Elements of Story

Last time, I posted the basic idea of the Finding Your Story workshop I teach at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, including my thoughts on what I call “the heart of the story.” A couple of past participants suggested I share some of the other story-writing principles I talk about, so here we go...

Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.
       I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette  of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):

1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.

2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.

3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.

By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.
       Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.

      In The Maltese Falcon, the shenanigans involving the pursuit of the black bird (the physical plot) occupy most of the screen time and generate most of the specific scenes. They’re fun and provide a lot of great moments, but they’re also confusing and ultimately not even that important to understand. The emotional and moral story of Sam Spade himself, though, is powerful: a compromised man, sleeping with both his partner’s wife and the woman who turns out to have murdered said partner, comes to realize that there’s still a code of conduct in this dirty world, that “when a man’s partner is murdered he’s supposed to do something about it.”
       Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.
       And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.
        These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.
       Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.
       It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.
       In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.
       For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.


***


At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”
       Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”
       A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.

         That can be tragic: he wants to dismiss the Sphinx’s prophecy and live the life he desires, telling Fate to go screw herself and living by his own will, right down to killing the king of Thebes and marrying his widow. But what he really needs is to learn to respect this Fate. Because she’s always going to win.
       The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)
        The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.

       Usually a happy ending comes because a character figures out what he needs instead of what he wants just in time to change events and attain what he needs. In the best tragic endings the character figures out the same thing—but just too late to change events and get what he needs.
       George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.
       Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”
       Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:

1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).

2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).

You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.
       In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.
       In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!) 
       One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.
       Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.
       In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.
       You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.
       Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.
       That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story: try starting at the end and plotting backward.
       Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.
       Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.


***


“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.

The Heart of the Story

I teach a workshop at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto called “Finding Your Story,” the basic idea of which is to help people dig through the clutter, confusion, and anxiety of writing to find what they’re really trying to say and the best way to say it. These are the notes I start the work off with and keep coming back to over the eight weeks of the class...and that I keep rechecking at myself, because one of the traps of this writing business is how easy it is to forget the basics while navigating all the little details.

For starters: you can’t know how to say it unless you know what you’re saying.
       And if you really want to know how to say it, it’s best to know why you’re saying it. If you’re writing to communicate—that is, hoping someone else reads it and gets something out of it—then you probably want to bring something to someone that they’ve never known or thought about or quite seen in that way before. Ask yourself who you want to be saying it to (roughly). But, even more importantly, ask yourself why it matters to you to put the time and effort into saying it.
       Knowing what you want to say can be a lot harder than it sounds; when most of us come up with a story idea we’re not thinking in those terms. We usually start with a situation we want to capture or a character we want to describe or a plot idea we want to play with. But deep down, there almost certainly is something we really want to say. These ideas are speaking to us for some reason. The work of this class is largely about going inside to discover (or remember) that reason.
       In order to find your story:
       Simplify.
       Find the heart of it.
       See your story as one whole entity, not a series of events.
       A good story is organic, not a structure of brick or timber. It’s one living thing, every cell growing from the original seed, and it needs all its components to keep it alive.
       A story is also a river. Elements come together into a single course that carries us to its destination. It’s not a series of pieces, it’s a single flow. The substance at the start becomes the substance in the middle and then the substance at the end.

      (Or, if you want to play with lame physics analogies, a story is like light: it’s a particle and it’s a wave, depending on how you’re looking at it at the moment.)
      Your job is to discover that organism and that river. I say “discover” and not “create,” because when the pieces come together I usually feel as though I’ve unearthed something—or liberated something or breathed life into something—that was there all along. Our ideas, and the way they connect our scattered experiences, thoughts, and feelings, nearly always hold the implication of a story within them. The more I feel I’m inventing something, the more likely I am to be going off course.
       Which isn’t to say that that you’re not going to be doing a lot of conscious creating and decision making. My gut feelings help me understand whether something works or not, but I usually have to do some thinking and analyzing to narrow my options enough for my gut to have something to work with. There’s a lot of “what if I try this?” before I get to “okay, right.”
       Beware of thinking, though. It can be treacherous. Our thinky brains love to run and play, but sometimes they need to be brought back to focus. I’ve found that exercises like the ones I’m assigning to you help with that focus.
        For that matter, beware of writing. Writing can fool you. Your own fun prose and clever inventions can distract you from noticing that you’re not sure where you’re going. A snazzy scene can pave over a gaping hole in your story—for the moment. Soon enough, though, that hole’s going to show up again.
       So your first job, before you can simplify your story, is to simplify the job itself.
       The most useful tool I’ve developed in my decades as a writer: anxiety reduction. And the best tool for anxiety reduction I’ve found—better than solitude, better than breathing exercises, better than Xanax, better than bourbon—is task reduction.
       One of the tricky parts about writing stories is that they contain so many elements that we can find ourselves trying to stay on top of ten things at once. Tone, structure, plot, character, voice, how we’re going to end it, the scene we’re working on, the scene coming up, and that scene fifty pages ago that still doesn’t feel right. Which summons those two unwelcome visitors so well known to every writer: confusion and anxiety.
        Pick one aspect of the story to work on at a time. In this class, you get to work on finding the heart of the story and put all the rest on the shelf. For the moment, stop asking yourself how the story should begin and how much should be in flashback and how to make your protagonist more sympathetic and whether it’s going to be funny or sad. Those questions will still be there when you come back to them, and you’ll probably discover that the answers will be much easier to find once you understand your story better.
       In fact, I’ve often found that a lot of those answers become not only easier but obvious. Now that I know what I’m saying and where I’m going, some choices become simply inevitable. Which is a wonderful feeling: one less thing to agonize over.
       Which brings me, at last, to the first exercise: Try to tell your story in briefer and briefer forms without losing its emotional, intellectual, and thematic essence. You can lose plot mechanics and details of milieu—in fact, you’re going to have to—but keep your eye on the essence of what you’re saying. Start by telling it in under 200 words. Then bring it under 100. Then 50.
       To keep this from getting too abstract, here are the “hearts” I’ve found in some other people’s stories, told in roughly 40 or 45 words. Mind you, these aren’t intended as literary criticism. I know they’re oversimplified. But I think they’ll help you get what I’m saying:

•    “A woman is so caught up in romantic dreams that she can’t appreciate her unglamorous but steady husband and throws herself into a disastrous affair that brings such disgrace upon her family and herself that she commits suicide.” (Madame Bovary)

•    “A boy who wants to feel worthwhile creates something that makes him a big deal for a while but then lets him down, forcing him to learn that he can only feel worthwhile by living his own life.” (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

•    “A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until they have to defend their nation from an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” (War and Peace)

•     “A people build a vast, secure empire but over time focus more on personal or otherworldly rewards and fail to teach their offspring civic virtues, so more and more of the running of the empire is handed over to foreigners who eventually pull it apart.” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)

•    “A man is abandoned by his lover and detaches himself cynically from human affairs. When she returns he learns she left him for a higher cause. He seduces her away from her cause, until through his love for her he realizes that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” (You know!)

Note that each one starts by telling you clearly who the story is about. (That’s usually one person, but stories can be about multiple people, or whole nations, too.) Then it tells you what the protagonist’s initial situation is, which usually means what’s wrong with his or her or their situation. Then it tells you what they try to do about it: affairs, superheroes, wars, foreign mercenaries, seductions. Then it gives you a sense of how that goes and where, through reacting—or failing to react—the protagonists end up.
        Note also: these summaries don’t sound all that interesting. All the catchy twists and offbeat milieux, all the dazzling touches of the authors, have been left out. This exercise isn’t about writing a springboard or an elevator pitch or a back-cover blurb. Your boiled-down story not only doesn’t have to sound exciting, I promise you it almost certainly won’t sound exciting. I’ll even say that it shouldn’t, at this point. What it should sound is clear and solid.
       In this exercise, don’t be afraid of simplicity. Simplicity is your friend.
        In finished writing (as we’ve all heard a million times), it’s usually important to show more than tell. But for this exercise: tell, don’t show.
       Don’t be afraid of your story sounding too familiar, either. The basic stories have all been told countless times and people will be telling them again forever. Good human stories will always feel as though we’ve heard them before. Which means your  summary may sound trite when you first read it. Banal, even. But no more banal than my summary of Madame Bovary, which isn’t bad company.
       It’s what you ultimately do with the story that will make it new and unique. And you’re not going to think about that now, remember? It will be much less frightening to do something dazzling with a story once you’re very clear on what the story is, because then you won’t be freaking out about technique and content at the same time. (Anxiety reduction: your other friend.)
       You’ll also note that these summaries all include the end of the story. Not the specifics. We don’t know that she swallowed arsenic, he admitted he was gay, Moscow was burned, the Vandals sacked Rome, and Louie rounded up the usual suspects. But we know whether our protagonists succeeded or failed in what they wanted and we have a sense of how they changed or what they learned.
        So when you summarize, include the ending, as best you understand it now. You’re not marrying it; you may change it completely as your understanding grows. But you won’t really know your story unless you know where it goes. It’s the end that makes clear the meaning of the whole thing. It’s the end that determines what you’re saying to us.
       There were two basic possible endings to Casablanca: Rick gives up Ilsa so she can help Laszlo; or Rick wins Ilsa away from him. Those two endings create different themes: a great cause matters more than any romance; or a great love matters more than any cause. They’re both worth telling. Just know which one you want. 
       The ending trumps everything else. You can have every character telling us that great causes matter more than romance, and countless moments throughout the movie supporting the same idea; but if Ilsa stays in Casablanca with Rick, then you’ve told us that, really, the romance matters more than the cause. If your ending doesn’t line up with the intent that’s implicit from the beginning, then  you’re not saying what you think you’re saying. And if you try to say contradictory things at once, your readers come away confused and dissatisfied.
       (This goes back to what I said about the story as an organism. I’ve never found the “beginning-middle-and-end” description of stories very useful. Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning? And the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany?)
       This exercise has multiple benefits. Boiling down will force you to decide what’s most central to the story and what’s more peripheral. In the course of that you’ll have to go deeper toward what your story’s really about. You’ll probably find elements that you thought mattered but turn out to have been distractions.
       It will also usually reveal things about what you’re doing that you’ve tried not to notice. Like the fact that you have a ton of fascinating material, but you don’t actually know how it’s going to fit together. Or you have a great starting point but only a vague idea where you’re going from there. Or you don’t know who your main character is. Or you’ve been trying to convince yourself that the ending will take care of itself, but really you’re terrified of having to confront it. Or you know this setting or material is compelling to you but you don’t know why. Or you just plain have no idea what you want to say.
       This will expose your weak spots. That’s a good thing. Go right at the scariest stuff. Don’t put off the part that makes you most nervous, expecting it to be easier later. It’s probably the most important thing you need to look at.
       That doesn’t contradict what I was saying about anxiety reduction: it’s about feeling the fear actively as you work through the confusion that keeps stirring up the anxiety. It’s about feeling the bad stuff more intensely as part of the process that leads to dispelling it. (That’s why focused task reduction is better than Xanax. Or even bourbon.)

        The exercise will also give you a document you can use. Once I have my 50-word (or so) description of my story, I keep it with my work and check it whenever I get confused about what I’m saying and why. Like a mission statement. (A couple of former students have told me that they read their summaries every day before starting writing, as a focusing ritual and to keep themselves from getting confused in the first place. I haven’t been doing that, but I probably should.)
       This short summary is that “heart of the story” I was talking about. The germ from which the organism grows. Bring your story down to this and then start building it outward, letting everything unfold from that essential story.
       Write from the inside out.