Dan Wells on Story Structure: transcript
Source1
I
This is a lot more people than I expected. This is the largest group of soon-to-disappointed people at this convention.
Let me explain really briefly who I am so that those of you who are in the wrong panel can leave. I’m Dan Wells. I am a horror writer. I have to be very careful of that pronunciation. A couple years ago, I told everyone I was going to the World Horror Convention and got a lot of funny looks.
Anyway, horror is an interesting genre. My book is actually being marketed as a psychological thriller. The first one is called I Am Not a Serial Killer. It’s an autobiography. It’s out in Europe. It’s doing very well in Europe. It’s been out there for a year. I think three years ago, I sold it and it’s coming out in the U.S. next month. Finally.
In addition to being a writer, I also do a podcast. Some of you may be familiar with it called Writing Excuses. Who listens to Writing Excuses? Awesome. Everybody else. I’m sure you’re also awesome. Writing Excuses is me. Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy writer you may have heard of. Howard Taylor is a sci-fi artist who’s bigger than all of us put together. We talk about writing for 15 minutes a week. It’s every Monday. You can look it up. I’ve got business cards up here if you want to grab one for the website address.
All right. While we’re waiting for this, let me give you a little bit of background then on this presentation. Somebody asked me last year what my favorite book on story structure was. I thought about that for a minute and I thought, it’s the Star Trek Role Playing Game Narrators Guide, which is not what this person was expecting. Role Playing Games, I’m not going to talk about Role Playing Games very much, but I am going to say that they are a really valuable source of story structure information because teaching you how to tell a good story is their whole product. So that’s what they do and this particular book I thought was awesome and I have based my presentation around it and thank you guys for coming. I’ll see you next year.
Story Structure, a presentation by Dan Wells as mentioned. Shamelessly, pilfered from the Role Playing Game.
Okay, I call this the Seven Point System and it is created by one of those guys. They’re the ones who were listed as authors on the website. So anyway, on the page, Seven Point System, there’s a hook, a plot turn, a pinch, a midpoint, another pinch, another plot turn, and a resolution. We are going to beat this system to death, so write it down now. And I use this to structure all of my books and the things I write, but there is an important caveat here.
Whoa, you didn’t get them? I told you to write them down. Don’t worry, they’re coming back. I told you we’re beating them to death. You will be so sick of those seven words or nine words because plot turn is two.
Alright, building a story. When you’re starting a story, you have to have a story in mind. John Brown in his great presentation yesterday, he talked about this. You’ve got to have something to say before you start to say it.
Now, let’s make this big caveat right here. Not everybody writes this way. About half of you in here are outline writers, which is what I am. You will completely figure out what you’re going to do before you do it. The rest of you are what we call discovery writers who sit down and just write as you go. I talked to some person about this and she said, if I already know how it ends, why do I write it? And I can’t do that, but other people can’t do this.
The point is either way you need to know how to structure a story because if you’re an outline writer, you do it before and if you’re a discovery writer, you’re going to do it after during the revision process when you try to provide some form to the thing that you’ve just written. So, either way, this can still be helpful to you.
So, before you construct your story, you need a pretty good idea what the story is about. As we said, you have to have some characters in mind, setting, conflict, all of those important things. I’m going to take for granted that you already know all that stuff. That’s not what this is about. This is about building a story.
So, where do we start? Where do you guys think we start? At the end! Nice! Somebody cheated. We start at the end. So, here we go. I told you they’d come back again. Resolution, that’s the seventh one. I’ll give you guys who are slow writers a chance to write down all seven if you want them. Even though they’re grayed out and you can barely see them. Resolution, what’s the resolution? We start at the end because everything in the story leads to that moment. This is not the falling action. This is not the last chapter. This is the climax. This is the point. What you’re leading up to. The story is going, what it’s about. And you need to make sure you know what kind of resolution you want to have.
So, let’s look at a couple of examples here. We have plot. Let’s say your story is about plot. A good example of this is the first Star Wars movie. This movie was about who is where, when, what are they doing, and how are they going to blow something up? The resolution then is something blows up. The alternate is character. You can focus heavily on character and, of course, our example for that is Empire Strikes Back. The resolution in that movie was not an explosion. It was a discussion between two characters. It was a moral decision. So, there’s a big difference between external conflicts and internal conflicts, and they’re going to end in different ways. Different things are going to be important, depending on what you choose to focus on in your story. If you focus on both, then you’re awesome, and we’ll talk about that later. Thank you. All right.
Now, as we go through these, we’re going to build, using this system, the plot of the first Harry Potter book, Sorcerer’s Stone. And so, our resolution there, what’s the resolution? What’s the big climax point of the first Harry Potter book? We saved the Stone. We saved the Stone via killing Voldemort, defeating Voldemort. So, there we go. Harry defeats Voldemort. That’s what we’re building toward.
So, now that we know where we’re ending, we need to start at the other end. We need to figure out where we’re starting. And a really easy way to do this, and now let me point out at this point, that these are not rules. There’s no rules to writing, okay? But this is an easy method that I use to help me. So, one simple trick to figure out where you start is to just take the opposite state. If one ends really strong, then you want them to start weak, because that gives you an arc of progress, so people can get invested in it, and then you kind of know where your story’s going. This is another reason why you need to have a good ending in mind.
So, let’s look at our example. Batman Begins! Batman. This movie ends with Batman in a position of great strength. He knows what he’s doing. He can fly. He’s a ninja. He can do everything. He’s beaten all the bad guys. So, it starts with him as this thoroughly depressed, directionless loser who has no goals in life, doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just kind of moping around. So, there’s a very simple arc of growth. Weakness to strength.
A different kind of arc is a shift. In the Dark Knight, he’s already strong. It’s not a progression from weakness to strength, but from one kind of strength to another kind. He needs to learn different things. So, the starting point in Dark Knight is not weakness. He’s actually very strong. In fact, they make a point of this. In the first movie, it takes him the whole movie long to defeat the Scarecrow. In the second movie, he beats up the Scarecrow in about 10 seconds and leaves him tied up. That’s their way of saying, look, he’s already awesome. That’s not the story we’re telling.
So, when you know what your end is and what your beginning is, then you know what your arc is going to be. That will let you know where you’re going to go. So, your hook is the thing at the very beginning, kind of your starting state.
Harry Potter, what’s our starting state? What’s the opposite of awesome wizard defeats Voldemort? Four little orphan who lives under the stairs and is sad, boring life, and it’s just you couldn’t possibly start weaker than he does here.
So, now, in between those two, there’s a midpoint. And the midpoint is how you start moving from your beginning state to your end state. It is where the character moves from reaction to action. They spend the first part kind of running away.
Let’s just go straight to our example, because it’s great. Fellowship of the Ring. First half of this book is, oh no, let’s try not to get killed. And the second half of the book is, let’s take the fight to Sauron. Let’s do something about our situation. And that midpoint is the Council of Elrond, where they make that decision, and so they move from one state toward the other.
II
So let’s go back to Harry Potter here, where our midpoint. He has to start sad and boring. He has to end as this strong wizard guy who defeats Voldemort. So at some point in the middle there, he has to learn who Voldemort is, what Voldemort wants to do, and then decide he’s going to do something about it. And in the book, this actually takes place over two or three scenes. First he learns about Nicholas Flamel and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He figures out that it’s being held in Hogwarts. He’s spoiler warning, sorry. And then in the forest, he sees this scary looking dude like sucking blood from a unicorn. He says, that’s messed up. I have to stop this. So that’s when he makes this shift from reaction to action and says, let’s take the fight to Voldemort and do something about this.
Now we have a plot turn. Just like the midpoints in the middle of the beginning and the end, the plot turn moves you from the hook to the midpoint at what sets you in motion. This is where we introduce our conflict.
So Harry Potter starts with a situation, but then a conflict is introduced. There’s different ways of changing the world the character lives in and kind of spurring them into action that way. You can meet new people, you can discover new secrets, you follow the white rabbit (in The Matrix, of course, what I’m referring to). This can take the form of a call to adventure. Someone comes out of nowhere and says, farm boy, come rescue the princess. Or it can just be confronting new ideas. You realize the Capulets are not baby eating monsters. And so that sets the story in motion. It takes the characters out of their starting state and puts them on a path where they are doing things and reacting to things and there’s a problem they’re trying to solve. And John Brown, don’t answer your phone and my thing.
All right, so in Harry Potter, our plot turn is fairly obvious. What do you think it’s going to be? Hey, guess what, dude, you’re a wizard. So Harry Potter becomes a wizard, goes to Hogwarts, learns magic. That’s a very standard call to adventure. Woo-hoo! Exactly what we need out of a plot turn one.
So we go to plot turn two. Plot turn two is going to carry us from the midpoint to the end. The midpoint is where you start, you resolve to do something. The resolution is where you do it. Plot turn two is where you get the last piece you need so that you can do it. So we have our little plot turn.
This often takes the form of the power is in you. Which sounds really cheesy when I say it, but it’s all over the place. It is everywhere. It is in Star Wars. Use the force, Luke, the power is in you. You see it in the Wizard of Oz. You can go home anytime you want, the power is in your shoes. Or we can see it in the Matrix. Neo, you’re the one, the power is in you, and then fireworks.
So this sounds cheesy, but that’s okay, your outline is supposed to sound cheesy. There’s no outline in the world, especially for a genre novel that doesn’t sound stupid when you describe it to somebody, okay? So don’t be afraid of cheesy things like, hey, the power is in you.
Okay, plot turn two also takes the form a lot of [John Brown walking behind me, doing everything he can to disrupt this]. Okay, grasping victory from the jaws of defeat. I told you there was going to be jaws in this. Okay, the, hey, don’t, okay, just wait, pay this off. Okay, something horrible just happened, but now we have the clue that we need. Now we have the piece we need, even if we don’t realize it at the time, and here boo guy, there’s jaws.
Okay, this is a good example, jaws, the shark the size of a bus just destroyed your boat, killed all your friends, you’re sinking, you have like two bullets left, and he comes in, he’s going to eat you. This is a horrible situation, okay? But in solving this problem, in fighting the shark off, he shoves a compressed air tank into his mouth. He hasn’t seen that episode of Mythbusters. So, in this world, it’s going to work, but he doesn’t know it at the time. The shark comes in for another pass, he says, I’m so dead, wait a minute, I haven’t seen that episode, this will work, and he shoots it, and he’s able to win. So that last piece was in place. So the shark didn’t see it either, if he had, man, he would have been screwed, huh.
Empire strikes back, horrible things, it just couldn’t possibly be worse for the alliance right now, it’s falling apart, Luke’s just lost a lightsaber fight, and his hand, his best friends wrapped in carbonite, he, all these awful things have happened. And but, what he learned in this scene, he doesn’t realize it until the third movie, but this scene taught him that Darth Vader is concerned about him, Darth Vader has human emotion that he exhibits in this scene, and so he doesn’t, Luke doesn’t know it yet, but later he’s going to look back on that and say, wait, that’s the last piece I needed, that lets me know that there’s still good in him, and I can use that to win.
So there’s our plot turn two, we need something that is going to give us the final piece, to move us from trying to succeed, to actually succeeding.
So in Harry Potter, our plot turn two, the power is in you, it’s in your pocket actually. He looks in a mirror, and because his motives are pure, that’s our key there, the mirror that it’s holding the stone, puts it into his pocket, and he knows that he’s pure, and that if Voldemort touches him, he’s going to get fried, and so he says, that’s the last piece I need, and so Voldemort touches him, and he gets fried, and then he defeats Voldemort.
So there we go, now we need pinches. A pinch is designed to apply pressure, and there’s lots of different ways to apply pressure, horrible things can happen. So the main purpose of a pinch is to force your characters to action.
And the best example that I could find of this is actually just Harry Potter, that’s our example here, right? These kids in the first book are 11 years old, and by the end of it we need them to be killing the dark lord that everyone in the world is afraid of. They’re not going to do that on their own, they need to be kind of forced into it, and so the troll attack is great, because there’s no adults anywhere, and so they’re forced against their will to step up to the plate and use the powers that they have to solve this problem that’s arisen. It also helps to introduce danger into a fun environment. Up until this point, Hogwarts has just been magical cafeterias, and people flying on brooms, and now there’s like, oh holy crap, this is scarier than I thought it was. The pinch applies pressure to the story. So what’s the pinch for Harry Potter going to be? It’s a troll attack. I gave that one away.
Pinch two applies more pressure, and specifically makes the situation seem even worse. As bad as your first pinch was, pinch two is going to be bad. Their plan fails, mentors die, everything goes wrong. Pinch two is the jaws of defeat. Plot turn two is where they grasp victory from it. Pinch two is the jaws of defeat. Make sure it is bad. So here’s some examples.
Loss of a mentor, really super common pinch two. Gandalf has been leading the party the whole time. Everything’s going great. They think they’ve got it covered, and then he’s, the Balrog shows up. They go through Moria. Everything goes wrong. They lose all this stuff, and of course Gandalf’s gone. That forces them to step up to the plate, forces them to action, forces them to start making decisions on their own, forces them to grow up. Very very good little kind of pinch that you should see everywhere.
Loss of everything. Batman Begins has a great pinch too, because the bad guy shows up, beats the crap out of Batman, burns down his house, kills everyone he knows, and then goes and terrorizes the city. But, so that’s a really bad pinch. They did a great job there, making things look hopeless for Batman. But why do we fall, and then I cried.
So Pinch two in Harry Potter. We need something here. He’s just decided, okay, we’re going to go protect this stone from Voldemort. And then horrible things happen, specifically, they go down into the dungeon and say, well, we’re going to go down and get it first. And they have to pass all these tests, and he loses Ron, and he loses Hermione, and he’s left alone in a room with a scary bad guy. So we’ve lost not a mentor so much in this case as companions. He’s left on his own. We’ve kind of forced him to do all this, and it seems hopeless.
So there’s our system, there’s our seven point system. All those things. I hope at this point you’ve managed to write down all seven of those things. The story is not complete. As you know, if you’ve read Harry Potter, there’s like a million other scenes in there that is not covered. That’s not the point. This is just the skeleton, and you need to hang some flesh on. Not literally, please. You add round characters in there. You add rich environments, you know, magical cafeterias, and quidditch game. We’re going to talk about some of these later, the Ice Monster Prologue.
III
I’ll just let you wonder what that is for a while. Try-fail cycles, subplots depending on size. If you’re writing a short story, you might not need any subplots. If you’re writing multiple ones or say you’re writing Wheel of Time, you’re going to need like 500 subplots. So our question here about what if you do both, what if you’re focusing on plot and character? That’s where this comes in. You can, and we’ll look at that later.
First, before we look at that, I want to talk about the Hero’s Journey, because that’s essentially what we just did with Harry Potter. Check this out. Here’s our Harry Potter thing that we just wrote. Excuse me. Now, see what happens when we remove all the nouns. That’s the Hero’s, now it’s not just the plot of Harry Potter, it’s also the plot of Ergon and the Matrix and the Wizard of Oz and Beowulf and like a million other things. Because it’s a very common archetypal plot that you see all the time. But you don’t have to do that, there are plenty of other plots. And as soon as I take a drink, we’re going to look at some other ones.
Okay, so we’re going to look at romance first. I promised someone that we would talk about love stories here.
So Pride and Prejudice. Nice. Can we use the same structure system that built us Harry Potter to build Pride and Prejudice? Yes, we can. How does Pride and Prejudice end? Boo-yah! They get married, engaged, whatever. I’ve seen the movie, they get married. Okay, so if that’s our resolution, then we need our hook. And our hook is our opposite state. So in this case, they’re not married, they’re single. I’m going to throw some sisters in there because we’re going to need them later. So we need our midpoint. As a midpoint that moves us from singleness to marriage, we’re going to have Elizabeth learning enough about Darcy to start falling in love with him. And in the book, she accomplishes this by having Darcy explain himself and his actions. He’s kind of socially awkward, so he does it in a letter, but it’s still enough. She learns about him and she learns that he’s a noble guy, that he’s a little concerned about impropriety because she has some pretty freaky sisters. But, so that’s our midpoint. And she starts to think, well, you know, this guy’s not as bad as I thought. She’s now moving from reaction (he’s horrible) to action (I need to learn more about this guy. I need to maybe drop by his house, things like that). So, plot turn one. We need to introduce our conflict. What’s our conflict here? Zombies! Somebody read the wrong one. They hate each other. They meet each other and they hate each other instantly, which is great. Back off, okay? He doesn’t hate her. She’s beneath his notice. He’s not handsome enough to tempt me. So, there we go. Plot turn two. Frankly, he must have been watching a different movie because she was handsome enough to tempt me, I’ll tell you that. Plot turn two. We need our last piece that is going to allow them to actually fall in love. And the way they do it in Pride and Prejudice is Darcy has already stated his good intentions in his nobility, but he hasn’t yet demonstrated them. So, that’s what he does by helping her sisters out of the problems that they are in. So, we need problems for the sisters to be in. Good thing we have two pinches left, huh? Pinch one, which actually takes place over a number of different scenes. Darcy breaks up Jane and Bingley. Says, you know, she’s not good enough for you, Bingley. So, there we go. That’s horrible. She finds out Darcy did that and then like right next, then he comes and proposes to her and insults her. Says, you know, I know this is stupid of me because you’re not good enough for me, but would you marry me? And so, that’s a pinch. She hates that. That applies pressure. Okay, pinch two. We need it to be worse than pinch one. That’s okay because Elizabeth has a much worse sister. Lydia runs off, Wickham, and this is a really bad pinch for Elizabeth because as we know, Darcy does not like the impropriety of her sisters. And so, when it turns out that she’s just run off and shacking up with this dude, that means Darcy is probably never going to speak to her again because her sisters are so freaky. But, of course, then we know Darcy is a good guy and he helps them both out and then we fall in love and then if everything’s awesome.
So, there’s our romance plot. Let’s look at a tragedy plot now. This is different from the other ones because it’s going to end sad instead of happy. So, the crux we’re working toward has to build toward failure rather than success, which is really weird.
We’re going to do this with Othello. Who’s read Othello? Not enough of you have read Othello. Okay, our resolution. Sorry? There’s a movie. You should all go see apparently. Okay, what’s our resolution of Othello? Everybody dies. More specifically, Othello kills himself. That’s really what we’re building toward here, okay? So, we need to start with our hook, which is the opposite state of not killing himself. He’s alive. He’s in fact happily married to Desdemona and we threw her in because she’s in the poster there. So, we figured there had to be a girl. Okay, midpoint. We need something that is going to move us from happy marriage to suicide. And I think suspicion. Somebody said suspicion. That’s a great one. He suspects Desdemona is cheating on him so that he’s moving from his happiness toward his sadness. Alright, so that’s a good conflict. We need to introduce it. Good thing we have a third guy in the poster. Iago swears he’s going to destroy Othello. That introduces our conflict. And as long as we’re here, let’s just toss the pinch right in there. He does so by planting evidence of an affair. So, that leads us into our suspicion and forces him into action. Pinch. Plot turn two. Plot turn two is going to be tricky because like we’re trying to build toward a sad ending instead of a happy one. So, what’s going to move him from suspicion to suicide? Knowledge. Knowledge, yeah? He’s a very violent guy. So, he could kill her. Killing her is actually the pinch. What turns him then, the information he gains, is that she was innocent. You guys aren’t reacting as well as I thought. She was innocent and he just killed her and so then he kills himself. No, he should have killed Iago. But Iago was like, Iago does get arrested at the end. So, we have that. But anyway, tragedy, everything’s sad. If he was smart enough to kill Iago instead of himself, we wouldn’t really be telling his story to begin with.
Alright, so. We’ve done hero’s journey, we’ve done romance, we’ve done sad ending tragedy. Horror, that’s my genre. Let’s do this one.
We’re going to do it with what I consider to be the most finely constructed short story ever written, which is The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe. The resolution here, we’re not necessarily building towards happiness or sadness. What we’re doing, the purpose of our story is to convince the reader that the narrator is insane. And therefore, our opposite state to begin in, the narrator is sane. That’s like the first thing he says is, hey, I’m actually sane. Guys, don’t do anything to me. It’s actually interesting in the story: he doesn’t even try to tell people he’s innocent. He just wants to tell them he’s not crazy. That’s more important to him. So, what’s going to move us from sanity to insanity? He murders a dude. He lives with a dude with this old guy. Let me point out at this point, the story doesn’t actually have any gender pronouns in it. And so, well, it does, but only when talking about the old guy. The narrator could just as easily be a woman, and it’s really cool to read it that way. I think you should all go try that. So, plot turn one. He decides he’s going to kill him. That’s when we introduce our conflict. I’m going to murder you creepy old man with your creepy eye. He has like this weird eye that freaks him out, and he decides he’s going to kill him because of it. No, because the point, the thing we’re building toward is not his action. It’s his insanity. So, this is where we have to kind of wave our hands a little. The reaction/action thing is not as strong in a case where your resolution is not one based on action. It’s based on a point we’re trying to make. But in the reader’s mind, what we’re trying to do is take you from a state where he’s sane to one where he’s insane. —
IV
— So the death, when he actually does it, when he actually follows through, that’s when the reader starts to go, OK, yeah, this guy probably is crazy because we all think about killing people, right? I’m not the only one. OK, plot turn two, we need that last piece of the puzzle. He killed a guy, but now we need to just drive it home that he is completely bonkers and we do that by having him hear the heart still beating under the floorboards. And that’s when we go, OK, this guy’s nuts. OK, we need to provide some pressure there and we are going to do so. First thing he does is he tries to kill the old guy eight times and he can’t do it because his eyes closed. And then finally on the eighth time he opens the door and the guy’s eye is open, he says, all right, you are dead, sucker, and he jumps on him and he kills him. So there’s our pinch one to provide kind of a lot of suspense there in the beginning. Pinch two, we get all our suspense at the end with the cops. Police said cops, police officers come to the house and say, hey, we heard a scream and he invites him in and sits him down on a chair right over where the body is buried. And then there’s this tense scene where he’s talking to them and he hears some creepy thing and it just builds up and then he ends up by screaming, no, his heart’s still beating even though he’s dead and so now we know that he’s crazy.
So there’s our horror plot, which is a little different from our other ones.
OK, now as we mentioned, these stories are not complete. You still need to add all this extra stuff to flesh them out. We are not going to talk about round characters in rich environments because you guys all, you can do that. You’re geniuses. We’re going to talk about the plot-based ones. We’re going to talk about the Ice Monster Prologue. We’re going to talk about try-fail cycles. And then we’re going to combine them all together, lots of different plots.
So Ice Monster Prologue, who is read Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin? Wow, more people have read Othello than George R. R. Martin? I don’t know whether that’s happy or not. Anyway, Game of Thrones, great book. It does not have, it’s a big epic fantasy story. Does not have a lot of action for quite a few pages. And it’s a magic, it’s a fantasy. Doesn’t have a lot of magic in it for like three fourths of the book. But it starts with a prologue where some guys fight an Ice Monster. And so that tells you right off the bat, this is going to have action and it’s going to have magic, so just bear with me now while we talk about this kid growing up.
So we see this a lot because the first scene of a hook is not necessarily interesting. I hate to break that to you guys. We have Batman starting off in a position of weakness. We have Harry Potter living under the stairs. The conflict isn’t introduced yet. There’s a lot of things that just haven’t happened yet. The thing is, we want people to still be reading this book 20 chapters from now. Which means we need to hook them now. But right now we’re busy laying the foundation for 20 chapters later. So you see this all the time. The Ice Monster prologue is just what I call it because of Game of Thrones. Lets you start with something that will grab people before the actual story is going to grab them.
There we go, we have Luke. The arc of our story here is little farm boy becomes a Jedi, but we don’t start with a farm boy, we start with a space battle, okay? Matrix, our arc is little hacker becomes a Jedi. But we don’t start with the little hacker, we start with the hot chick in tight black leather who beats up the bad guys, okay? That’s the hook that gets people in, they get people invested. And then we start laying our foundation for a long thing. You do not need to do this. Plenty of stories don’t do this. But a surprising number of them do, okay? So that is a good way to just get people ready. That’s a great way to start a story, to start a book.
See, try fail cycle, who knows what a try fail cycle is? Somebody just shout it out. My goodness, that is the most confusing concept ever. Okay, before your heroes succeeded anything important, they should try and fail multiple times first. Why? Because victory should be earned. Because if your heroes can solve the problem on the first try, then your problem was not hard enough and nobody cares. So we need lots of try fail cycles to get people going.
Try fail cycles can serve a lot of different purposes. They can demonstrate consequences. In The Last Crusade, we get to the last room and the knight says, choose wisely, the good one gives you eternal life and the bad one will do horrible things. We don’t know what the horrible thing is. And when Indy chooses, there’s not a lot of tension in the audience. Cuz we don’t know what the consequences of a wrong choice are. So we get to see the consequences first when the other guy chooses. So we have tried, we have failed, and now the audience knows, this is serious.
All right, sometimes try fail cycles. Why does this always get the biggest laugh? Okay, sometimes try fail cycles look like victories. Wesley’s trying to rescue Buttercup. He has to go through all three guys before he can do it. Yes, he beats the first two, he beats them all. But in beating them, he does not immediately gain his objective. He has to pass these obstacles first and that makes his eventual victory more satisfying.
On the other hand, sometimes failures are actual failures. We have poor Inigo. How many times does Inigo try and fail to avenge his father’s death? Let’s look at him. He starts off by asking the man in black. He says, do you know this? And he says, no, I don’t, and I’m gonna beat you up. And then the man in black finds the six-fingered man, but they kill him. Then we discover it’s Count Rugen, and then he’s too drunk to do anything about it. And then he finally confronts him and the dude runs away. And then he tries to get through the door and it’s locked. And then he gets through the door and he gets stabbed in the stomach. And then after ten try fail cycles, he finally does what he’s trying to do. That’s why this is the best moment in the movie. That’s why this is everyone’s favorite, because he earned it. He tried really hard and he got what he wanted and he failed and we were with him the whole way. So that’s why try fail cycles are really important to have.
So moving on now, plots and subplots. We need to have lots and lots of them. Most stories have more than one plot. As we had the question at the beginning, what if you’re trying to focus on character and plot at the same time? Most stories do. If you look at a TV show, every TV show on television, except the ones I don’t watch, has two plots going at the same time. Here’s our main plot, here’s our B plot. And each thread, each action, each resolution or climax that you are working toward can be mapped out with the system. And then you weave them all together. You’ve got all these little threads going at once and you kind of weave them together until you get something useful.
So we’re gonna do this with The Matrix, okay? We’re gonna put everything that we’ve talked about all into one thing. The way I look at The Matrix, it’s got four plots. Three main plots and a subplot of the betrayal, and they all end thusly. In our action plot, this is where Neo has to defeat the agents. That’s kind of our overarching thing. We also have a character plot where he needs to become the one. He needs to grow as a person, and he needs to know that the power is in him. We have a romance plot where we’re trying to get these two characters to fall in love with each other. This, as we see, is a very standard hero’s journey. We have our call to action, we have our mentor disappearing, we have all of the standard hero’s journey stuff. Character plot, very different. We are instead building towards a character climax, an internal climax where he has to realize things and make decisions about himself. We have our romance plot, which is not necessarily all that different from the Pride and Prejudice one. Sorry for the blasphemy there. But when you bring it down to a structural level, a romance tends to be fairly the same. Now we have our betrayal plot, which is Cypher. We’re trying to build toward a moment in which Cypher betrays everybody. That’s our subplot that we’re going to mix in there and blend in there. So all of these four plots, they have our seven points.
Now we’re going to braid them together. The way we do this is we have our events. We spread them out to give ourselves good pacing. There’s the one time I’ll say that during this pace. I’m sorry that pacing was on there. So all of you people came for pacing. There you go, pacing, spread them out. Now, on the other hand, we’re going to line those moments back up again when we need to create a really powerful scene. We’re going to have different important things happening in different plots, and they happen at the same time. Those are the big scenes that get us going and that we remember and have a big impact on us. So let’s look at it. —
V
— We’re going to go through now. We start off with our Ice Monster Prologue. Let’s beat up all these guys and hover in the air and show off our special effects. Then we start our hooks. We have our beginning state for our character and it’s pretty much the same across all three of the main plots. He’s a loser. So, then we kind of slowly start building one of the plots. Then we’ll bring in one of the other plots. Then we’ll bring in some other stuff. Morpheus tells Neo he’s the one and that’s when we meet Cypher. So now we’ve just introduced our subplot braided in there and we just keep building. Neo is the wimpy new guy and so Trinity doesn’t really care at this point. And he falls in love with her anyway because she’s Carrie Ann Moss. Then meanwhile behind all this we have our other subplot going. Makes a deal with the agents. People think maybe something’s going on but we don’t have time for that because we need more room here. This story is really long. So, here we go. We don’t have time for that because we need to go meet the Oracle. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to tell the agents where you are. The Oracle does this so we’re building now this other plot. And Trinity doesn’t really want to talk to him. And this is slower than that I think. Anyway, Neo spots the trap they try to escape and then huge scene. We get our big attack and that results in this. Let’s toss one more thing in there. This is the resolution of one of our plots coming at the same time of a pinch in one of our other plots. That’s a large part of why that scene is such a big deal in the movie. It’s because we’re seeing these two things happen at the same time. It has much more impact. If it was just Morpheus getting captured for no reason, that wouldn’t affect us as much as if he was captured because of a betrayal of a character we liked. Then we start to move towards the second half. We’re now in the action phase. Neo’s taking matters into his own hands. He is risking his life to save people and we get try-fail cycles. There’s like five things he does. He needs to rescue Morpheus and he starts by the lobby scene, which is great and it’s fantastic, but it doesn’t actually get him. He doesn’t rescue Morpheus yet. Then he goes up on the roof. They get attacked by an agent. They escape with the skin of their teeth. They fly a helicopter. They manage to get him out, but then the helicopter crashes. There’s all of these failures. They’re not out yet. They make it to the subway. The two guys get through. Neo’s left alone. Bad things are happening. We need more room. Did that happen? Awesome. So Neo realizes the power is in you, Neo. And he realizes that thanks to Trinity. Trinity tells him. So then we have our other thing and he becomes the one. So now we’re seeing all these other plots with their big main events happening at the same time. We’re combining character resolutions with action resolutions and knitting them all together. And that enables us to defeat the agents at the end. Yay.
So I hope that that was helpful because the point we’re trying to make here is that once you know how to do this, you can take all of these threads, all of these elements of your story and your characters and your magic cafeterias, and you can combine them into something that has structure that your audience can look at and say, that all makes sense. I love the way that works.
So does anybody have questions right over here?
[…] It depends on the book. The one that I’m doing right now, I did this first. And in writing it, I’m about a third of the way through it. Yeah, about a third of the way through it. I’m realizing that I have neglected some of these other subplots. And so during this writing phase, I actually stopped last week and changed and said, okay, I’m realizing now that this character is more important than I thought she was. So I’m going to figure out what her arc needs to be. If she’s cool now, I want to make sure she’s cool at the end so she has a good moment. So the way I do that is by figuring out her resolution and then mapping out how to get her there. So I kind of combine them before and after.
Over here first. […] Oh, absolutely. Like I said, there’s no rules. His question was, do you have to have a love interest for the romance or can it just be a relationship? You could do a romance kind of plot, that basic plot with anything. It could be a guy loving his car, honestly. Whatever you want that resolution to be, whether someone gets together with the significant other or whether somebody finally gets their car back from the whatever, I don’t know, whatever your resolution is going to be, that’s what you’re building toward.
[…] In most cases, yes. You look at… Yeah. As often as… So Star Wars is another example. We have our action plot, which is we need to blow up the Death Star and our character plot, which is you need to rely on the force and those happen at the same time. Use the force, Luke. Put away your targeting computer. He does. Both climaxes hit at the same point and that’s why it feels very significant. Well, no, that’s actually, you know, using this system, that’s fairly easy to do because you just figure out a really good climax resolution and then map it out backwards from there. So your second act, you know, of your main plot is going to be depressing, maybe, and bad things are going to happen. I heard Brandon Mould describe the three-act structure once as “act one, you put your characters up a tree, act two, you throw rocks at them, and then in act three, you get them back down again.” So act two tends to be the sad one, but you could have other plots and subplots that are happy going on at the same time the main plot is sad.
Now, you had a question. One of the things about this system that I was trying to say at the beginning is these are not hard and fast rules. And while I believe that you can take any story and figure out what the seven points are for it, I honestly don’t think most authors knew that at the time. They were writing it. And so in a lot of cases, the midpoint is going to show up somewhere else. I actually did and cut out for time. I had a mystery story, a Sherlock Holmes story mapped out. And the midpoint came really, really early because in my case, in my opinion, in a mystery, in a Sherlock Holmes especially, the midpoint is moving from reaction to action. That’s where you take the case. That’s where you begin your investigation. That probably starts really early. So it doesn’t have to be exactly in the center.
For me personally, endings are by far the hardest. That is why I started using this system is because my endings suck inevitably. And then I have to go back and I have to rewrite them like four times and then I think that they’re fairly good. When I do this, I don’t have to do as much rewriting because I know where I’m headed before I start. And so I can get there more effectively. I know a lot of people, the middle is a lot harder. Middles are fairly easy for me. I think maybe that makes my books boring in the middle because I’m just happy to talk about this dude drinking orange juice or whatever he’s doing in the middle.
So, right here. I’m not a serial killer, it’s a trilogy as well. It is indeed a trilogy. No. It was intended in my mind to be a standalone book. And so it had an ending and I thought, here it’s going to end and then I sold it and the editor called me up and said, great, I want to buy your book. I want to buy two more too in the same series. And I thought, well, yay, first of all, I’m not going to say no. But I had to change the ending so that there was room for two more books. And because of that, I think that if you read the books, I did give it a more solid character arc going through. But the books are fairly episodic because they were never intended to be a single through story. So, any system can work.
I’m a huge in Europe. That means when I go to Europe, I literally grow about 10 feet. I have a lot of fey ancestry. No, my book came out in Germany and it’s already in its fifth printing in Germany. It’s a super awesome bestseller. Thank you. So, yeah, when the bombs fall and I need to flee the country, that’s kind of where I’m headed.
So, I believe we are out of time, but thank you all for coming. Please come up and get a business card and a pin and all this stuff. Thank you very much. Thank you.
-
Dan Wells on Story Structure, YouTube video (Dan Wells, 2010). ↩︎