alex_beecroft

Last week, I started to talk about the structure of stories. At its most basic level it’s true to say that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. But there are other things that you might want to think about before you start to make a plan for how to write your story – refinements and additions to that basic structure which make it a bit more fine-tuned.

If you crack open almost any writing book on the subject of structure, you’ll come across more tables and graphs than – if you’re anything like me – you know what to do with. I do much better with words than pictures (it’s why I’m a writer and not an artist), so the graphs don’t convey a lot to me. But I can summarise what I’ve learned from these books so far:

Beginning.

In the old days, the beginning used to be quite a leisurely process. In fact, I have some writing software which suggests that every novel should start with the character in his ‘ordinary world’. We should see what our main character is like, when he’s in the setting where he has been up until the story started. We should get to know the character in the place where he is at home, before anything out of the ordinary happens to make things take a turn for the unusual.

You don’t have to look far to see examples of this. The Lord of the Rings opens with Frodo at home in the Shire, doing fairly normal things with fairly normal people. The Hobbit opens with Bilbo at home in the Shire, being determinedly ordinary, until Gandalf provides an inciting incident of some dwarves at the door.

In the old days, it used to be standard to introduce the MC by watching him grow up, so you got all the backstory as well as the current ‘Ordinary World’ setting.

The idea of this was that you would get to know what your MC was like on a normal day to day basis before something comes along and throws him into a story. The structure went a bit like this:

Ordinary World > Inciting incident > hero rejects the quest > hero accepts the quest > main story starts.

I’ve never been quite sure why it was important for the hero to reject the quest to start off with, but that’s what the epic journey people usually say ought to happen. These days, however, we’ve all become much more impatient with our stories and we’re no longer interested in watching your MC get up and have breakfast, brush his hair and feed the dog. Not, at least, unless he’s feeding the dog in small bite sized chunks to his unsuspecting room-mate.

Modern readers tend to want to skip the ‘ordinary world’ part and go straight to the ‘inciting incident’ – the thing that happens that sets the MC off on a story.

Modern readers want to know, often in the first paragraph, that some epic shit is going down (or at least that something intriguing is happening right now.) This is what editors and agents mean by ‘a hook’ in the first paragraph. Something needs to be happening at once to grab the reader’s attention and make them want to read on.

I didn’t want to believe this, but after several weeks of reading indie fiction in which nothing does happen in the first few chapters I discovered that it doesn’t matter how brilliant your later chapters are if your reader is so bored by your earlier ones that they put the book down two chapters in and never pick it up again. If I read like this myself, I can’t blame others for doing the same, I must just accommodate them and start being interesting earlier.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have backstory any more, but it does mean that backstory will have to be threaded into the story while the story is going on, and is no longer allowed to take up chapters on its own.

So, the beginning has become quite minimal. We’ve jumped straight to the thing that happens to start the story. Our character has been shoved out of an aeroplane without a parachute, or he’s noticed that his room-mate is sporting a nice new pair of tentacles this morning, or he’s received a letter from the bank telling him he’s being thrown out on the street, or he’s knocked down a cyclist and fallen in love with them on the spot. We have hit the ground, hit the story and we’re running.

Middle:

But because our beginning is shorter – it takes less time to get the story up and running – our middle is longer. Suddenly the middle has to advance the story and let us get to know the character and include any absolutely necessary backstory. And it has to do this while resisting the tendency all authors know about – the tendency to get a little saggy and bloated around the middle.

There are a couple of things I’ve found in story structure books which suggest ways of tackling the long slog of the middle of a book without allowing it to be too much of a slog. One suggestion is that there should be a point in the middle of the middle – at the mid point of the book – where the story changes focus.

Perhaps our character has been seeking revenge up til now. Perhaps his housemate failed to water his special plant, and in return he fed the dog to the man, and has been systematically alienating all his housemate’s friends and trying to convince the housemate that he’s insane. As we’ve said before, this will be expressed as a problem (how to get revenge on his hm) to which he has tried several solutions, none of which have entirely worked. How about, at the mid point, one of these attempts fails so disastrously (not only does HM fail to believe he’s mad, he actually buys MC a new plant!) that MC is forced to realise that his goals until now have not been entirely a good idea.

Now the book has changed direction and the problems he faces are new ones (how can he get the friends back? Can he persuade that interesting fellow in the castle, Victor something, to reanimate the dog from the bits he has left? Our character is still driven by his reaction to the relationship with his housemate and the houseplant, but now he’s trying to mend the things he broke in the first half.

This gives you a nice opportunity to do something fresh and surprising in the second half.

Another thing to bear in mind with the middle is that the second half ought to be higher octane than the first. Yes, you start with something immediately interesting, and you carry on with interesting things, but the stakes ought to be getting higher and the tension building up as you go along. Nobody wants to read a story that gets less gripping as you go along, and a story that stays at the same level of peril and anxiety all the way through is rightly called flat.

So, when you’re structuring your novel, make sure things build up to a climax. And not an unrelated climax. It’s no good to suddenly have MC and his housemate come together because they’re threatened by random aliens. (Though you might get away with it if they were vegetable-aliens and the strange plant HM killed was actually an alien child.) The point is that the climax has to build naturally from everything that’s gone before.

To put it in a shortened form. Your middle can go something like this:

MC first attempt to solve problem, fails. MC does something even more serious in an attempt to get revenge, but that doesn’t work either. MC does something really bad, and HM responds with unexpected generosity (Mid point). MC changes his mind about his goals, but now his previous actions are having dire consequences which he must combat. He tries, but things get worse. He does some epic shit, but it only makes things harder. He tries something batshit insane. Crisis!

The crisis is the point where your middle turns into your end. For example, in The Hobbit, there’s a mid point shift where Thorin turns from being ‘relatively reliable companion’ to ‘gold and power crazed idiot,’ and is now acting as antagonist. Everything has escalated from uncomfortable behaviour at the dinner table to ALL OUT WAR.

When you have all out war, there’s not much further you can go in terms of racking up the stakes and the tension, so now it’s time for the story to resolve itself.

Ending

Once you have a crisis, there are generally only two ways the story can go. The characters fail, or they succeed. MC and HM fail to rescue Victor from the mob and the dog remains dead, leading them to be permanently estranged. The elves kill the dwarves and then are killed themselves by the goblin army, and the kingdom is never restored.

This kind of tragic ending will gain you much kudos from literary reviewers who think it’s an unflinching look at the realities of life. I generally find them terribly depressing – and every bit as made up as the happy ending, but if that’s the way you want to take it, it’s your story. Do what you like with it

Or, your characters can succeed – the dog is reconstituted, the household is saved. The battle is won and the kingdom is left to prosper.

But ending the crisis is not quite enough. There must also be a resolution to all the other plot threads you may have going, and there must be a sense of closure.

It’s unsatisfying just to finish with the end of the big battle. We want to see how the world and our characters have been changed by the ordeal they’ve just been through. The heroes need to come home and apply the things they’ve learned to the task of making the world a better place, otherwise what was the point?

So the ending is where the characters come home (or decide not to come home, but find somewhere new to belong.) Plot threads are tied up, and all the unanswered questions you’ve raised finally get an answer.

Ends don’t seem to have undergone the shrinkage that beginnings have, but that’s probably because they’ve always been short. To go back to The Lord of the Rings, there’s nothing worse than the situation in the Return of the King film, where the ending just kept not being over. Everything would be said that needed to be said, there’d be some cathartic weeping and a sense of home coming, wrapping everything up, and then a fade to black and everyone would sigh with satisfaction. And then, fuck me, they’d wind it all up again and do it a second time, and a third, until by the end my feeling of satisfaction had turned into a wish to just get on with it already.

Endings – wrap everything up once. Then finish.

Next time – strangers from the subconscious. Still in ‘stuff to do before you even start’ mode, we’re on to creating our starter set of characters.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Picture from Isabelle Grosjean ZA

So, you have an idea for a story. You’ve asked yourself lots of questions and you know you have a central situation in which one or two main characters find themselves, which they don’t like and want to change.

The essence of any story is to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In the beginning you establish who the story is about – you draw your main character and you attempt to make the reader like him/her. You also give your main character a problem. Something is wrong in their life or their world. Something needs to be changed in order to save the character’s self-respect/the company/the princess/the world.

Beginning = establish the character and his problem.

In the middle we follow the character as he tries to solve his problem. In a typical story the character will have about three tries at saving the thing that needs saving, and he will fail each time. Ideally, when he fails, he will make the situation worse, until finally it looks utterly hopeless. The point at which the situation looks utterly hopeless is called the ‘black moment’, and it’s there to rack up the tension and the sense of peril – the sense that an unhappy ending is just around the corner.

Middle = the character tries to solve the problem, only to end up in a situation where everything looks hopeless.

But our character does not succumb to despair. He pulls one final attempt out of the bag and against all the odds he succeeds this time, solving the problem, making the world of his story a better place and learning the virtues of persistence/self-sacrifice/whatever virtue you were writing about in the process.

End = the character pulls out all the stops and succeeds, learning something in the process. The world is left better off (even though you may have introduced a second problem later on to set up a sequel.)

This is a very basic account of how it works.

For example – in a romance [beginning] we meet the characters. Each character’s goal is that they want to end up with the other, but both of them have a problem which is preventing that. Maybe A is already married, and B has a psychotic alien bounty hunter on his trail and doesn’t want A to get messed up in his life.

[middle] Now both of them attempt to solve their problems – A asks for a divorce, B sets a bear trap in his garden. But this only leads to A’s partner deciding they need to go to relationship counselling, and B finds an actual bear in his trap which tries to maul him. Oh noes! It all looks hopeless.

[ending] But then A has the brilliant idea of disguising his partner as B. The bounty hunter kills his spouse and A and B are free to be together (until the intergalactic police come to arrest them for the murder of the bear.)

Every story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Short stories are no exception to this. The same structure holds true whether you’re writing something 1000 words long or 100,000 words long.

So how do you know what the right size is before you start writing?

This is largely a matter of complexity. The best short stories consist of one single, brilliant idea developed without any subplots or verbiage. What would happen if someone went into the past and stepped on a single butterfly? Would it unravel the whole future? What would a car accident look like from the perspective of the tree they crashed into?

Short stories tend to be very minimal. One person, one problem, one attempt at solving it, one shocking twist of a conclusion.

This doesn’t make them easy. Far from it, in fact. There is less space in a short story to make mistakes, to waffle around until you find the direction you want to go in, to have some fantastic things make up for the less brilliant stuff. Short stories have to be self contained, disciplined and lucid. I think they are the hardest thing of all to write.

If you have an idea that you really want to explore from the perspective of two or more people, something where you want to add a bit of complexity, a digression or two where your characters meet someone particularly awesome, or explore an awesome setting, or do something to exemplify some philosophical point at tangent to your main story, then you are looking at a longer form.

All stories have a beginning, middle and end, but some stories also have sub-plots. Subplots are like a little extra story woven into the larger one. Maybe during one of your character’s attempts to solve his problem, he goes off to Tibet to learn snow-magic from the yetis. Now you have a little story inside your story where the character has a sub-problem [how to find the yetis and convince them to teach him magic] and this too needs a middle and an end. [He tries bribing them with yaks, but they're not having it. Then he saves the life of their shaman and succeeds, emerging having learned to control snow and ready to go and use this in the pursuit of his larger goal.]

It’s a good rule of thumb that the longer you want your story to be, the more characters you should add. But each of these characters has to be woven into the book’s overarching plot somehow, so unless you want to write something as long as the ASOIAF series, five main characters is probably an upper limit for a novel.

Whether you gravitate more to short or long forms will largely depend on the kind of story ideas that come to you by nature. The minimalist, single brilliant ideas of short stories can’t really be developed into novels, and the sprawling complexity of novel ideas can’t usually be reduced into shorts.

But the modestly complex ideas suitable for novellas can easily grow while you’re writing them and end up as novels. My feeling is that if you find that happening, it’s good to go with it. Never look a gift novel in the mouth.

You can also make short stories into novels if you really want to. I wrote Captain’s Surrender that way. By writing each incident in the characters’ ongoing relationship as a story of its own [Josh kisses Peter and Peter doesn't condemn him], [Peter puts down a mutiny], [Peter decides Josh makes a good alternative to debauching the local women], [Josh appears to die in a naval victory and Peter grieves], etc etc, I was able to finish each part and feel a sense of achievement over each individual story, while slowly building an arc that would stand as one novel.

This is also how I wrote my first ever finished novel – an old man tells a story about Loki, Loki appears and tells a story about his listener’s true love, his listener finds the true love and tells her a story that means she has to come back home with him etc.

I don’t honestly think it’s a good way of writing a novel. In both cases, the joins are visible (at least to me) and the internal structure of the stories fights against the structure of the overarching plot. But if you have problems achieving length in a story – if you can only think of short story ideas, and you desperately want to write a novel – this is the only way I know of to turn one into the other. And the experience of fitting a series of shorts into an overarching structure which tells a novel plot from start to finish is very good experience in what goes into a novel, so that next time you can plot the novel without needing the stepping stones of the shorts.

To sum up. Look at the idea you got last week and ask yourself ‘how many main characters have I got?’ ‘How many problems have they got?’ ‘How many different settings are there?’ ‘How many potential ways are there for an attempt to solve this problem to fail?’

If the answer to most of these things is ‘one’ then you’ve probably got a short story on your hands. If it’s ‘Oh God, where do I start, there’s so many?’ then you have a novel. If it’s somewhere in the region of ‘a few’, then start off aiming for a novella, and see whether it grows as you go. It may, it may not. If this stuff was entirely predictable it would be a science, but it’s not. It’s art, and uncertainty comes with the territory.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.