Major Literary Work Planned In Advance
Blake Snyder’s Plot Structure Beat Sheet
What makes a story great to read?
Once, one of his playwrights, Zayd (who would later become my husband), wrote a play in which two human beings wake up together only to discover that they are in a cage, a zoo of sorts. Derek, who believed and taught us to believe that plays are, by their nature, lyrical—poetry unfolding on the stage—complimented Zayd on his dialogue but said that the whole play would have to be scrapped unless “the question” was answered. “What question?” we asked, and he stood up: “Where is the toilet? You think you can have two people in a cage overnight and not tell us where they use the toilet? You cannot.”
Derek was correct, of course: if the logistics of a narrative are flimsy or absent, then it hardly matters how lyrical its lines are. I have called upon this and additional bits of Walcott’s wisdom countless times in my own writing and teaching. He once said, of another student’s play, “If a character’s problem can be fixed with medication, then it’s a story of chemistry, not of tragedy.”
Danielle Maurer, Trying to write a novel 96 upvotes by Cristina Hartmann, Monika Kothari, Craig Weiland, (more) TL;DR: Lots and lots of notes coupled with hundreds of questions. Seriously.
As a disclaimer, my co-author and I are currently writing a three book series, with plans for more in the same world if we can ever get this series published.* It’s fantasy, so there’s a lot of world building. This is some of our process for world-building; your mileage may vary.
For me, it always starts with a map. I love drawing and sketching, so I start building my world with a basic idea of its layout. Put a city here, a river here and so on. None of it is necessarily set in stone initially; for instance, my co-author and I just slightly redesigned the world map to include more towns and to adjust for certain distances that we wanted as part of the plot (and since we’re not published yet, that’s totally okay). Once we have it a way we like it, the map stands strong for any and all future books in that world as a base reference point. For our current world, we have one large (watercolor!) map, plus a few smaller maps of areas outside the bounds of the main map. (You can do this with sci-fi too, though maybe it’s a map of planets instead of cities.)
There are also some details that we tend to think out at this point that don’t necessarily go on the map. For instance, how many moons and suns does your world have? (Ours has two moons).
Next, that mapped out world shapes the people. Who would live by the river? Who lives in the desert? How does that shape their customs and their way of life? Are there different races? What types of creatures live in each area? Is traveling between cities possible? How you go about doing it? I have pages and pages of notes discussing all the different races in my fantasy worlds, including their characteristics and even some of their traditions. We have a few races that are entirely our own which we have never seen in other books and we are very proud of that. Each of our races has a different feel to them; many of them live within specific locales. We have information on average lifespan, average height, languages spoken and other general characteristics. This applies to the actual story characters as well; each has a developed history behind them to help drive their individual storyline and each has some defining characteristics. Some of it we may not use in this series, but it’s nice to have if we do decide to include it.
I already mentioned this briefly but next we tackled the cultural aspects of our world. We came up with a religion very early on (with a family tree of gods, which might seem like a stereotype). Were the gods like people? Were they aloof? What kinds of things were there gods of? How are they worshipped? We have good gods, slightly darker gods, and gods of weather and gods of thievery. To give some variety from culture to culture, we created some tweaked versions of their names. For instance, our goddess of magic’s name has a few letters dropped in one locale. There are priests and priestesses and one goddess in particular has a large role in the story that we’re writing. We even dealt with the idea that certain areas might not have a god for certain things that other areas might.
Then we delved into the history. What year is it? Do they even have years? Do they have a calendar? What do they use as a dating benchmark? What races appeared first? Were there small kingdoms at any point? Where are the lines delineating those kingdoms? We wrote a brief outline of everything, from the creation of the world to the creation of the races to rise of different political entities. This was also where we mapped out our current political system and how it was going to change from book to book. Ours is based on a large empire with small state-like provinces that used to be individual kingdoms. We discussed whether the empire would be good or bad, corrupt or not (we went for corrupt in the end).
We came up with customs for different cultures. Our empire officials have a particular kind of salute. We wrote marriage customs and slang for the dwarves. All of this was premised on the question: what would each race do different based on their environment and their abilities/characteristics?
Currently, we are still working on the language. This is kind of optional based on the story you’re writing, but we wanted to have one since it’s tied into our magic system (see below). We have only just settled on verb conjugations and sentence structure, but we really want it to be cohesive and actually speakable. I’d say this has been the most time-consuming and creative step so far because we actually have to make up new words based on the sounds we’ve chosen and determine their meaning(s). Like I said, this is optional, but I often feel like a coherent language of its own is a sign of a world built right.
And because this is a fantasy, we developed a magic system. We sat down and asked ourselves, what causes the magic to work? How does one channel the power? Where does the power come from? In the end, we basically made magic a kind of bacteria, channeled through hand gestures and language. It’s possible to get a childhood disease that permanently gets rid of the magic bacteria in your system and prevents you from ever using magic.
With a lot of this information, no one is going to know about it except us, but we felt it was important for us to understand every aspect of our world. If we run into something we don’t feel has been explained (or that we’re “cheating” on), we start asking questions about how it works. Most of this information is contained in pages and pages of notes, both physical and digital (saved with back up copies) - which saves us having to flip back through what we’ve already written. I won’t lie; it’s time-consuming. Hopefully though, the upshot of all this is that when people finally read our novel, they’ll see the immense world behind it bleeding through the cracks [1].
[1] Perhaps Cristina Hartmann can confirm - she’s helping me proof read and edit.
*The prologue to the first novel in the series discussed here can be read atThe Curse Sneak Peek - Prologue by Danielle Maurer. Enjoy!
Danielle gave a far more comprehensive answer on the nitty-gritty details of world-building than I ever could.
I want to talk about something slightly different: how to come up with an idea for a unique universe.
There are a few steps (some overlap with Danielle, but that’s because her answer rocks):
Look at historical examples of these issues: research historical examples of these social, political or cultural phenomena. Try to find personal accounts of these times, not just broad historical surveys so you get a better feel of how people responded and felt during these times.
Think about the guiding principles while building the political, cultural and social infrastructures: when enough people believe in the guiding principle, they will create structures mirroring these principles. Take the American government as an example. The Founding Fathers wanted something mg more representative, better than being ruled by a distant monarchy, so they created the checks and balances of the American government. The people in your universe will do the same. Think how that will work.
I thought about these questions when I wrote my first sci-fi book (still in the draft phases). I was inspired (putting it loosely) by how some people advocated the idea of “efficiency” and “optimization” in a society. People asked why societies supported “dead weights” such as not-so-smart folks and people with disabilities. These people had the idea that only the smartest, fittest and the “best” should get scarce resources. It’s social darwinism at its extreme.
I thought, well what if they did? I did some research and found two most two societies in history that tried to uphold that “guiding principle” of efficiency and human supremacy. These societies were–you guessed it–Nazi Germany and Ancient Sparta. I also read bioethics papers of certain philosophers who supported euthanasia for people with certain disabilities. I picked a few ideas from these societies and began to construct the world.
My imagination did the rest.
I’d also say that the depth of world-building depends on your genre. Fantasy usually (not always) requires a wider scope of world-building than say, a young adult science fiction novel. Regardless of how far you delve into your world-building, you still must think about the internal consistency of your world(s).
https://www.quora.com/profile/Danielle-Maurer
Why I’m Against Redundancy In Stories
https://www.quora.com/profile/Marcus-Geduld Marcus Geduld, Shakespearean director, computer programmer, teacher, writer, likes dinosaurs. To start with, I will define a “story” as a linear narrative: a tale of “one damn thing after another.” There are, of course, stories that aren’t structured that way. I am not going to consider them here, because, in most cases, I’m don’t find them pleasing. (I have some theories that elevate linear narratives above other narrative structures, by which I mean that the linear form will most please most readers, probably because readers experience life as “one damn thing after another,” but I won’t push those theories here. Here, let’s just say that I happen to prefer linear narratives, so I’m going to discuss storytelling within the framework of that aesthetic.) Because I hate the clunky phrase “linear narrative,” from here on, I’m going to replace it with the word “story.” Please indulge me! I know there are other kinds of stories. But for the duration of this essay, I am using “story” to label just one type of story. In their purest form, stories move FORWARD CAUSALLY. Event one (at the earliest time in the story) causes event two (at a later time), which causes event three (at a still later time) and so on. Readers have this basic template in their heads. It’s a pleasing template, and they notice when a story veers from it, which isn’t to say that all veers are bad veers. Readers don’t mind veers – in fact they sometimes enjoy them – when they understand the purpose of the veering. For instance if, in a story, Fred goes to a cafe, meets Alice, and then leaves to go to work while Alice remains, the reader will understand (if it’s clear Alice is an important character) why the story stays with her and then, later, travels back in time to catch up with what Fred saw on the way to his office. Such a story breaks from simple linearity, but for a clear reason: it can’t follow Fred and Alice at the same time, because they are in different locations. When a writer handles this badly – say if he makes the Alice subplot boring – most readers get irritated. They say, “What’s the point of all that Alice stuff? Let’s get back to Fred!” Partly, the readers are upset because they feel the writer has broken linearity FOR NO GOOD REASON. (As I am only granted access to my own head, I can’t prove this paragraph’s assertion. It’s a guess, based on some navel gazing and the assumption that many other readers are similar to me. My base assumption is that readers prefer linearity by default but are willing to accept breaks from the timeline if they understand the reasons for the breaks. Readers respond to fictional timelines as they often do to real-life ones: if your friend says, “Let’s go to the park,” but then insists you take a long, circuitous route there, you will likely be irked or confused if you don’t know why your friend wants to walk that way. But if he says, “I know this is not the fastest way to the park, but if we go this way, we’ll walk past this really cool building,” you may be willing – you may even enjoy – the detour. We don’t want our time wasted, in life or art.) Readers also tend to respond well to cliffhangers, which are, by nature, breaks from linearity. Again, they are acceptable (and even fun, in an agonizing sort of way), because (a) we understand the reason for them, which is that the writer is teasing us, and (b) we enjoy that reason – we like to be teased. (Also, (c) we know we’ll get back to the timeline once the tease is over!) Some readers hate cliffhanger. These readers, I think, have an extremely low tolerance for breaks in timelines: “Dammit! I want to know what’s going to happen next?” I have a titillating love-hate relationship with cliffhangers. Since I so love the linear form, I REALLY want to know what’s going to happen next. It’s agonizing when the writer refuses to tell me. But it’s a sweet agony, because I know he’s going to tell me in the end. The writer is, in effect, a lover who is flirting with me by temporarily withholding sex. Readers don’t mind stepping off the relentless, forward-moving conveyer belt if there’s something worth lingering over. In a strict causal sense, all we need to know is that Claire is crying. But it might be sweet to pause for a moment and watch a tear trickle down her cheek… and then to move on. Most of us like pausing to look at flowers on our way to the supermarket. But, eventually, we want to actually get to the supermarket. So, again, linearity can be stretched, paused, meandered from, etc., as long as we have some sense of the purpose (to watch the tear) and some reason to trust that the author will get us back on track soon. My next assumption is that we can’t attend to two thoughts at once. If Mike has two hobbies, stamp-collecting and baseball, he can talk about one and then the other. He can’t talk about both of them at the same time. He can shuttle very quickly between them, but that’s still one and then the other – not both at once. Similarly, a story is either moving forward or it isn’t. It can’t both linger and move forward at the same time. If it’s examining the tear, it’s not moving forward; if it’s moving forward, it’s not examining the tear. Consider this story: “Once upon a time, Bill was in love with Mary. He asked her on a date, but she rejected him. So he tried to forget her by moving far away, to France. So he tried to forget her, by moving far away, to France. But, in the end, he was always haunted by his memories.” As you can see, I inserted a very clunky and obvious bit of redundancy. If that doubling is a problem, why is it a problem? It’s a problem because it breaks linearity for no good reason. If you’re reading the same sentence twice, then you’re clearly not moving forward. And the stutter, in this case, isn’t interesting. It gives you no new information. It’s like a bore who insists on telling you a joke he’s told you before. You have to endure it before you can move on. So, again, in this obvious example, my point is that redundancy is unpleasant because it breaks linearity. We ask, “What’s the point of repeating the same sentence twice?” Actually, that question is incomplete. Things can only have “points” in some context. It’s meaningless to ask “What’s the point of a hammer?” A hammer has – or doesn’t have – a point in contexts such as doing-carpentry or baking-a-cake. “What’s the point of bringing a hammer to the cinema?” (The context is the cinema.) “What’s the point of repeating information if the goal is to move forward – unless there’s some compelling reason to pause or sidetrack?” Here’s another example: “Once upon a time, there was a huge, really big castle.” This irritates me for the same reason the last example irritated me. Even though “huge” and “really big” aren’t literally the same words, they are close enough, and “really big” doesn’t add any new information that “huge” didn’t already add. Since you can’t experience two things at once, when you’re experiencing the repetitiveness of “really big,” you’re not moving forward. And so the pleasure of linearity is broken “for no good reason,” which feels unpleasant. Or does it? Some readers will complain that I’m nit-picking in this case. “Okay, maybe the writer could have omitted ‘really big,’ but Jesus Christ! It’s just two words! Just skim past them!” Other readers will (truthfully) say, “those extra two words didn’t bother me.” Which leads us to an interesting point about aesthetics: as soon as you posit an aesthetic rule, even if people agree with it in principle, they won’t always care about it – or even be affected by it – in specific cases. Let’s say that we come up with an aesthetic rule that notes in songs should be sung “on key.” This is a rule many people already agree with. Off-key notes sound bad. But if, while you’re listening to a song, a dog barks right at the moment the singer went off key, you won’t hear her lapse, so you genuinely won’t be bothered by her violation of the “don’t sing off key” rule. You also might not be bothered by it if you happen to not be paying close attention, and you also might not be bothered by it if the song is deeply meaningful to you (or the singer is beautiful). You don’t have mental bandwidth to perceive the bad note AND some competing pleasure. (Most of us have, at some point, been so dazzled by special effects – or sexy actors – in a movie that we haven’t been bothered by its lackluster plot.) It’s even possible that, for a moment, you WERE bothered by the off-key note, but the rest of the song was so good that you forgot that you ever were bothered. (There also tends to be, for many of us, a social aspect of art – a real or imagined relationship between us and the artist. People tend to “forgive” artists for lapses. “Well, she sang off key, but she has a cold, so it’s understandable…” What is one actually feeling when one notices an artistic blunder but forgives the blunderer? One might be completely honest, in such a case, if one says, “The blunder didn’t bother me.” Being “bothered” is a negative emotion. If one doesn’t feel anything negative – because one is experiencing warm feelings of forgiveness – then one likely isn’t bothered.) But rules are still useful. When we tell our children to look both ways before they cross the street, we don’t mean, “Because if you don’t, you will DEFINITELY be run over TODAY, when you cross this SPECIFIC STREET.” We mean looking-both-ways is a good rule of thumb to follow, in general, because if you don’t follow it, at some point you may be hit by a car. We also realize that kids shouldn’t try to apply to rule on a case-by-case basis, because they don’t have all the information they need to know whether any specific case is one when it’s worth applying the rule. For instance, a particular street may look deserted, but you never know when a car will suddenly zoom out of a driveway. Aesthetic rules work this way, too. Yes, a reader might be able to ignore – in fact, he might even not notice – a tiny bit of redundancy. On the other hand, he might notice it and be bothered by it. In general, it’s just good to avoid redundancy. That way, there’s no chance a reader will be bothered by it. (If you don’t notice a small blemish in a work of art – say you don’t notice a little mustard stain on a dress (or you do notice it but aren’t bothered by it) – that doesn’t mean you’re inferior in any way to someone who does notices and is bothered by it. And if you do notice it, you’re not inferior to people who don’t. It’s THERE! Anything perceivable may or may not be noticed by a given person. It’s reasonable to say that the dress would be better without the stain, even if the stain doesn’t bother some people. The people who are bothered will stop being bothered if the stain is removed, and the people who were never bothered will remain unbothered, because it’s not the case that they enjoyed the stain: they just weren’t negatively affected by it. By removing the stain, the dress has a positive effect on more people than it had with the stain. And no one is bothered by the stain being removed.) Is all redundancy bad? No. Like all breaks from linearity, redundancy can be pleasurable if the reader senses a purpose for it: and if the pleasure that purpose brings exceeds the pain of not-being-able-to-move-forward. “Once upon a time, there was a giant. He was big, and I mean REALLY big. You may be thinking of him as big-as-a-house or something, but he was way bigger than that. His knees brushed against the clouds. He was one huge mother of a giant!” Here, redundancy is obviously and purposefully slathered onto the prose in order to evoke a feeling of immensity. What’s important for artists to understand is the effect that redundancy always has: it breaks linearity. It’s also important for artists to understand that audiences crave and expect linearity. There are often fun effects artists can create by thwarting and subverting expectations. They should just be aware of what they’re doing. If redundancy is creating an interesting effect, great; if redundancy is just in the story because it hasn’t been pruned out, it’s a weed. It’s a mustard stain on a dress. The subtlest – and therefor most-treacherous, because it’s hardest to weed out – form of redundancy is when the repeated information is coming from two different sources. This tends to happen most often in “multi-media” productions, such as film and theatre (and comic books, etc.) If a story is being told through a combination of dialog, images, sounds, etc., then it’s possible (even probable) that redundancy will creep in when two different aspects of a work meet. For instance, in a play, a character might say, “That’s the reddest car I’ve ever seen.” If the set also contains a red car, we have redundancy – and not interesting, meaningful redundancy. Remember, my base assumption (which you can disagree with) is that our brains can’t attend to two things at once. So even if the line is spoken simultaneously with lights coming up on the car, the audience will still experience the line first and then the visual second (or the other way around). They will experience “red car … red car,” which breaks linearity. Now, you may be thinking, “Well, what is the director supposed to do? The play calls for a red car and there’s a line about the car being red.” (One thing the director COULD do is cut the line, but let’s assume that, maybe for legal reasons, he doesn’t have that option.) There may be nothing the director can do. One can’t always solve all problems. And this might be one of those problems that the audience “forgives” or doesn’t notice. But it’s still a problem. It’s still a violation of my aesthetic rule. One’s goal, when creating art, should be to do one’s best. You don’t go to hell if you allow redundancy into your art. You’re not a “bad artist” if you don’t solve lapses that are out of your control. That’s not my point. I am not judging anyone. I am just trying to explain why I think redundancy is – or can be – a problem, and why, as an artist, you should try your best to root it out. This multi-media quagmire becomes worse when, as is usually the case, multiple artists are collaborating. Both the costume designer and the playwright are trying to tell the same story. It is very likely that rather than dividing up aspects of the story between them, they will overlap and both give some of the same information. The natural person to watch for this is the director. He should say, “We don’t have to tell that part of the story with costumes, because we’re already telling it with words.” (Sometimes it’s fun to experience the same information in different ways. So it may be that HEARING ABOUT a red car and SEEING a red car doesn’t feel like redundancy. But be very careful – if you share my aesthetic – because this can quickly become an excuse. ANY time two different aspects of a multi-media piece are giving the same information, they are giving it in two different ways. Imagine someone asked you to do the dishes and then held up a sign with “do the dishes” on printed on it. That would just feel redundant – and possibly insulting. My general rule of thumb is to not excuse redundancy just because they same information is being communicated in two different ways. That, itself, is not enough to excuse it.) If you agree with me that redundancy is (or can be) a problem (or if you don’t, but you enjoy trying on other people’s aesthetic shoes, even if those shoes don’t fit), you may enjoy grappling with what I call The “Macbeth” problem: you’re a director, staging “Macbeth,” and – like me – you’re against redundancy. Given that, how do you present the witches? In the play, when Banquo sees the witches, he says… What are these So wither’d and so wild in their attire, That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth, And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught That man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her chappy finger laying Upon her skinny lips: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. If, before or after he says this, the audience sees wildly dressed, women with beards (and chapped lips, etc.), there’s redundancy happening. Maybe it wouldn’t bother you, but if you were hired to craft a production that would please me, what would you do? You could cut Banquo’s speech, but it’s a pretty good speech. Most Shakespeare lovers – myself included – love the plays at least partly for their poetry. Cutting this speech is a little like cutting “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night’s Music,” but it is a possible solution. But if you kept the speech, is there any way that you could present the witches that wouldn’t be redundant? (You’re not allowed to eliminate redundancy by injecting confusion. If the witches look young, beautiful women, would that “work” or would it just be perplexing, given Banquo’s description of them? As much as I hate redundancy, I prefer it to confusion.) Remember: not all redundancy problems are solvable (which doesn’t make the non-solvable ones “not problems.”) Is this one solvable or not? Since I haven’t yet had the pleasure of directing “Macbeth,” I haven’t solved (or tried to solve) this problem, though I have some ideas about how I might solve it. But if I was directing the play, the problem would pop into my head, because I consider part of my job, as a director, to be rooting out redundancy (and keeping the play chugging down its linear track, unless there’s a compelling reason to veer away from the track). As an editor mercilessly strikes out unnecessary adverbs (even if leaving them in wouldn’t bother most readers), I mercilessly cut – or try to cut – all redundancy. I look at each moment in the play and ask myself “Is there any redundancy here?” and, if there is, I kill it if I can – unless it’s serving a clear purpose. It’s hard, because it’s not always just a matter of “kill your own darlings.” I am often forced to kill other people’s darlings. That hat the costume designer worked on for a month… or that little thumbs-up gesture the actor loves so much (which isn’t needed, because he also says, “Good idea!”)… They are darling, darling darlings. But they’re redundant darlings. So they have to go.
“…good prose is so much less of a mystery, finally, so much less of a shock, than bad prose. Good prose, after all, relates to our shared essence: we know it when we read it, we assent to it, we get it. Bad prose, on the other hand, is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What’s going on here?
I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl’s latest novel, ‘The Technologists,’ by the following line: ‘Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass.’ I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously? Incredulously, they cut down the hanged man. … Incredulously, she flossed her perfect teeth. …”
– from James Parker’s review of “The Technologists,” by Matthew Pearl, for the “New York Times Book Review “… sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamozov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction – and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form – is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire . Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.”
– Jonathan Franzen, in an essay about “Edith Wharton,” from “The New Yorker,
I am worried my story is too fast-paced. What can I do to remedy this?
https://www.quora.com/profile/Marcus-Geduld Marcus Geduld, Published author, lifelong reader. 3.5k Views I would dig deeper. “Fast paced” might be your gut response, and it probably hints at some real problem, but it’s too broad to suggest solutions. If a doctor said, “My prognosis is that you’re sick with something,” you’d want more information. I direct plays more-often than I write fiction, but there’s a similar hint that occurs in rehearsals: the play drags or rushes by too quickly. When this happens, it’s a mistake to tell the actors to “go faster” or “slow down.” That would attack a symptom without treating the underlying cause, which would come back to bite me, later. A too-slow pace usually means the stakes aren’t high enough. I need to help the actors understand why each moment is so dire for their characters. A too-fast pace usually means they’re not earning each moment: they’re moving on to the next bit of behavior without really experiencing whatever prompts it. Are you saying your story is confusing? That information is hitting the reader at a pace he can’t manage, so he can’t keep the characters and/or plot-points straight in his head? Specific details can help. “And then there was Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice.” (A line from the movie “Goodfellas.”) Are you saying that you’re “telling rather than showing”? Are you just explaining thishappened, then that happened, the the next thing happened…? Are you forgetting to dunk the reader in the pool and let him feel the wetness of the water? Are you saying that characters are reacting in unrealistic ways, getting over shocking events more quickly than people normally would in real life? Are you saying that too-many dramatic events are occurring one after another, which makes your plot seem contrived?
What are some tips you have for writers to ensure willing suspension of disbelief? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Assisted a BBC director, son of a film historian. Answered Dec 14, 2013 · Upvoted by Sheri Fresonke Harper , Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Washington Ext… I sympathize with your pain, but this attitude is a problem:
“Part of me feels that if a story is good enough, then it should not matter if it is plausible.”
You have put “good enough” in one category and “plausible” in another, whereas for many readers a story can’t be “good enough” if it’s implausible. This isn’t the case for all readers, but what I most want from fiction is to forget it’s fiction. If a Tolkien or a Stephen King can get me to really believe, at least for a short time, in Elves or ESP, they’ve given me a tremendous gift.
There’s no shortcut. You simply have to do it. (Or don’t do it and accept the fact that people like me won’t enjoy your story.) You need to root out the implausibilities and alter them or justify them, making them plausible. And if you can’t immediately figure out how to do that, join the club. It’s a puzzle, and you’ll have to work at it. Hint: study other people’s solutions. I’ve mentioned some specific ones, below.
I almost didn’t write “justify,” because it tends to lead many writers astray. Make sure that your justifications are both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. In other words, if you claim, in chapter six, that faster-than-light travel exists, you can’t justify it by, in chapter nine, quickly explaining that your story takes place in a parallel universe with different physical laws.
Why make me live with disbelief for three chapters? And if you’re going to make up such a radical piece of story logic, it should be affecting your entire world. I can’t buy a Universe that’s exactly like ours except for faster-than-light travel. Surely they’d be many ramifications. Think them through. If you do, you can lace them throughout your story, making the FTL revelation plausible when it occurs.
Does that mean no space opera can possibly work? No. There’s a good way to work implausibilities into your story: state them up front. “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” work because FTL travel exists from the get-go, before the reader (or viewer) even has time to fall into a state of belief.
“Once upon a time there was king who could turn invisible…” works, because we’re trained from childhood to shoot off from a hypothetical premise. In such stories, you needn’t explain where the king’s abilities come from. “They’re just magic” works for most readers, but only if magic is part of the world from page one.
“Once upon a time, the King of England ordered his troops … blab blah blah … “ then, four chapters later, “… and so he turned invisible …” doesn’t work, because you gave the reader three chapters to assume a non-magical framework.
Rule: nothing in fiction should contradict the reader’s mental framework. Whenever something does, the reader will get distanced. And he always has a framework, even while reading the first sentence of the story. If not told otherwise, he’ll assume the story world is the same as the real world. That’s the default framework.
“Toy Story” immediately establishes an alternative framework. From its opening shots, we learn that in its world, familiar toys are conscious and can move about on their own. But we assume that, aside from this, the film’s world is pretty much like ours. If, an hour into the movie, Mr. Potato Head started breathing fire, we’d be confused and distanced. Why? Because that would contradict our framework.
Moral: front-load your implausibilities! That can be via extremely straight-forward exposition, such as the text crawl at the beginning of “Star Wars,” the narration at the beginning of “Star Trek,” or the opening of “The Hobbit”: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…”
Here’s how Susana Clarke’s Dickensian fantasy novel, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” starts:
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
Or you can front-load more stealthily, via dialog and description. Just make sure it’s early dialog or description. Here’s the opening of “Game of Thrones”:
“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked, with just the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no business with the dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”
“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they are dead, that’s proof enough for me.”
[Spoilers:] And just a few pages later, these characters are attacked by what are clearly supernatural creatures. After that, nothing magical or supernatural happens for many chapters, but the mental groundwork has been laid.
Does this mean that if you’ve created a complex sci-fi or fantasy world, with all sorts of differences between it and the real world, you have to front-load all those differences. No. What you have to do is intellectually and (more important) emotionally prepare the reader for them.
Having established that magicians exist, Susana Clarke doesn’t need to immediately tell me that they cause cause objects to levitate. Does she need to tell me they’re immortal (which is not the case in her novel, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s true)?
That’s an interesting question. You have to use your judgement. If I know magicians exist in the world, I can probably wait until chapter four and only then find out they can levitate small objects, but if you suddenly tell me (after 100 pages) they’re immortal and use that as a major plot device, I’ll be distanced.
There’s another hint for you, and it’s a major one: if an implausibility is the solution in the plot, make sure the reader knows about it (or can deduce it) earlier. In other words, if you tell me a character is a wizard, you don’t have to front-load “power of invisibility,” but you do have to tell me he can turn invisible before he uses that power to get out a fix. Otherwise, I’ll smell deus ex machina, which means I’ll become aware of an authorial hand. Which means I’ll fall out of a state of belief.
And make sure you don’t tell me about invisibility right before it becomes a solution. I see this screw up constantly on TV. We learn about some new magic ability for the first time at the start of an episode and then it becomes a big solution at the end. (After which, it’s usually forgotten in subsequent episodes.) That’s bubble-bursting. It would have worked better if the ability had been brought up one or two episodes earlier, giving me time to shrug and forget about it. The seed would have been planted in my mind, which would have made the solution feel inevitable and grounded in the rules of the world when it happened, later.
So, summing up:
Front-load major, categorical differences between the story world and the real world, such as faster-than-light travel or the existence of magic.
Hint at differences which will become major plot points long before they become important, so that they seem like casual facts about the world.
I’m not a “Star Wars” fan, but it’s interesting to study the film from this perspective, because Lucas had to make his audiences accept both sci-fi (e.g. FTL) and fantasy (e.g. The Force) elements. Notice that he front-loaded the former (via the text-crawl and the opening shot of the space cruiser) and hinted at the latter.
The Force is especially interesting in this regard. [Spoilers:] Lucas understood (consciously or not) that he’d paved the way for a sci-fi world, not a fantasy world, and that if he’d just suddenly plopped magic on the viewer, it would be distancing. So he slowly builds up to it, starting with Obiwan just talking about it, then doing small tricks (“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…”), and then gradually ramping up this reality until we are able to buy the implausibility that Luke Skywalker could “use the force” to destroy a huge space station.
Here are two more homework assignments: study Kubrick’s “The Shining” and Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” (the director’s cut if you can get it). Whether you’re fans of those films or not doesn’t matter. The point is, they are relatively realistic, and yet they carefully sprinkle in fantasy elements until the viewer is in a state where he’ll accept almost anything.
[Minor spoilers follow:]
Kubrick begins with by setting a mood: nothing supernatural, but extremely ominous photography and music. He then evokes the idea of ghosts (“My wife is a ghost story and horror film addict”) and, about ten minutes into the film, shows a minor incident of ESP. That allows him to go about 20 minutes with no magic. He has laid down a careful nest for magical eggs to hatch later. Watch the movie and pay careful attention to how he prepares us for each new magical element. (E.g. “Room 237” gets mentioned—and then forgotten—long before we see inside it. “You’ve always been the caretaker” comes way before the final shot of the film…)
Bergman begins his film with an extremely minor piece of magic and even suggests it might be a dream. (I’m talking about the moving statue.) He then gradually amps up these “visions,” each time making them a tiny bit more remarkable and less easy to explain-away as a dream or hallucination. Each one prepares you for the next, bigger one, but he leaves space between them, sometimes half-an-hour or more. So you don’t feel manipulated. The previous haunting is just somewhere in your brain, doing its work.
I urge you do what you can to quit thinking of realistic world-building as a burden. It’s not. It’s the challenge and fun of writing fantasy fiction—really of writing all fiction. Think of yourself as a stage magician and give yourself the goal of making your audience believe in magic. (Imagine a magician saying, “My trick is really good. Why do I have to make it believable?”) Use hints, indirection, telling sensual detail, or whatever you need to get the job done. Because it’s the main point. It’s not just a boring task you have to do.
China Mieville and one of his students on story structure [From a transcript of an interview with author China Miéville. Link: China Miéville on Novel Structure for Beginners]
I was wondering if you could give me some advice on how to deal with structure? How do you deal with it?
“You’re talking about writing a novel, right? I think it’s kind of like…do you know Kurt Schwitters, the artist? He was an experimental artist in the 1940s who made these very strange cut up collages and so on and very strange abstract paintings. And I was just seeing an exhibition of his, and one of the things that is really noticeable is he is known for these wild collages, and then interspersing these are these really beautiful, very formally traditional oil paintings, portraits, and landscapes and so on.
And this is that old—I mean it’s a bit of a cliché–but the old thing about knowing the rules and being able to obey them before you can break them. Now I think that that is quite useful in terms of structure for novels because one of the things that stops people writing is kind of this panic at the scale of the thing, you know? So I would say, I would encourage anyone that’s writing a novel to be as out there as they possibly can. But as a way of getting yourself kick-started, why not go completely traditional?
Think three-act structure, you know. Think rising action at the beginning of the journey and then some sort of cliff-hanger at the end of act one. Continuing up to the end of act two, followed by a big crisis at the end of act three, followed by a little dénouement. Think 30,000 words, 40,000 words, 30,000 words, so what’s that, around 100,000 words. Divide that up into 5,000 word chapters so you’re going 6/8/6. I realize this sounds incredibly sort of drab, and kind of mechanical. But my feeling is that the more you can kind of formalise and bureaucratise those aspects of things. It actually paradoxically liberates you creatively because you don’t need to worry about that stuff.
If you front load that stuff, plant all that out in advance and you know the rough outline of each chapter in advance, then when you come to each day’s writing, you’re able to go off in all kinds of directions because you know what you have to do in that day. You have to walk this character from this point to this point and you can do that in the strangest way possible. Whereas if you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and saying where do you I go from here you get kind of frozen. The unwritten novel has a basilisk’s stare, and so I would say do it behind your own back by just formally structuring it in that traditional way. And then when you have confidence and you’ve gained confidence in that, you can play more odder games with it. But it’s really not a bad way to get started.”
[From the comments under the transcript.]
[–]craftyodysseus Novelist … China’s great on structure. I was lucky enough to get taught by him at university, and his emphasis on structure really helped me write my first (publishable) novel. Effective use of chapters/sections to create tension isn’t emphasized nearly enough. Makes or breaks a novel, much of the time.
… each chapter should answer one question, whilst asking another two. So the reader constantly feels like they are progressing towards an answer, but the answer keeps getting more complex, keeps getting further away from them.
… one of the questions you ask, typically the one at the end of the chapter, should have an immediate pull, a kind of mini cliffhanger. (What’s going to happen next? How are they going to get out of that one? What is she going to say?)
The second question, which you may choose to conceal in the middle of the chapter so the reader is barely aware of it, is likely to be more long term, perhaps even abstract (Is victory worth it at any cost? What is the value of a human life? Will those two ever get together or will they always be apart?)
That way, your structure both has an immediate cliffhanger pull (wanting to know what will happen right in the next chapter) and a more overarching pull (wanting to know how the novel as a whole will turn out).
Quieter chapters will ask/answer the second kind of question. Faster paced/action chapters will focus more on the first kind of question. Alternating the two different kinds of chapters creates a satisfying variance.
This is all a massive simplification, but a good starting point. Good TV (The Wire, Breaking Bad etc) is great to study this kind of thing.
… you can’t end every chapter on a super cliffhanger or they lose their effect. Using a chapter ending to linger on a significant moment and ask a subtle question is great too, and balancing the two together…that’s the real trick.
How to avoid information dumps?
First, think hard about what information is crucial for the reader to know at each point, remembering that it’s okay for readers to have questions and to grapple with mysteries. What info must they know to be able to follow (or be emotionally/sensually affected by) this part of the story. (“Story” could refer to fiction or non-fiction.)
If the reader needs to know 19 things, you have structural problems. Rethink the order of events so readers need to know only two or three things.
Then, assuming we’re talking about fiction, find narrative reasons why that information must come out. It’s okay to indulge in a little straight-forward exposition (“In the fourth year of the war, Angela gave birth to twins…”) but it’s worth minimizing it, because too much tends to bore readers.
So if it’s imperative the reader understands that the story is about a mother of twins and it’s set four years into a war, try this sort of thing:
With a shock, Angela realized the boys were six today. Before the war, when the kids were toddlers and Mike was still alive, they celebrated Tommy and Freddy’s birthdays with balloons, cake, and pin the tail on the donkey. Back when they weren’t spending days scrounging for food and nights fending off rats.
Cake!
A month before they turned five, Tommy started begging for an iPad and Freddy wanted some sort of remote-controlled helicopter which Mike said was too dangerous. But the bombs started falling a few days later, and that put an end to iPads, helicopters, electricity, and birthdays.
or
“I can’t spare much,” Jenny said, “But here’s a bit of chocolate, cause I know you love it.”
Angela shrieked. “Oh my God! Chocolate. Where did you get it?”
“That’s a state secret.” Jenny winked. “Oh, and this is for the twins. How old are they, today?”
“It’s tomorrow. They’re going to be six.”
“Here,” said Jenny. The bundle was wrapped in old newspaper and tied loosely with a filthy bow. Angela peered inside.”
“You found them Spongebob?”
“Don’t get too excited,” said Jenny. “One of its legs is missing and it was in the sun, so its faded. I washed most of the dirt off.”
“They won’t mind,” Angela said with a sigh. “They were only two when the bombings started, and they don’t remember a time when things weren’t broken and dirty.”
In other words, come up with a reason why characters would discuss the info in a natural way. Or figure out a way you can sneak the info in while writing about something that’s emotionally or sensually resonant:
For the first year of the war, Jenny was able to survive by begging soldiers for scraps of meat. But the last three years almost defeated her. She often went days without even a stale crust of bread and only kept alive by digging for insects. Her clothes were in tatters.
It gets easer and more fun to convey necessary info when you get past the first chapter. In chapter two, and in later chapters, when you realize the reader needs to know something, you can go back into an earlier chapter and slip in it.
For instance, if the above conversation between Jenny and Angela is part of chapter one, it might prep the reader for this in chapter three:
The only thing Angela needed now was a bit of ribbon. Such an insignificant trifle, but where … “Ah!” she said, as if she’d solved a complex equation. Jenny’s present for the twins—that Spongebob doll they’d torn to pieces! It had been tied together with ribbon. Had she kept it?
If you’re tired of my bad writing, check this out:
ACT I
SCENE I. King Lear’s palace.
Enter KENT, GLOUCESTER, and EDMUND
KENT I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.
GLOUCESTER It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed, that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.
KENT Is not this your son, my lord?
GLOUCESTER His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blushed to acknowledge him, that now I am brazed to it.
Look at the data Shakespeare packs into this naturalistic conversation, all motivated by character psychology and circumstance:
There’s a king in the play.
The speakers seem to be close to him. Perhaps they’re courtiers.
There was a rivalry between two Dukes, and the king seems to have changed his mind about which one he likes best.
the king is dividing up his kingdom.
One of the speakers has a son.
The son is illegitimate.
Here’s the opening of “Neuromancer,” by William Gibson. I’m quoting it as an example of how much mystery you can maintain. Most readers will trust that, as long as they get the gist, the puzzling aspects will become clear eventually.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
“It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in here early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”
“The sky about the port …” What port?
“It was a Sprawl voice…” What does “Sprawl” mean?
Why does Ratz have a prosthetic arm?
Who is Lonny Zone?
Who is Wage?
What are “joeboys”?
Is Case German? Why does Ratz call him “Herr”? Is Ratz German?
What do you think fiction writers should focus on?
This may seem like a non-answer, but I mean every word of it, and I strongly believe it. If a fiction writer wants to write good fiction—fiction that moves and challenges his readers—he should focus on whatever affects him: whatever turns him on, scares him, excites him, makes him angry, etc. His job is to transfer that passion from his own brain to the reader’s, using words as tools.
This is too personal to generalize. For some writers it will be politics, for others it will be strawberry pie. I don’t want someone who is obsessed with pie to write a lukewarm novel about politics. I’d rather he make me hungry. And Joe Kline shouldn’t waste his time writing about pastries.
What makes a story great to read? Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Updated Mar 12, 2014 · Upvoted by Ellen Vrana , Full-time writer. Originally Answered: What makes a story great? There are always exceptions, but if I was planning to violate any of the following rules and principles, I would seriously think about why I was doing it. Also note that aesthetics are largely subjective. The following will help you write stories that will satisfy someone like me.
A great story is constructed to hook me and refuse to let me go. There are many techniques authors can use to do this, including creating high-stakes drama, making me care deeply about characters, piquing my curiosity, etc. At each point, there must be something driving me to move from one sentence to the next.
It overflows with sensual detail. The story is told, as much as possible, in a way that makes me feel as if I’m seeing things, smelling things, hearing things, tasting things, and touching things. Orwell describes a character’s experience eating a rancid sausage as “bombs of filth exploded in his mouth.” That hooks me much more effectively than, “The sausage was disgusting.”
Its characters should obey “Stanislavsky’s Rules.” Stanislavsky was a Russian actor and director who formalized (amongst other things) a system of analysis many actors use today. It’s based on the premise that characters pursue goals. They’re not necessarily self-knowing: they may not know what their goals are. But, still, they have goals and they pursue them.
For instance, a particular character’s goal might be “to marry the girl.” Conflict occurs when a character’s goals are thwarted by a competing character (another suitor), by a force of nature (the girl dies), or by his own inner qualms (shyness). If a character achieves his goal or is permanently thwarted, he must either form a new goal or be out of the story.
The author needn’t communicate his character’s goals, and doing so is often a bad idea. As a reader, I just need to feel that the characters are psychologically plausible, even if I can’t explain how.
Despite its title, this is a great book for writers: A Practical Handbook for the Actor. So is this: Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis.
Its characters need to be distinct from each other. One doesn’t necessarily have to draw them as broadly as Dickens, but Dickens is a great teacher. In well-told stories, characters (even minor ones) are never collections of quirks. “He always scratches his beard” isn’t a character. Neither is “He’s continually sarcastic.”
Its stakes must be high. That’s not to say all the characters must be in life-or-death peril. Some great stories have been written about high school kids with crushes. But I need to both understand and, more important, have a visceral feeling of why it’s vital Shelly get a date with Dan. The author must make me care!
Its plot must be plausible. By that, I don’t mean it must avoid dragons or giant robots. I mean that stories should obey whatever logic they set up. If it’s established in Chapter One that the sultan has a flying carpet, the author has to explain why, in Chapter Two, when he’s locked in his bedroom, he can’t just fly out the window.
Either its plot or characters (or both) must surprise me. If a story doesn’t have plot twists—if it’s obvious what’s going to happen—then I must be surprised by how the characters get from Point A to Point B, or by their reactions. “This is a love story, so I know the woman is going to fall in love with the man, but he ruined her business and she hates him! How is he going to win her over?”
Its writing style must either move out of the way or reveal an interesting (often invisible) storyteller character. Great writing (in the stylistic sense) can be matter-of-fact. It can be so simple that you don’t notice it: you only think about the plot and the characters. Much brilliant genre writing is like this, and it takes just as much skill to write as “flowery” prose. It’s vital that the author removes all clunky phrasing and he must make his writing as sensual as possible.
Or he can make the narrative voice a distinct character—one that calls attention to itself. He can use obscure words, noticeable rhythms, complex metaphorical systems, wordplay, and so on, as long as this is in service of a distinct voice: the evocation of a storyteller I enjoy spending time with. (It’s worth considering Stanislavsky’s Rules for this hidden character, even if he’s an unnamed 3rd-Person narrator.)
She tried to imagine herself chatting and laughing with a roomful of strangers, completely at her ease. It seemed an impossible fantasy, like a child wishing for wings.
“An impossible fantasy” is an abstraction. Wecker makes it visceral by likening it to a child wishing for wings. This is the primary use of metaphor in fiction. It’s why, “I’m describing something abstract” is never an excuse for not making it sensual.
Also note Chekhov’s rule that if a gun appears in act one, it must be fired in act two. (Otherwise the gun is gratuitous.) Every detail must exist for a reason!
Even if it’s a tragedy, it contains humor. Shakespeare understood this, well. Most readers shut down when subjected to page after page of misery. If there’s no humor, the story had better be damned interesting.
It must avoid awkward exposition. There are only two acceptable sorts of exposition: (1) straight-forward description that doesn’t pretend to be anything else (e.g. the text crawl at the beginning of “Star Wars”) and (2) exposition that’s so deeply hidden, the reader doesn’t notice it.
Let’s say you need to get the reader to understand that Sarah is Bill’s sister. You can not have him say, “Sister dear, please pass the butter,” unless you’ve established that he always talks to people in that stilted way. In casual conversation, most people don’t label their friends and family. They just say, “Pass the butter.”
You must either be overt—”Bill turned to his sister and said, ‘Pass the butter’“—or incredibly stealthy: “Remember when mom used to buy that really salty butter?”
Also, most of the time, unless we’re talking about something trivial, we don’t say what we want. We’ve all swallowed social rules that make us temper or hide our desires.
So, if George wants his wife to quit fussing over her face so they can get to the party, he probably won’t say, “Quit fussing over your face so we can get to the party” (unless their relationship has reached an intense moment of crisis or he’s a specifically antisocial sort of character). He’ll glance at his watch and say, “Do you think they’re wondering where we are?”
It should avoid judging its characters. Let me, the reader, decide whether they are good or bad. In the best stories, that’s difficult, because the “good guys” have negative traits and the “bad guys” have their charms.
It should avoid didacticism. Let me, the reader, draw my own moral or conclusions. In the best stories, all conclusions are complicated. If the entire “message” of a book is “bigotry is bad,” the writer could have just told me that, and I probably knew it, already.
A great story about bigotry involves me in a world in which bigotry is a force and helps me feel what the characters feel, both the sufferings (and lusts for revenge) of the victims and the fears of the bigots. The story has the confidence to let me live in its world and emerge however I emerge. It doesn’t drive me towards a school-lesson conclusion.