SABRIYA Writing Journal 4: Writing Rules

I've started to write, after many weeks of planning and plotting. Now, the rules of writing, for me, will vary day-to-day. Not that the rules change, but because I'll forget them from one day to the next. Thus the critical need for rewriting and remembering the rules.

MY WRITING RULES:

The following assume I've taken the time to outline the story, and completed due diligence in researching the broader aspects of the era and characters—both critical writing tasks, which in this case I've done. The rules below are not about general research, planning or plotting (see Journal entires 1-3) but about stringing the words together for the first time.  

1. VISUALIZE FIRST. Take time to visualize the scene as if watching a movie. This may be the most time consuming thing about writing—NOT WRITING.
2. START OBJECTIVE. Every scene should begin with a paragraph from an objective or universal Point-of-View (POV) that describes the setting and characters in the scene with a disaster close at hand. By objective POV I mean the POV of someone NOT in the scene—the narrator—who can see everything about the scene, e.g. God's POV.
3. ONE POV. After that first objective POV paragraph, every other paragraph in a scene must be told from a single character's POV who is IN THE SCENE, perhaps the POV of the most emotionally conflicted character.
4. WRITE FOR IRONY. Every description, and perhaps line of dialogue, should contain an ironic comparison. 
5. WRITE TO TARGET. First draft not so much, but second draft must condense word count to the target number, OR revise the rest of the chapter or book so word count goal (overall) is observed.
6. WRITE ATTITUDE. Write with an emotional attitude that channels the POV character. Nothing in this word is clean and objective. Even God has an attitude and sometimes he expresses with with catastrophic results. Attitudes vary from sarcasm to sweetness, from retribution to forgiveness. Vary the attitude as you vary the POV. 
7. END ON CLIFF. Every scene ends with a cliff hanger described by Step 3 (the disaster step) of the Scene-Sequel structure pattern. In some cases this may be an objective, universal POV, like the first paragraph of the scene. (more on Scene-Sequel below)
8. RIGHT WORD. Never hesitate to take the time to find the right word, turn-of-phrase, or trope. (more on tropes below)

Scene-Sequel Structure Pattern

Writing in a Scene-Sequel pattern is method of structuring your writing at a paragraph, sentence, or micro level. If you deconstruct the best fiction writers' output, you will see it. I always start out writing a new project by following this pattern anally, by putting these hidden steps in Scrivener to constantly remind me. After a few weeks the pattern becomes almost automatic.

In every scene-sequel sequence there is a DISASTER that spurs the action forward (or in a new direction...a mini-turning point). Here's a diagram from my on-line workshop (Storycraft Training). An explanation follows.

Novel Scene-Sequel Sequence (simplified)

Running from left to right in the above diagram. (1) The protagonist has a physical GOAL to achieve. (2) The protagonist takes action to achieve that goal, and in so doing creates CONFLICT with the antagonist. (3) Because of the conflict, the goal is not fully achieved, resulting in a DISASTER. (4) The protagonist experiences an EMOTIONAL REACTION, which acts as a motivation to keep going. (5) The protagonist spends some time evaluating in his mind (THOUGHT) the DILEMMA faced, until... (6) The protagonist makes a decision about the next goal and takes the fist steps to achieve it. [And the process REPEATS starting with the new goal.]

Tropes

Using tropes in your writing is like writing with subtext—it keeps the reader intrigued and intellectually engaged.  Here is a summary of useful tropes copied from Google's AI engine.

Tropes are recurring themes, ideas, or literary devices used in storytelling. They can be categorized into various types. Tropes can be elements of character, plot, or setting, and they often reappear in different stories, sometimes becoming defining characteristics of a genre. 

Here's a breakdown of some common types of literary tropes: 

Metaphor: A comparison between two unlike things without using "like" or "as" (e.g., "Juliet is the sun"). 

Simile: A comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as" (e.g., "Her smile was like sunshine"). 

Irony: A figure of speech in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words (e.g., saying "Oh, fantastic!" when something bad happens). 

Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole (e.g., "wheels" for a car). 

Metonymy: A figure of speech in which one thing is used to represent something else with which it is closely associated (e.g., "the crown" for the monarchy). 

Hyperbole: Exaggeration used for emphasis or effect. 

Litotes: Understatement, often for ironic effect (e.g., saying "not bad" when something is actually very good). 

How to Plot a Long Historical Novel

I have successfully used this story plotting technique with dozens of my screenwriting clients. Movies, however, are much shorter than (long) novels.  So, to put particulars to the work flow, this post explains the plotting effort used to construct my long historical novel Wizard Clip Haunting (WCH).

THE SIX STEPS IN MY INSTAGRAM POST ABOVE reveals why I haven't been blogging recently. I've written or edited a number of books in my career but I had never written a novel. In  2014, after several drafts of a WCH screenplay I started to think seriously about ditching the screenplay and writing the novel. The research travel I was doing in a bid to improve the screenplay provided fodder that turned out to be much more interesting as a novel. For the movie script I was limited by time and words; and the actual historical events became more interesting the more I traveled and got to know the real-life characters. (The genealogical sites like Ancestry.com and Geni.com were very helpful).

I JOKE that when I have money I make a movie, and when I don't I write or edit a book. While I wait for one screenplay to gain some traction in L.A. (there are things a-foot) and while I wait for the last book to be printed in mass in China, and while the H U G E sailboat refit project is under winter wraps until late March....I dug out the novel effort, last worked on in 2013–2014. Every time I pick it up again, there's were more significant plot points to include.

ONE OF THE IRONIC "OBSTACLES" to completing long projects,  and which I always recommend it to story clients, is to read lots of material similar to what you're trying to write. In that stead, and for his novel project, Pam and I just finished reading aloud to each other Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. It was a great read. I felt myself getting emotionally involved with the characters, and even got a mild case of vertigo one night. None of that happens when I watch a movie. Movies are over toooo quickly. But Pillars, due to its length (about 400K words) can last for weeks on end, two hours every night. I was sure  reading and hearing Follett's cadence for words would help when I start revising and reading out loud my own work. (Update 2023 - Follett had an effective on me. The novel is finally done and released, and it's 372,000 words. Agh! Had to self-publish it under my distribution banner since no publisher would touch it. LOL!)

The image above is actually the carded plot of the novel. I've actually written about 50K words of it, but stopped to revisit the plot and fully card it out. Here are the steps I've taken over the last few years, weeks, and days:

1. Researched the historical events. There area a few short books and dozens of articles and references in history books of the period and event itself.

2. Used the Story Diamond to identify the 13 main plot points.

3. Wrote 3 drafts of the movie screenplay.

4. Got some good and some bad notes.

5. Let the story sit for a couple years as I went onto other projects.

6. Took two road trips to research the actual events and my imagined events. One to New Orleans and Pittsburg, and a second trip to Maryland, West Virginia and eastern Pennsylvania. Both trips were immensely rewarding in terms of discovering ironic "true to history" material, which widened the story's scope—fodder I could not include in the screenplay without turning it into a mini-series (a pitch deck for a TV series now exists.)

7. Poured over the hundreds of photographs and documents and books and interview transcripts collected on those two trips. Before I committed to writing the novel, I experienced frustration because all the good stuff I was discovering would not fit into a screenplay. 

8. Made another revision of the screenplay and pitched it a few time. No takers.

9. Let it sit for a few years...went sailing, etc.

10. About 8 years ago, I wrote a few chapters as a test of my novel writing skills. I wasn't satisfied. Put it aside again. Then, last month I read Dwight Swain's "Techniques of $elling Writers" and "Hit Lit" by James Hall (recommended by my friend "The Other Chris Pratt")  Both books revealed that I was doing a lot of things right, and they gave me the courage to take the novel seriously. So,  I re-edited those early chapters and wrote a few more, read them aloud to Pam. We both liked them.

11. The original Story Diamond was not geared for a novel, however, but for a movie. I also realized that the Diamond was not formatted (being in the diamond shape) to track subplots easily. For that I needed a WIDE horizontal surface. I have a vertically mounted 4'x8' Story Diamond on casters that I roll out for clients who come to my office for beating out a story. In that process we use a drawer full of colorful 3"x3" Post-Its. 

Stored behind the Story-Diamond-on-casters are a couple pieces of 3/16" black Foamcor I use for small set lighting (or blocking the light).  I got them out and set them side-by-side behind my desk, and opened the drawer of Post-It's. Now, I was able to break the story according to characters and subplots and keep each on its own colorful row. The picture on the left is 3/4 of the whole thing toward the end of the exercise. (I found the Post-It's stuck better once I dusted off the Foamcor. : )



But I was not going to be able to let this piece of Foamcor sit as a reference in the walkway behind my desk for the year it would take to write. And as more ideas came, I'd need to write out some detail notes that would not fit on the Post-It's. So I opened up Apple's Keynote, which I use for creating the slides for my workshops, and opened a new file that was 4,000 pixels (W) and 1,500 pixels (H) and recreated the Post-It plot board into Keynote. It took me a day to create the file you see here. Click on it to enlage.

Although I work on a Medium speed Mac Pro with two large displays (which I use to edit 2K and 4K videos) Keynote is not designed for such a large file. It claims to be only 451K (not big, really), but with this many cards and objects on a single large "slide" it requires some patience. The app only slowed down, however, toward the end. (I use Keynote as well for creating Story Diamond files but set the Keynote file and my monitor vertical.) Keynote is much better (on the Mac) for this sort of thing than anything else, including Power Point. It's very easy to create, color and align objects, and change the size of both cards and text in them. [BTW: these are TEXT boxes filled with color, not rectangles with text overlaid in them. Thus, there is ONE object per card to move and manipulate, not two.]

12. Once I got all the cards in place (along with a number of story notes (the cards with a lot of text on them), I grouped them with green rectangles to denote preliminary chapter groupings, with each card within a green rectangle being a scene or a sequel (see Scene-Sequel post). The light pink near the top row are my SCENE GOALS, and the dark pink are the SCENE DISASTERS. The SEQUELS are not always individually carded but are implied by the contents. The blue is the antagonist, and the other colors are minor characters. The white boxes at the top represent most of the 13 traditional beats of a story, and the yellow boxes are dates to keep the chronology in order—since this is a historical story that takes place over a 37 year period with both of the story taking place over just 4 years.

13. I write long form projects in Scrivener, as I did the first draft of this project's screenplay (I finish up screenplays in Final Draft and novels in MS Word). I love Scrivener's flexibility for moving text blocks around. I used the old screenplay file for the novel. While I have about 50K already written of the first chapters, I will now populate the Scrivener folders/chapters with the chapters designated by the green rectangles in the Keynote Card file, and identify the doc-files/scenes within each Scrivener chapter by the individual cards in the Card Plot file.

14. Finally, as I write in Scrivener on my right display, the Keynote card file will occupy my left screen, along with other writing aids like my favorite thesaurus: http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml. Thus, I can keep updating the card plot as I write, and it allows me a bird's-eye view of the story, showing me how the scene I'm currently writing connects to the whole.

Blessings,

stan

Scene-Sequel Roller Coaster

I'm preparing for a story meeting with a client this morning. In the process I created two slides (below) to guide our conversation. My client is not a novelist or screenwriter, but a public speaker. She's wanting to keep her audience engaged as she makes her presentations and tells her story. She's a fairly animated person, and is already engaging to listen to. But she sees the need for more structure to a long series of short talks that would benefit from following a pattern, thus helping her audience over time to see where she's going.

The basis of the slides (which I have used extensively in my workshops and in my Storycraft Training on-line series, http://www.storycraft.stanwilliams.com) came from studying a number of other story gurus, and so I give credit to: Dwight Swain, Randy Ingermason, Jack M. Bickham, and WastedPoet.com....and Ken Follett. Thank you one and all.

SCENE-SEQUEL

Think of the SCENE as an action, external, or physical scene, and the SEQUEL as the mental, internal or psychological scene. Both screenwriters and novelists through their craft SHOW both of these, and a speaker or dramatist does the same, although the minute craft are a little different (which we will not delve into here.)

Each scene or sequel is broken into three parts of unequal lengths. 

1. In the GOAL your protagonist will physically attempt to attain something.
2. In the CONFLICT your protagonist will meet with people who try to stop her.
3. In the DISASTER  your protagonist will be defeated.
4. In EMOTIONAL REACTION your protagonist will internally respond to the defeat. 
5. In DILEMMA THOUGHT your protagonist naturally transitions into an internal monologue about what to do next. There are various options that create the dilemma, each with a positive or negative consequence, and unfortunately the protagonist will not be able to know what the unintended consequences will be. This creates an increase in anxiety and enhanced dilemma. 
6. In DECISION your protagonist chooses one of the options thought through in the previous step. And this launches your protagonist in to the next Scene-Sequel duplex with a goal to achieve.

The desired roller coaster effect (whether it be physical or psychological) follows the black arrows I've drawn on the diagram. The bird's-eye view of this is that the Scene is generally a downward dread, and the Sequel gives us an upward hope. And, when you string them together in a longer form composition, you end up with an endearing and engaging roller coaster, as seen in the diagram below.

READ MORE about this use in a novel at Randy Ingrermanson's website, Advanced Fiction writing.
Here's the link for his "Writing the Perfect Scene" post.

The Sequence Approach (Paul Gulino)

[UPDATE: Please see Christopher Pratt's (the Other Chris Pratt, not the actor) comment at the bottom of this post. It's instructive.]

I recently reviewed Paul Gulino's book "Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach." I found the book a bit obtuse and not clearly written, but Chris Soth (of ScreenwritingU) makes it easier to understand. Soth calls this structure the Mini-Movie Method (MMM).

This method of structuring a movie divides the story into 8 segments where Act 1, 2A, 2B, and 3 are all divided in half by events like the  Inciting Incident, Pinch Points and the Final Incident, giving you, theoretically 8 equal parts.

Now, think of those eight segments of a movie, each 12.5% of the whole, as INDIVIDUAL movies or long sequences, each with a beginning, middle and end. Or 8 short movies strung together, each with a climax (the moment or turning point).

The 2016 Best Picture, MOONLIGHT, is constructed with three long sequences. The three parts tell the the coming of age story of a gay-black man raised in a poor, drug invested part of Miami. First, as a boy (called Little); second, as a teenager (called Chiron, his give name); and third, as an adult (called Black). The three sections are each preceded by a title card, simply:

i

Little

ii

Chiron

iii

Black

This simple and direct structure, made explicit to the audience, was one (of many) reasons the screenplay won an Screenwriting Oscar for BEST ADAPTATION.

So, what Gulino (and Soth) propose is that you divide your feature into 8 parts, two for each of the major 4 segments: Act 1, Act 2A, Act 2B, and Act 3. These 8 parts are the same segments (less the Prologue and Denouement) you'll see on my StoryDiamond or on the linear representation of a Story's 13-20 Beats --- both represented below in miniature. (Click on the links above for posts that explain. And, click on any diagram for a larger version, that you can actually read.)

  

[BTW: I have updated the StoryDiamond again, and for the first time in six years edited and updated the Annotation or Notes Document that goes with it. If you use the Story Diamond I encourage you to download the latest at the links herein.]

Now, here's the new thing I came away with. If we think of each of these 8 segments, or sequences, or mini-movies as each having a goal that the protagonist needs to achieve, then it's like you have 8 subplots, which run sequentially, as opposed to most subplots that run in parallel.  Here's a diagram I crafted. Below the diagram is a further explanation. (You can click on any image to make it bigger.)

1. One good way to hook your audience is that each of the sequences has a goal. Let's call the first seven, "subgoals," as the end point of each of the subplots. (In the digram, the subgoals are symbolized by the red stars). The story must be constructed in such a way that each subgoal MUST be achieved before the next subplot can be engaged, and the next subgoal be achieved. That is, the first subgoal is logically nested (and its resolution more or less resolved) before the second subgoal can be pursued and achieved. This is very much like a video game (which I don't play) where to get to the end of the game you have to acquire all the earlier magic lanterns, or pots of gold along the way. If you miss one, you stop dead in your tracks. 

The trick is to construct a story where the eight subplots and subgoals are logically dependent, nested and chronologically sequential. The later goals all have to be subservient to the earlier goals. (Soth used INDIANA JONES AND THE LOST ARK as an example.) And in movies like THE LOST ARK you can even think of each of the 8 subplots with their attending subgoals as "set pieces" or locations. So, you have a 11 minute adventure in one wilderness location, there's a 1.5 minute climax where the protagonist finds some level of defeat and that propels him or her to the next set piece and the next sequence. Come to think of it the James Bond movies are pretty well structured like that. 

2. Of course, each of the subgoals MUST support the final main goal. This is what I teach about subplots (that run in parallel) and their subgoals—e.g. every subplot goal must be related to the single moral premise, and the virtues and vices associated with it. That is, every subplot has to struggle with the same conflict of values, but perhaps in a different way.  In Gulino's Sequences (and Soth's Mini-Movies) the subplots are sequential, and logically dependent. This is brilliant. 

3. The process suggests that just after each goal is achieved, there is an increasingly terrible and epic failure on the part of the protagonist, which causes his hopes to descend into fear. According to the Moral Premise theology (yeah, I should start a religion), these immediate descends are the consequence of two related forces: (1) the action of the antagonist, and (2) the weakness of the protagonist, which is a milder form of the powerful vice exerted by the antagonist.

Do I need to point out the emotional roller-coaster effect this creates? Alas, one of my bully pulpits. 

This perfectly follows an age-old concept of novel writing—in every scene-sequel sequence there is a DISASTER that spurs the action forward (or in a new direction...a mini-turning point). Here's a diagram from my on-line workshop (Storycraft Training). An explanation follows.

Novel Scene-Sequel Sequence (simplified)

Running from left to right in the above diagram. (1) The protagonist has a physical GOAL to achieve. (2) The protagonist takes action to achieve that goal, and in so doing creates CONFLICT with the antagonist. (3) Because of the conflict, the goal is not fully achieved, resulting in a DISASTER. (4) The protagonist experiences an EMOTIONAL REACTION, which acts as a motivation to keep going. (5) The protagonist spends some time evaluating in his mind (THOUGHT) the DILEMMA faced, until... (6) The protagonist makes a decision about the next goal and takes the fist steps to achieve it. [And the process REPEATS starting with the new goal.]

Now, I've added a couple of things from my other workshop sessions (c.f. Storycraft Training). Let me repeat the diagram for ease of reference.

4. Each sub goal has to be harder to achieved, and the conflict and tension associated with its accession has to be higher than the last subplot and goal. I have gradated the vertical scale into +8 and -8 levels. 

5. Likewise the disasters (represented by the black dos) are increasing terrible. Thus, the goals and the disasters, get farther and farther apart, creating an escalating emotional roller coaster. the dipole here is HOPE vs. FEAR—a good way to convey it on an emotional level, which for a story is critical. Of course there are other ways to define the roller coaster, e.g. rationally (Is the protagonist progress toward the goal progressing or retarding?), and/or morally (Is the essential truth of the moral being tested true or false?) 

6. Lastly, going back to my earlier description of the 13-20 beats, the Turning Points and the Pinch Points have a characteristic difference in how each of those seven disasters occur. The odd number disasters (above, i.e. 1, 3, 5, 7) are initiated or caused by the antagonist's power, whereas the even number disaster (above, i.e. 2, 4, and 6) are caused by the protagonist's weakness, blindness, and poor judgement. 

Comments?