Who Knows How to Write? You Do.
Do books about writing liberate us to discover ever more creative forms of expression? Or do they dictate templates that will supposedly produce success while cutting out the mucky parts of creative spelunking?
To one side we have the compendiums of wise-experience-nuggets that super-successful authors become entitled to write when they’ve entered the semi-deified stratum of ‘great writers,’ like Stephen King’s On Writing. Nearby are the inspirational books on the craft and process of writing like Natalie Goldbergs’s Writing Down the Bones or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Move left-brain to find more technical manuals such as James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure or The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne.
The dispute between worshipers of creativity and engineers of structure rages on. Wild man hardboiled author Jim Thompson supposedly said, ‘There is only one plot–things are not as they seem.’ Thompson worked on a couple films with Stanley Kubrick, The Killing and Paths of Glory. Kubrick is quoted as saying anything that can be written or thought can be filmed, cheering for the wide open unpoliced world of creativity. On the other side of the debate are all the insiders who say if the story doesn’t hit the beats within a line or two of the prescribed page number, you might as well go back to your call center job.
Screenwriting gurus opine in the loudest voices about story structure. The early days of movie-making already saw how-to manuals like Ralph P. Stoddard’s 1911 enticingly titled The Photo Play: A Book of Valuable Information for Those Who Would Enter a Field of Unlimited Endeavor. But the field exploded starting with Syd Field’s 1979 Screenplay. Field’s paradigm, promoted in courses taught at USC and several books, uses a three act structure with a plot point at the end of act one when the protagonist confronts a challenge requiring a goal. The hero tries and fails to achieve this goal through the long second act, facing a turning point at the middle called the midpoint that reverses the hero’s fortunes. In the third act the goal is achieved or not and the results depicted. Sound familiar?
With the addition of pinch points and possible expansion into four or five acts, this structure has served many a book peddler. For example, Michael Hauge added concepts of identity and essence to the external storyline. Starting with his 1989 book Writing Screenplays That Sell, he discusses the emotional wound of the protagonist which produced a defensive identity structure that is safe but inauthentic. A first act turning point presents a new situation that can’t be managed through the habitual safe identity. The character goes on an inner journey in parallel with and motivated by a six stage external journey, leading finally to the courage to drop the mask and live his or her essence. Hauge collaborated with Christopher Vogler, whose 1982 book, The Writer’s Journey, adapted Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey for screenwriting. Their 2003 collaboration is The Hero’s 2 Journeys.
Nor can we forget the zippy title Save the Cat!, Blake Snyder’s super-popular how-to book explaining that protagonists should save the cat, meaning do something good that gets their audience to root for him or her. He crafted the Save the Cat beat sheet cataloging fifteen stages of a story’s development, from the opening statement of the theme, through a B story, bad guys closing in, an all is lost moment and a dark night of the soul. You can listen to long-form interviews with many of these gurus on the YouTube channel Film Courage. There are more but you get the flavor.
Whether you illustrate your writing advice with cats or travelers, conventional story structure is a roller coaster ride at a theme park: you get strapped into a car, you’re hauled up some hills and fly down some terrifying inclines to finally roll back to a satisfied stop. You can step out and walk around, but when you come back to the ride it will give you the same sequence of thrills and chills and produce the same sensation of closure at the end. Yes, there are considerations of theme and symbolism. But this is basically a manipulative narrative structure designed to take you on a repetitive predetermined emotional trip. Call it aesthetic emotional manipulation. Is this the best human creativity can come up with?
Not an answer to that question, but I’ll mention a writing book that doesn’t get a tenth the attention of the famous screenwriter gospels, Linda Aronson’s The 21st Century Screenplay. It’s not another chart of beats or plot points. It doesn’t adapt Campbell’s monomyth or update Aristotelian dramatic structure or combine action units in a sequence. Aronson discusses ‘conventional narrative structure’ in one section of the book. Just one. She observes that this is a narrative structure designed to manipulate audience emotions. Then she offers a bunch of other options.
Take tandem narratives. Traffic is an example, where several separate stories unfold, all touched by drug trafficking. Or multiple protagonist narratives which follow the stories of several people in a group, throwing out the received wisdom of the hero’s journey crowd. Examples are The Jane Austen Book Club and Saving Private Ryan. Many thrillers use this one. Then there’s the consecutive stories narrative. This was made famous around the third millennium BCE by one Odysseus, who wandered around the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy having one misadventure after another. More recent examples? Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film depicting different versions of a crime as seen through the contradictory subjective viewpoints of victims, witnesses and criminals.
And there are flashback narratives with many permutations. For example, bookend flashbacks start with a flashback, then end with the flashback after the story has clarified its meaning. The rosebud in Citizen Kane is a famous example. Preview flashbacks tell a linear story, except the first scene is a hook that previews something crucial that will happen later. Rian Johnson’s teenage neo-noir Brick includes an early scene showing the dead body of someone who won’t die till later in the story. Another way to include a flashback is to sprinkle bits of one life-changing incident from the backstory throughout the narrative, so you gradually come to understand what happened.
There are many more fascinating story structures in Aronson’s book. I recommend it as a grand escape from the dreary sameness of writing gurus’ advice.