...there
was an aspiring writer. And he lived in
a beautiful world of wild dreams and deep denial...
But let’s
not talk about that guy.
Last week I
talked about basic linear structure.
This week I want to talk about narrative structure. Narrative structure relates to—big
surprise—my narrative. It’s about how
I’ve chosen to tell my particular story.
While events unfold in a linear fashion for the characters, how I decide
to relay these events to my audience can change how the story’s received and
interpreted (more on that in a bit). So linear is how the characters experiences the story, narrative is how the reader experiences the story.
One quick
note before I dive in. Within a story
there might be a device or point of view, like a first person narrator,
which gives the appearance of “telling” the story. For the purposes of our discussion here,
though, if I talk about the narration I’m talking about the writer.
That being
said... here we go.
In a large
chunk of the stories any of us will encounter, the linear structure and
narrative structure are going to be the same thing. The story starts with Wakko on Monday,
follows him to Tuesday, through Wednesday and Thursday, and concludes on Friday. It’s simple and straightforward, but that
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. My
own book, 14, fits in this category. It’s loaded with twists and reveals, but the
linear structure parallels the narrative.
There are
also a fair number of stories, though, where the narrative doesn’t follow the
timeline of the story. Sometimes the
writer does this with flashbacks, where a story is mostly linear with a
few small divergences. Other times, the
story may be broken up into several sections and the reader needs to follow
clues as to where these sections line up.
These are often called non-linear stories, or you may have heard it as
non-linear storytelling (it was the hip new thing for a while there).
Now,
there’s more to narrative structure than just wanting to switch around my story
elements so I can look all cutting-edge.
If I’ve chosen to jump around a bit (or a lot) in my narrative, there’s
a few things I have to keep in mind. Be
warned, we’re moving into an area that requires a little more skill and
practice.
First off,
putting things in a new narrative order can’t change the linear logic of my
story. As I mentioned above, the week
goes Monday through Friday, and this is true even if the first thing I do is
tell you what happened on Thursday.
Monday was still three days earlier, and the characters and events in my
story have to reflect that. I can’t
start my book with everyone on Thursday baffled who the murderer is, then roll
the story back to Monday were everyone witnesses the killing and sees the
murderer. If they knew then, why don’t
they know now? There’s no logic to it
(barring a case of mass amnesia). If I
have Phoebe act surprised that she owns a cat on Friday and then
have the narrative jump to her finding the cat in an alley on Tuesday, I’m
going to look like an idiot while my linear structure collapses.
These are
very broad, simplistic examples, yes, but it’s amazing how many times I’ve seen
this problem crop up. Writers want to
switch stuff up, but ignore the fact that the logic of their story collapses
when the narrative elements are put in linear order. This is an easy one to fix, it just requires
a little time and work. And sometimes a
bit of rewriting.
The other
big issue with having narrative and linear structures so far apart is that
people need to be able to follow my plot.
I can have tons of fancy word choices and beautiful language in my
story, but readers are still going to put it down if they can’t figure out
what’s going on.
For
example...
Think about when a little kid tells you a story about Iron Man and Batman
and Snuffleupagus and there’s a moon base and they had a spaceship that Iron
Man made before they fought the werewolf and the werewolf hates only getting to
go out on Halloween so he decided when he was a little kid because only
Snuffleupagus liked him and the rest of the time he has to get shaved because
it’s too hot so he decided to go to the Moon so he could be a werewolf all the
time and no one would make fun of him cause he didn’t know there were aliens on
the moon but Batman saw the wolfman spaceship and tried to stop it and asked
Iron Man to help and they fought the werewolf and Batman knew the werewolf when
they were kids before he was Batman so he decided to help him move to the moon
because they broke his spaceship but Iron Man had another spaceship he built
after the Avengers movie and it looks like a big Iron Man and the werewolf had
promised Snuffleupagus when they were little that he could come and so they got
him out of the broken ship and you kind of tune it out and start mentally
skimming. I mean, you just skimmed a lot
of that, right? It jumps around so much
that after a point it just becomes noise.
Y’see,
Timmy, the problem with chopping up my narrative too much is that people are
automatically going to try to put it in linear order. As I mentioned last week, we all do this
almost automatically because it’s how our brains are set up. The harder the narrative makes it for someone
to reorganize the linear story, the less likely it is they’ll be able to follow it. Which means the more likely it
is that they’ll put it down.
I talked about the idea of a detective at a crime scene last week. If you’ve read a few mystery stories—or
watched a few crime shows—you know a standard part of the mystery formula is
the hero going through the events of the story and putting them in linear order
for the other characters and the audience.
And how many are there? Eight or nine, usually? Call it ten elements that are out of order
and the writer’s admitting it might be
kind of tough to keep up at this point.
There was a
movie that came out about eight or nine years ago (I’ll be polite and not name
it) that was a non-linear mess. I don’t
think there were two scenes in it that followed each other. So we’re talking about well over a hundred
scenes that were all scrambled and out of order. Maybe as many as two hundred. The actors were fantastic, but the story was
impossible to keep up with. It didn’t
help that certain events repeated in the story.
Again, to be polite and protect the innocent, let’s say one of the
characters was in a serious car crash and then was in another serious car crash
two years later. The audience was getting random scenes of burning cars, ambulances, emergency surgeries, recovery, and physical therapy... from two car crashes. So we're left trying to figure out which car crash the character was experiencing/recovering from at
various points--once it was clear there’d been two car crashes--and then
figuring where this scene fit in relation to all the other scenes. The audience had to spend their time trying to
decipher the movie rather than watching it.
So
non-linear structure can be overdone and become a detriment if I’m not
careful. This can be really hard to spot
and fix, because it’s going to depend a lot on my ability to put myself in the
reader’s shoes. Since I know the whole
linear story from the moment I sit down, the narrative is always going to make
a lot more sense to me, even though for someone coming in cold it might be an
illogical pile. This is one of those
times where I need to be harsh and honest with myself, because if I
don’t my story’s going to be incomprehensible.
That’s
narrative structure in a nutshell. Maybe
more of a coconut-shell. However I
decide to tell my story, it still needs to have a linear structure, it still
needs to be logical, and it still needs to be understandable.
Next time,
I want to explain how linear structure and narrative structure combine via
dramatic structure to tell a good story.
Until
then... go write.
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