Where Do Stories Come From?
Part II: How I Deal With Story Structure
In my last deep dive, I focused on the free-flow, mushy task of allowing the subconscious mind to do its thing when developing a story. Being loose and not too tightly attached to your ideas is an important virtue to keep at every stage of the process (not just the beginning) because it allows you to make adjustments fearlessly when you hit roadblocks in your writing.
Despite the importance of remaining flexible, however, the end goal of any creative script, prose, or any other writing is to be both clearly understood and emotionally effective. That means eventually you will need to zero in on a solid structure (big picture) and precise moment-to-moment work (small picture.) This is where the real elbow grease of writing comes into play and you can hit a lot of deeply frustrating moments in the process.
The most important thing for you to have during this phase is a lot of patience and an indefatigable belief that you can make your writing work in a way you end up loving. If the scene/action/dialogue is not quite working for you, that means there is another better version of your script somewhere in the ether that does work, and it is just waiting to be found.
Right???
Now that I’ve gotten my idealistic view out of the way, let me give you a more down-to-earth perspective: while about 80% of the time you are going to be able to make your script into that better version, there is still that other 20% of the time when you have to make some hard choices for the sake of getting your story done. Yes, it could always be better, but there are definitely times when it is okay to cut your losses and say, “That’s good enough. There’s more at stake than this line of dialogue.”
(It took me a long time to learn this lesson which is part of why I finished so few scripts over the years. However, since I have begun to allow this bit of humility and practicality into my process in the last five to ten years, I have seen so many more stories through to completion.)
So, let’s talk about how I approach structure.
The Three Lenses
The way I like to think about structure when writing is on three different levels: writing structure, story structure, and emotional structure. For the story to work as a whole, I am constantly pushing and tugging between these three levels. The best way I can describe it is like I am trying to focus a picture looking through three different lenses on a camera until all the details become sharp and crisp. If you adjust one lens, it affects the focus on the other lenses and vice versa, so it becomes a tricky balancing act.
(SIDE NOTE: I’m not a photographer, so if this metaphor makes no sense to someone who is, I apologize. It’s just my way of thinking about it, so hopefully you can get over my ignorance and still understand what I am describing.)
Lense 1: Writing Structure
I had a screenwriting teacher in college who taught us the most important skill you can have as a writer in Hollywood is the ability to write structure. Even if you have mundane writing and sappy characters, if you know how to create a three act structure that works in a television or movie script, you will get the job over a James Joyce who can’t fit his stream of consciousness dialogue into an hour time slot with commercials.
The same can be said for any professional writing job whether it is a magazine story with a word limit, a comic script with a page limit, or a screenplay with a time limit. You always need to be aware of how your story will fit in the medium where it will be seen.
Lense 2: Story Structure
With that said, the other element of structure that is often talked about is the three act structure. Beginning, middle, end; hook, line, sinker; setup, complication, resolution—the rule of threes is something deeply ingrained into our subconscious understanding of story. There are lots of books out there about why and how this works. However, what is more important than why it works is that, when you are done, your story feels complete intellectually and emotionally. To get there, these three broad stroke elements of the story need to be present and clearly understood by the writer.
Whatever structure you feel best resonates with your story (i.e. three act, Joseph Cambell’s the Hero’s Journey, Dan Harmon’s story circle, etc.), the reason you should understand them is not to tell you what to write next. Instead, use the structure templates to help you recognize whether or not your organically written story has fulfilled a complete circuit.
More often than not, if you just follow the course of natural character actions and choices from moment-to-moment without thinking ahead too much, you will see most stories fall into one of these structures naturally. Recognizing your hooks, turning points, and climaxes, you can use the structures to help you define whether those moments are happening at the right time and in the right order.
(SIDE NOTE: For this to happen naturally, your characters need to be well defined with clear motivations, fears, strengths, and weaknesses which I won’t get into here. If you do your homework on those character elements, however, you cannot go wrong. If your characters are well developed, you will eventually notice your story start to practically write itself.)
Lense 3: Emotional Structure
Finally, there is a third type of structure I think about that may be addressed less often in writing classes which is the emotional beats of the story. Some of the best writing classes I ever took were actually my acting classes because they allowed me to inhabit characters physically and really break down how a character behaves from moment-to-moment when interacting with other characters. I cannot stress enough how important good moment-to-moment work is for creating emotionally satisfying scenes. It can make the difference between a scene that feels natural and heartfelt versus a scene that feels stilted and cringey.
If there is one quality your emotional structure needs to work well it is authenticity. Your characters need to feel as though they are behaving and responding to every situation as they really would based on their motivations and world views. This can be a little trickier than it may seem to pull off.
Often from a writer’s perspective, we may want to make a character behave as we the writer need or want them to for the sake of satisfying one of our other story structures. However, not being self-aware of this writing pitfall is the bane of creating emotionally relatable characters.
It can usually go one of two ways: 1) Low stakes: You write a character who takes action too quickly without setting up high enough stakes for the action to have strong emotional consequences. 2) Unrelatable characters: The character’s action plays out with proper motivations to back it up, but it doesn’t connect emotionally because the writer hasn’t given the reader enough opportunities to connect with and start liking the character.
Remember, real people aren’t perfect and neither should your characters be. People make mistakes, say dumb things, have emotional outbursts, and give loved ones the cold shoulder all the time. The reasons can be many for such behavior, but allowing your characters to make those mistakes allows your scenes to not only feel real but also create drama with tension.
So, for example, instead of having your character blurt out how they love someone they’ve had a crush on during a quiet scene (logical), a more realistic approach might be to have them hold it in out of fear of rejection creating tension until that moment at the end when it finally all spills out at the most inconvenient point in the action (illogical.)
One thing acting classes taught me to really understand was subtext: the thing a character is really saying under the words or actions they are displaying on the surface. The reason understanding subtext is so important is because it is how people really communicate all the time, every day. They say one thing, but we all know they mean something else whether we acknowledge it or not.
Writing characters with subtext is one of the best ways to create characters who feel authentic and relatable. It also gives readers/viewers an opportunity to connect with your characters because they can say, “Oh, I know what she really means.” Having moments with subtext is just one example of a way you can get your readers emotionally involved with your characters.
Another example is using humor. If a character uses humor, it is an insight into their true feelings about the world. If it makes your reader actually laugh, congratulations! You just made an emotional connection with your reader, and this connection is only going to deepen their feelings for the character when you put them in a dangerous situation later in the story.
My point is recognizing the moment-to-moment granular interactions that make characters emotionally relatable is key to making them feel authentic—just like your real life friend/brother/boss/mother/co-worker. It takes a lot of practice, but similar to the story structure, this emotional structure comes down to being very clear about your character’s desires, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. (Again, I’ll have to write something else about character development.)
Focusing Your Story
Keeping these three structures in mind means making a lot of compromises and adjustments between the three. This is where being flexible personally is important as you tighten things up structurally.
For example, I may have to lose a great character moment I like because it is the sacrifice I need to keep my story within my page count limit. Other times, I may need to move a scene to a different point in the story because I realize it is actually the emotional climax happening too soon, and it needs more tension to pay off properly. Or I may realize there needs to be one more frame of silence before a character speaks to allow the tension to build and give more weight to a line of dialogue, but doing that may mean I have to sacrifice another frame on the same page to stay within my page limit.
Sometimes I find I have all the elements of a good story structure there, but for some reason the story feels bland and predictable in its current format. This happened on a story I wrote recently where the idea seemed cool, but the delivery felt like something that I had already seen either in movies or in television.
The problem was not that the story’s structure was bad. It had all the elements of beginning, middle, and end. There was even a twist at the emotional climax, and yet it felt like something wasn’t clicking the way it should when the twist happened. After giving it some thought, I concluded I had been thinking about my story delivery in the wrong format. In my head, I often imagine things in a television/movie format because that’s how I consume a lot of stories. However, this was a comic book story, so I needed to think about ways to use that format to my advantage.
The structure that ended up working was a narration structure. Rather than delivering the story beats in a purely third person visual format, I overlaid the visual beats with a first person narrative that was out of sync with the visuals. However, to make the otherwise pedantic twist more of a surprise, I tried to make it seem as though sometimes the narration was referring to the visuals. So while you are following the narration it becomes unclear who the narrator is talking to. I don’t reveal who it is until the very last page where I wanted the emotional climax to occur.
It was a little sleight of hand to misdirect the reader and create surprise, but it is an example of how sometimes to bring your emotional lense into focus you need to think about how your story structure and writing structure are working together, also.
PS. Sorry I am not revealing more details about my story example, but it is currently in the process of being produced. So if you stick around and keep reading my newsletter, you will likely get to read the whole eight page comic and see for yourself how weird and creepy it is!
Sterling Martin is an artist and designer living in Chicago, IL. His background includes drawing, writing, theatre, teaching, improv & sketch comedy, and whatever else he can get his hands on to be creative. You can find him on the internet at:
Instagram: @sterfest.art
Website: sterlingmartin.design
Twitter: Maybe someday?
Linkedin: I’m pretty sure I have one of those
Facebook: Ugh, do I have to?