Running a
little late this week. Again. Crazy busy these past few days. Craig DiLouie was here in southern
California, so we hung out for a day. Then there was Valentine’s Day. And if you haven’t seen Black Panther
yet I highly recommend it. Fantastic
movie.
Oh, plus a
couple of outlines for new projects, too...
Anyway...
This past week
at the Writers Coffeehouse I babbled on about different forms of structure and
how they work together. I haven’t really
gone into that here in a couple of years, so I figured now might be a good
time. While it’s all fresh in my mind.
Fair
warning—this is kind of a sprawling topic so it’s going to spread out over the
next two posts as well as this one. I
also may use a few terms in ways of which your MFA writing professor would not
approve. But I’ll do my best to be clear,
despite all that.
Speaking of
professors...
Structure
is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot when we’re talking about
writing. Sometimes in a generic sense,
like that last sentence, other times in much more specific ways. You may have
heard gurus talk about narrative structure, dramatic structure, three-act structure, or maybe even four- and five-act structure (if you’ve been
dabbling with screenwriting a bit).
An
important thing to be clear about before we go too far—all of these are very
different things. I think this is why
people get confused about structure sometimes.
A lot of things fall into this general category, and while some of them
are vital to the storytelling process... some aren’t. And it doesn’t help when “expert” gurus try
to conflate them. I read an article once
where one guy was trying to use the five-act structure of television shows to demonstrate that three-act structure was an obsolete form
(ProTip--it’s not).
When we
talk about structure, we’re talking about the underlying framework of a story. The skeletal system, or maybe the nervous
system, depending on how you want to look at it. And, just like with anatomy (or architecture
or programming) there can be more than one underlying system. And they all work
together to make a functioning person. Or house. Or story.
It’s key to
note that all these systems (or structures) are not the same. Sometimes things
will overlap and serve multiple purposes. Sometimes they won’t. And, as I
mentioned above, just because something worked in that story doesn’t mean it’ll work in my story.
Okay. Got all that?
Good. Get ready to take a few notes
The three
main structures in a story, for our purposes these next few weeks, are linear
structure, narrative structure, and dramatic structure. They all interact and work with each
other. Just like with anatomy, if two
elements are strong and one is weak, a story won’t be able to support itself. So it’s important that I have a good grasp of
all three and understand how they work.
The one we’re
going to deal with this week is linear structure. Simply put, it’s how my characters experience
the story. There’s a Russian literary
term for this called fabula. Another
term you may have heard for this is continuity. Thursday leads to Friday which leads to
Saturday. Breakfast, coffee break,
lunch, dinner. Birth, childhood, college
years, adulthood, middle age, old age, death.
There’s a
simple reason linear structure is so important.
Almost all of us are experts with it.
That’s because linear order is how we experience things all the time,
every day. We notice when effect comes
before cause, even if the story gives them to us out of order. A good way to think of linear structure, as I
mentioned above, is a timeline.
When detectives break down the clues of a crime, them may discover them
out of order, but it doesn’t change the order the events actually happened
in. If I’m writing a story—even if I’m
telling the story in a non-linear fashion—there still needs to be a linear
structure.
A good way
to test the linear structure of my story (a method I’ve mentioned before) is to
arrange all the flashbacks, flash-forwards, recollections, frames, and other
devices in chronological order. My story should still make logical sense like this, even if it's lost some dramatic
weight this way (more on that later). If
my story elements don’t work like this (if effect comes before cause, or if
people know things before they learn them), it means I’ve messed up my linear
structure.
Now, I
want to mention a specific example where linear structure gets messed up a
lot-- time travel.
In a time
travel story, it’s very likely there’ll be multiple linear structures. My time traveler might be experiencing Thursday,
Friday, then Wednesday, and then Thursday again.
They’re still experiencing four days in a row, though—even if their
friends and coworkers are only having three. And their three are Wednesday-Thursday-Friday.
I mentioned
this diagram at the Coffeehouse on Sunday. It’s a pair of timelines featuring
two characters from Doctor Who—Jack Harkness and the Doctor himself. I’ve marked a few key, mutual
events in their lives.
Jack’s life
is pretty straightforward, for our purposes here. A is when young Jack first meets the
Ninth Doctor and decides to travel with him for a while. B is when he later encounters the
Tenth Doctor and Martha. C is
when they all briefly meet again a year or so later to stop Davros and the
Daleks. They meet again (D) much,
much later in Jack’s life. And E
is when the Doctor’s there for Jack’s death at the ripe old age of twenty
billion or so (mild spoilers, sorry).
That’s a
pretty normal, linear timeline. Young to
old. The one most of us have (just
slightly exaggerated in his case).
Now... look
at the Doctor’s. This is the linear
structure of the show because we (the audience) are following the Doctor around
(more on this next week). He travels in
time, though, so he meets Jack in kind of an odd order. First time for him isn’t the first time for
Jack, and vice-versa. But it’s still a
logical, linear order for the Doctor—he’s living his own timeline, A-B-C-D-E,
just like Jack. A and B are the Ninth
Doctor, C through E are the Tenth.
Make sense?
Y’see,
Timmy, no matter what order I decide to tell things in, the characters are
experiencing the story in linear order.
If halfway through my book one of my character flashes back to what
happened a week ago, this isn’t new information for him or her—it
happened a week ago. So all of their
actions and reactions up until that flashback should take that information into
account.
It sounds
pretty straightforward and it really is.
Linear structure is going to be the easiest of the three forms I blab
about over the next few weeks because it’s logical and objective. But, alas, people still mess it up all the time. And the mistakes are
usually because of... narrative structure.
But we’ll
talk about that next week.
Until then,
go write.
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