Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  making the villain more heinous. Depict him as sociopathic, cold-hearted, and even sadistic. Position the villain’s intended outcome as inherently selfish. Avoid moustache twirling. The villain at least needs to be less than conflicted about what he’s up to, if he’s not having a great time doing it.

  making the ticking clock louder and the obstacles more ominous. Assign a deadline for what the hero needs to accomplish. Let the reader sense the ticking of that clock by showing how the hero feels and responds to the pressure and anxiety of time running out.

  All of these will contribute to dramatic tension and the effect of conflict in the story. If you can isolate these essences and focus on strengthening them in your revision, then your story will have a second life. It will be resurrected.

  You can now see how important it is for the writer to fully understand the nature of critical feedback and the places to look for these weaknesses. Defending a story on these issues (i.e., resisting the feedback) can be as much an indicator of naïveté, ignorance, and hubris as it is an injustice.

  Feedback is a gift. Developing a story sense that can sniff out these weaknesses is a weapon. Give yourself this gift, arm yourself properly, and watch your story sensibility soar.

  Thematic Weight

  Theme Defined

  Theme is a bit of a wild card in the writing conversation. Some confuse it with concept, others with propaganda. Theme can indeed be conceptual (such as hypocrisy in a politician or age discrimination against a hero nearing retirement), but that’s fine; it’s actually a good source of conceptual energy. Theme is a manifested connection between the story—its world, its culture, its politics, its moral compass, its focus on an arena or issue or element of the human condition or existence—and reality. For example, a love story set in a spaceship can have themes on love, marriage, sex, and morality (yes, multiple themes are not only kosher, they can be impossible to avoid). Then again, a cop drama set in a big city can seem virtually themeless. It’s the author’s job to make a story relevant, to artfully parallel a theme or hot-button issue with the reader’s reality, causing him to reflect, to discuss, even to simply notice.

  The theme of The Help is racial prejudice. It also touches on themes of class struggles, cultural influence, and sexism.

  The theme of Gone Girl is the treacherous landscape of marriage, pure and simple. Marriage is hard. Sometimes it’s dark and horrible. Psychotic people have a hard time with marriage. That’s what the book asks us to think about.

  Nelson DeMille’s fabulous novel Up Country takes his war veteran hero back to Vietnam thirty years later to investigate a crime for the U.S. government. It has themes on the cruelty of war and the impropriety of the Vietnam War in particular, midlife career crisis, love and family, and forgiveness. This is an example of a theme virtually writing itself. You simply can’t write about Vietnam without the cruelties and inequities of that theater bubbling up through the narrative.

  Notice how those themes cut across several categories. Things that happen. The nature of entities and cultures and people. The scope of a moral compass. The issue isn’t what your theme is. Frankly, themes will emerge from a story without any effort whatsoever on your part. If you have characters who exist in the world, who interact and live within microcosms (cultures, societies, and organizations), all with certain assumptions, settings, and parameters, then theme happens. It will be there.

  This is often the case in deep genre stories. They unfold according to the tropes of the genre—romance is a great example—without any effort whatsoever on the author’s part to say something thematic in the narrative. “Love is hard,” even “love sucks,” will be a hard message to avoid in a love story, because, as in any genre, the nuclear core source of energy in a romance is conflict. And conflict is almost always thematic.

  Then again, there are stories where the theme is intentional—the story has an agenda, a point of view to sell you. The novels of Jodi Picoult are a case in point. She’s created an entire cottage industry by fictionalizing recent events and going deep to examine the sociological and psychological genesis of what led to these events.

  In her 2008 novel Nineteen Minutes, we meet the two young perpetrators who would end up shooting and killing nine students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. The thematic question was never the right or wrong of their actions but rather the social pressures and cruelties perpetrated upon those boys, and the response by parents, teachers, and the various institutions that define that sociology. Dramatic tension was never the engine here, since we all know how the tragic events of the shooting unfolded. And Picoult never needs to comment on the equity of those episodes from the past, as this approach is one of the few that licenses episodic narrative, which in this case is in context to the unfolding of a too-familiar present day plot. She simply hits the “play” button and allows the horror to rain down upon us, firing the furnace of our own outrage and allowing us to sublimate it all into our own life experiences. There isn’t a moment of preaching or journalistic documentary anywhere within her story.

  Pulling that off, of course, is pure art … the art of thematic writing at its finest.

  Theme may or may not have been a factor in the rejection of your story. If you are writing within a deep genre—mystery, romance, fantasy, or science fiction—odds are that it wasn’t a factor. Other niches, however—literary fiction, historical fiction, adult contemporary—are richest when readers are immersed in a thematic context that allows them to feel the same pressures as the characters.

  When theme surfaces as a deal breaker, it is usually because the writer tried too hard to sell a polarizing and controversial point of view, to recruit readers to one side or another. When overselling theme trumps logic and dramatic effectiveness, it’ll get you tossed.

  In a story I coached, the author had his hero gun down senators who didn’t align with the author’s political beliefs and then had the Supreme Court pardon the killer because, darn it, those senators deserved to die.

  Theme can kill you, too, if you’re too transparent.

  Look at the themes in your story. Is there a particular theme about which you feel strongly? Something you care deeply about and hoped to make a statement about for your readers? If you’re writing about love or politics or religion or other aspects of human existence, then your story probably contains more themes than you even know. If you’re trying to rewrite history, or if you’re messing with laws of nature or predicting future agendas, then you need to be conscious of what you’re doing in terms of manipulating the reader toward a specific point of view. Dan Brown walked the line in The Da Vinci Code, but it worked in his favor: Of the 80 million people who bought the book, a massive percentage were angry and resentful of how Brown challenged their personal belief systems. No doubt there were those who bought the book just to see why everyone was so upset, but that’s certainly not the optimal narrative strategy for any story. Getting the reader emotionally engaged is always the smarter bet.

  Make that choice at your own peril. It’s a fine line.

  Chapter 8

  Narrative Bodybuilding Part Two

  Story Architecture

  By definition, stories unfold in a certain order. Publishable ones, that is. Therefore, we can conclude that if a story is unpublishable, it’s likely because it lacks that certain order.

  That order is known as structure. For some, it’s the most terrifying word in all of fiction. For others—especially those who cast off old, limiting beliefs—it can be the salvation of a story.

  Every story has structure, for better or worse. Its presence is never in question—only its effectiveness, clarity, and power. To leave those critical variables to chance, or at the mercy of your own sensibilities, is like trying to do brain surgery on a hunch, when proven science is available to ensure that the patient lives to see another day.

  Story Structure Defined

  Story structure, which is a subset of “story architecture,” is the order
in which narrative exposition unfolds. The classic form of story structure shows a story unfolding in three “acts”—a setup, confrontation, and resolution. Some story gurus and analysts expand that model to provide a deeper contextual definition, but nearly every viable model begins with or is drawn from the three-act structure. All structures arise from an intuitive flow that consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end, and all of these structures attempt to assign meaning and context to all three (or more) of those sequential segments.

  “Story architecture,” on the other hand, is the integration of sequential structure with the more aesthetic elements of character arc, dramatic tension, and reader engagement, the sum of which constitutes the full presentation of the story to its reader. This analogous term arises from architecture itself as the core essence of the design and construction of buildings. It is no accident that the word building is synonymous with the word structure, which are interchangeable terms for describing a house or a large dwelling. Architecture includes the shapes and artful blending of materials, colors, and images that attach to the core structure itself.

  Writers fall into three categories where structure is concerned.

  1. Organic Writers

  These writers unspool their stories organically, completely relying on their current level of intuitive story sensibility (for some, this manifests as guesswork), which is often informed by their experience as readers of stories and viewers of films. They may never have heard of or glimpsed a story structure model or paradigm before. If you’re in this camp, you get a sense of how stories unfold and what goes where by reading novels and seeing movies, and then following your gut to allow the story to unfold as it spills from your mind through a keyboard or pen onto the page.

  As I’ve said before, this is a common, if risky, way to work. It’s like thinking you can repair a toilet because you’ve been sitting on one for all these years—many have discovered the folly of following that hunch. Sometimes the author’s sense of structure works as a guiding instinct, but more often it’s problematic, resulting in a complete mess.

  That writer from the earlier example with the First Plot Point squarely in the middle of his draft? He was in this category. He was organic, and lost. While his premise was strong, his sensibility ultimately failed him.

  2. Structural Story Designers

  These are writers who understand and abide by certain principles of story structure, most of which are built upon and around that three-act dramatic paradigm. Screenwriters in particular live and die by this model, to the extent that script readers will reject a work if the First Plot Point hasn’t shown up by page 30. What’s interesting about this approach is that the structure of a story that works, that will find an agent and/or a publisher and ultimately attract readers, is the exact same one for organic writers and structural story designers. The same structural flow—setup, confrontation, resolution, however you break it down into even more finite and clearly defined parts—is what any story will look like … when it works.

  The criteria for structure is the same—exactly the same—for organic writers and for those who design their stories. Which means that organic writers, using multiple drafts driven by feedback and their own state of story sensibility, are moving toward that form and function from square one, molding their story toward that end format. Story designers begin with the format and install their unfolding story into it.

  The difference is one of process, not outcome. In a published book (at least a traditionally published book, as improperly structured self-published books do find their way into the market), nothing other than the author’s knowledge of structure, which may or may not be informed, vets the story.

  There are many versions of this principle, mine included, circulating within the writing conversation. But upon close examination they are all closely aligned with a basic flow and architecture. All of them send the story to the very same structural destination. Some models break that structure down into more concise subsets with four or more acts. Don’t be fooled, though—the contextual flow of the story is the same across most of these models.

  Writers in this camp follow these structures because they make sense to them, they work, and they are evident in successfully published works and produced films. Structure isn’t something you invent but rather something you can interpret and apply to your own premise and character needs.

  3. Deniers

  Finally, there are some who reject the notion of structure altogether. These writers, though fully aware of viable structural models, advocate allowing the story to spill out of their heads onto the page and trusting their story senses to optimize the outcome. If this sounds like the organic writer’s process, that’s accurate … but only through the first couple of drafts. Enlightened organic writers—and there are many, some you’ve heard of (Stephen King, Diana Gabaldon, Jeffery Deaver, and so on)—know the story isn’t done until it aligns with the principle-modeled flow of structure, even if they refuse to call it by that name. Deniers—those who don’t know or reject the principles of structure—label their drafts final when it suits them, sometimes with major structural flaws still glaringly in place.

  I see this all the time in my coaching work; it’s one of the most common sources of story weakness and failure. Perhaps you already see yourself in one of these three categories and already sense that the way your story unfolds structurally is where it took a dive.

  The denial method is confusing and paradoxical on several counts.

  First, those who use it are actually preaching about a preference of process rather than an alternate structural format for a finished, polished story—even though, in their defense of process, they are saying the opposite by declaring structure is formulaic. (There are many formats, but upon closer examination you’ll see that the variance is a degree of depth; all viable forms have the three- or four-act structure as its basis.) This is a naïve and inaccurate perception, by the way (if you doubt this, use the classic structural paradigm and test it against best-selling novels and produced films; you’ll see it in action every time). Spilling words from their heads onto the page is their preferred method of searching for their story. It’s how they get their premise on paper. And because many of these nonbelievers (some of whom believe the characters are telling them what to do or that they are getting guidance from some cloud-dwelling muse with a knack for fiction) have experience and some degree of story sense, it turns out well for them.

  Don’t be fooled by these writers. As I said, their successful stories almost always end up aligning with the very architectural models they reject.

  The first goal of revising your story’s structure is to understand which of these three groups you fall within.

  Your story bears witness to this, but don’t look there to find out. Rather, go back to your process and acknowledge what structural context you used or rejected. If you didn’t align with a proven model, or if you drank the Kool-Aid and simply wrote what you felt in the moment, chances are that this is the number-one reason why your story didn’t work as well as intended. Your revision work will focus on bringing your story flow into a keen alignment with the principles of story structure.

  This circles back to an earlier point. There are two categories of story failure: The story isn’t good enough, or the execution wasn’t up to snuff. Messing with, ignoring, or being ignorant of basic story structure principles easily transforms great premises into defective manuscripts.

  Chances are high that your revision will focus right here, at the structural level.

  Find another process.

  This is revision. It’s no longer about what seemed fun, what felt good, or what Stephen King says. You’re in a pit here, one into which King has likely never fallen, and you need to dig your way out of it. Story structure, as defined by proven principles that millions of novels and screenplays have adhered to (most very rigorously) may be your best hope and your strongest tool to fix it. My advice, culled from coaching hundreds of clients
who have sent me structurally broken stories, is this: Learn the model. Call it three-act structure or four-part narrative flow (my preference), but they are essentially the same thing.

  The model I teach and apply for story analysis defines a flow of four different contexts—the mission of that quartile of your narrative—across the entire arc of the story. This actually shows you what to write and where to put it. When you have determined your core story, this model is deliriously liberating. You are shown what level of exposition and transparency to apply to specific parts of the story, as well as what each transitional milestone needs to accomplish and where it should appear. (A transitional milestone is a scene or a single moment within a scene when the whole story changes, such as when the ship hits the iceberg in the movie Titanic.)

  Here is what that four-part structure looks like when presented graphically:

  Many writers have told me that the understanding and adoption of this as a story-flow paradigm, as a guideline through the maze of story options, as a means of helping decide what to write and where to put it, is the single most empowering thing they’ve ever experienced in their writing journey. They sometimes tell me this after decades of wandering around in a forest of less concise options, one of which is to pay no attention to structure at all.

  To help you navigate this four-part flow by adding specific context-driven missions that fall within them, see the list that follows, which lists the various story models endorsed by some of today’s most well-known story teachers and gurus. Noted screenwriting guru Art Holcomb provided this list, and it’s an invaluable tool. Note how none of these writing mentors is in disagreement. Rather, any differences here are matters of specificity and degree.