Back when I still had a day job, I was a financial analyst. It is therefore really unsurprising that I enjoy looking at writing systems that are very structured and involve analyzing stories to pick out what works or doesn’t work. There are, however, a couple of problems with this.
The first one is that I’ve never found an analytical approach that was much use to me for writing a story.
Reading about analysis is fun (for me). Analyzing other people’s work is also fun (for me). Analyzing my own work feels like trying to study Mount Rushmore by looking at tiny pieces of it through a microscope. I know what I want the story to look and feel like, but I can’t tell whether the tiny lump I can see through the microscope is a carving mistake that needs to be polished out, or whether it’s the very beginning of the left corner of Washington’s mouth, and needs to be left alone.
I personally do find some of the analytical approaches useful when it comes to revision, but that leads me to the second problem: most of them are very dogmatic. And a lot of writers, particularly beginners, take these prescriptions far more seriously than is helpful.
There are several mistakes that people tend to make when approaching these directives, most of which relate to the way they look at the analysis systems.
First, there’s a tendency to take each directive too literally. If the system says that the protagonist must “descend into the underworld to receive knowledge,” the writer of a story set in present-day spends weeks trying to figure out how to make this fit their premise, and ends up sending the protagonist down to the basement to root through some old paper files for no really good story-related reason. If the system says that each scene must have a goal, an obstacle, and end in failure because success is boring and won’t keep readers reading, the writers twist themselves into knots making sure that the main character can’t succeed at anything—if the poor protagonist goes to the kitchen for a sandwich, they have to discover that they’re out of bread.
This leads writers to shove scenes, events, and characters into a story just to make it fit a particular system, not because they belong in the particular story. Most analytical story formulas are metaphorical and/or symbolic. When they say that the central character has to “descend into the underworld,” they don’t mean that every main character has to end up underground at some point. The protagonist doesn’t even have to end up sitting in the dark, or depressed.
And while multiple analysis systems use similar phrases, the metaphorical meanings of each phrase depend more on how and where the author of the analytical system uses it than on anything else. The same description means something different if it’s near the start of a story-formula than it does if it comes in the middle or at the end.
Another major mistake lots of writers make is to consistently apply analytical formulas only to one specific level of storytelling throughout the story. This is perfectly understandable, as most analytical approaches focus on analyzing and organizing one story element (usually plot, structure, or characters) as if that’s the One True Key to making a story work.
In reality, there isn’t just one thing that will make every story work, and most writing advice applies to multiple levels of the story. Scenes may need to have goals and obstacles, but those goals and obstacles work just as well when they’re emotional, intellectual, thematic, or characterization-centered as when they’re related to the plot. The goal/obstacle/success-or-failure structure is often more effective when there’s a mixture of scenes that move the central characters through action, plot progression, emotional development, puzzles, etc., instead of pounding relentlessly on action/plot-centric goals over and over.
Also, when a story formula focuses on one story element alone, writers sometimes miss the fact that they already have a Call to Action or Resistance or a Descent Into Underworld in their story, because the step in their story isn’t the same story element that the formula calls for. The Call to Action may be emotional- or character-related, rather than plot- or action-related. The Resistance may be due to a plot obstacle, rather than emotional or intellectual.
A writer who misses this problem can end up inserting an event or a scene in order to provide the “missing” step (which isn’t actually missing). This makes everything feel slightly off, because they’re trying to follow a familiar six (or twelve, or fifteen) step formula, but they’ve doubled up on one or two of the steps without noticing.
It’s also possible that the story the writer wants to tell is following most of the steps of the formula, but it doesn’t actually need to be explicit about all of them. This is actually one of the advantages of following a formula—if it’s familiar enough to most readers, one can sometimes cover parts of the formula by implication, or in half a line of dialog. If the story doesn’t need an advice-giving Mentor, it’s better to leave that character out than to shoehorn one in just so the writer can check off the “meets Mentor,” “Trained by Mentor,” and “Death of Mentor” steps from a formula.
Formulas are great for science. But for the art of fiction and the craft of writing? I’m not so sure.
I sometimes find plot structures useful for draping events over if I have reason to fear that the middle of the story will be rambling.
The ones I find really funny are those that insist you start with something. A one sentence summary of the story. “In this story, there is a scene where the heroine gets her husband released from imprisonment and the rest of the story supports that.”
I have a rather off-this-week’s-topic question that I only just realized I had.
Basically, I’m experiencing three different kinds of Stuck with the three main stories I’m working on.
The first kind, and the easiest to remedy, is “I’m stuck because I don’t want to be working on this story right now.” Not too hard to just force myself to get my rear into my chair and my hands on the keyboard and start writing according to my outline (which I actually have for once, which is nice).
The second kind is “I’m stuck because this character just started sword training, and it’s going to take a year for her to have any skill whatsoever, and I wasn’t planning on a Sword Training plot for this story, and I’m not sure how to skip to the point where she heads off to the next plot section without it feeling way too abrupt.”
The third kind is “I’m stuck because this character is about to arrive in her long-lost homeland and is feeling apprehensive. And I don’t know how to get her across the border to her long-lost homeland because there are a few minor obstacles in the way, and I’m struggling to figure out how to write this thing the way my head says it’s supposed to come out. And I’m a perfectionist, so if it doesn’t come out right…” Sigh.
I don’t have too much of a problem with Stuck #1; I know the solution for that. But I would really love any advice you can give me for #2 and #3.
Also, do you have any tips for making main characters who are fundamentally different from one another? Apparently all the “unique” characters I’ve been brainstorming don’t sound that unique to an outside observer.
Thanks for posting! This blog is my go-to resource when I need a quick tip on something I’m struggling with 🙂
I had difficulty learning to transition too. I suggest just skipping to the next scene and trying to throw in a few allusions. It may be bad at first, but it takes practice.
Thanks. I’ll give it a shot.
Because it’s easier to make suggestions about someone else’s problems than to deal with one’s own…
For Stuck #2 my first thought would be to see if I could move the sword training into the character’s backstory. If that fails, I’d ask “What else is happening during the year of sword training?” If the answer is, or can be made to be, “nothing much,” then I’d put the one-year skip between two chapters, possibly with book-end scenes or descriptions for the start and ending of the training.
If there are significant other things happening during the year, then I might grit my teeth and put in a sword-training subplot anyway.
For Stuck #3 I’d sit down and “brainstorm” or “noodle,” putting down various possible and impossible plans and details until I hopefully came up with a set that satisfied me.
For making characters different, my first thought is to look at and list the ways the characters *have* to be alike due to sharing a common setting, and then use that to find places where they *don’t* have to be alike.
I second the chapter-break suggestion for Stuck #2. In fact, I would consider putting in a stronger division. If the other chapter breaks generally do not involve a large time skip, then jumping a year will feel wrong. So I would consider writing Part 1 ending with the future-swordswoman getting accepted for training, possibly with a short scene showing her being nervous, unfit, inept, whatever. Then I would open Part 2 a year later with the swordswoman demonstrating competence before heading off to resume the plot. (The main downside is that the book is now split into parts and you need a suitably important division point to put Part 3 and possibly Part 4 depending on length, but those *don’t* have to be time skips.)
This assumes that nothing seriously important happens during the year of sword-training, or at least nothing that can’t be treated as backstory for Part 2.
For #2, maybe you could cover it in a few paragraphs about all the sweat, all the muscles becoming more taut, all the I-can-run-a-mile-now sort of thing, illustrated with the trainer barely having to exert themselves at the start of the protagonist’s training, then smiling and giving a compliment at the six month mark – then losing a practice bout after a year. Maybe?
Wow, thank you, everybody!
Having attempted Mrs. Catelli’s method, I am now on track to make some decent progress on Stuck #2.
To be honest, I’ve never enjoyed reading or writing training sequences, even thoroughly summarized training sequences, and nothing particularly important happens during the year I’m skipping (to the main character’s knowledge, anyway; lots of things are going on elsewhere in the world that she gets to deal with later), so I ended Part One just before sword training begins and began Part Two just as the “things happening elsewhere” reconnect with the MC’s life. It turned out a lot smoother than I was expecting, and as I went my backbrain handed me a character and said, “Give this guy a redemption arc,” which has turned out to make everything else easier.
My immediate thought was, “If the skill is developed but only mentioned after a chapter break, will it have the weight it needs as an important development?”
My thought immediately after that was, “I don’t know, actually.” (So please don’t take this as criticism, it’s me demonstrating one of my many limitations.) Maybe our hostess can write something on that, sometime…
It’s implied that the character is going to be learning the skill over the next year *before* the break actually happens, and then when we pick up the story a year later, she’s at least passably good with her blade. Not an expert or a master by any means (that isn’t possible after just a year, I think; I spent four years learning karate and was still pretty much useless afterward), but good enough to hold her own and defend herself when she needs to. Will that give it enough weight? No idea. But I figure that it’s better than springing it on the reader in Part 2 without any background of, “Oh, and this character is going to spend the next year in training, so when we come back…”
My usual approach to #2 is to just ignore it for the nonce and write the scenes that come after, planning on going back and “filling in the gaps” later.
This does work, but it turns into a lot *more* work, because inevitably, things happen when I’ve filled in the gaps that affect what follows, so everything after that point needs to be rewritten to a greater or lesser extent.
(The above makes it sound as though my writing process is neater and more organized than it actually is. I tend to write unattached scenes, little gems, as it were, and only later figure out what order they go in when I string them onto what the story structure has evolved into to turn them into a necklace or whatever. My subconscious seems to know how it will all play out, because it does–I just wish it would talk to me more about what was going on so I could feel less lost in the process.)