Story structure is hard work

The last couple of months...

I've been spending what writing time I have on my fourth children's fantasy, so blogging has gone a bit on the back-burner.

The biggest difficulty with this latest book is not only that I'm doing it on my own without the help of my usual co-writer, but that for ages there was a big hole (and I'm talking ginormous) where there should have been the bulk of the story.

The First Act, as you might call it, was mostly fine. In fact it was fine through versions 1, 2 and 3 each of which took a different tack, with a different main character as the focus.

But the Second Act? So so. And the Third? Practically non-existent, except that I had a minuscule idea about how it would finish. Probably.

Because structure is always a bugbear for me, I have to work really hard at it, and I have a brain that says, Nah, let's just give up on that for today, when I've only just sat down to write.

So what made the difference? 


I enlisted some help. First I went back to a book written by Libbie Hawker - Take Off Your Pants! - which I'd read before and hadn't felt was quite as helpful as I'd hoped. However, I persisted with it this time, since it's primarily about structuring, and made some real progress.

Hawker doesn't work to a three act structure particularly; it took me a while to realise that she's focusing on character arc as her main structural approach. Nevertheless it proved useful, because it made me focus on where my main character was going to go as she journeyed through the book.

Then I turned to an old favourite: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, with its fifteen 'beats' that point out the way in which many movies (and a number of novels) are structured to give the viewer/reader the greatest satisfaction.

Snyder is more of a three act structure man, which is fine. I needed that in conjunction with Hawker's character arc approach.

Now the thing is...

Both these books helped enormously this time round - aided by the fact that I was determined I wasn't going to be beat.

But I need to say that neither of them quite mention the fact that you really have to know quite a lot about your story before you try to work out things like character arcs and fifteen beats.

In spite of the way it reads in the books, you can't actually start out by sitting down and just doing a synopsis. At least I can't. I have to have piles of stuff written in order to know who the characters are, and in order to figure out at least something of what the story is actually about.

Consequently I now have a large bunch of separate files: various incomplete drafts, piles and piles of notes (to the point that no matter how hard I try I can't quite get them in any sort of order) and all sorts of notes on top of notes. What this process does is give me ideas enough to move forward on a synopsis. It stops me from believing that what I've written first time round is going to be enough, and that I need to keep digging deeper and deeper and asking Why until I'm blue in the face.

One result has been that the two main male characters in version one became one main male character in version two who eventually became the sidekick to the female main character - in the current version. Other characters came and went; whole scenes ended up in the bottom of the pile; fantastic plot moments were abandoned.

And then came Janice Hardy...

I pulled together the Hawker and Snyder synopses (such as they were, still incomplete). And then discovered a third book which I hadn't read before: Janice Hardy's Plotting Your Novel [also published as Planning Your Novel].

Hardy provides us with a series of workshops, taking you right back to the beginning, the place where I'd been months before when I was writing drafts and notes galore. You can skip some of the workshops, or you can - as I did - force yourself to answer the questions she provides, and see if there are other things that you should consider. (If it sounds like hard work, it is, but it was also satisfying because of the sense of progress.)

So now I had three 'assistants' on the case, and in spite of my brain threatening overload, I also had an increased sense of where the story was going. And wonder of wonders, as I pulled the various synopses together, I began to see that big hole that had been such a bugbear filling up at last with real content.

The job isn't finished yet. But I now have a real sense that completing a decent synopsis is possible. And once that's on the page, the real - and enjoyable - part of the writing can begin.

To be continued...

Save the Fantastic Cat

I've been re-reading Blake Snyder's excellent, Save the Cat, as well as reading for the first time his third book, Save the Cat! Strikes Back. They're extremely encouraging for writers, whether screenwriters or novelists, or storytellers of any kind. They give a means to work out structure far more satisfactorily than any other 'system' I've come across, and they offer ways to go back over your work and find flaws, and work out how to fix them.

My mode of operation, however, tends to be that I have to initially write something of the story before I can figure out who the characters are and what they're up to. I can't just take an idea and fill up Blake's 15 beats without that.

In fact, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I've been writing a fourth book in the Grimhilderness series, and it's been going very sluggishly. Procrastination is part of the problem; life getting in the way is another problem; and lack of where to go after a certain point is another. But I do have a bunch of characters who are alive in my head, and I have a number of situations, and a general sense of what the overall story is.

This is more than enough to get started on the 15 beats.

Except that I immediately began to discover that things just weren't going to work, once I started setting my story as it stood alongside Blake's beats. Not because I couldn't match certain things up, but because the hero turned out to be passive, and there was no great reason for him to go on any journey anyway. In fact, if  he had any sense he'd go into hiding. Hardly the work of a hero. So back to the drawing board.

I re-watched J K Rowling's film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Rowling's world is so full of stuff by now that she can reference all sorts of things and fans will pick up on them. (I'm not quite so good at keeping such detail in my head as those sorts of fans.) I thought about her story in terms of Save the Cat.

It's interesting to ask: who is the hero? Whose journey are we going on?

Because plainly we have a quartet of lead characters, and the most important of them, Newt Scamander, doesn't go on any great journey at all: he is what he is, unlike Harry Potter, who goes on an immense journey over seven books. Is there a catalyst moment for Newt? I suppose you could find one, and you could find some of the other things that heroes are supposed to have in stories. But Newt is already fully-formed at the beginning of the movie; he doesn't need to change in any great way. Nothing much troubles him - except when there's a threat to his beasts. Otherwise he has a resource for almost every situation and doesn't really need others to help him much.

Which means that the hero who changes is someone else. Snyder mentions this in Strikes Back: the character who isn't quite the main character but who goes through the process of being stuck to having something unstick him to being thrown into a different world to being changed and finally coming back to what he loves but with a different viewpoint.

This is plainly Jacob Kowalski. He starts off on the back foot with no hopes (turned down by the most wonderfully po-faced Bank Manager you've ever seen), with the only life he can envisage being stuck in a canning factory - even though he's served his country in WWI. He is affected by a catalyst - the meeting with Newt and the accidental swapping of their bags. And even though he's the American equivalent of a Muggle, he's thrust in the magical world, and sees all kinds of things he never knew existed. He faces fearsome creatures and learns to love them, and even copes with the horrific rhinoceros-like creature that nearly stomps him to death. And in the end, even though he loses his ability to see magic at work, he gets his much-desired bakery shop and it's a roaring success. And at the very end, Queenie turns up there, and it looks as though his life may change even further.

But besides Jacob, another one of the quartet goes through a considerable journey too, and that's Tina, the kind of magical detective. She's down on her luck as well, having made some mistake in her job, and is reduced to investigating without the proper authority, being put down by her bosses (again) and generally not being able to understand Newt's nonchalant approach to life.

But the things that change Jacob's life change hers too, and she's forced to accept Newt and work with him, stepping into a different kind of world as well, where she has to see that Newt is far ahead of her in the play, and even, in the end, will rescue her from her past when she's threatened with death.

I don't know whether Rowling wrote the script as we see it portrayed in the movie, or whether she wrote the outline and dialogue. However it was done, it's a considerable feat, juggling all the elements that are in it. And if you can keep up with it all, it's likely you'll find Snyder's 15 beats being worked through in their proper order and giving the film a solid underpinning.

No longer a prequel...

Over the last week I've been hammering away at the structure of my next children's novel, which used to have the title, The Disenchanted Wizard, but may not be called that by the time it's finished.

The book started out from two separate ideas: firstly, to show how Mr and Mrs Map in Grimhilda! got stuck together on either end of the map of Grimhilderness. Secondly, there was to be a major character called the Moorish Dog. There's still a Dog, but he's no longer Moorish, and the map of the Iberian peninsula that was connected to him has also gone.

Supporters claim they won't go to the 'New' Den
when the Old Den is closed - but they did.

As has the idea of showing how Mr and Mrs Map got stuck. As has the revealing of who they were: two different couples so far; both gone. As has the shifting of most of the cast to the Isle of Dogs in London during the playing of a football match in Millwall Stadium (otherwise known as The Den). There'll still be a football match (I hope!) because the leading character in the story - a girl rather than a boy, this time - plays football. And so does one of the other main characters.

What else has gone? Quite a bit has come and gone, until the characters are beginning to wander around wondering if they should be in search of another author...

Anyway, the last week has been an interesting rewriting of the plot as it appeared in the draft I wrote back in November. Most of the characters are still there, most of the big scenes are still there, but the reasons for these things happening and the reasons why the characters do what they do has also changed a good deal. Such is life in the writing world.

Oh, and by the way...it's no longer a prequel...it's another 'sequel of sorts' like The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret.

130 pages into The Luminaries, and...

I'm a 130 pages into The Luminaries and am tossing up whether I want to spend another longish patch of my (reading) life on the rest of it. The character who opened the book has made no further appearance for getting on for a 100 pages, or so, and the character who took over from him, (Balfour) ostensibly telling his story with interruptions, somehow managed to tell a story long enough to last the entire night, and yet little real time passed.

At present two more characters have appeared, and are discussing yet another facet of the mystery that pervades the book, but I'm a bit lost as to what the mystery is actually all about because each new character adds another mystery to the original one, and I'm losing track of what belongs where. This would be okay, perhaps, if there was only another 100 pages to go, but at this rate I'll sink deep in the mire of mysteries without being able to make sense of a thing. Perseverance may help, I guess. I'm a bit concerned to read in one of the reviews that some of the mystery elements are left hanging loose by the end. That doesn't grab me, if I've waded through 800 pages, and find not enough explanation. Perhaps Catton is hoping I'll have forgotten about these loose ends by the end. I remember in the first of Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series that there was a very odd little patch where he seemed to be interested in a man walking around on the outside of a building (the details have grown a big vague), and the action seemed to be connected to one of the main characters. But then this aspect of the story was dropped completely, and never heard about again. No one mentioned it in passing even.

Then there's the astrological stuff, which apparently gives considerable structure to The Luminaries, and has been commended by some reviewers (I've been reading more reviews of the book today than the book itself, trying to see if it's worth continuing on). So far I haven't figured out how the astrological stuff makes any difference to the story as a whole, though one particular reviewer seemed to have it all worked out. (Don't ask me who...I'd have to go back and find it again.) The same reviewer lauded the idea that each successive section of the book should be half the size of the previous one, and while this may have something to say about the book as a whole I can't quite see that it adds anything to the story. When I was first trying to write novels I used to think it was great to have some such structure behind everything, either because someone else had done it, or because it proved my literary worth and would no doubt impress publishers. In fact these things usually got in the way of actually writing the book. Now Eleanor Catton may have much better motives for what she's done - being a much more intelligent writer than I am (she has to be: she's written a complex 830 page book for starters, something I couldn't conceive of attempting, and has invented epigrammatic sayings which give the appearance of deep thought about the human condition) - but I'm struggling a little to see the point. Maybe, again, if I persevere, I will.

Then there's the way in which she describes people's personalities, sometimes at length. (She describes a lot of things - clothes, rooms, the state of Hokitika - and describes them well.)  This works up to a point, but as many contemporary writers have found, characters tell us far more about themselves when they speak, and when they react to other characters, than when they're described. As soon as you start describing a character, not just their clothing and build, but their state of mind, I find I switch off - I want to discover the character for myself, and you have to have a very good reason to tell me lots of stuff about a character. If it's not immediately relative to the scene he or she is in, then I'll forget it before I've turned the page. This doesn't just apply to Catton's writing - it applies to any novelist who wants to give me a page of descriptive stuff before letting the character open their mouth. One of the reviewers says that as the book goes on, Catton describes less and less and gives us fewer and fewer of her epigrammatic statements about life. So perhaps I need to get through the first 360 pages before I'll discover a change of pace.

Some of the best writing in the book so far has been between Balfour and his politician friend, and then between Balfour and the clergyman. There's some cut and thrust at this point (still some epigrams and some descriptive interior stuff, but not quite so much), and at this stage it felt as though the book was moving forward. But other dialogues seem to falter, because we can't quite see the relevance. The dialogue between Balfour and the Maori, Tauwhare, seems included mainly to make a point about race relations, and however fascinating it may be, would Balfour really stand out in the pouring rain in order to have the conversation? Yes, it does add a bit of knowledge about the deceased person, Crosbie Wells, so maybe there's some point to it. I'm sure there's some point...

Well, I've kind of convinced myself to continue, and since somehow I managed to get a copy from the Library not that long after the book was published, perhaps I should make the effort.....

Update: I never finished this book. In fact I don't think I went back to it again, having better things to do with my life. The Book Editor of the Otago Daily Times, on the other hand, read the thing twice!

Changing poems

I've been reading the poems that the Writer's Almanac sends through daily since some time in 2009, and recently have increasingly found that the quality of them has become less poetic and less vital.  When I first started getting them, I used to keep them in a folder each day, for 'future reference.'  Well, yes, enough said about that.  And then I kept them in Evernote, but only if they appealed to me.  At least in Evernote there was more of a likelihood that I'd see them more than once.

Increasingly, they haven't appealed. I think firstly that the choices of poems now seem to lean more and more to the easy. Occasionally there's one with a bit of bite, but far too many of them are surface, descriptive, and fail to have something that says, Have at you!  Occasionally there's one from a poet whose name you recognise, and often those poems have more punch, but they're few and far between.

Furthermore the poems are often slack in construction (even though many of them have been published); there's little rhythm, little sense of internal rhyme, often little shape. I don't expect poems to rhyme, but I do expect them to have something for the ear to hear and enjoy.  I don't think they have to have a particular metre, but it does help if they've got rhythm.  Many of the recent ones have lacked this.  Shape is a matter of taste, perhaps, but it seems as though many of these poets have never read anything that came in stanzas or verses or thought that the way the poem was architectured made a point as well.

So yesterday I decided to unsubscribe from the Writer's Almanac (sorry, Garrison Keillor), and try something different. In fact, I wound up getting a daily tweet from Verse Daily, a site that looks a bit more amateurish than Writer's Almanac, but, if their poems are anything to go by, may have something better in their store.  I've been chewing over today's offering Self Portrait: Swimming in Monkeys, by Michael Teig on and off all morning. It's an odd poem, one that I presume is trying to pin down what goes to make up a personality by using all sorts of seemingly random metaphors. Some of them click (with me) some don't...so far. But the thing is I've enjoyed coming back to it and trying to get my teeth into it.  This hasn't happened much lately with the WA offerings.

I also signed up to get daily emails from The Poetry Foundation, a very professional-looking site that's long-established, and has a huge archive of poems. Their offerings have also been more mind-catching.  Today's piece, Flounder, by Natasha Tretheway, is a more conventionally laid-out poem, four lines to a verse, and is the 'conversation' between an old Negro lady and her grandchild/great-niece (?) about fishing - but much more, of course. It's an easy poem to pick up, and yet it has hidden depths, and a wonderful last verse. I like poems where the last lines suddenly switch things around, or take you off into a corner you didn't expect.  This one certainly does.

I've also just finished a review this morning of a book I began back in August: Poems of Devotion.  The review will probably go online at some point.  The editor of the book is Luke Hankins, and he's done a wonderful job of bringing together poems that have a religious element in common, but are devotional in the sense of Hallmark cards or little pretty gift books kind of devotional. These poems are tough, gritty, bite you in the neck kind of poems - although there are also ones that lift you out of the earth and into the air. It's taken me a long time to do the reviewing because the poems needed reading and re-reading. And there's a lengthy introduction to the book as well. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys good poetry.  It's a feast, though, watch out, there's quite a bit of pepper and curry and chilli in it.

The Fall

[Spoiler alert.]

Tarsem Singh's film, The Fall, is a visual extravaganza, with some utterly beautiful shots, many extraordinary locations, a great deal of imagination, and a performance from a young Romanian actress called Catinca Untaru (she was eight or nine at the time the movie was made) which is as natural as you can get on film.  Even some of her mishaps with her lines have been left in and add to the charm.  She plays opposite adult actor, Lee Pace, and the pair are fine together. 

Regrettably, The Fall starts out with a good idea, with humour, with a great deal of fantasy, but increasingly becomes incoherent.  What could easily have been a film to delight children (my grandson was watching it until it suddenly became increasingly violent) turns into a film that loses its plot - literally. 

Both Alexandria (Untaru) and Roy Walker (Pace) are patients in a very casually-run hospital around the time silent movies were becoming increasingly successful.  He's a stuntman, and has had a nasty accident jumping off a bridge, on a horse.  The horse dies, and Walker is left paralysed in his legs.  Alexandria has had some fall in which she's broken her arm (she spends most of the movie with it stuck up in the air at an awkward angle). They meet by accident, and he begins to tell her a long and fantastical story about five men who all have a passion for revenge on the wicked Governor Odious.  Initially the story is simple and like a folk-tale; it also chops and changes at the whim of either the storyteller or the listener.  We also understand that Alexandria sees the events in quite a different way - at times - from what Walker intends. 

Unfortunately, Walker more and more adds in elements of his own life and misery, and instead of the story working towards some grand climax and romantic ending for the main character, the Black Bandit, it becomes a brutal and unpleasant tale in which the other four characters die at the hands of Odious' soldiers, along with the savage who has assisted them, and the monkey belonging to one of the adventurers (called Charles Darwin, but only remotely resembling the historical man).  The Black Bandit even admits to being a coward (he was also prepared to shoot his beloved). The story somehow comes into Walker and Alexandria's own time, and with real people are included.

Walker tries to commit suicide, with the apparent assistance of Alexandria, and though he doesn't achieve this, he takes to the bottle, feeling that his life as a stuntman is over.  In a long and not very successfully worked-out sequence, Alexandria, both in reality and in the story, pleads with him to face life again and move on.  He eventually does, and the last sequence has the hospital patients watching the movie that he was originally making, and we hear that he goes on to work as a stuntman in dozens of other movies.

It's a great pity that the movie becomes so downbeat about three-quarters of the way through.  It loses any continuity it might have with the earlier parts, and the two sections are quite inconsistent in style.  The whole film shows a lack of being thoroughly worked-out - even within the ever-changing world of the story there has to be an internal consistency, and this is lacking.  (I've seen a couple of other movies over the years that tried to switch part way through from being a comedy to a tragedy; it didn't work there either.)

We only discover late in the proceedings that some of the characters in the story are based on people in the 'real' part of the movie.  It would have been far more effective if we'd understood this earlier on.  And there are a number of oddities: one example is when the five bandits (as they're sometimes styled) capture one of Odious' caravans in the middle of the desert. A princess appears out of the door.  She's preceded by a young boy, her nephew, (so she informs the others), but extraordinarily he's just left behind, and no further mention is made of him.  The old rule applies to all storytelling: if you're going to introduce a character who appears to have a purpose in things, then you'd better make sure he does, or you alienate your audience.

Equally, it takes some time before we realise who the Princess in the story is based on: the only attractive woman in the cast up to that point is one of the children's nurses.  But it isn't her, and she never actually has anything to do with Walker.  The Princess is apparently the movie actress that Walker is in love with; she's gone off in real life to live with the actor who plays the hero in the movie being made at the beginning. He turns out to be the model for Governor Odious.

I know how difficult it is to structure a story well and I understand that especially in fantasy writing it's easy to leave loose ends.  Unfortunately, this so seriously undercuts the values of this movie that it makes the audience irritated and frustrated.  Given that Tarsem spent four years making the film, you'd wonder that he didn't give himself just a bit more time to pull it all together in terms of the story.  (And he had two other writers on the job, anyway.)

Structure and Dance

Earlier this month I mentioned that I'd been reading Blake Snyder's book on screenwriting, called Save the Cat. The one I read was a sequel to another book with the same title - they have different subtitles, however.

I've just finished the original book (guess you're thoroughly confused by now) - it's called Save the Cat - the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need. It's written in a style that the average teenager could probably read (if he/she wanted) but that's not to say that its ideas are aimed at someone with the low mental capacity of some teenagers.

The best thing about the book is its focus on structure (the sequel has the same focus but comes at it rather differently). Okay, we may not all be wanting to write a blockbuster, or a top comedy, or a thriller or whatever, but the points Snyder has to make about structure are worth considering whether you're a screenwriter, a playwright or a novelist. You may not feel that everything he has to say is relevant to your craft - you may feel that you're above the kind of advice he gives (obviously people have told him they are by the way he pokes fun at them) - whatever you're reaction to the book it's still worth considering in the light of STRUCTURE.

Did I shout? Sorry, but structure, as I've mentioned on innumerable occasions, is what makes a book, movie, play hold together in a way that's satisfying to the reader, viewer, bum on seat.
I guess you could say the problem with Snyder's approach is that he's thinking only of making movies that are top dollar sellers; lesser movies, indies and so on, don't really get a look in. (He gives Memento a few snide side-comments.) This is fair enough, but obviously not everyone wants to write a blockbuster. However, Snyder's points on structure still stand for most stories: many a decent non-blockbuster movie has fallen over because the structure doesn't follow some of the best principles. Geniuses might get away with a lack of structure (Shakespeare and Dickens, for starters) but most of us aren't geniuses, and we need the backbone that structure gives.

On another topic entirely, my wife and son and I went to the Dunedin City Baptist Church Ball last night (yup, Baptists dance). The Church has held a few of these over the years, and of course there have been 21st birthdays and weddings notable for their dances too. It's good to get together with a bunch of people, many of whom you know, some you don't, and relax by dancing.

I wasn't desperate to go, because I was fearfully tired in the late afternoon after a day of cleaning up and particularly after an hour and a half spent in the garden, where I seemed to run out of energy completely. However, dancing seems to revitalise the body as well as the soul, and I danced most of the dances on the card last night. Pulled out of the line dancing as I just couldn't get to grips with the seeming lack of flow, but otherwise enjoyed what we did.

For some reason the music accompanying the Gay Gordons dance was out of sync with the steps - otherwise things were fine.

It's quite delightful seeing the big grins on people's faces - especially people who are often serious in the day to day - and seeing them skipping around the floor like children. I suspect there'll be a good deal of dancing in Heaven!

Photo by Andrew West of people doing the Gay Gordons: opening section. It looks rather more sedate than our version last night, and the room's a lot less crowded.

Intuition and Structure in Composing and more...

I bought a copy of a book called Performer as Priest and Prophet a few months ago, but hadn't got round to reading it. I first came across it at work, where my boss had a borrowed copy from the Hewitson Library. Something about it rang bells, and I bought a secondhand copy (it's out of print). However, with all the shifting around in the house due to the renovation of the kitchen, it kind of got shelved in more ways than one.

The book is by Judith Rock, a professional dancer (and former auxiliary NYPD police officer!), and Norman Mealy, a liturgist and musician (and occasional hymn-writer) - Mealy died before it was completed, but still had a great deal of input.

I only began reading the book this morning (in the bath - a great place to read: the mind seems more relaxed, and absorbs more, and is less distracted), so I can't really comment on it overall. But one thing struck me, and that was Rock's comments on intuition in the arts. (She wrote the Introduction.)

It made me consider how I write music. To an extent, I've tended to put down my way of composing. For the most part, I start at the beginning and finish at the end. Sometimes I do some chopping and changing on the way (particularly now that I work half between the piano and half between the Sibelius program), and at all times I'm looking for the right note or chord in relation to what goes before and after. But I seldom start out with a 'plan,' and sometimes the music just doesn't go - even though it seemed promising at the time - and gets abandoned before it reaches the end. Sometimes something that seemed promising is promising, but it takes a patch of time away from it to realise it. My piano piece, the one that wound up with the title, A Cowboy Learns the Tarantella, is a case in point. I woke up with the 'theme' running around in my head, went to the piano, jotted it down and then thought: that's pretty basic. But a few days later it came together, and 'basic' or not, it works. And Schoenberg Plays with his grandchildren - another piece that didn't in any way start out with that title (the titles tend to come later) - also started out with what seemed a great idea, but it just didn't want to work. It was only after I came back to it some time later than I saw the potential: same kind of material, but different approach.

I kind of find the music as I go along, rather than having it all worked out beforehand. Even with songs, it's as if a particular idea connects itself to the opening words, and we go along from there. It's very possible that a totally different idea could work - in fact, more than possible. What gets written on Tuesday may not have turned up on Thursday.

Structure suffers a bit in the process - I've discussed this several times in this blog - and there have been pieces, particularly pieces for larger forces than just a piano, or piano and voice, that have required some considerable sorting out. That's perfectly normal, of course, for any work, and I probably do it more with the piano pieces and such than I remember afterwards. It's just because they're smaller scale and more manageable in terms of tidying up structure.

What I'm saying is that I suspect far more composers work intuitively than we're led to believe by musicologists. The latter find all manner of connections in works afterwards; the composer doesn't think 'rationally' about these connections at the time; he or she tends to be so focused on getting the thing down on paper (preferably before it all blows away and he or she loses concentration) that he/she doesn't pick up a number of the connections.

But when you go back over your own work - particularly some time later, after you've forgotten the sweaty stage - you can often be surprised by what's turned up.

And talking of that, in one of the posts I just picked up regarding structure, I find that I was writing about a screenwriter called Blake Snyder. I'd forgotten his name altogether, but now realise I've just read a book by him called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: the screenwriter's guide to every story ever told. It's a sequel to Save the Cat! the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need. When I got Save the Cat! on interloan, I thought it was the first of the two books I was getting; it was the second. This second title goes through about fifty well-known movies and shows how each and every one of them follows a structure that's virtually identical.

Now whether that's really true is another matter. Whether the scriptwriters sat down and said: here's the structure, what story can we tell, is another matter altogether. I rather think Snyder has come along, like a musicologist, and made these films fit his theory. In the end the book isn't very inspiring. I'd still like to have a look at the first of the two books, though I suspect it's title is a little overblown. Yes, certain facets of storytelling turn up again and again, particularly in the movies - and there's a certain satisfaction in that. But quirkiness in movies, oddball approaches, the thing that is different, is also satisfying, and it would be horrible to think that we would have to endure endless movies all plotted along similar lines forever and ever Amen.

(Incidentally, I've just seen that Snyder died just last month of a pulmonary embolism- he was only 52.)

Well, I've strayed a fair way from my opening, but that's what happens when you don't have to go to work for a couple of days, and can relax while blogging!

That old problem of structure

A while ago I wrote about the difficulties I have with structuring a story (or anything else I create, if it comes to that.) Today, in my regular email from Time to Write (Jurgen Wolff) I received the first of nine 'answers' to structure, as posited by the American graphic designer and design educator, Louis Danziger. Jurgen has written the thoughts in italics that follow Danziger's points. The interesting thing about this is that Danziger is basically saying each story/work has its own 'formula'. You can't apply the formula from the last novel to the one you're writing now.

1: Design is a problem-solving activity.

In writing, the problem is how to tell the story most effectively.

2: The solution to the problem is in the problem itself.

3: If you are having difficulty in finding a solution, it seems to be most productive to go back to clarifying and enlarging one's understanding of the problem. Restating it, paraphrasing it, asking the questions in other ways, gathering additional information all seem to help. The form is in the in-formation.

When you're having problems telling a story, don't look for a formula. Look deeper into the characters and the story. I've always found that in writing a script, if the middle isn't working, the problem is actually earlier, in the way I've set up the characters or the situation.

4: In the best work, form and content are inseparable. Always seek to find the perfect balance.

Again, it's tempting to make the story fit a formula or paradigm, but the best work comes when you let the story define its own shape. That's why I'm skeptical of courses or books that say 'a romantic comedy must have these 14 steps' or 'a horror film must always have this shape.' Of course letting the story define its own shape is harder.

Update 17.5.2021

Checking this blog post out again this morning, I realised that the second half of Danziger's thoughts were never added, so I went back to Jurgen Wolff's blog, and found them. Here they are:

5: In the best work there is always a benefit for the audience; the client; and yourself (in this order of importance).

As writers, we might think of the publishers or producers as the clients. Unless they can see the benefit, they won't buy the project, so it's useful to start thinking about this right from the start. Convincing them is getting more difficult, but that's balanced by the fact that going around them (for instance, by self-publishing) is getting easier.  

6: Always strive to give value. Be fair, honest, and responsible.

7: Have the nerve to fail. Fear of failure is the biggest obstacle to creativity and growth. No one ever built or ruined a career on any piece of work. In the scheme of things, one's failures or successes for that matter don't count for a hell of a lot. A sustained body of failures or successes is another matter.

I think this is the toughest part of what we do. I know failing isn't bad...but it sure feels bad!

8: A great deal can be learned about creativity in studying the sciences and in developing the scientific attitude: i.e., Question, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Evaluation, etc. 

Lissitzky gave his equation for design as follows: Problem, Invention, Art. 

My own view of his equation is that the first two are primary and the third is a function of how well one has dealt with the problem and invention. 

'Art', like talent, is out of your hands, don't even think about it. Develop a deep and abiding commitment to excellence. The rest will take care of itself.

9: Nobody's perfect.

Amen.

Structure

One of the things about any kind of work I create that always bugs me is structure. Only with songs do I get less hassled, because the words give the thing a kind of structure. Even then, there’s the concern that the song maybe doesn’t have any sort of climax, or anything to hold it together musically.
When it comes to straight piano pieces, however, I find structure not at all straightforward. I suppose the problem in part is that each piece has its own structure, or has a structure similar to the old classical models, but doesn’t necessarily follow them to the T.
Structure has been drummed into our creative heads as something that the rest of the thing builds on, but with music I find that more often than not the structure comes out of the work I do on the piece. Sometimes that works fine; sometimes not.
It’s even worse when it comes to writing something with words, like a novel. No matter how I work out outlines and plan and dig and delve into what each scene means and where it fits, the structure as a whole still seems like a scaffolding that’s continually about to fall down. I wouldn’t trust any workers on it, that’s for sure!
Perhaps the problem is that structure is fine, but like editing, it isn’t something that should take priority. Once you’ve written the thing, you have to look it over and see whether it holds together. If it does and the structure doesn’t appear to be quite like anything else around, then maybe you’ve inadvertently created a new structure. Just don’t try and give it a name, or set out its requirements. There’s every possibility you’ll never use that particular structure again.
No doubt the pundits will disagree with me. Three Acts, we’re told, when it comes to screenplays and novels. (Even though the novels that they quote don’t in fact seem to fit comfortably into anything like the structure they’re proclaiming.) Form, when it comes to music, and the more classical the better. Form when it comes to poetry, and you’d better be able to identify it.
But poems tend to write themselves often, sometimes in a formal way, sometimes not. Music starts with ideas, with rhythms, with faint tissues of somethings that eventually work themselves into a bigger shape. And novels often start out in the middle and work backwards and forwards until you’ve discovered where they really ought to start and finish.
Certainly I appreciate shape; I appreciate form in poetry more than total looseness; I appreciate form in music. But proclaiming that the old forms can’t be surmounted by new forms (which may seem to have less shape when put up against the old) is just traditionalism. What did Tevye say? Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions our lives would be as shaky as, as... as a fiddler on the roof! But he came to realise that traditions don’t last forever, and the fiddler seemed to manage to play up on the roof in spite of shakiness.
All this is a very long preamble to some comments I came across today on structure:

"There was a structure there for sure, but it was composed very non-linearly. I think the structure started to really come together towards the end. We started feeling like, 'Ok, this is what it is!' The early part of the film kind of discombobulates you… for twenty-two minutes into the film there’s no narrative. It just bounces around, you’re in New York, you’re in Nashville, you’re in San Francisco, you’re in Portland, it just shakes your head around and then the narrative hits at twenty minutes. It’s actually a four-act structure. Which is totally not the way you’re supposed to do it… and it totally works.
Aaron Rose, the director of an independent film called "Beautiful Losers," in an interview on The Filmlot.

Anatomy of a Story

I got a book out of the library yesterday, The Anatomy of Story, 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller, by someone called John Truby.

It’s very readable, but it doesn’t offer anything new. The 22 steps (which at one point he admits could be less or more) are supposed to replace the old three-act approach, which they do, to a point. However, the steps themselves are written up in several other books I have on writing that I already have on my shelves, and quite honestly, I can’t see Mr Truby actually using them in working through the sheer slog of writing a novel or a screenplay.

Construction and structure are to me the biggest difficulties in writing a major work. Some geniuses were able to get away with virtually ignoring both of them – Dickens is a prime example, especially in his earlier work (later on he produces even greater novels that are much better constructed) – but without a good sense of both it’s hard for a first-time novelist to get moving. Some people seem to have an innate gift for it. Others, like me, are better at other aspects of writing.

The problem with Truby’s book is that he gives examples of screenplays and books that supposedly follow his rules, yet, when you look at his analyses of the actual works, you find that only a few do. What really got me was when he analysed Joyce’s Ulysses, and tried to make out that it followed his approach. It’s plain from the analysis that it certainly doesn’t. Films like Tootsie and a few others he quotes, may do, but they seem almost to be the exception. His constant bringing in of The Godfather actually undermines his case, since the ‘hero’ in that film doesn’t have any change of attitude (except perhaps to get worse) and to state that it’s Michael’s wife who changes, is to defeat everything Truby has written up to that point.

I was enthused when I began the book. By the time I’d skimmed through most of it, I was disappointed. It really doesn’t cut the mustard.

Incidentally, the single work Truby is noted for, apart from this book, is a television episode which he wrote nearly twenty years ago.