Beating the Story

by Robin D. Laws

  If, because you’re trying to obey a style rule, you find yourself writing a longer scene than you otherwise would, or taking the long way around to make a point, discard that rule. Whoever sold it to you cares more about superficial order than economical storytelling.

  Having said all that, I do strongly endorse one standard piece of advice about style. Put off struggling with it until at least your second draft. Nothing kills writing momentum during the initial creation phase than getting stuck on a bum phrase and trying to hammer it into submission. It’s normal and natural to rephrase your sentences as you write them. But when one passage in particular starts kicking your ass, let it go. Come back to it with a fresh mind on later passes through the piece, when you have the foundations of the story in place and can focus mostly on fine-tuning your expression. When I hit a rocky section of text, I use the highlighter function in my word processing program of choice, to mark it out for a later grim reckoning.

  About a half of the time, it turns out that I was overthinking my way into an unreasoning hatred of the passage in question. With refreshed perspective it turns out to be either perfectly fine as is or can easily be fixed with a minor tweak I just couldn’t see the first time around.

  The other half requires tongs and a blowtorch.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s get back to the real questions of the first draft stage.

  Building Dramatic Scenes

  Dramatic scenes almost invariably employ the same basic structure.

  The petitioner makes a request of the granter.

  The granter resists the petition.

  The petitioner presses the point, either:adopting a different emotional tactic, allowing the scene to continue

  or repeating the same failed tactic, leading the granter to conclusively refuse, ending the scene

  If the scene is still continuing, the granter either:resists again, shifting emotional tactics in response to the petitioner’s new tactic , allowing the scene to continue, returning to 3

  or concedes, granting the petition, ending the scene in the petitioner’s favor

  Requests, especially in the early parts of a dramatic story, tend to consist of both:

  text, what the character literally asks for

  and subtext, the deeper impulse for emotional reward behind the petition

  Text and Subtext

  For example, when Holly wants to look at the cut on Tom’s hand, the text is, “Hey let me take a look at that cut,” and the subtext is, “Let me put myself in the position of caregiver, assuming power over you in a way you can’t deny without seeming ungrateful.”

  In some genres, characters make subtext into text, blatantly proclaiming their desires. Soap operas, seeking high emotion while remaining very easy to understand even while distracted, use this technique. Sophisticated psychological dramas may show the characters moving past subtext into a real discussion of their desires only in their climactic or pivotal moments.

  Tactics

  Emotional tactics describe the way characters appeal to others to get what they want. They arise from the characters’ personalities, histories, and often their dramatic poles. If you have envisioned your characters as internally consistent beings engaging in the sort of behavior you know from life, their tactics will come to you as you write, without having to think of them in these analytical terms.

  If you’re stumped for a likely tactic, either from the petitioner while asking for something or the granter for refusing it, you may be bending your characters into a dramatic conflict even though it makes no sense based on what you’ve established. In other words, you’re contriving their situation and writing a scene you should abandon in favor of an alternative that better fits your piece’s inner logic.

  In rare cases, the conflict might make perfect sense. However, you’re temporarily unable to see how your characters ought to express it without repeating themselves, as we mostly do in real life arguments. You’ll almost always find it best to leave a placeholder in the text for now and wait till your idling brain solves the problem for you. But if you need an idea now, dammit, a look at a list of emotional tactics inspire your character’s next move:

  bargaining

  browbeating

  bullying

  citing authority

  debating

  deflecting

  delaying

  demoralizing

  distracting

  embracing

  jollying

  placating

  playing dumb

  pleading

  reassuring

  scolding

  soothing

  threatening

  Hitting the Poles

  For strongest impact in dramatic exchanges, have your characters use tactics that exploit or arise from protagonists’ dramatic poles.

  When you want characters to believably accept petitions the audience wants or expects them to reject, depict the petitioner making an appeal to the very core of the granter—to the granter’s dramatic poles.

  If a character’s poles have already been established as freedom vs. responsibility, the audience might not want him to agree to stay home and protect the ungrateful townsfolk instead of going off to enjoy his life. But when the wise grandmother convinces him to remain by appealing to his responsibility, we understand why, and accept it as a credible choice, if not desirable.

  Often a character’s dramatic poles consist of a strong state and a vulnerable one. When we care about a protagonist, we take it especially hard to see the vulnerable state brought to the fore or taken advantage of.

  When a character whose poles are genius vs. self-doubt receives a dressing down from a forbidding loved one and crumbles emotionally, that down arrow hits with enhanced impact. The character has suffered not just any old emotional setback, but the one we have been most primed to fear.

  What Is That In Beats?

  A dramatic scene can be marked as consisting of one, two, or many beats, depending on how thinly you choose to slice them. To avoid cluttering the map, I rarely see any practical reason to note them as anything other than a single beat, with the outgoing arrows showing whether the viewer is likely to take heart from the outcome, or react with anxiety.

  Theoretically, though, each scene consists of two moments:

  the petitioner makes the pitch

  the granter rebuffs or accepts

  If we sympathize more with the granter than the petitioner, we feel anxiety in the first moment, as we worry that the granter might give in. If we sympathize with the petitioner but assume the granter will rebuff, we likewise feel fear for our focus character.

  On the other hand, if we sympathize with the petitioner and think the pitch likely to succeed, we feel hope. The second half works as an up note if we sympathize with the petitioner and the petition is granted or we sympathize with the granter, the petition is refused, and we think it unlikely that the granter will suffer an ill consequence as a result. Failing that, it registers as a down note.

  This breakdown of one beat into two increases rigor but is probably of little practical use to the writer. You may feel that with key dramatic scenes you want to notate both of the two key beats, to fully capture the emotional direction of a pivotal moment.

  You might find it revealing to occasionally map every shift in emotion in a key dramatic scene, for example if a satisfying version of the scene eludes you on the page. An example of this fine-grained analysis, looking at a scene from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, appears in Chapter 11.

  Building Procedural Obstacles

  When a procedural scene, in which a character confronts an external obstacle, gives you trouble, you might check to see that it contains the basic components typical of such moments.

  the hero takes note of t
he obstacle

  we see why it should be hard to overcome

  we see the likely consequences if it is not overcome

  [optional] the hero, or a foil character, tries to defeat the obstacle in an obvious or foolish way, and fails

  the hero:solves the problem in a surprising or otherwise gratifying way, ending the beat on an up note

  or fails to solve the problem, ending the beat on a down note and leading to a negative consequence

  As with Dramatic beats above, you can slice each obstacle into many beats if that assists your process. (Spoiler: it probably doesn’t.) Steps 1, 2, and 3 combine to form an introductory down beat, as we worry for the ill consequences that come with failure. Step 4, which you generally only want to use if you intend for the hero to succeed, and should ration carefully throughout your narrative, extends the suspense with another down beat. In Step 5, you end on either an up note if the hero succeeds, or a down note if the hero fails.

  The surprising or gratifying success may also function as the Reveal of a previous bit of Pipe, if you previously set up the nature of the surprise. In a classic example, the spy might use the piece of gadgetry he was previously supplied with and briefed on, but in an inventive and unexpected way.

  As someone steeped in whatever procedural genre you’ve decided to tackle, you will hardly ever need to start with a structural breakdown like this. Relevant obstacles will arise mostly full-blown. But if the execution of a particular obstacle seems lackluster, you can check the structure to see which step could use greater emphasis or a fresher angle.

  An example might go like this:

  The horror that haunts the gated community pursues our hero, Diana Chu. She sees and hears it as it chases her across a deserted playground.

  The thing is gigantic, amorphous, and gnashes its slavering jaws. On a physical level, it clearly outmatches Diana.

  We don’t need dialogue or description to imagine that it will dismember her, as it did the security guard, if it catches her.

  Diana tries to speed off on her skateboard along a bench, but she hits a device installed on it to thwart skaters (fitting the theme of an over-concerned, controlling community unwittingly breeding a monster) and goes flying.

  Landing on her back, she has a flash of inspiration as the creature nears. She coos to it like she would an adorable dog: “Who’s a good boy, huh? You’re a good boy.” Having previously figured out that the creature incarnates the community’s exaggerated fear of outsiders, Diana decides to react to it without fear.

  Yelping in confusion, the creature appears to dwindle. It turns and runs off.

  This counts as an up note for Diana, who we did not want to see eaten by the monster of the week. But now she has a new problem: how does she get rid of a monster without showing aggression toward it?

  Some procedural scenes, those depicting fights for example, present the viewer with dozens if not hundreds of back-and-forth moments of hope and fear. Every punch thrown in a fistfight could theoretically be mapped as an up or down beat. I can see no benefit from actually doing that. Unless there’s a fight choreographer in your life you’d like to annoy and confuse.

  The Dilemma

  Once enmeshed in the writing process you will find that some scenes yield to you instinctively. Their function speaks clearly to you, and you are able to execute them as desired and move on.

  That’s a good day.

  And a situation that requires no help from a writing guide.

  What you do want advice on are the scenes that seemed captivating or necessary when you first conceived of them yet utterly elude you when it comes time to move from premise to text.

  Maybe you’re writing well but feel that you’re doing poorly, because you’re tired or distracted.

  Perhaps the scene as conceived completely justifies itself as an apt and necessary part of your narrative, but you’ve lost track of why and therefore can’t see how to crack it.

  Or maybe the scene is misconceived and either needs to be reconfigured from the ground up, or discarded entirely.

  Find out which of these conditions applies by identifying the scene’s Dilemma.

  The Dilemma restates, for your reference, what you expect the reader to fear for and hope for. For added punch, write it in the first person.

  I fear that the creature will grab Diana, and hope that she gets away.

  I fear that Tom will say something to Holly that he can’t take back, and hope they make peace with one another.

  I hope that Major Kong fails to open the bomb bay doors, and fear that he will succeed.

  I fear that Llewyn’s neediness and jealousy will lead him to humiliate himself, and hope that he keeps his cool.

  Ambiguous beats are marked by contradictory hopes.

  I fear that Lady Macbeth has succumbed irrevocably to madness, and hope that she recovers—yet also, paradoxically, wonder if this might be a fitting punishment.

  I hope that Morris doesn’t break Catherine’s heart, but fear he will reconcile with her, dragging out their doomed marriage even further.

  Testing the Dilemma For Aptness

  The most likely problem with the scene is that you aren’t writing your way quickly and clearly enough to the heart of the Dilemma.

  Before you address, that, though, check to see that it doesn’t have a worse issue instead.

  It may be failing you because it doesn’t fit the broader sweep of your narrative. Ask yourself how its Dilemma relates to your:

  throughline

  core question

  boil-down

  source of disorder (iconic hero story)

  transformational arc (transformational hero story)

  dramatic poles (dramatic narrative)

  If you can’t clearly and immediately answer these questions, your inability to crack the scene showed your instincts working as desired, identifying a scene that never belonged in your story in the first place.

  Now ask what would happen to the shape of your story if you cut it. Are there any other beats on your map that won’t make literal or emotional sense without it?

  When that is the case, you’ll need to conceive a fresh scene that does pass the aptness test while also delivering those necessary moments.

  If no, snip out the whole thing. Alter your beat map (if you have one at this stage) accordingly, noting the new transitions and changes in emotional rhythm that result when the scene disappears.

  Cutting to the Dilemma

  Now that you have a scene that you’re sure passes the aptness test, for which you have crystallized its Dilemma, take another run at the scene from the top.

  Set the previous version aside in another file for the moment; you can paste the strong bits back in as you need them. But be careful not to veer away from your Dilemma in order to preserve a phrase or exchange just because it beguiles you in isolation.

  Now ask yourself: what is the absolute latest point in this scene I can start it, while:

  still clearly presenting the Dilemma

  and avoiding distracting and irrelevant questions on the part of the viewer

  Emerging writers tend to overdo the introductory passages of scenes, giving valuable real estate over to travel details, social pleasantries, location description, logistical behavior, and other bits of padding.

  You need a little of that transitional material to put the scene in context, but less than you probably think. And it’s easier to add that stuff later if you need more of it than it is to cut it out if you wrote too much, because you may have woven an important introductory bit into the cushioning.

  Resolving the Question

  Having presented the Dilemma, you then show it working out, using either the dramatic or procedural scene structures given above.

  Once the Dilemma has been r
esolved one way or the other, and the reader delivered into a state of hope or fear, you again want to cut the fat and get out of Dodge as quickly as you can.

  In some cases, you might choose to cut to a new scene before the resolution even occurs, leaving the question of whether Tom forgives Holly or Diana finds an ally on the other side of the door as a cliffhanger to come back to later. (Scenes that cut before resolution pose an unanswered question and therefore always work as down beats.)

  7

  Revision

  The revision routines of celebrated writers range from nonexistent to obsessive. Most of us aim for something in between. An over-revised manuscript can lose its energy and focus. An under-revised manuscript reveals slapdash conception and execution and is likely full of erroneusms. In short, this is where the hard, detailed work comes in.

  Assuming you find the beat analysis system useful to your process, you’ll still be referring to it as you dig in, especially as a diagnostic tool when scenes fail to achieve the life you intended for them. However, you’ll be using concepts already introduced in the previous chapters of this book, rather than any new ones specific to your first or later revision rounds.

  Whether you:

  mapped first, then wrote a first draft…

  mapped, wrote an outline and then a first draft…

  or wrote a first draft and then constructed your beat map…

  ...you are now at the stage every writing guide tells you matters most of all, the revision stage.

  Seat-of-the-pantsers, you’ve now discovered, having written it, what your story was really about. This is where you start to rip out all the stuff that your beat mapping identified as inapt. Along the way you’ll find more sections that don’t fit, and remove those as well. Having done that, you’ll look into reordering your material, and write whatever new apt sequences your story needs to make sense and realize its throughline.