Skip to content
Five Ways
Subscribe to my newsletter and get a free story!
Share this:

Class Excerpt: On Story Basics and Ways into Stories

Freytag's pyramid
Freytag’s pyramid
I’m finishing up the Moving from Idea to Draft class, or rather finishing up the writing phase and still need to shoot a couple dozen little videos, ugh. But I wanted to share this from the introduction to the class because I thought it might be useful for some people plus maybe tantalize a few into trying one of my on-demand or live classes.

I begin with some basics of story mechanics. Quite probably much of it will be familiar — feel free to skim if you feel like you’ve heard all of this before.

A basic part of a story is its arc. The arc, graphed out, is a roughly slanted triangle, with the slope on the lefthand side usually significantly longer. I’ve provided a diagram of it, also called Freytag’s pyramid, or sometimes his triangle.

The X axis of that diagram is story tension; the Y axis is the story over time. As the storyline progresses, while there may be momentary lulls or dips in tension, the movement is upward. Tension is increased by things like complications, reversals, and raising the stakes.

But more than that, something in the story must change. The problem must be resolved in some fashion, even if it’s only to show that there is no resolution. The change provides the resolution; without it, we have only a scene or static moment, which is generally an unsatisfying thing for a reader. Often (I might go so far as to say usually) there are two changes, an internal one inside the protagonist and the external one taking place around the protagonist.

The change can, in some circumstances, take place outside the story by occurring in the reader’s understanding of the story. What seems innocent (or vile) at the outset turns out to be the opposite. This sort of subtle change can be beautiful when it works. If you look at Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love“ for example, you can see this sort of shift at work as we learn more about the circumstances behind the story and move from light-hearted to deeply sad in a story whose emotional core is — for me at least — the power of fantasy as a temporary escape, but only a temporary one. This sort of change, taken as far as it can go, is a twist ending and is best suited to flash fiction, but it can and does work at greater length, as with Ian Banks’ The Wasp Factory (I don’t want to spoil the ending, but urge you to find the book and read it if you haven’t.)

Do you need to understand what will change before you begin to write the story? No. But some story origins will have signs and clues leading to the change, while others will require you step back and consider it in various ways before moving on.

There are multiple forms in which an idea for a story can present itself to a writer. What I’ve done is try to present each, along with examples drawn from my own and other authors’ writings, with some tips and tricks for expanding them into a complete story.

Ways into a story are separated into structures, fragments, and directives. I’ve split them into these groups for the purpose of talking about them more easily, but each group has similarities of approach and possible issues that may make it useful to, after finishing an overall group, spend some time thinking about the material and trying to apply it to one or more stories before moving on.

  • Structures include plot, technique, stealing from other writers, culturally determined structure, and conceits/devices. These are the paint-by-numbers kits of the writing world, or at least they are ways to start a story that give you a great deal to work with.
  • Fragments may yield considerably less information. They include characters, dialogue, setting, scene, beginning, ending, title, images, or objects.
  • Directives give you little information but are more about the form in which you will shape the story: its flavor or flair, if you will. They include narrators, point of view, historical moments, concepts/issues, emotion, imitation or tribute, theme anthology, research, genre, and collaboration.

No matter what your starting point, at some point in the process of writing, you will need to think about the emotional core of your story, its heart. You can think of this as the “message” of the story overall, what it (not you) is trying to say about the art of being a self-aware, autonomous creature. That can vary, but examples are:

  • Life is complicated
  • You can’t always get what you want (but if you try real hard you can get what you need.)
  • It’s important not to lie (or insert the ethic of your choice).
  • Economics affects circumstances.
  • Karma is a bitch.
  • Etc.

You may not know this core going into the story, you may not know it in the middle of the writing or even at the very end. But before the story can be called finished, you need to figure it out.

The point at which you figure it out will affect your writing process. You may even use it as your starting point. I can only think of one time I’ve done this, which was the story “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen”, which I wrote for the anthology Beyond the Sun. I had been thinking about the idea that people accumulated grudges and slights and that sometimes those got in the way of communication and even healthy living. I took that idea and literalized the metaphor by creating creatures who consisted of such layers and turned out to have entirely different entities at their heart.

The point at which you realize the emotional core is the point at which it will begin helping you organize the story. It often happens to me that I do not reach the stage at which I think about this until after the first draft is done. In that case, this is part of the rewrite process, and involves my going back and reading the story in order to try to figure this out.

These are often the stories that are the most self-revelatory, because the moment we as author understand the message of a story, we begin constructing plausible deniability. Stories that are raw and full of emotion are rarely understood until after the fact of their construction, in my experience, unless you are deliberately sitting down to write about a painful experience in order to process and/or explore it.

Once you know the heart of a story, though, you know what to remove or add, because you can tell what’s getting in the way of the heart of things, and where it is not getting communicated sufficiently clearly.

A crucial point about this is that sometimes it can take time, and it’s very hard to force it. Usually you should let it steep a while. It’s my belief that your unconscious mind takes some time to turn it around and consider it from a few angles before delivering up something worthwhile. You can force it through focused timed writings, sitting down and just writing within constraints, but you will do a lot of thrashing around creating superfluous verbiage that you cannot use in the final version of the story.

Want more of this sort of thing? Check out The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers.

22 Responses

  1. One of the things I like about Sheri S Tepper’s novels is that the right-hand slope is incredibly steep. Three pages from the end, you’re still not sure of the outcome.

    I hate those books where the plot or crisis gets resolved and then the author takes 50 pages or more to tie off all the loose ends.

    Keep that slope good and steep please.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each Month

Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.

Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.

 

"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

You may also like...

Writers and Natural Talent: More About that MFA essay

Graffiti reading "I am Batgirl"Recently, Ryan Boudinot wrote an essay for The Stranger titled “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One“. Among other things, he observed:

Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don’t. Some people have more talent than others. That’s not to say that someone with minimal talent can’t work her ass off and maximize it and write something great, or that a writer born with great talent can’t squander it. It’s simply that writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.

This is, in my opinion, wrong-headed, elitist, and insulting. Other people have replied eloquently. Chuck Wendig said:

This is one of the worst, most toxic memes that exists when it comes to writers. That somehow, we slide out of the womb with a fountain pen in our mucus-slick hands, a bestseller gleam in our rheumy eyes. We like to believe in talent, as if it’s a definable thing “” as if, like with the retconned Jedi, we can just take a blood test and look for literary Midichlorians to chart your authorial potential. Is talent real? Some genetic quirk that makes us good at one thing, bad at another? Don’t know, don’t care.

What I know is this: your desire matters. If you desire something bad enough, if you really want it, you will be driven to reach for it. No promises you’ll find success, but a persistent, almost psychopathic urge forward will allow you to clamber up over those muddy humps of failure and into the eventual fresh green grass of actual accomplishment.

Writers are not born. They are made. Made through willpower and work. Made by iteration, ideation, reiteration. Made through learning “” learning that comes from practicing, reading, and through teachers who help shepherd you through those things in order to give your efforts context.

(As with all of Chuck’s posts, worth clicking through to read in its entirety)

and Russell Davis said:

Write what you want, read what you want… but don’t look down your nose at anyone else for what they write or read. The truth is there’s no such thing as a sellout, and if you think there is, you’re wrong. We’re writers. We tell stories and if you want to claim the writing moral high ground because you’re “literary,” have I got news for you: Twain was a genre writer. Poe was a genre writer. So was Dickens. And Hemingway. Steinbeck. Hawthorne. Melville. I could go on and on, but let’s end with this: so are you. Dress it up how you want, literary fiction is a genre, too.

(Also worth clicking through to read.)

And my reaction is much the same as theirs.

A Small Confession

I will confess now. I have one of those literary degrees. Mine’s fairly highfalutin’; I got it from the Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University, where the people I studied with included John Barth, Steve Dixon, Jean McGarry, and Madison Smartt Bell. Post-degree, I stuck around on fellowship for a while.

And I think what Boudinot is mistaking for talent is more the result of working with students who have both been hampered by the educational system and also just not having done enough of the three things you must do in order to be a good writer. (Will I reveal them? Sure. Keep reading.)

Writing is hard. Think of what happens with words, how a reader interprets them, how they may bring meanings with them that the writer never anticipated. How a scene is constructed from the trail of words on the page by means of evoking certain things in the reader’s head.

That’s magic. That’s amazing. That’s… an act so profoundly unlikely and amazing that it humbles me every time I set out to do it.

I am speaking as one of the people who has been told they are talented. I know I have a facility with language. But I think it says more about my education and reading as a child/teen than anything else, because I read and read and read, and did it all over the place, including one summer where I steadily worked my way through the folklore and mythology section of the children’s library, because I’d exhausted all the fiction.

Writing 1,000,000 Words

There is an axiom in some circles: to get good, genuinely good, at writing, you must write 1,000,000 words. This is not an exact science, but as a rule of thumb, it is not a terrible one.

But it is not entirely true. To become a good writer, you must perform a combination of three things.

  1. You must write. You must write and write and write. At first it will be hard to know how to get a character across the room. Later you will learn more complicated things. Writing will always get more complicated, in my experience, but we learn to trust ourselves to sit down with a blank page and know that we will emerge with a story.
  2. You must read. You must read good stuff, and try to figure out what makes it good. You must read appealing stuff, and try to understand how its draw is created. You must read amazing stuff that makes you weep because you will never be that good, and then you must go and try to be that good nonetheless.
  3. You must think. You must notice the world around you and try to understand it. You must exercise empathy and try to pry into some of the secrets of the human heart and psyche, even if it means admitting some things about yourself in the process.

This is something I tell my class, because I know it is true. I have been seeing it in action for almost three decades now. If you write and think about writing, you will get better, even if people are actively trying to hamper you. That is the secret of teaching writing. I can help you get better more quickly in a class, but the degree to which is entirely up to you and how much effort you are willing to put in.

There are Mozarts, natural geniuses. I think they are far fewer and farther in between than people are willing to admit. There are writers who read deeply as children. I was one and it gave me a head start. There are writers who started writing and sending out early. There are writers who set out to imitate their heroes and worked doggedly to do so. That is the norm.

Are there terrible writers who will never get better? Well. There are some getting better a lot slower than others, and I would suspect often it’s a case of a lack of number three. But better? If you do something often enough, you will get better at it eventually. And that’s what is, to my mind, important.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

...

Writing Progress and Thinking About Frame Stories

Image of a tortoiseshell cat named Taco
A tortoise shell spoke from her perch on the arm of a weathered Adirondack chair, a second-story balcony overlooking the way. That's not how it was.
I finished up “Villa Encantada”, a short story with a frame clocking in at 4500 words yesterday. It’s urban fantasy, the same world as the novel I just sent off to beta readers.

The story’s set in a fantasy version of the complex I live in, which has been FRAUGHT with HO meeting woes that I will not get into here. It’s the result of sitting at many meetings thinking about how much more interesting it would be to live in Villa Encantada, a similar condo complex filled with witches, retired gods, defunct oracles, and even a centaur. Hopefully there will be more set in the same setting.

The story’s also dependent on a secondary frame story,, which I’m not sure about. Here’s the beginning:

The cats were telling stories, from their spaces in the Game, scattered around the sun-baked parking lot of the Villa Encantada complex.

A grizzled Siamese had grabbed control of the telling. He licked his haunches and said, Once upon a time there was a woman who could not forgive herself. Every day she tried to kill herself in the smallest of ways, with cigarettes and lack of sleep and careless driving. She punished herself for a crime she couldn’t name, burning cups of coffee uncushioned by food, high-strung nights of crap television, unsatisfying and numbing all at once.

A tortoise shell spoke from her perch on the arm of a weathered Adirondack chair, a second-story balcony overlooking the way. That’s not how it was.

He blinked, a gesture as majestic as an ice shelf, kilometers high, sliding into the sea.

The tortoiseshell remained undaunted. She continued.

This is how it was.

There’s pieces from the frame used in the actual story itself, which I think makes it feel less superfluous, but I’m also always wary about devices like that. When they work, they’re beautiful – when they don’t, they’re awkward and distracting. So what makes one frame “work” where the next one doesn’t?

Making the frame a story in and of itself is something that often works. If you want to see a book that is concocted of nothing but frame stories, look to Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden (Kindle version and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice and Kindle version). Valente weaves frames in and out of each other so deftly that she constructs a beautiful basketwork ball of them, a construction where, following one line, you slip into another, and another, then somehow find yourself back in the beginning, with nothing but the world changed.

Other considerations for frame tales: they should be (in my opinion and perhaps not yours but who knows, feel free to chime in with a comment) as well-written as the content they contain. They should be connected somehow, so there’s a reason for the frame tale, something it contributes to the overall shape of the story.

For example, in Villa Encantada, the tortoiseshell cat appears in the story as well, and it becomes, through the interjection of the frame, her story, the story of her efforts in the Great Game played by the cats of Villa Encantada. And then I twist that again in the ending, but I won’t spoil that. :p

So, to recap, frame stories should be:

  1. actual stories (or contain the sense of a larger story) in themselves
  2. beautifully written
  3. connect with the internal story and change its meaning

Anything else? What are your favorite frame stories and why? What have you tried with them and what’s worked best (or worst)?

...