Balance

In many ways, stories are a balancing act, and the balance point for every story depends on exactly what the author is juggling and how much of whatever-it-is they have to keep in the air. A guy riding a unicycle is a balancing act, but so is a pyramid of seven people standing on a teeter-totter while juggling knives and flaming torches.

Balance is a dynamic thing. Whether a person is balancing on one foot, on a unicycle, or on the top level of the pyramid, they’re constantly adjusting to small changes in their center of gravity. Balance is often paradoxically easier when one is in motion—running is easier for most people than standing on one foot; when a bicycle is in motion, it’s fairly easy to stay upright, but when it’s at a complete stop, you have to put your foot down to keep from falling over.

Stories work the same way. Everything has to be in the right balance to keep them moving, but the balance is different for every story. It doesn’t matter what type of story it is—a slam-bang action-adventure can be written as a one-note unicycle of a story, with everything focused on the car chases or sword fights and not much in the way of setting or characterization, or it can be a complicated seven-layers-of-subplots-on a teeter-totter type of story, with everybody kidnapping, stealing, shooting, blackmailing, and double-crossing everybody else for reasons hidden in their pasts and their personalities, like The Maltese Falcon.

Ultimately, both sorts of story have to stay in balance. If the unicycle-action stops, the story breaks down. If one layer of subplots wobbles too far out of line, the whole pyramid collapses.

Oddly enough, sometimes it can be easier to keep a complicated, multi-layered story moving than it is to keep a straightforward one balanced. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is known for having a complex plot and paying a lot of attention to characterization, but also for leaving several fairly major loose ends. The flaws haven’t stopped the book from being on several “Top 100” book lists, or from being made into a classic Humphrey Bogart movie. The complexity of the characters and plot allows the author throw in a dramatic revelation every couple of pages, so that the reader is constantly reevaluating whose story to trust and trying to figure out who is going to get killed next. There is so much going on that a couple of dropped plot points hardly matter, until the book is over and the reader has time to think more carefully about what happened, when, and why.

Balance also doesn’t have to be symmetrical in every aspect. You can have a teeter-totter with one adult at one end and three small children at the other; as long as the weight is the same on both sides, it’ll balance. In a story, the main plotline can be balanced by two or three minor subplots, or by a combination of characterization and atmosphere. Different combinations of viewpoint, dialog, narrative summary, action, and so on can all balance in a satisfactory way, if the writer uses stronger areas to make up for weaker ones. Strong dialog can balance minor weaknesses in description, characterization, and even action, depending on what the characters choose to comment on. Strong characterization can shove plot and setting into smaller positions at the other end of the teeter-totter; strong plot can do the same for characterization and setting. Everything doesn’t have to be exactly the same size or have the same emphasis in order to balance.

In real-life, balance is something we learn when we graduate from “infant” to “toddler.” Once learned, it becomes largely instinctive through experience and constant practice, unless we need to learn something that needs a different sort of balance, like riding a bicycle or taking gymnastics or juggling. Story balance is similar—there isn’t a formula (two paragraphs of narrative plus eleven sentences of characterization plus a page of dialog balances one three-page car chase, half an avalanche, or a minor missing plot point…). Learning to balance the elements of a story is one of the reasons why writing books all seem to emphasize reading “really good books” as well as needing to write the proverbial million words of trash:  seeing how other writers “do it right” and then practicing a lot is the “experience and constant practice” that makes balancing story elements instinctive.

The catch comes in how writing is often taught and practiced. I have a huge collection of how-to-write textbooks and popular advice books, and nearly all of them include writing prompts and exercises. Nearly every exercise focuses on one specific element of writing at a time: Description. Action. Dialog. Viewpoint. Word choice. Sentence variation. Setting. Characterization. Revelation. Plot points. The Hero’s Journey. This is a great way to learn and/or practice a specific aspect of story that one is having trouble with, but it does nothing at all for figuring out how to blend and balance all these things into a story.

Putting everything together, in balance, is not simply a matter of copying a bunch of two-paragraph writing exercises in order, so as to get a three-page story, the way you’d put together a jigsaw puzzle. Those exercises will have to be cut up, rearranged, mixed together, and revised. Balanced. It makes for an interesting exercise itself, one that requires the writer to focus on the balance of the whole story, instead of the pieces. It’s not a mechanical procedure. It’s instinct and intuition and personal taste (some people like a balance that’s heavier on characterization, other people like more plot, or more atmosphere, or…), and a fair leavening of personal process, which means how you go about it will be different from the way anyone else goes about it.

It’s still worth trying. Experience and practice are how we get better at things.