No Stone Left Unturned

DESIGNING THE STORY

The music is so beautiful … I can hardly believe I wrote it myself. -George Gershwin

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TRUCKERS AND ROAD BUILDERS

The first step in learning how to design a story is to realize how the skill of an audience member –at best– gives the writer an ear for what might seem right or wrong once the story design is finished – but almost nothing about how to design a story from scratch. This is because creating a story and consuming it as an audience member are two entirely different endeavors.

A member of the audience is like a truck driver taking in the roadway ahead. As he drives along, he is unaware of culverts embedded in the road grade, and he absorbs little about how the land was altered to make way for this road, or even very much about the great steel structures and concrete foundations supporting its lengthy bridge spans. He sees almost nothing of these features because the driver cares almost entirely about how the road carries him ahead to where he wants to go.

On the other hand, the story designer is like a civil engineer who focuses on how roads are made. Her concern starts with how it must serve the needs of those who will use it long before the first travelers embark. As the engineer reviews and develops her design she wonders if the bridges are high enough, or if she’s placed enough drainage near desert washes, or if the paving material here and there is really suitable for the weather.

Both our trucker and our civil engineer are highway experts in their own ways, but the expertise needed to drive atop a finished roadway is not the same as the expertise needed for its design and construction.

To write a book is not the same thing as to read a book. To make a movie is not the same thing as to watch a movie. To design a story for a computer game is not the same thing as to play a computer game. As a member of the audience we may distinguish the difference between good and bad storytelling, and we may have all sorts of opinions about the plot and character development — just like the trucker who can distinguish every bump in the road. But that does not make us storytellers any more than a bumpy road creates civil engineers.

One could read every story in literature, view every movie ever made, and play every computer game ever built, and little would be known about the underlying craft of these products. We would have our opinions and tastes, and our experience would show us examples of what we might like to pursue and avoid in our own writing styles — but so far we’ve only seen a finished product and nothing about how it was created.

So before we go any further, I’ll explain how to design a story from the bedrock up.

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DECIDING WHERE TO GO

The most important factor in a design, whether a story or anything else, is the goal. The goal might be to create a flashy sports car with lots of performance. Or it might be to build a truck with a practical amount of cargo space. What is the point of a sports car? To draw attention. What is the point of a truck? To haul stuff. What is the point of your story? Whatever premise you wish to prove.

When I begin to write a story, I forget about settings, plot lines, cute dialog, massive explosions, robots, and engaging characters — all of that comes later. I focus only on where I want to go with my design, and this decision becomes the central guideline for all subsequent decisions as I create the details.

Just as every decision about a sports car design is done with the objective of creating a flashy automobile in the end, and just as every component of a truck is designed so that a practical cargo-hauling vehicle is assembled in the factory, the pieces of a story are selected and assembled with the premise in mind. Anything that is weak or misaligned is replaced or discarded. Anything that is left unconnected is either tied in or tossed out. If I stick to my goal I will make my point with the audience almost as a byproduct of having included only those elements which support my chosen premise, while removing those that don’t.

How do you ultimately prove your premise?

You decide where you want to go and work like mad to drive that point home in every step along the way. You remind yourself of the goal when creating, editing, and rewriting. You never stop thinking about the premise and use it like putty knife to apply the story elements while at the same carving away loose ends and ill-fitting scenes and irrelevant dialogue and everything else that does not fit.

In the end, if you stay on-track, there will be little doubt why each part of the story is there and where the whole story is headed.

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PARAMETERS

Starting with your premise, the process of writing a story is one of continuing refinement by defining and working within the constraints of your design parameters.

Parameters are the accepted limits placed on a design. The written form of these parameters are called design specifications. For a truck it might be cargo capacity, transmission ease-of-use, and “manly” styling. For a sports car, it might be cornering ability or sound system performance. Parameters are not the actual design decisions, but rather the questions you are constantly asking when making those decisions. For example: How fast should the car be able to go? — rather than saying exactly how much horsepower it needs.

Here are the five most important design parameter questions to answer when designing a story…

What do you want to prove?

Who would you like to see in the story?

Where would you like it to happen?

When would you like this story to take place?

What is the single most obvious way to prove the premise?

Here’s what I mean…

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WHAT DO YOU WANT TO PROVE?

I’ve talked a lot about how the audience must be able to find the premise as the story telling experience unfolds.

But how do we come up with a premise?

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the premise can be any statement of fact — even something not true in the real world. It should also be a statement that galvanizes the thoughts of the writer — something that is really annoying or truly interesting. Some of my personal favorites are along the lines of power and how it corrupts normal people.

Often your favorite premises will be those you have seen before, and this is perfectly fine since just about every idea for a premise has been covered at one time or another. In fact, some authorities will argue that every premise has been written already — so the trouble to cough up something truly unique may be a wasted effort. Many fine stories have been written based on a fairly ordinary-sounding premise like “good will overcome evil, ” or “decency can prevail even in the midst of horror.” Just say what you want to say, and don’t worry if somebody else has tried to make this point before.

If the idea of creating a premise seems foreign, you can start to get a feel for this by looking for the premise in the stories you have been experiencing lately. Try to say out loud what the story is trying to say (not a synopsis of what is happening). A good story will broadcast it over and over in many different ways — like in the movie Men in Black — There really are aliens on the Earth and everything we can read about them in the tabloids is true. Very often a character will actually state the premise at some point, like when K stops to read a tabloid headline and in all seriousness deadpans how the tabloids are “the most authoritative reporting on the planet.”

Another way to hear a premise is listening to people who speak passionately on a topic. People like this will often spin their premise into a catch phrase — like Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream…” speech, where the point is how he believes that his dream will soon become a reality.

Pick something. Try it on for size. Perhaps even start sketching out some ideas for characters and settings to help. But don’t start to write anything concrete until you have written the premise in ink and taped to the side of your computer screen. Remember — your premise will be the anchor and reference point for every character, setting, idea, and action in your story. Stay with creating your premise as long as it takes, because once you know what you want to prove you will have a guide and filter for the whole story — and based on this you’ll properly select what belongs, and discard what does not fit.

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WHO IS INVOLVED IN THE STORY?

Each main character needs to start with a motto for life — a central guiding principle (really their own personal premise).

Here are nine types of people to get you started…

1. The perfectionist — Being right is most important.

2. The over-giver — Making other people happy is most important.

3. The performer — Image is everything.

4. The reclusive artist — Trust no one.

5. The inventor — Trust no one else’s ideas.

6. The servant — Do what you are told, that will keep you safe.

7. The fun-lover — I do what I want, and I am good at what I enjoy.

8. The bully — I am the boss.

9. The accommodator — I bend to fit in.

Characters have a history — which means sketching a background story describing the most important events in their past. These can leak into the “real” story when needed, though are most useful for painting the character clearly in the writer’s own mind. You should see each character to the extent that you know how they dress, who they might vote for, where they might shop, and what rubs them the wrong way. Construct your characters in ways that intrigue you — ways that make them unique and interesting and larger than than life verging on the superhuman — giving them the capacity to become great characters once revealed to their fullest extent in your story.

It takes a little practice to create realistic and somewhat larger-than-life characters complete with backstories. Yet not so hard once you understand how the world is full of useful building blocks. Many of us have worked for a tyrannical or bumbling boss. Most of us have clear memories of our parents and grandparents – or insane uncle – and we’ve had the chance to see how our friends interacted with their families and our co-workers with each other. We all know crazy, quirky, manic, annoying, weird, stupid, and brilliant people in real life — these are the building blocks for your characters.

Go to the mall. Go to a gospel church. Go to where people hang out, and listen in. But don’t go to the movies or read any stories to find your characters — these are not real people, and you’ll only succeed –at best– in making a very imperfect copy of what somebody else has already created. Instead build your own characters from the intriguing pieces of the real people you meet in the real world — they’re out there. Believe me.

Here’s one way to do this in detail…

When you see some character trait or mannerism or catchy way of speaking, make a mental note, then jot down that down as soon as you can. After several hundred of these snapshots notes, grab a handful and read each one out loud, one after the other without pausing — then ad lib a sketch about some person that might include these pieces — who they are, what they do for a living, who they live with, etc. It sounds nuts at first — and may see hollow at first — but push ahead anyway, digging through the pile to fill in the missing pieces, or use these to take your sketch in a whole new direction. Sometimes this creates great characters. Often it’s a massive joke that goes nowhere in the end. But keep trying, and keep adding to your note pile. Eventually you’ll come up with some amazing results.

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WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE IT TO HAPPEN?

Once the premise is set and you have your main characters sketched out, the next most important decision is the physical setting. Although we have pieced some characters together, we can not effectively pin down who these people are until we have a sense for where the story will take place. A military setting might infer a tendency towards macho behavior, whereas a university setting might steer the characters toward a veneer of intellectual reserve.

The premise is one guide for deciding on the setting, and the collection of characters you have in mind is the other. If the story is a morality play and your characters seem interested in the dilemmas that arise when hard choices are needed, then perhaps a religious setting might be effective. If it is “the good individual versus the evil empire,” perhaps an authoritarian world is best. Keep in mind the idea of the crucible as discussed in Part 1, and try out lots of smaller settings — places you’ve read about in the newspapers and online, and especially consider places you know well from personal experience. Don’t just say “Africa.” Rather, try pinning it down to a tight locality such as “the Orthodox Jewish section of Omaha, Nebraska,” or “a fishing village on Kodiak Island, Alaska.”

Once you begin to have an idea for a setting — go there, or at least go to someplace as similar as possible in order to sniff the air and listen to the sounds. This is the world of your story, and as the writer you will need to be a sort of demigod of the place — knowing more about it than anyone in the story — because your characters can only occupy the space that you create for them.

The details…

In the same way that you need to keep notes on different types of people, you should also start keeping notes on interesting places. The best settings are often combinations of two or more real places, which give a sense of reality without creating the distraction over whether or not the place is depicted correctly in your story. Also, as with designing your characters, do not copy setting ideas from existing stories. You will only create a second-rate setting, since it would be based on your limited interpretation of somebody else’s imagination.

Make your snapshot notes about real places, drop them on your desk, and rummage around until a picture starts to form — then write like crazy about this place until you know where everything is — from the church clock tower that strikes the hours 12 minutes late to the bakery where someone always seems to forget about the smoldering pies in the oven — thus filling the morning air with the smoke of burning apples.

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WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE THIS STORY TO TAKE PLACE?

Another refinement in the parameters of your story design is the decision about when the story will happen. The “when” parameter is the period of time covered, particularly whether this time is in the past, the future, or contemporaneous. “When” also includes the time before the story — the backstory– and the overall environment as a result. Many apocalyptic settings have a “when” in the near future after someone has screwed up the world as we know it now. In this sense, the “when” is that time in the fictional future as well as those events that lead up to such a dismal circumstance.

Deciding when the story will happen is a matter of how far away from the present time period is necessary to allow for the premise to be proven. A story about human passions, or conflict over money, power, romance, etc. can happen very well in the present age, so there is no need for delving into the past or inventing a fictional future. On the other hand, if you are trying to say something about horrendous consequences for mankind, it might be better to select some truly dark time in history, or an even darker time in a terrible future.

The advantages of a present-day time period include familiarity with the material and less effort diverted into replicating the past or inventing a future. On the other hand, the present day offers few unique settings that have not already been explored thoroughly. Ultimately, when to set the story depends on where the writer’s expertise and interests lie. A historian may have no problem creating an ancient setting, whereas a journalist might be more comfortable sticking with the present-day — and someone with a technological bent might feel quite comfortable inventing a setting in the future.

One thing is for certain — the audience is full of experts on history, current events, and technology. So whatever time you do pick, it’s wise to do a lot of research and consult with a few experts in the area, because few design elements can spoil a story faster than too many glaring inconsistencies about where the story is happening.

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WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST OBVIOUS WAY TO PROVE THE PREMISE?

This question is really the first tool I use to figure out what happens in the story. Once I have my premise, my roughly drawn main characters, and a tentative location and time, I start to sketch some tenetive routes for the story. Of course, much more could be written on how to generate the story events than what I say here… yet I have to start someplace, so here we go…

Remember the temperature curve? (See Part 3.) In the second half of the story, as the protagonist begins to take on his nemesis, he will fail along the way except for the climactic sequence of events at the end of the story. This is where I start — right in the middle of the main conflict.

Keeping in mind how you’re trying to prove the premise, and using your fabricated characters and settings, write 10 to 20 brief scenes or sequences of scenes, each of which are intended to be the big climactic end of the story. Don’t worry if these are almost the same or vastly different — the objective now is to get the ball rolling so that you have some material to work with. Most of this will wind up in the trash, so don’t go hog-wild with details. Just write a page or two in each attempt.

Next, set aside all but the best five or six of these sequences, then rate them in order of strongest to least powerful. After this, place the second strongest sequences at the midpoint of the story (this will be rewritten to be the midpoint crisis), then lay out the rest in ascending order of temperature all the way to the end, placing the very strongest sequence last. Then, at the conclusion of each climatic scene, show how each attempt fails in some way — how the protagonist gets tripped up or outmaneuvered by the antagonist — except for the very last attempt where the protagonist finally wins.

Of course, you have just made a huge mess, since none of these scenes connect. So now rewrite each of these starting with the one that seems farthest out of place — change what happens, but not the level of intensity, to better fit the other scenes. And keep rewriting these sequences until they line up fairly well.

Next, have a look at possible beginnings for the story — something that puts the characters into an initial bind — like the way McCoy runs into the time machine, leaving Kirk and the landing party trapped (see Part 3 for more on this). Once you’ve placed the protagonist and main supporting characters into their initial bind, write scenes showing them coming to grips with the predicament and struggling to formulate a plan to deal with their understanding of the antagonist at that point. Let them slowly get a handle on the exact nature of the dilemma and conflict all the way up to the midpoint of the story, then bring them face to face with the midpoint crisis — the realization of what they are actually up against and the choice to persevere or quit — thereby tying the first half of the story into the second with its five or six sequences of growing conflicts that you’ve already roughed out.

Before you can say you have a rough draft, you’ll also need to write earlier scenes to introduce and splash the main characters showing their personal premises and those attributes we will need to believe about them in later scenes. And then lastly, create a prologue sequence — the very first scene in the story — which tells the whole story in a nutshell. Don’t bother with an epilogue for now, since at this stage you’ll have no idea yet what loose ends might be desperately hanging around for an answer until your story is nearly into its final form.

Of course, you’ll still have a giant mess for a long time, but now the framework is intact and properly lined up for the details to come — as well as underpinning needed to hold the story intact as it endures the detialed dialoh-writing, scene deveopment, rewriting and polishing that lies ahead. Everything needs work — but having it now hanging on a proper framework, you’ll to get into the details without worrying about whether or not some major structural element is missing.

It’s all there. It just needs a lot of effort and dedication. But like a bulldozer clearing the land, you now have the surveying in place and know where to plow ahead.

That’s where we’ll pick up next time…

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Next Time: Selecting the Details

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