Where I share thoughts on writing and the writing life.
Working on a Building
A book writing project is similar to a large building project except that writing a book often takes many years longer than completing even the tallest building
“I’ve got to get the basement right before I build the house.”
A good foundation is important…
I once had the occasion to drive by a construction site once a month. The first month they started digging a hole. The second month the hole got bigger and deeper. The next month the hole got bigger and deeper still. Finally, just as I was beginning to think that instead of a building, maybe they were constructing a tunnel to China, a concrete column appeared. After that, the building zoomed skyward almost like a Chinese bottle rocket.
I often use this analogy with my students to point out the importance of a firm foundation to their stories. Writing a story is a little bit like a huge building project. Even some of the terms we use in story are also common to construction. We We talk of world building. structure, arc, and blue print. Even the term plot is common to both endeavors.
Writing, especially the novel, is similar to any other building project. There is the planning stage, (the blueprint), the writing stage, (the construction), the editing stage (the building inspector’s visit), the completion stage (the final draft) and the move in stage (moving the story into the world). One difference, however is that it often takes months or years longer to complete a novel than to build even the tallest building.
I’d like to focus on one part of the book writing process: structure. In my experience, until recently novel writing seminars and books gave only a passing glance at structure (John Gardener’s The Art of Fiction and Robert Roy’s The Weekend Novelist Being exceptions, though each of them devote a scant few paragraphs to the topic.
For screenwriters, the other variety of long form fiction, this is not the case, Screenwriting books are replete with diagrams, explanations, and discussions of story structure. Among the most popular are Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, John Yorke’s Into the Woods, and that doorstop of a book, Story, by Robert McKee. (For an insight into Robert Mckee’s book and and it’s popularity with screenwriters, watch the movie Adaptation.)
Why do screenwriters fret so much over structure (or as they often call it, story)? I think the reason is simple. A publishing company may spend a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars producing distributing the latest A-lister, and most first novelists are shocked to learn that the lion’s share of promoting their book falls on them.
…whether building a house or writing a book.
It’s not unusual for a production company to spend $100,000,000 or more getting an average movie onto the screen. A “blockbuster” may take many times that. (For an inside look at how a movie gets to the big screen, click Here) With all the money, time and personnel invested, the producers want to make damn sure the movie is a success. But even then, it’s more-or-less a crapshoot. The producer Samuel Goldwin of MGM once famously said, “If I had produced the scripts I rejected and rejected the scripts I produced, the result would probably have been about the same.”
In recent years, however, more attention has been given to structure by writing teachers and writing coaches. One recent example is Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel, wherein she adapts Blake Snyder’s work to narrative fiction.(If you’re curious about the name, keep reading.)Writers are also dusting off old tomes like Arisotle’s Poetics, Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Freytag’s The Technique of Drama, which is probably the most misunderstood of all story structure tropes. The work of K.M. Weiland and Ruthanne Reid et al is also of note.
In the next few installments I will be going over several of the most well-known story structure ideas with examples of how they relate actual works of fiction.
Why story structure? you can’t escape it. It has been around since The Epic of Gilgamesh. Understanding story structure will both help you become a better writer, and help when dissecting a classic work to learn how it is put together, which I highly recommend.
Is there one over-aching structure that all stories can fit into? I haven’t found one. Some work well for a single hero, others for a group. Some work with suspense or tragedy, others with comedy. I have seen attempts by writing teachers to shoehorn all stories into a single trope, but often they have to be modified or hybridized. But you will find that some structures are more versatile than others.
I’ll start our (hero’s?) journey with my next post, going back to the beginning, with Aristotle’s Poetics.
Happy Writing!
The term “Save the Cat” comes from Blake Snyder’s book, wherein he says that if you have a bad protagonist and want him to get the audience’s, sympathy, have them do something like save a cat at the beginning of the movie. This actually happened in the movie Alien, when Sigourney weaver’s character, Ripley, literally saves a cat. This was turned on its head in the beginning of the series, House of Cards, When Kevin Spacey’s Character, Frances Underwood, kills a dog. Sympathy, anyone?