In Which We Discuss Storytelling

By the way, I am still reading War and Peace and Stephen King's works, despite the long gaps. I fully intend to get back to both of them.

I've been reading a lot about how stories work recently because I'm trying to write. I've been trying to write for years, but it was hard to figure out how to write a novel-length story. Now with ADHD medication and two Masters degrees under my belt, I have the focus and the confidence to see a path through from where I am now to where I want to be. And right now, that means gathering the tools to analyse and breakdown stories, and understand why they work, so I have a framework I can play with in new and interesting ways. 

Recently, I've read/been reading Randy Ingermanson's How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, Shawn Coyne's The Story Grid, and Paul Tomlinson's Plot Basics.  I'm also rereading Stephen King's On Writing. They're all fundamentally describing the same thing, but in slightly different ways. They're all trying to codify how stories work in our brains, so this is something we all instinctively recognise when we see it, but we don't know exactly why it works or what we're seeing. Most writers didn't intentionally try to structure their stories in specific ways, but stories that work tend to have things in common, and those things are what 'story structure' tries to describe. It's like building a map of a city. The map isn't the city, but it helps you figure out your way through it.

The consensus is, broadly speaking, that a story contains these elements in this order:

• An Inciting Incident to set off the plot, i.e., why is this happening now and not earlier or later? What was the trigger?
• Escalations, factors which make things harder for your character. These are often called 'complications', but I prefer escalations because my mind links 'complication' with 'problem' and thinking of these factors as problems made it harder for me to identify them. Randy Ingermanson talks about a character in a crucible. The crucible gets hotter and hotter until the character breaks out of it. This metaphor is quite useful because it also includes the idea that once a crucible is broken, you can't use it again. You can use parts of it, since the character probably hasn't solved the whole problem (if they have, you're probably at the end of the story) but whatever your character faces in future should be different in some way.
• A Crisis point, where your character makes a decision. Basically, I picture this and the escalations as a game of Buckaroo. You pile things onto your character until they can't take it any more and they do something. This something 'turns' the story, points it in a different direction. Something has fundamentally changed. As I type, I realise I don't like 'turns'. That makes me picture a game of Snake, and that image isn't useful to me. That snake has no direction, it doesn't have a plan, it's doing random things. For me, a better image is a labyrinth, and the 'turn' is a choice about which path to go down. There is somewhere your character is trying to get to, metaphorically speaking (or literally, like in the movie Labyrinth), and the story you're telling is about each turn they come to and how they decide which path to take.
• A Climax, once the decision is made. To be honest, I still haven't gotten my head around this, but I think I see the crisis point as both the moment in which the character makes up their mind and the immediate action they take, while the latter is more properly part of the climax. Plus, this same structure applies to the story as a whole and is also the structure of each component of the story, that is, beats, scenes, chapters, acts, etc, and while the climax of the entire story might be big and obvious, the climax of a scene might be very simple.
• A Resolution, that is, an ending.

As I touched on in that list, this structure appears in every smaller part of the story. However far you zoom in, you see it, which is why Randy Ingermanson uses his fractal snowflake metaphor. The decision made in one scene might be an escalation for the main story, or the climax, or the resolution. For example, 'Reader, I married him' is a decision for that scene, but it's also the resolution of the story (the story being Jane Eyre).

To expand on the labyrinth metaphor I just came up with; your story starts with your character entering the labyrinth. Each scene within the story describes each choice they make about which way to go. So, you might spend some time describing the walls because your character is trying to use information from them to figure out which path is the best one. That's where exposition and backstory might come in, as metaphorical 'signposts' to explain why your hero chooses the paths she does.  It doesn't have to be backstory, it can also be things happening in the present. But, if you're just describing the walls because they're pretty walls and your character isn't using that information to make decisions, it can be boring. There's only so much of it you can get away with before your reader wanders off.

As well as walls, you'd also describe what else your character is seeing. Who she meets, her own mental state, etc. Eventually, she comes to a split in the path and she must choose which one to take. Ideally, for a strong story, neither should be a good choice. They should both be bad, so she's picking the lesser of two evils. Maybe she doesn't know who to trust, but she needs an ally so she has to decide who she distrusts the least. Alternatively, they can both be good but mutually exclusive. Maybe she has to choose between staying with her long term partner and getting married or pursing her career.  After the turn, the climax might be her seeing the new path she's on, realising it's better or worse than she thought, or that might be the resolution. The smaller the section - beat or scene vs act or story - the smaller the climax and the less the resolution. Plus, they might be the inciting incident for the next section, and so it's better to save your description for that.

The choice your character makes should make sense to your reader because they've seen all the escalations that have build up to it and they've gotten to know your character through the choices they've seen them make before. For instance, maybe your character is naturally trusting and has been taking the advice of other characters about which path to choose, but she's now reached the point where she's realised those choices haven't been right for her, so she decides that, this time, she's going to go the other way. Or maybe your character keeps picking the path that looks the most welcoming, but horrible things have happened, so she tries going the unpleasant way, realising the labyrinth is tricking her. Your character learns about the problem she's facing and makes better decisions, until she's finally able to make a decision that gets her out of the labyrinth. Before then, she'll not understand the problem she's facing, or she'll have a limitation that prevents her from making the best choice (e.g., she's scared of spiders and all the good paths have spiders on them), and she'll reach a point where everything is lost. Somehow, she'll figure out the final thing she needs and turn the whole story around, which is the crisis/climax of your novel as a whole. Darkest night to victory. Alternatively, your hero might fail to understand or overcome her shortcomings, in a way that makes sense based on what we've seen and she will fail to get out. She'll stay stuck in the labyrinth. That's a sad ending. Or you can be bittersweet - she gets out but has lost something, or she never gets out but she helps someone else escape.

The crisis point, where the story 'turns', is an emotional experience for the reader. Shawn Coyne talks about story values, which, to be honest, I still feel like I haven't fully grasped. They're fundamental parts of human experience that can shift. For example, life. You can be safe, you can be in danger, you can be dying, you can be dead, you can be suffering a 'fate worse than death'. Or love. For romantic love, two people might be strangers, or attracted to each other, or rejecting, or hating, or disliking, or they can be increasing in intimacy, they can be soul mates, etc.  Coyne depicts these values as linear in The Story Grid, but now that I'm thinking about it, I think that's one of the things my brain doesn't like. Coyne and I need slightly different maps for the same territory, you see, because we are different people operating different brains. My brain prefers to add more dimensions. If you're trying to map different values of 'love' to a line, is 'used to be in love but now loathe each other' the same as loathing each other, or is it through love and then out the other side? My brain doesn't like it being on the line, it wants to draw another axis, like an x-y grid. Although, since there are definitely more than two directions you can go in, I'm actually picturing something more like an asterisk.

However you picture it, your characters choice should matter, and talking about values is one way to describe how it matters. We can all understand why going from safe to in danger matters, or why it matters if you've gone from loved to ostracised. If your characters choice doesn't change something that matters, it's not a scene-turning choice. Characters do make small choices, like choosing tea over coffee, which don't really impact the story but do characterise them or change something slightly so something else can happen. Include those, but build your scene around a bigger choice.

The idea that makes sense to me is the choice being the turning point of the scene, but Coyne, if I recall correctly, defines the turning point as being the final escalation that your character has to react to. That can be an action or it can be a revelation, a new piece of information. That is useful to think about, because you don't want your story to be all revelation or all action, but the map that works for me is one where I think of the choice as the turning point.

You could have a very short segment, like a sentence or a paragraph, that just has beginning, turn, and end. In longer scenes, it's generally the escalation part that expands the most, though some scenes will have important emotional climactic moments which require more space. You can create a cliffhanger by ending the scene immediately before or after your hero makes their decision known, leaving the climax and resolution unfulfilled, so we're waiting for them.