The stories we tell each other collectively – sorting out the meanings of the word “narrative”, we find the fiction behind the fact.
Some words are so big that they become meaningless.
Let’s put that more precisely: Some terms are used so generally that their denotations are harder to pinpoint than people who use or people who hear such words may realize. Try to define exactly what “freedom” means, or “democracy”.
Out of the field that concerns us here, at least two terms have reached this general ‘buzzword’ status: “storytelling” and “narrative”.
There are professions and there are fields of study trying to get to grips with storytelling and narrative, for instance the profession of dramaturg or the theoretical approaches of narratology.
Dramaturgy is defined as the craft, art, or the practice and techniques of dramatic composition or theatrical representation, where composition refers to the way in which the various parts are put together and arranged. In other words, structure.
Narratology is defined as the study of structure in narratives or the study of narrative and narrative structure, where a narrative is something that is narrated, a representation or description of an event or series of events with the connections between them – that is, of a story.
Especially in American English, there is a second meaning to the word narrative, one that hasn’t made it into the British Collins dictionary yet and only to 2c in the OED, though by now the term is used widely in UK media in the same way as in the States and the rest of the world: “A way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values“ (Merriam-Webster). In other words, ideology.
In this second definition, the term “point of view” is used generally, not in the technical or dramaturgical sense that a cameraperson or a novelist would use when talking about a scene. In the same way that PoV is a far narrower technical term within storytelling than in general use, so is “narrative” far broader in general use than among authors talking shop. Hence for technical use, we need yet another definition, one that is much more precise than what you find in a general dictionary: (more…)
An author we know was offered a contract for her novel on the condition that she cut down the length from 600 manuscript pages down to 450. Most manuscripts can do with a little pruning; see our post how long is a story. But shortening the text by a quarter is a tall order.
Here’s some advice we were able to give her.
1. Remove backstory.
Many authors tend to tell too much about their heroine’s origins or childhood in the first couple of chapters. They think that the readers need to know where the character comes from or how the protagonist grew up in order to understand her properly. Actually, this is a fallacy. It can be counterproductive to explain too much about a main character for two reasons:
Because making that character’s background specific removes the chance for the readers to identify with the character. An everyman type of character, someone blank (at least initially), can make it easier for the readers to put themselves in their shoes.
Because readers like mystery. The audience does not want to be spoon-fed but likes to work things out for themselves. Characters that do strange things are fascinating, and the things they do appear strange mostly because we don’t (yet) understand their motivations. If we know everything already, understand their conscious and subconscious desires and needs, then that explains everything they do before they even do it, so there is less chance for them to surprise us.
This post is adapted from a longer piece by one of our founders on his personal Substack. Read the full article here (just click “no thanks” if you don’t want to subscribe).
If we’re watching a movie or reading a novel, we want a good story that reaches us on an emotional level. We demand to be excited, moved, aroused, even outraged or scared witless.
People enjoy the emotions that stories provoke. Emotional responses are the reason we succumb to stories, and storytellers deliberately try to elicit the “visceral” effect that powerful feelings engender. In order to root for the heroine, she must be placed in danger; in order to empathise with the hero, the audience must be able to identify with him and care about his fate. Writers and storytellers do a lot to engage the audience and keep them reading or viewing. The best techniques to maintain the audience’ attention are the ones that grab the audience emotionally. Stir them! Excite them! Make them feel! Boredom sets in when there is no increased heart rate, no sweaty palms, no rapt attention.
“Our top story tonight: …”
Newspapers and other news media such as television or online news portals know as well as novelists and moviemakers that the promise of emotion is what gets the audience’ attention in the first place and the delivery of emotion is what maintains it. Hence news media employ some similar techniques to fiction authors and screenwriters. Not for nothing is a news show or paper divided into “stories”. (more…)
Here at Beemgee, we know a lot about how stories work. We consider ourselves experts on dramaturgy and narrative. Fiction is our forte.
But we don’t claim to understand non-fiction anywhere near as well. That’s why we were very keen to attend a session on non-fiction by Yvonne Kraus at the author conference at this year’s Leipzig book fair.
Here’s a brief summary of what she taught us.
The Two Basic Structures of Non-Fiction Books
1. Reference and articles
Look at the bottom left of the scribble in the photo and you’ll see circles arranged in a circle, with lines going from the individual circles into the center of the arrangement. Each individual circle stands for a unit of content, or a chapter. This representation is trying to express a way of reading a book. The reader can dip into any chapter at will, they each function independently of each other, it is not necessary to read them in sequence or to read all of them. Cookbooks are a good example. Each recipe constitutes a chapter, a unit, and can be consulted without knowing the other units.
If we are talking about content more complex than recipes, for example political articles, the units may contain information that is repetitious in the book as a whole if this information is necessary in order to understand the content of several individual chapters. I.e. it may well be the case that the same basic facts are stated in several of the chapters if they are requisite to know, because the author cannot assume that the reader will have read previous chapters in the book already. The chapters do not build on each other. Certain units of information may be referenced, for example a lasagne recipe may call for béchamel sauce, the making of which may not be described in the lasagne recipe but instead the lasagne recipe may simply say, “see the recipe for béchamel sauce on page 27 in the section ‘basic sauces'”.
The main body of the book may be subdivided into meaningful sections. The promise the book makes to the reader is that the reader will find specific information on a particular subtopic easily, and without having to read the entire book. (more…)
When the bad guy makes the hero’s journey difficult.
Let’s say your hero or heroine is a falsely accused fugitive from the law. While on the run, every policeman or government agent is effectively an antagonistic obstacle. This is particularly the case if there is a specific character who represents the state and whose mission it is to catch the heroine. This detective or agent casts out the net to catch the fugitive, using all the instruments of the state at his or her disposal in order to actively thwart the heroine’s escape.
Or maybe your story is about a soldier behind enemy lines on a mission to find and destroy (or steal) the enemy’s new super weapon, or perhaps rescue an important person who has been captured. Any enemy soldiers the hero encounters are, of course, obstacles. One could say that they are external obstacles if they just happen to be there, like a patrol unit. But if there is on the enemy side a character who is aware of our hero’s approach and is actively seeking to stop him achieving his mission, then the soldiers and/or henchmen this character sends out to find the hero are not external obstacles but antagonistic obstacles.
As we have said before, this division into three classes of obstacles – internal, external, and antagonistic – is not cut and dried and need not be followed too strictly. But differentiating between the different kinds of obstacles a hero or heroine must face while designing and planning your story can lead to a more exciting plot, simply because you can disperse the obstacles systematically within the story journey and have all the different kinds of obstacle build up to a great crescendo at the climax. (more…)
Ali Luke is a freelance writer and novelist who blogs about making the most of your writing time at Aliventures. For her best tips on making time to write, sign up for her email newsletter: you’ll receive a free copy of her mini ebook Time to Write: How to Fit More Writing Into Your Busy Life, Right Now.
Pacing in fiction is how quickly—or slowly—the story progresses. The right pace for a story depends on its genre. If you’re reading a thriller, you’ll expect a fast-paced read with lots of action; if you’re reading a historical novel or epic fantasy, you might enjoy a slower pace with lots of emphasis on the world of the story.
It’s tough to get pacing spot-on when you’re drafting. It might take you years to write a book that takes just hours for someone to read. What feels “slow” to you as you write might actually go by pretty quickly on the page. Or, you may find that you repeat yourself, going over the same narrative ground multiple times, because you barely remembered what you wrote six months ago.
So, don’t worry about your pacing as you draft. Instead, address it in the redrafts—ideally, with the help of beta readers, but even simply reading over your full manuscript yourself can help you spot areas where the pace feels off.
Here’s what to look for when redrafting your work. (more…)
Should we reassess the success of our storytelling?
The Evolution of Stories
In previous posts we described the evolutionary case for storytelling. There is a point to telling stories, a reason why we do it. Stories have a deep “biological” function. The idea is that the fact that we as a species tell each other stories is an evolutionary adaptation which has increased our ability to survive and thrive on this planet.
And while the argument seems very plausible to us, the description of humans as “the storytelling animal” also seems to us to indicate the typical hubris of our species. By calling ourselves that, we set ourselves apart from the other animals who share our planet, who ostensibly are not intelligent or gifted enough to be endowed with an instinct for narrative.
But who is to say that whales, wolves, or even bees don’t tell each other stories?
If an elephant never forgets, surely their memories are filled with events and occurrences? And who is to say there are no plots and characters in these reminiscences, no themes or motifs in those recollections, no dramaturgy to those pachiderm pasts? (more…)
How perceptive a character is of her surroundings may have dramaturgical relevance.
A character who is good at noticing small details may make a good spy or detective, so if you are developing a detective or spy you may want to give your character this ability. But whatever your character’s profession, stop at least once per scene and ask yourself,
What is a detail that only this character might notice?
Why is this important? Because their perceptions can make characters more interesting and vivid.
If a certain plot event hinges on a character perceiving some small detail or other, it may be a good idea to plant a foreshadowing moment long before the scene, to heighten the impact of the act of perception.
Furthermore, a character’s perception may influence how your audience understands and enjoys the entire story. How exactly depends on two important factors:
Some theorists have posited that stories are all about problem-solving. And certainly – as we have seen – problems are at the very core of story. So by giving the audience a chance to vicariously experience protagonists dealing with problems, a story is in effect a sort of playground or simulation where we can experience what potential problems and solutions feel like – but without any real-life consequences.
An important consideration here is cause and effect. In real life, what we experience has so many causes that it is well-nigh impossible to accurately pinpoint them all. We constantly feel the effects, but it’s hard to pinpoint all the causes. Nonetheless, we really like to have explanations for what’s going on, it gives us a greater sense of control over our own lives. As a species, we seek agency, we’re always looking for what caused something to happen, for the why behind things being as they are. We find it very confusing when we don’t know the reason for the events we live through, and we build elaborate mental constructs to explain to ourselves the world as we perceive it. In this context, we sometimes speak of “narratives”.
In stories, every scene must be the result of a preceding plot event. As we have said before, in between each plot event of a narrative you should be able to place the words not “and then”, but “because of that …”. (more…)
As we have seen, there are two parts of the process to creating a story. One is concerned with the story itself, with what the story comprises and the arrangement of its elements. The other has to do with how you tell it, with the text of the manuscript or screenplay.
Or let’s try another approach to understanding how interwoven the two aspects structure and words are. In Chinese, the word for literature and writing is “wen”, and this word originally meant “pattern”, or design, as for example of woven silk. A pattern is structure.
Consider a tree in winter. Its trunk and branches are the ‘bare bones’ of the organism. Only in spring and summer, when leaves and flowers come out, does it really come alive, does it truly reach its full potential in our eyes, does it become a complete tree in its ideal state. Without the trunk and branches there would be nowhere for the leaves and flowers to grow. So perhaps as an analogy we can see the trunk and branches as the story, and the leaves are the words. And the flowers? Well, maybe they are metaphors …
As Lu Chi put it in third century C.E.,
“When the substance of a composition, trunk of a tree, is by Truth sustained, Style aids it to branch into leafy boughs and bear fruit.”
Translation Shih-Hsiang Chen, in Cyril Birch’s Anthology of Chinese Literature(more…)
Long or short form, commercial or artistic: stories need to be developed before they are told.
The fewest of people with the inclination to write stories actually make a living off it. There are more unsuccessful authors and screenwriters than successful ones, if we measure success in terms of monetary remuneration. And there are yet more people who would love to write that book but never seem to get around to it.
In fact, according to a 2015 YouGov poll in the UK, being an author is the most desirable job in that country. 60% of Britons want to write for a living! In the land of the Bard, J.K. Rowling, and Richard & Judy, perhaps that is not so surprising. Yet we may assume that in other countries too, the desire to tell stories is quite prevalent.
Practice makes perfect, so they say. The best way for a writer to improve their writing is to write. You may have heard of the theory that to be really, really good at something, you need to have done 10,000 hours of it.
But who has 10,000 hours to spare before producing anything readable?
We would contend that any writing is practice. The artist in the garret must eat and so a suitable option would be earning from writing. This is, after all, an age in which content is regent. Perhaps it is even true that more stories are being told today than ever before. There is an abundance of media and channels, and all must be filled with material. Hundreds of original series are being produced for the streaming services, cinema is not dead after all, and neither is TV, publishers are still publishing novels while self-publishers do it too.
Advertising is another field in which storytellers can hone their craft. Every company needs its image video, every product its presentation. Even towns, nonprofits, and unions tell stories. (more…)
This is an age of faster, faster, more, more. At the latest since the advent of the internet, everything seems to be speeding up. Processes that took weeks a few decades ago now take only a few hours, things that in the twentieth century took hours now take place within minutes or seconds. You can get from A to B in less time than ever. The requirements on most of us for most of our work call for ever greater efficiency. We must not waste time. We must be quick.
Composing a story is a painstaking process. And yes, here at Beemgee we built our fiction tool in order to make the process of composing a story more efficient. We want to make it easier to organise a plot and determine the characters’ motivations – for the authors themselves, and for all the people communicating about the story, so between interested parties such as authors and their editors or screenwriters and producers.
But though we might want our authors’ efficiency to increase, let’s not kid ourselves. Composing a story is still a painstaking process. Because most of the time is spent thinking.
Thinking takes time. And that is mostly what plotting and outlining a story really is, thinking. (more…)
Here is a selection of books on the craft of storytelling, most of which we can recommend to budding authors.
Aristotle, Poetics. Oxford University Press, 2013. – Influential in the west, though to be read and interpreted with some caution.
Baxter, Charles, Burning Down The House. Greywolf Press, 2008. – Interesting essays on storytelling.
Beinhart, Larry, How To Write A Mystery, Ballantine, 1996. – Contains much that is true beyond genre writing.
Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots. Continuum, 2005. – More erudite than the title would suggest, and somewhat controversial since he favours classics and disses almost every story of the last 200 years.
Boyd, Brian, On The Origins Of Stories. Harvard University, 2009. – The world’s foremost Nabokov expert with a brilliant and comprehensive – though occasionally quite dry – explanation of why stories are an integral part of the human species, an evolutionary adaptation we couldn’t live without. (more…)
Stories should take three people out of their comfort zone: The heroine or hero, the audience, and the author.
This is an excerpt from a talk we gave for Jericho Writers. We delve into the idea of taking the protagonist out of their comfort zone, the details behind characters’ wants and needs and how they effect the plot and character transformation, and how all that can relate to plot points and pinch points. Most importantly, we remind authors (whether plotter or pantser) that it is always not only about the protagonist, but also about the authors themselves, and about making the audience experience emotions.
Universal storytelling principles behind the most successful movie series ever.
The sumptuous music of John Barry, the stunning set designs of Ken Adam, the directorial skills of Terence Young or Guy Hamilton, the innovative editing of Peter Hunt, the screen presence of Sean Connery, the zangy theme tune by Monty Norman, memorable actresses, spectacular stunts, and exotic location scouting – a fortunate convergence of individual talents built up the abiding popularity of Ian Fleming’s literary creation, the British MI6 agent James Bond.
Most writers don’t have access to such a talent pool, nor do most authors write action-packed spy capers. Also, 007 stories in particular seem so specific a category that authors might not consider that their own works have much in common with them. So one might be tempted to think that most writers can’t learn anything useful from James Bond.
Many people say there is a James Bond formula. Guy Hamilton, director of four of the early Bond movies, has said not. But there are certainly recurring scene types and structural elements that bear examination. A closer look reveals at least seven dramaturgical principles that any author could consider applying.
Take a look at your book shelf. Chances are there are European and North American authors there. Perhaps you have some Central or South American writers too. And maybe some Indian or Pakistani novels. And perhaps some Russians.
All of these authors wrote or write in the tradition of European storytelling, via colonial or cultural influence. Modern African authors writing novels, for example, have adopted this written prose text form although African storytelling traditions are primarily oral.
What most of us, at least in the western world, know about how to tell stories is influenced heavily by Aristotle’s Poetics. In this rather thin book, Aristotle describes some basic precepts of dramatic composition that continue to be circulated in creative writing classes and how-to books today.
Another strong influence on western storytelling is the protagonist/antagonist duality which arose along with Christianity. Would there be a Sauron without Satan? A Darth without the Devil? A Voldemort without Lucifer?
So what about stories that were created without any knowledge of Aristotle or Christianity? How are stories that had no contact with the western way of composing narratives different?
You have likely heard of The Divine Comedy, of Don Quixote, of Shakespeare – but have you heard of the Three Kingdoms? Of Sun Wukong? Of Cao Xueqin?
We asked ourselves, how are stories that had no contact with the western way of composing narratives different? Are the principles of storytelling really universal across cultures? Our idea was to find out by taking a look at classical Chinese literature. We discovered a number of interesting aspects to the Chinese way of telling stories, and have summarised them here.
In this post, we’ll tell you about the novels we read. Each was a revelation in its own way. The long-form novel came along quite suddenly in China just over 500 years ago. Generally recognised as the first great Chinese novel is Three Kingdoms, which appeared around 1494 CE. The most modern of the novels we’re considering here was published around 1760. That means we’re looking at Ming and Qing dynasty literature.
So which classical Chinese novels should you read? Here’s our list of favourites.
Nothing should be more important to an author than how their story makes the audience feel.
As an author, consider carefully the emotional journey of the reader or viewer as they progress through your narrative.
The audience experiences a sequence of emotions when engaged in a narrative. So narrative structure is a vital aspect of storytelling. The story should be touching the audience emotionally during every scene. Furthermore, each new scene should evoke a new feeling in order to remain fresh and surprising.
The author’s job is to make the audience feel empathy with the characters quickly, so that an emotional response to the characters’ situation is possible. Only this can lead to physical reactions like accelerated heartbeat when the story gets exciting. We have to care.
This “capturing” of the audience, making the reader or viewer rapt and enthralled, requires authors to create events that will show who the characters are and how they react to the problems they must face. The audience is more likely to feel with the characters as the plot unfolds when the characters’ reactions to events reveal something about who they really are – and how they might be similar to us.
One Journey to Spellbind Them All
Here we present a loose pattern that we think probably fits for any type of story, whatever genre or medium, however “literary” or “commercial”. It’s not prescriptive, just a rough checklist of the stages in the emotional journey the audience tacitly expects when they let themselves in on a story. The emotions are in more or less the order they might be evoked by any narrative.
KT Mehra knows a thing or two about writing from her own experience, not only as an author but as a supplier to writers and authors of fine stationary, in particular fountain pens. Not only that, she is digital savvy too.
Back in 1999, KT and her husband Sal started a small web company to create websites for local businesses and provide internet access. They both had a passion for fountain pens, and one day KT, in an excess of enthusiasm, ordered far too many from a pen company. Just for fun, she decided not to return any of them and instead asked her team to design an e-commerce website to sell the extra pens.
To everyone’s surprise and just like that, the website came together quickly and was an instant success.
KT believes that in the modern digitally saturated world, it’s more important than ever to stay true to your thoughts and create something tangible. In that spirit of creation, she feels that something as elemental as putting pen to paper is ever more essential.
Despite offering a digital tool for authors, we couldn’t agree more!
Develop a romantic relationship that your readers will engage with and root for.
Most of the romance novels you love so much use certain secrets to hook their readers in and keep them engaged.
Learning the secrets to create such compelling romance novels will help you perfect your characters’ love story.
The Basics
The best way for your readers to relate and root for your relationship is for you to make it realistic and dynamic. To build the foundation of any great love story, you need to have a few things down first. (more…)
Rachael Cooper is the Publishing Manager for Jericho Writers, a writers services company based in the UK and US. Rachael has a Masters in eighteenth-century literature, and specialises in female sociability. In her free time, she writes articles on her favourite eighteenth-century authors and, if all else fails, you can generally find her reading and drinking tea!
What is a manly novel, or a womanly novel for that matter?
Does it matter that 1984 was written by a man, or that a woman penned Harry Potter?
Like anything, people lump writers into stereotypes and groups, along with their work. In some ways, this makes it easier to categorize and begin understanding their novels. In others, it can handcuff an audience’s reading and pigeonhole writers.
Women have been writing, and out writing, men for millennia. From Sappho to Toni Morrison, Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, myriad women writers have changed the world with their words.
Out of all the novels written by women, these are three of the most “manly” of all, the ones you’d bet were written by men.
A blurb is a short text on the back of a paperback book designed to get you to purchase that book.
Received wisdom in the publishing industry has it that the cover design triggers browsing bookshoppers to pick up a particular book from the table, after which most people will turn it over to read what’s on the back. The short text on the back cover must then arouse so much interest about the content of the book that the impulse to purchase is triggered. Many customers might glance into the book first before actually going to the checkout.
The blurb text is also used to advertise the book in some print magazines and online shopping platforms. Again, the cover is likely to determine whether the blurb text gets read, but in most cases a sale is unlikely without the blurb having done its job of persuading the prospective customer that this is the right book for them.
Films also have blurbs, which are usually placed in combination with the film poster or a film still.
A blurb is therefore a marketing text. It is not a brief synopsis of the story! The blurb is not really designed to provide information, but to create interest. So the job of the blurb is actually to give just enough information to make withholding more information effective. Not saying quite as much as the recipient wants to know is how to arouse curiosity.
What this often boils down to is answering three key questions about the story in the blurb: (more…)
Joseph Campbell’s study of worldwide myths, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949), has become massively influential in commercial storytelling. Campbell was not the first to consider the concept of the hero and mythological or archetypal stories, and by no means the last (see Northrop Frye, as well as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg). But Campbell’s work consolidated what others, including Carl Jung, had suggested into a theory specifically about storytelling.
George Lucas read The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a young man, and we may assume that Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg were also familiar with the book. We can see the influence of Campbell’s ideas on some of the most successful movies of the 1970s and 80s, and ever since.
Christopher Vogler studied film at the same school as George Lucas, and subsequently while working at Disney wrote a seven-page breakdown of Campbell’s book. This in time developed into The Writer’s Journey, which has become the basis of the popular conception of The Hero’s Journey.
Campbell was an expert on James Joyce and a professor of literature with a particular interest in comparative mythology and comparative religion. The Hero With A Thousand Faces is by no means a how-to book or a storytelling manual. Rather, it posits the theory that all the myths of the world have elements in common and propounds the idea of the “monomyth” as a basic structural model of traditional storytelling. (more…)
George Lucas had already stated his debt to Campbell in the development of Star Wars, and the idea that there might be a template for stories that are so successful they last over centuries and across cultures caught on quickly in Tinseltown. (more…)
One of the many experts on storytelling to have attempted in a book to describe the essential elements of a story is John Truby.
In The Anatomy of Story (2007), Truby identifies 22 steps in any protagonist’s narrative, which may play into four aspects of the story: character, plot, story world, and moral argument. Thankfully, Truby does not insist that every story must follow the template strictly and contain all 22 steps. He does, however, identify as critical that the story show seven attributes of a main character and their storyline: (more…)
A synopsis is a summary of your story intended to be read by industry professionals.
This makes it a different text from a blurb, which is designed to be read by the public.
In both cases, you probably want the reader to purchase your story. But the reader of the blurb is merely buying a book or a movie ticket. The reader of the synopsis is taking a much greater risk if they decide to invest in your story.
An editor or publisher or a movie producer or director is accustomed to hearing story pitches. They want to find out as quickly as possible if your story is something that they might be interest in. So they need certain questions answered fast. These questions usually concern the premise(more…)
You might think that your story could be enjoyed by anyone. But most stories particularly appeal to more or less specific target groups.
When you’re developing a story, it helps to have an idea of kind of people who are going to be enjoying it. The more specific this idea, the more likely you are to conceive and form the material in a way that will appeal to them.
The Ideal Audience
So while you are writing a story, you may have an ideal reader or viewer in mind. This might be your projection of a particular real individual, or just a vague idea of a type of person. Your ideal reader or viewer gets every joke, spots every reference – no matter how obscure –, and feels just the way they should during each scene.
The ideal audience is a figment of the author’s imagination. Picturing this figment in as much detail as possible in your mind’s eye might be a good starting point for finding out who your target audience is. Is the ideal reader a gentleman sitting in an armchair? Or a teenage girl lounging in a café?
Specifying your target audience to industry professionals you’re pitching to can make it easier for them to judge whether your work is something they can invest in. Typically, the criteria for target groups are: (more…)
Dramaturgy means “the craft or the techniques of dramatic composition”.
In other words, everything to do with the story except the words with which it is told. If your story is about two people in a room, dramaturgy tells you who these people are and what happens in the room. In terms of storytelling process, the term dramaturgy refers to the planning or outlining stage rather than the execution or writing.
The study of dramaturgy has produced a nomenclature that is used by dramaturges, script consultants, story advisors, editors and publishers, producers and filmmakers, as well as authors. Some terms may seem more familiar than others, and often their definitions are not entirely agreed upon. (more…)
If you dont know what your story is really about, start finding out now (and don’t stop).
By Amos Ponger
Mankind’s Stories
The human ability of creating stories and the consumption and absorption of stories are very deeply connected to the core of our civilizations. Our efficiency as a species and cooperation in all scales of human endeavor rely on our ability to tell, decode, understand, and believe in stories.
Story has been so important for mankind’s cooperation, development and the way humans have understood themselves that all of our grand evolutions and revolutions – from the agricultural, religious, economic and cultural revolutions, the invention of money and law, the renaissance and humanism, the American, French and Russian revolutions, modernism, to socialism and capitalism – have actually happened through processes of rewriting collective Story. Revolutionaries and evolutionaries from Moses through Jesus, to Buddha, have actually risen upon a grand scale transformation of how humans understand themselves and cooperate with each other. And that has been done by story. Often the seeds of politics of whole centuries had actually been sown by poets, philosophers and prophets. STORYTELLERS.
Your Story
Now, even if you don’t plan on a revolution(more…)
What does meaning mean? When is a tale meaningful? A few perspectives on imbuing your plot and characters with a subtext.
It’s no mean feat to make your audience feel they have learned something through your story.
Meaning is that which is intended or understood. The audience draws significance, relevance or profundity out of a story when it understands the deeper implications, reasonings and causes behind it. The meaning of a story depends on the standpoint. An author may mean something different from what the audience understands.
Let’s try to unravel this tricky but essential element of stories. We have noted that stories cannot help but exhibit four distinct elements:
Characters
Plot
Style (aka language, or “voice”)
Meaning
The interplay of characters and their actions form the plot, and all this is brought into a story structure, or narrative. Since there is always an author writing the novel or a team of people making the film, their stylistic choices determine the language of the work. In this post, we’ll skim the surface of the fourth element. Meaning is, of course, a broad term for something very hard to pinpoint.
We could add more story elements to the list. For instance, we have claimed that there is No Story Without Backstory. Furthermore, since the characters act within a time and place, there is always a story world. And in order to make the audience understand all this, there is always some measure of exposition. Then there is change or transformation, cause and effect, etc.
Let’s break down how we might look for the meaning of a story. (more…)
In recent years, scientists have been writing books about the reasons why we tell each other stories.
Neurobiologists have discovered that when a person is immersed in a story, their brain patterns are similar to what they would be if that person were actually performing the actions they are reading about or watching. So if a recipient is emotionally engaged in a story, they are essentially “living” it – at least in terms of the brain patterns. The excitement is real, the fear, the empathy, the arousal. See Boyd, 2009, or Gottschall, 2012*.
Simulation
This has given rise to the analogy of the flight simulator.
Stories are everywhere. We create and consume them from an early age. Homo sapiens have done so for millennia – our modern media are a result of our ancient need for stories. We have been telling them to each other ever since we, as a species, have been human. It’s what homo sapiens do. It’s a defining characteristic. What evolutionary biologists call an “adaptation”.
That means there is a reason for us to tell stories: They help us survive. (more…)
Let’s look at what each do to see the differences between the three different kinds of editors. And then find the other editorial task they all have in common.
The VR viewer wears special goggles and occupies a space within a virtual holodeck, which is created by two diagonally opposing little boxes shooting lasers out at right angles. The viewer can move within this virtual space, which might be the stage for a story. The goggles will show the viewer whatever program is loaded, Matrix-like. The 360° view is created quite conventionally, by filming a location in all directions, the camera at the centre, pointing outwards and panning all the way round.
So far, so good. It gets more interesting when such virtual locations are populated.
For VR, actors are filmed not with one or two cameras from a couple of angles, but with 40 or more cameras from all angles, the cameras all pointing inwards with the actor at the centre. The resulting 40 or more images are stitched together. The VR goggle wearer can therefore walk around the actors and see them from the front, from behind, from any angle. The actor was never at the location, but is superimposed into the virtual space (this already happens in conventional film with green screen technology).
What you get is the viewer as a ghost, moving about the story stage and around the characters at will. The effect is like intimate theatre. (more…)
Working for over 20 years as an award winning film editor and story consultant, Amos Ponger studied film science, cultural sciences, art history and multidisciplinary art sciences at The FU Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and the Tel Aviv University. He has a Master’s degree from the Steve Tisch School of Film in the Tel Aviv University, worked as an editing teacher in two Israeli film academies, is senior advisor to our story development tool Beemgee.com, and recently co-founded the story consulting service Mrs Wulf. Book his services directly here.
The Transformational Process of Creating a Great Story
We all know that creating a great story is a process that can sometimes take many months and even years to fulfill.
If you talk to professional writers they will probably tell you that they have complex relationships with these processes of writing. Involving dilemmas, fear and joy, suffering and excitement. And that these self-reflexive processes are also processes of self-exploration.
Yet many writers, scriptwriters, filmmakers tend to put a lot of energy into their external journey towards completing their story, focusing on drama, act structure, “cliff hanging”, while neglecting minding their own internal processes on their journey.
What many film and story editors encounter while working with directors and writers is that authors and directors tend to have a very strong drive. They endure months in writing solitude, or filming in deserts, storms, war zones, perhaps even putting themselves in danger in order to realize their artistic vision. Yet at the same time very often they have a remarkable incapability of explaining WHY they HAVE to do it, and can only do so in very vague terms. (more…)
How narrative structure turns a story into an emotional experience.
Image: Comfreak, Pixabay
Storytelling is a bit of an overused buzzword. While we are all – by dint of being human – storytellers, how aware are you of the principles of dramaturgy? What exactly constitutes a story, in comparison to, say, a report or an anecdote?
And just to be clear, the following is not a story. It’s an how-to article.
Whatever the medium – film or text, online or offline –, storytelling has something to do with emotionally engaging an audience, that much seems clear. So is a picture of a cute puppy a story? Hardly.
Stories exist in order to create a difference in their audience. Stories always address problems and tend to convey the benefits of co-operative behaviour.
While there simply is no blueprint to how stories work, let’s examine the elements that recur in stories and try to find some patterns.
Who is the story about?
All stories are about someone. That someone does not have to be a person, it can be an animal (Bambi) or a robot (Wall-e). But a story needs a character. In fact, all stories have more than one character, with virtually no exceptions. This is because the interaction between several characters provides motivation, conflict and action.
Moreover, stories usually have a main character, the figure that the story seems to be principally about – the protagonist. It is not always obvious why one character is the protagonist rather than another. Is she simply the most heroic? Is she the one that develops most? Or does she just have the most scenes?(more…)
Reflections on dialectically guided writing, or: Can dialectics help us tell better stories?
Guest post by Richard Sorg.
Prof. Dr. phil. Richard Sorg, born in 1940, is an expert in dialectics. What is that, and what does it have to do with my novel? Well, “All great, moving and convincing stories are inconceivable without the central significance of the contradictions and conflicts that represent the driving energy of movement and development.” This puts us in the middle of dialectics. And of storytelling.
After studying theology, sociology, political science and philosophy in Tübingen, West Berlin, Zurich and Marburg, Richard Sorg taught sociology in Wiesbaden and Hamburg. His book “Dialectical Thinking” was recently published by PapyRossa Verlag. (Photo: Torsten Kollmer)
Ideas that contain a potential for conflict.
Sometimes there is a single but central chord at the beginning of a piece of music, even an entire opera, which is then gradually unfolded. Its inherent aspects, harmonies and dissonances emerge from the chosen, sometimes inconspicuous beginning, undergoing a dramatic, conflictual development, so that a whole, complex story emerges at the end of the path of this simple chord after its unfolding. This is the case, for example, with the so-called Tristan chord at the beginning of Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde”, a leitmotif chord that ends with an irritating dissonance.
The beginning of a story is sometimes an idea, an idea which you may not know how to develop. But some such ideas or beginnings carry a potential within them that is capable of unfolding and which holds unimagined development possibilities. ‘Candidates’ for viable beginnings – comparable to the dissonant Tristan chord mentioned above – are those that contain a potential for conflict or contradiction within. But it can also be a calm with which the matter is opened up, a calm that may then prove to be deceptive. We also find something similar in some dramas, for example with Bertolt Brecht.
And with that, we are already in the middle of dialectics. (more…)
The answer provides many clues about the story in question. While we tend to ask “where”, the setting actually encompasses somewhat more than location.
In Film, the term location is generally used to refer to scenes that are shot outdoors rather than on a sound stage or in the studio. In the specific context of filmmaking, the word “setting” is often used in scripts is a hyper-ordinate term to refer to both types of shooting, indoors in a controlled environment and out “on location”.
But for stories in general, the concept of setting refers to rather more. Let’s find out how setting relates to
time
genre
story world
premise
Time
Each Star Wars story reminds us of the setting before it even starts: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. In being reminiscent of “once upon a time”, the famous opening establishes that the setting is essentially a fairy tale with spaceships.
“Middle-earth” is a valid answer to the question of setting for The Lord of the Rings. One might be tempted to explain that Middle-earth is a fictitious realm, maybe say something about how its quasi-medieval technology relates to the actual Earth’s history, or possibly mention the connection to the Midgard of Norse mythology.
So in addition to describing physical space, both these examples of setting contain hints and associations about the time when the events of the story take place. (more…)
There is no right or wrong way to write a work of fiction. Perhaps the main thing is to just sit down and get on with it.
Many authors start by writing the beginning of the story and working their way through to the end. This seems intuitive, as it mirrors the way narratives are normally received – from opening to resolution. Furthermore, it allows a development of the material that feels natural, beginning probably with a setting and a character or two and growing in complexity as the story progresses.
But this isn’t the only way to get a story written. The author is not the recipient, after all. The author is the creator.
Creative habits seem to differ according to medium. Most screenwriters spend a lot of time working out the intricacies of plot and complexities of character before beginning to actually write the screenplay. Some novelists, on the other hand, seem to require the writing process in order to get to grips with the material. For such authors, the act of working on text is so intimately intertwined with the craft of dramaturgy that the shaping of the story has to be performed simultaneously with the writing of it.
Flow
In some cases, a writer might have a fairly clear idea in mind where the story is headed, or already be aware of certain key scenes that ought to be included. In others, the author may not know how the story ends(more…)
The logline is probably the hardest sentence to write.
The logline sums up a story in one sentence. This sentence should be memorable and clear, which means it is unlikely to be much longer than thirty words or to have complex syntax.
Once your reader has read your logline – or your listener heard it –, they will ideally know the following about your story:
who it is about
what the central conflict or main problem is
what the most important characters do in the story
why they do it, i.e. what their motivations are
how they do it
where all this happens, i.e. what the setting is
when it happens, i.e. what the period is
The first of these points even counts double – since usually the logline should convey not only who the main protagonist is, but also what antagonism she faces.
What’s the logline for?
The purpose of the logline is to pitch your story.(more…)
In real life, conflict is something we generally want to avoid. Stories, on the other hand, require conflict. This discrepancy is an indicator of the underlying purpose of stories as a kind of training ground, a place where we learn to deal with conflict without having to suffer real-life consequences.
In this post we will look at:
An Analogy
Archetypal conflict in stories
Conflict between characters
Conflict within a character
The central conflict
Along with language (in some form or other, be it as text or as the language of a medium, such as film) and meaning (intended by the author or understood by the recipient), characters and plot form the constituent parts of story. It is impossible to create a story that does not include these four components – even if the characters are one-dimensional and the plot has no structure. However, it is formally possible to compose a story with no conflict.
It just won’t be very interesting.
In terms of narrative, conflict is presented as a series of confrontations of increasing intensity. If there are no confrontations – no battles of wits or fists, no crossing of swords or sparring with words – there is little to hold the audience’ attention. To create confrontations, there must be at least a of conflict of interest between the characters.
Conflict does not occur at particular points in a story. It permeates the whole of it. It expresses the values transported by the story’s theme. It creates at least two options of choice, both of which must appear to some extent reasonable and justifiable to the protagonist, particularly at the moment of crisis.
The step outline is the scene by scene (step by step) account of what happens in the story.
Like a textual storyboard, the step outline presents the narrative in its entirety – without actually being the narrative. It is a complete report of the story – in the present tense! – that describes every plot event.
Cause and Effect
The step outline therefore makes one of the most important principles of storytelling very clear, cause and effect.
Apart from the kick-off event and the closing event, every plot event fulfils two functions, at least to an extent:
It is a precondition of events that follow it in the narrative
It is an inevitable consequence of events that have preceded it in the narrative
The step outline should make it easier to understand how the individual events relate to each other in this chain of cause and effect. The step outline may thus be read as the author’s construction plan of the narrative.(more…)
Detectives and other investigators abound on our TV and cinema screens.
In the western world, crime fiction – mystery, thrillers, suspense, whodunnits, etc. – makes up somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of all fiction book sales. Why is the crime genre so popular?
Crime is fascinating, to be sure, because most of us don’t commit it. But the popularity of the genre has little to do with crime per se. It has far more to do with the very essence of how storytelling works.
In this article we will be looking at:
Cause and Effect
Agency
The Whydunnit
The Narrative Principle
Why Some People Don’t Like Crime Stories
The Search For Truth, or Gaining Awareness
How Crime Is Like Comedy
Cause and Effect
Crime fiction exhibits most clearly one of the fundamental rules of storytelling: cause and effect. In crime fiction,(more…)
The protagonist is the main character or hero of the story.
Photo by Jack Moreh on Freerange
But “hero” is a word with adventurous connotations, so we’ll stick to the term protagonist to signify the main character around whom the story is built. Sometimes it is not so easy to know which is your main character.
Generally speaking, the protagonist is the character whom the reader or audience accompanies for the greater part of the narrative. So usually this character is the one with most screen or page time. Often the protagonist is the character who exhibits the most profound change or transformation by the end of the story.
Furthermore, the protagonist – and in particular what the protagonist learns – embodies the story’s theme.
For simplicity’s sake, let us say for the moment that in ensemble pieces with several main characters, each of them is the protagonist of his or her own story, or rather storyline. Since the protagonist is on the whole a pretty important figure in a story, there is a fair bit to say about this archetype, so this post is going to be quite long.
In it we’ll answer some questions:
Is the protagonist the most interesting character in the story?
What are the most important aspects of the protagonist for the author to convey?
What about the transformation or learning curve?
How Interesting Must The Protagonist Be?
Some say the protagonist should be the most interesting character in the story, and the one whose fate you care about most.
But while that is often the case, it does not necessarily have to be true.
Events propel narrative. Narrative consists of a chain of events.
These do not have to be spectacular action events – they can be internal psychological events if your story is about a man who does not leave his room, or spiritual events if you are recounting the story of Buddha sitting beneath the tree. But events there must be if there is to be a story.
Events in a story are effectively bits of knowledge the author wants to impart – in a particular order, the narrative – to the recipient, i.e. the reader or audience. The story is told when all the pertinent knowledge has been presented, when all the bits of information necessary for the story to feel like a coherent unity are conveyed. An author(more…)
We have discussed time a great deal in this blog. Of course, the spatial dimension may be just as relevant.
The Story World
We may distinguish between the overall story world location and specific locations. By story world we refer to the overall setting and logical framework of the story. This is always unique to the story, although that becomes most obvious in stories set either in a fantasy world (like The Lord Of The Rings) or in stories that have a setting tightly bound to a geographical feature, such as Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, or Deliverance. In each of these latter examples, a river – and the journey up or down it – provides the story world. Yet story world is more than just physical location. It describes an entire environment, including the ethical dimensions. Consider Wall Street or The Big Short, stories that describe a “world” where making money comes first.
The setting is usually established in the first part of the story, and the rest of the story should be true to what has been set up at the beginning.
Locations
Within the entirety of the “world” come the specific locations(more…)
This may seem like a silly question. How long is a piece of string, right? And the simple answer is:
ideally, a story is as long as it needs to be, and no longer.
There are norms that have developed over time, and which are more or less inculcated into us due to our exposure to stories in their typical media. Back in the 1970s or 80s a music album contained a total of about 40 minutes of sound, because that is as much as would fit on a long-playing vinyl 33 rpm record, approximately 20 minutes on either side. With the advent of the CD, suddenly musicians felt the artistic need to create albums that were twice as long.
You’d think that stories wouldn’t be subject to such constraints because the carrier media for stories are more flexible. However, when it comes to moving pictures at least, what is typically considered a fair attention span to expect the audience to tolerate does seem prone to popular beliefs by industry players in the respective markets. For example, a typical feature length film is roughly two hours long. This is practical because cinemas can comfortably manage two screenings an evening. If the film is good enough, it could of course easily be longer, but at some point viewers become restless and need an intermission.
A typical two hour-ish movie has between forty and sixty scenes. Formatted according to industry standards, a screenplay has approximately as many pages as the finished movie would have minutes. In terms of plot events, some people in Hollywood believe that a commercial movie should have exactly forty (which in Beemgee’s plot outlining tool would mean exactly 40 event cards).
Content and form may be mutually determined, to some degree at least. A short story is usually considered such if it has less than 10.000 words. By dint of its length, a short story probably concentrates on one character’s dealing with one specific issue or occurrence, and is unlikely to have subplots or multiplots (that is, be about more than one protagonist).
Short stories are great practice for writers cutting their teeth. Our friends at the self-publishingschool have gathered 11 Easy Steps for Satisfying Stories.
A piece of written prose fiction between 10.000 and 50.000 words is often considered a ‘novella’. This is a sort of hybrid between the short story and the novel. The narrative of a novella is likely to cover more ground – that is, relate a longer and more complex set of events – than a short story simply because it is longer than a short story. But to state that a novella perforce has more depth or more action than a short story would be a meaningless generalization. What is likely is that the focus in a longer narrative such as a novella is on a string of occurrences (or chain of events, i.e. causally linked events) rather than the story revolving around the meaning and effects of a single occurrence. (more…)
The seven elements of every line of dialog in a story.
Dialog enlivens stories. But dialog in stories is very different from real spoken language. It conveys information that the audience needs to know in order to understand the story as well as the characters – the one speaking the lines as well as the one reacting to them.
There is the rule of thumb that it’s better for the author to use action to explain things or move the plot forward than dialog, at least in film. Certainly, when the author makes characters say things solely to convey some bit of knowledge to the audience or reader, the lines tend to feel false. That’s a form of exposition, explanatory stuffing. If in doubt, leave it out. You’ll be surprised how much the audience understands even without explanations.
On the other hand, Elmore Leonard noted how readers don’t usually skip dialog. People like dialog. Dialog can be exciting. Dialog can be action. So authors had better know how to write it.
Here are seven things you ought to consider about every single line of dialog you put into your characters’ mouths. We’ve created this free table to help you. Feel free to download, use and share it.
In storytelling, a McGuffin (or MacGuffin) is something that the protagonist is after – along with most other characters in the story.
The use of a McGuffin is a device the author employs in order to give a story direction and drive.
Easy to spot McGuffins are the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the statuette in The Maltese Falcon, private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan, the ring (more specifically, the act of its destruction) in Lord Of The Rings. Note how in these examples, the McGuffin is in the title of the story. The McGuffin is embedded in the narrative structure and becomes what the story is about, on the surface at least.
Typical genres that have McGuffins are comedy, crime, adventure, fantasy and other quest stories. But conceivably, a dressed up McGuffin might be found in any genre.
Nor does a McGuffin have to be an object. It could be a person or a quality. In a story of several characters vying for the love of one other character, that love might be considered the McGuffin. A place might become a McGuffin too – consider the role of the planet Earth in Battlestar Galactica.
In terms of narrative structure, a McGuffin occupies the(more…)
One of the most far-reaching decisions an author must make is how to narrate the story. Or: Who is telling the story to whom under which circumstances?
To be fair, this question is a relatively new one for authors to ponder. In the pre-modern age, authors just grabbed their quills and started writing. But as novels became more sophisticated, technical questions became more explicit and relevant. Narrative voice – the matter of who is talking here, or what is this text we’re reading purporting to be – is a factor at the latest since James Joyce’ Ulysses and all the self-aware post-modern novels that followed. Previously, there had already been a difference between author and narrator. When in a novel by Charles Dickens you, dear reader, are directly addressed, then already there is some sort of discrepancy between the person saying “dear reader” to you and Charley Dickens the man. But this discrepancy didn’t become a popular topic to construct stories around until the twentieth century.
Anyway, while not a traditional archetype, and in many cases not even a participating character, the narrator is never really quite the same entity as the author either.
To begin with the basics, the standard narrator types are:
first-person, where usually the protagonist tells his or her own story
third-person limited, where a narrator tells a story from one character’s point of view only, meaning that the audience/reader is not told of any events that this character is unaware of
third-person omniscient, where the narrator can relate what any of the characters are doing and thinking, and is not limited in what to present to the audience/reader
In film, first person and third-person limited effectively amount to the same thing: the audience gets one person’s perspective on the story per shot or scene (there is also the first-person “point of view” camera angle, but rarely is an entire film presented that way). In prose, first and third person is the difference between “I did this” and “she (or he) did that”. This is a stylistic choice. In the sense of what the narrator knows and tells, there is not necessarily much difference.
Close or Distant
But potentially there is big difference between narrative stance. A narrator who is limited to reporting in third person on only one character can do so “close” or “from a distance”.(more…)
Theme is a binding agent. It makes everything in a story stick together.
To state its theme is one way of describing what a story is about. To start finding a story’s theme, see if there is a more or less generic concept that fits, like “reform”, “racism”, “good vs. evil”. The theme of Shakespeare’s Othello is jealousy.
Once this broadest sense of theme is established, you could get a little more specific.
The theme is the expression of the reason why THIS story MUST be told! The theme of a story holds it together and expresses its values. Theme may therefore be seen as an implicit message. But make sure that the message remains implicit, allowing the audience to understand it through their own interpretation.
Since a theme is usually (though not always) consciously posited by the author, it has some elements of a unique and personal vision of what is the best way to live. At best, this is expressed through the structure of the story, for instance by having the narrative culminate in a choice the protagonist has to make. The choices represent versions of what might be considered ways to live, or what is “right”.
But beware! This is a potential writer trap. See below.
How story expresses theme
Theme is expressed, essentially, through the audience’s reaction to how the characters grow. A consciously chosen theme seeks to convey a proposition that has the potential to be universally valid. Usually – and this is interesting in its evolutionary ramifications – the theme conveys a sense of the way a group or society can live together successfully.(more…)
One of the most important choices an author must make concerns Point of View.
In storytelling, people use the term Point of View (or PoV) to refer to different things. We’ve narrowed it down to four definitions:
The overall perspective from which a story is told
The scene by scene perspective of a story
The narrator’s point of view
Attitude or belief system of the author
Overall perspective
The entire Star Wars saga is, in very general terms, told from the point of view of the two characters that have least status: the robots C-3PO and R2-D2. They are not present in every single scene, but they are part of the overall course of events – and in a ironic tip of the hat to their function of providers of overall point of view, George Lucas has C-3PO relate the entire story so far to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
George Lucas borrowed the idea from Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which tells a story of generals and princesses from the point of view of two peasants. These two are involved in the action, but understand less about what they see going on than the audience does.(more…)
Guest post by Richard Sorg.
