Or a drama
king. I don’t judge...
When we left off, I’d just finished babbling about narrative structure, which is how my
readers experience a story. Before that
was linear structure--how my characters experience a story. This week, I want to talk about how those two
structures come together within a dramatic structure to form the actual
story.
Warning you
now, this is going to be kind of big and rambling, but I’ve also included a lot of
pictures. Go grab a snack now and hit
the restroom. No one will be admitted
during the dreadful story dissection scene...
Also
(warning the second), the story I’m going to dissect is The Sixth Sense. If you’ve never seen it and somehow avoided
hearing about it until now, stop reading and go watch it. Seriously, if you’ve made it this long
without having someone blow it for you, you need to see that movie cold. People love to give M. Night Shyamalan crap,
but there’s a reason The Sixth Sense made him a superstar
writer-director. So go watch it and then
come back. The ranty blog will be here
waiting for you when you get back.
Seriously. Go. Now.
Seriously. Go. Now.
Okay,
everyone back?
As the name
implies, dramatic structure involves drama.
Not in the “how will I make Edward love me” sense, but in relation to
the building interactions between the elements of the story. In most cases, these elements will be
characters, but they can also be puzzles, giant monsters, time limits,
or any number of things that keep my protagonist(s) from achieving his or her
goal. Any story worth telling (well, the
vast, overwhelming majority of them) are going to involve a series of
challenges and an escalation of tension.
Stakes will be raised, then raised again. More on this in a bit.
Now, I
don’t mean to scare you, but I’ve prepared a few graphs. Don’t worry, they’re pretty simple and
straightforward. If you’ve been
following the ranty blog for a while, they might even look a little familiar.
graph #1 |
On this
first graph (and all the others I’ll be showing you) X is the progression or
the story, Y is dramatic tension. This
particular graph shows nothing happening (the blue line).
It’s an average day at the office, or maybe that long commute home on
the train. It’s flat and monotone. No highs, no lows, no moments that stand out.
Boring as
hell.
Harsh as it
may sound, this graph is a good representation of a lot of little indie art films and stories. There are a lot
of wonderful character moments, but nothing actually happens. Tonally, the end of the story is no different
than the beginning.
graph #2 |
As a story
progresses, tension needs to rise.
Things need to happen. Challenges
need to arise and be confronted.
By halfway through, the different elements of the story should’ve made
things much more difficult for my main character. As I close in on the end, they should be
peaking.
Mind you,
these don’t need to be gigantic action set pieces or nightmarish horror moments. If the whole
goal of this story is for Wakko to ask Phoebe out without looking like an
idiot, a challenge could be finding the right clothes or picking the right moment
in the day. But there needs to be
something for my character to do to get that line higher and higher..
Now, here’s
the first catch...
graph #3 |
Some people
start with the line up high. They begin
their story at eight and the action never stops (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest).
This doesn’t leave a lot of room for things to develop, but the idea is
that you don’t have time to see that because we’re hitting the ground running and
going until we drop.
You might
notice the line on this graph looks a lot like that first one up above. It’s pretty much just a straight line because
there isn’t anywhere for things to go.
And, as we established, straight lines are pretty boring. They’re monotone, and monotone
is dull whether the line’s set at one-point-five or at eleven.
Rising with setbacks |
That’s the
second catch. Dramatic structure can’t
just be a clean rise like that second graph.
That’s another straight line. And
straight lines are... well, I’m sure you get it by this point. In a good story, there will be multiple
challenges and the hero isn’t going to succeed at all of them. He or she will win in the end, of course, but it’s not going to be easy getting there. They’ll face mistakes, surprises, bigger
challenges, and determined adversaries.
For every success, there’s going to be some setbacks. So that blue line needs to be a series of peaks
and drops.
If you know
your physics, you know that we don’t feel a constant velocity. Think about riding in a car. As long as it’s a steady speed, you don’t
notice. You can drink coffee, move
around, whatever. What we feel is acceleration—the
change in velocity. Those ups and
downs are when things stand out, when we know something’s happening.
Make sense?
So, with
that in mind, here’s a big graph.
Notice that
D-F flashback. Even though it’s near the
end of the story, it’s got more dramatic weight than G through K. This is the big, easy trick to dramatic
structure. No matter what my narrative
is doing, it has to keep increasing the tension.
Y’see,
Timmy, this graph is what pretty much every story should look like if I map it
out. They’re all going to start small in
the beginning and grow. We’ll see
tension rising and falling as challenges appear, advances are made, and
setbacks occur. They’re not going to be
exactly like this, but the basic structure—an escalating, jagged line—is almost
always a given. Small at the start,
increase with peaks and dips, finish big.
Simple,
yes?
Keep in
mind, this isn’t an automatic thing.
This is something I, as the writer, need to be aware of while I craft my
story. If I have a chapter that’s
incredibly slow, it shouldn’t be near the end of my book. If a scene has no dramatic tension in it at
all, it shouldn’t be in the final pages of my screenplay. And if it is, it means I’m doing something
wrong.
Now, that
being said, it should be clear that where things happen within a narrative is
going to effect how much weight they have.
Again, dramatic structure tells us that things in the beginning are
small, things at the end are big.
Something that’s an amazing reveal at the end of the story won’t have the same impact at the beginning.
Let me give
you an example. It’s the one I warned
you about at the top. I’d like to tell
you an abridged version of The Sixth Sense. But I’d like to tell it to you in linear order.
Ready?
The
Sixth Sense is the story of Malcolm, a child therapist who is killed by one
of his former patients in a murder-suicide.
Malcolm becomes a ghost, but doesn’t realize he’s died so he continues
to “see” his patients. Several months
later, across the city, a woman becomes jealous of her new husband’s daughter,
Kyra, and begins to slowly poison the girl.
It’s about this time that Malcolm meets Cole, a little boy with the
power to see ghosts, and decides to take Cole on as a patient, helping him deal
with the crippling fear the ghosts cause.
When Kyra finally succumbs to the poison and becomes a ghost, she finds
Cole, too—inadvertently terrifying him when she does. Malcolm suggests to Cole that helping her
might help him get over his fear. Cole
helps expose Kyra’s stepmother as a murderer and also helps Malcolm come to
realize his own status as one of the deceased.
And everyone lives happily ever after.
Even the dead people.
The happily
ever after is a bit of an exaggeration, granted, but it should make something
else clear. When the narrative of this
story follows the linear structure, a huge amount of drama is stripped
away. It’s so timid and bland it almost
reads like an after-school special rather than a horror movie. A lot of the power of this story came from
the narrative structure. The order
Shyamalan told this story in is what gave it such an amazing dramatic structure
(and made him a household name).
This is
what I’ve talked about a few times with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling. There needs to be a reason for this shift to
happen at this point—a reason that continues to feed the dramatic
structure. If my dramatic tension is at
seven and I go into a flashback, that flashback better take it up to seven-point-five
or eight. And if it doesn’t, I shouldn’t
be having a flashback right now. Not
that one, anyway.
For the
record, this is also why spoilers suck.
See, looking up at the big graph again, E is very high up in the
dramatic tension. It’s a big moment,
probably a game-changing reveal, in a flashback. If I tell you about E before you read the
story (or see the movie or watch the episode or whatever), I’ve automatically
put E at the beginning--it’s now one of the first events you’ve encountered in
the narrative. And because it’s at the
beginning, it’s now equal to G in dramatic tension. Because things at the start of the story
always have very low tension ratings.
why spoilers suck |
The thing
is, though, E isn’t at the start of the story.
It’s near the end. So now when I
get to where E really is in the story, it isn’t that big spike anymore. It’s down at the bottom. The dramatic structure of the story is blown because I didn't get that information at the right point. It even looks wrong on the graph when the blue line bottoms out like that.
If you want
an example of this (without giving anything away), consider Star Trek Into Darkness. I can’t help but notice that a lot of
people who were demanding to know plot and character information months before the movie came out were also
the same ones later complaining about how weak the story was. Personally, I went out of my way to avoid
spoilers and found the movie to be very entertaining. It wasn't the most phenomenal film of the summer, but I had a lot of fun with it
It’s
dismissed as coincidence.
Now, here’s
one last cool thing about dramatic structure.
It makes it easy to spot if a story is worth telling. I don’t mean that in a snide, demeaning
way. The truth is, though, there are a
lot of stories out there which just aren’t that interesting. Since I know a good story should follow that
ascending pattern of challenges and setbacks, it’s pretty easy for me to look
at even the bare bones of a narrative and figure out if it fits the pattern.
For example...
By nature
of my chosen genre, I tend to read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories and see a
lot of those movies. I’ve read and
watched stories set in different climates, different countries, and with
different reasons behind the end of the world.
I’ve also seen lots of different types of survivors. Hands down, the least interesting ones are
the uber-prepared ones. At least a dozen
times I’ve seen a main character who decides on page five to turn his or her house
into a survival bunker for the thinnest of reasons, filling it with food,
weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.
But twenty pages later, when the zombies finally appear... damn, are they ready. Utterly, completely ready.
In other
words... there’s no challenge. There’s
no mistakes, no problems, no setbacks.
The plot in most of these stories just drifts along from one incident straight to another, and
the fully prepped, fully trained, and fully loaded hero is able to deal with
each one with minimal effort. That’s not
a story worth telling, because that story is a line. And I’m sure you still remember my thoughts
on lines...
On the
other hand we have C Dulaney’s series, Roads Less Traveled. The series begins with The Plan, protagonist
Kasey’s careful and precise strategy for surviving the end of civilization. But almost immediately, the plan starts to go
wrong. One of the key people doesn’t
make it, a bunch of unexpected people do, and things spiral rapidly downward. Challenges and setbacks spring up as the tension goes higher and higher.
That sound
familiar?
And
honestly... that’s all I’ve got for you.
I know I’ve spewed a lot, but I wish I could offer you more. Y’see, Timmy (yep, it’s another double
Y’see, Timmy post), while the other two forms of structure are very
logical, dramatic structure relies more on gut feelings and empathy with my
reader. I have to understand how
information’s going to be received and interpreted if I’m going to release that
information in a way that builds tension.
And that’s a lot harder to teach or explain. The best I can do is point someone in the
right direction, let them gain some experience, and hopefully they’ll figure it
out for themselves.
So here’s a
rough map of dramatic structure.
Head
that way.
Next week,
I’ll probably blab a bit about Watson, the supercomputer.
Until
then... go write.
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