has your hero badly smashing up his fist as he pummels the mask again and again. For its reprise, you decide that he now has a handy pair of wire cutters in his belt, which he uses to reach out and simply snip off one of the wire bits holding the mask in place.

  Other Repetitions

  Likewise, you’ll want to nip out identical Gratifications and Bringdowns wherever they occur. These flourish beats don’t contain the various moving parts that foundation beats do, so you have less leeway to vary them.

  As previously mentioned, sometimes you need to mention bits of information more than once, so repeated Questions or Reveals might still make the cut. Mark them, however, to remind yourself to write or rewrite them with enough variation to avoid a straight-up rehash.

  Character Tracking

  Now review each beat involving a character or characters to ensure that it tracks with their poles, arc, or ethos.

  Do scenes featuring key dramatic characters demonstrate their relationship to one or both of their poles?

  Do scenes featuring transformational heroes show them moving on their arc, either forward or backward?

  Do key victories of the iconic hero demonstrate her iconic ethos?

  If the answer to any of these questions is no, look for ways to reconceive the scene so that it becomes yes.

  In the case of an iconic hero, you might also look for less pivotal scenes that can be drawn closer to the point by bringing in her ethos.

  Procedural Pitfalls

  Look at all of your Procedural beats to find holes in your internal logic.

  Do any of them need prior Pipe beats to make sense? If so, find places to slip in that required exposition, as unobtrusively as you can.

  Do certain actions of the adversaries or other supporting characters require them to have information they shouldn’t? This question can provoke much brow-furrowing, and the later you discover a problem of this type the harder it is to fix. Whenever characters act on information, ask yourself how did they know this? When they can’t know, you’ll have to change the affected beats to make sense. Often you can think of a way for them to gain the information, but only in a way that isn’t interesting to watch or hear explained. Either make it simple and fascinating (perhaps by installing a prior Pipe beat) or junk this moment in favor of one that doesn’t require unrealistically informed antagonists.

  Do they require the characters to be in places they can’t get to, given your timeline? Again, this calls for a major rethink.

  Does the plot only work if allied characters don’t share information, which they have no believable reason to withhold? Procedural writers still get away with this, but this contrivance grows creakier by the year. By the time you read this every audience member might be on high alert against it. Reconfigure this plot thread, either by adding a credible, easily understood reason for characters to withhold vital facts from one another, or by having them share what they know, building out new chains of consequences from that assumption.

  Predictable Moments

  Audiences take in more narrative than ever before, absorbing it even as it adapts to this exposure by taking on ever-more-complex structures and strategies. They binge-watch TV on disc and in streaming formats, and burn through the books in a series one after the other. Increasingly they silo their tastes, reading everything in a tightly defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre. Without getting into the relative intricacies of satirical dinosaur porn vs. regular dinosaur porn, your audience may expect certain moments to occur in your story based on:

  The genre you’re working in.

  External cues, like your title, book cover, movie poster, and so on.

  Conventional signals across fictional narratives. In film and TV, we never see characters cough for no reason. Therefore when you see a character cough in more than one scene, we know he has lung cancer or tuberculosis or something just as fatal.

  Inevitable consequences of previous beats. For example, if you establish that the character has received an important letter but refuses to open it, we can safely assume that the letter will be opened eventually.

  When you delay the introduction of an expected story moment, you leave the audience waiting. Nothing slows down our sense of time like being made to wait, whether in a line up at the bank or while reading a book or watching a movie. No matter what else happens in the space between expectation and delivery, you’ve still left your audience in a waiting
room.

  Review your map for key moments the audience can likely see coming many beats ahead of the actual event. To change your narrative from the predictable to the surprising, move the expected incident as far forward into the story as you can, and then deal with the consequences of it happening earlier than the audience expects.

  Failing that, ensure that any predictable outcome occurs in a surprising way, or leads in an unanticipated direction.

  Apt But Unnecessary Passages

  Having searched for all of these hallmarks of flat, meandering, inconsistent, or over-familiar storytelling, take one final sweep of the beats on your map.

  First, direct a hawkish eye at the new beats you’ve introduced (if any) during this series of review stages, to make sure that none of these late-breaking moments fail to track or introduce entirely new pitfalls or rhythmic irregularities.

  But most of all, scour the map for moments that meet all of the tests, but still don’t need to be there, because they repeat earlier beats, or can be left to the viewer to infer.

  Thread Mapping

  In a complex narrative in which the story threads into multiple plotlines, you may wish to add customized symbols for each major plot or character. These might appear over the main symbol for each beat. At a glance you can then see how long your story has gone without devoting a beat to a particular thread.

  When thread mapping by plotline, choose an abstract symbol to represent each. A sprawling saga that follows four levels of society—the poor, the servants, the middle class, and the elite—might map as follows. Here’s a sample excerpt of that map, in which our imaginary author has chosen a manor for the elite, a bridge for the servants, a ruined hovel for the poor, and a modest home for the middle class.

  You might prefer a system of color coded backgrounds behind the beat icons. You can mark intersections between threads by dividing the color field into sections: halves where two threads intersect, thirds where three come together, and so on. This won’t work if you or anyone else who needs to refer to the map has trouble distinguishing colors.

  As this book is not printed in color we’ll stick with image diagrams here.

  A map focusing on keeping track of the cast can use images of people more or less resembling your various characters. Here’s what an excerpt from the larger map would look like.

  Thread mapping shows you how much weight you’re giving to each element you’re tracking. It gives you an approximation only, as some beats occupy much more space on the page or time on screen than others.

  If you discover that a thread you thought would occupy a central spot in the narrative doesn’t appear much on your map, that may be a sign that it doesn’t interest you as much as you thought it would, or can’t be elaborated into an extended series of scenes. The map may be telling you that it can be dropped in its entirety. Perhaps it can still earn its keep if folded into another thread.

  You might otherwise discover that:

  A large number of scenes take place between minor characters. Find ways to give their roles in the story to your leads. Alternately, seek entirely new sequences that perform the same function in your story but would naturally feature your main characters.

  A subplot has expanded to take attention from your main plot. Decide whether this has happened because:

  you find the subplot more interesting than the main plot

  or you lost track of your throughline and let the implications of this rogue element carry you in an unwanted direction

  In the first case, develop a version of your story in which the former subplot now becomes the main action. Do you like that better than your original thought? Pursue it. Does it turn out not to warrant that level of attention? Go to the solution for the second case.

  In the second case, cut this plot, leaving only those beats that make your main plot understandable.

  A character or subplot first appears so late in the narrative that readers are likely to resent the time you spend introducing it. Move its opening beats, or new beats that prefigure it, to as early a point in the story as makes sense without detracting from your current introductory sequence.

  A major character goes missing from your piece for a long period of time. Where possible, address this problem by changing the spacing between scenes featuring the overlooked character. This might necessitate dividing scenes up, if your story’s chronology permits. Scenes created only to remind us that a major character exists risk seeming superfluous—because, aside from this pacing issue, they are. If your story needed them, you would have conceived of them before you noticed a gap on your thread map.

  A character you thought of as minor drives a surprisingly large number of beats. This may signal either a diffuse plotline in need of tightening, or a more interesting one beginning to emerge from your current vision. Determine why the character has seized control of your narrative. Is it because:

  your plot needs that character to set its events into motion?

  that character has grown in interest and richness, eclipsing the people you originally intended to write about?

  In the first case, see how many of that character’s plot turns can be reconceived to instead put the characters you really care about at the center of the action. If after doing that the character that insists on upgrading himself still drives a solid chunk of your narrative, be sure to flesh that character out in order in order to maintain audience interest. Depending on the type of story you’re writing, that might entail giving the character:

  dramatic poles that his actions can resolve

  qualities that make him a foil to your true protagonist(s)

  intentions and actions that threaten the progress of the iconic hero, making him a full-fledged antagonist

  In the second case the process of writing or outlining has shown you what you care about, and it’s this character. Likely he has already fleshed himself out in the course of your scene building. Establish his dramatic poles, transformational arc, or iconic ethos, and envision a new narrative in which this character is a, or the, protagonist.

  Or just kill off the pest at the earliest opportunity, like Shakespeare did in Romeo and Juliet with that notorious scene-stealer, Mercutio. As a working pro, he knew that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

  When to Thread Map

  Thread mapping only justifies the effort when you’re writing a large cast of characters or threading together very distinct plots and subplots. When writing a narrative with a small number of protagonists, especially if that number is one, thread mapping wastes your time and encourages counterproductive overthinking.

  None of this book’s four examples of beat mapping include thread maps, as none of them warrant it.

  From Map to Prose Outline

  If you started with the map, you may or may not then wish to complete the intermediate step of writing a prose outline before embarking on your first draft.

  Your working relationship with an editor, producer, or other client may require a comprehensible prose outline before you receive approval to move on.

  Absent such necessities, you may well find it illuminating to render the map into a condensed version of your story that hits the main points without dialogue or extended description. Doing this may cause procedural plot holes and off-track character moments you couldn’t see in diagram form to stand out on the written page.

  On the other hand, you might be self-publishing, writing on spec, or otherwise have the freedom to move from graphic representation to first draft. You may feel that you’ve done enough analysis for a while and want to move on before you lose the elusive spark that drove you to the story in the first place.

  6

  First Draft

  At this point in the process of writing your piece, you may have:

  completed a beat map and a prose outline based on it

&
nbsp; completed a beat map, and intend to skip the prose outline stage

  or decided to take the seat-of-the-pants approach, writing first and analyzing later

  In the last instance, you may have jotted down some basic notes, perhaps establishing such points of story conception (see Chapter 1) as throughline, theme, core question, boil-down, and elements relevant to your characters, which vary depending on whether you’re telling a dramatic or procedural story.

  Wherever you’re at in your process, this is the chapter that discusses the actual creation of story beats on the page.

  More Agnosticism, This Time on Style

  Just as it sets aside issues of structure, this book does not attempt to tell you much about style.

  Stylistic assumptions vary widely not only by form, but within them. Reader expectations for prose style fix themselves heavily to genre, from the lit-fic tradition of density, lyricism, and experimentation to the somewhat retro preferences of fantasy fans.

  Moreover, stylistic approaches go in and out of fashion, in a way that the foundational elements of narrative do not. A style dictum can go from rule to guideline to point of controversy to relic over the course of a few generations.

  For beginning writers, I present a few token bullet points on style before moving on:

  Learn the prevalent styles in your chosen field by reading deeply within it.

  Read essays on style by prominent editors in your field, and adopt the bits that make sense, and reject the stuff that comes off as overly hidebound. As soon as someone articulates a rule, its salience starts to erode.

  Beginning writers for reasons I only partly understand tend to gravitate to outmoded styles, with dialogue straight out of ‘30s movies and descriptive prose evoking the Victorian era. Shake this unconscious tendency by reading plenty of recent work as well as the classics.