Some Short Essays on Writing Stories

[KLSymph]

Writing is an aggravating exercise.  In the last four years, I've found it painful and time-consuming, and every day I try to get better at it if only so I can get my ideas on paper without cringing.  In order to organize the lessons I've learned, I've written a few short essays based on my experience on the craft of storytelling and fanfiction, and I share them here for anyone who might find the ideas useful.

I learned these lessons from reading stories, studying style guides, observing other writers, and from good old practice.  I don't pretend that what I've concluded are the definitive answers to the foibles I've encountered, or that they work well for everyone, but for my own sake I phrase these essays as if I am confident in what I speak of.  Take from them whatever you agree with and discard the rest, or simply disagree loudly and publicly.  I am always eager for debate.  Questions are also welcome, since I am stingy with examples and explanations.

Nor do I pretend that what I've written are all my own ideas; a good amount of it is paraphrased from the advice of professional writers.  Some particularly recent and influential guides are:
(Elements of Fiction Writing)  Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
(Elements of Fiction Writing)  Scene and Structure by Jack M. Bickham
(Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

List of essays:

1. Plot and Direction
2. Making Sense
3. Originality

[KLSymph]

Plot and Direction

In fanfiction, the depressing norm is for amateur writers to begin stories but not finish them.  Their tales stop at the end of a chapter and don't continue.  For a regular person without training in writing, continuing a story is about interest and momentum, and a plot appears to be a sequence of events.  You have a main character.  You write something interesting that happens to him.  Then something else happens to him.  Something else.  Something else.  You repeat this something-happens loop chapter after chapter after chapter, and then if you're lucky you reach the most interesting event, and then "the end".  Or if you're not lucky, you don't know what the next interesting thing should be, and then "writer's block".  This view of plot is natural.  It's even the accepted definition of "plot": a general course of a story including significant events that determine its course or significant patterns of events.  A sequence of events is what the reader sees, and it makes sense that when the reader tries to write his own story, he will follow this model.

However, writers who want to finish their stories need a more sophisticated model for plot.  Here's one:

A story has a story question.

A story begins when the question is dramatically posed.

A story advances when the reader comes closer to answering the question.

A story ends when the question is finally answered.

As a writer you should keep in mind one story question which drives the overall plot of the work, while placing other relevant questions along the way.  A reader's sense of a story's cohesion depends on whether she identifies a story question to care about, and she will think that any part of the story that doesn't relate to the question is irrelevant.  At the end of the story, readers expect the question posed at the beginning to be answered, and they feel disappointed if the narrative has gone somewhere else.

The first few paragraphs of a story, the first scene, or otherwise the stuff before the first "division" in the story is where readers look for the story question, and therefore that first part should pose the question dramatically.  It should be a full scene that grabs the reader's attention and makes her care, immersing her in the conflict immediately.  A common mistake among amateur writers is to begin the story with the line, "It was a normal day...."  Because the average reader only gives a story a small grace period before deciding whether to continue it, the first sentence should grab her attention immediately.  To do this, the first bit of the story, often from the first sentence, should pose that story question.

As the story rolls along, its main question's answering looms larger and larger.  A story advances in the eyes of a reader not because more things have happened, but because the story question has come closer to being answered, which generally means the protagonist's options are dwindling as obvious but incorrect answers are tried and discarded.  This is a subject for its own essay.

Then as the story reaches its climax, when the protagonist either succeeds or fails utterly, the reader sees the story question answered and the story comes to a stop.

Most fanfiction writers don't plot in this fashion.  Instead of asking a real and tangible question, they make a statement and sometimes dress it up in question form: "what if Character A did this unlike canon?", or "Character B is in a new setting, what happens?".  A statement doesn't make a story because the reader has nothing to look forward to.  In fact, a common problem with a statement-turned-question is that an author poses the question form and then answers it immediately.  One standard "what if" formula in fanfiction, the crossover, asks the story question, "what if characters from series A met characters from series B?"  The author then proceeds by formula: well, first have them meet and show some interesting initial reactions, and then begin the something-happens loop.  But if you look at the story-question model, the problem with this formula is obvious: when the author showed the initial reactions, he answered the "what if" question, and once that question is answered, the story is over.  "What if series A met series B?"  "Well, they had some interesting initial reactions."  The end.

Or it should be, but that author doesn't know it, and runs the something-happens loop until he has no more energy, and abandons the story.

Instead of making this mistake, you should choose a close-ended, tangible question with a definitive, interesting answer and plenty of conflict along the way to develop.  Will the couple get together, yes or no?  Who was the murderer, the butler or the maid?  Will the hero save the world, or will the villain destroy it?  These questions are easy for the reader to find and relate to.  If you keep the story question in mind, your story has a direction that becomes much harder to lose track of and much less likely to sputter and die. If you find yourself lost, see if your characters have forgotten the question, and if so then get them back on track. If the momentum is disappearing, ask yourself how to make answering the story question more urgent or more immediately important. Once the question is answered, you can end the story (or if you want, ask a new question and start over) knowing that your reader's expectation has been met.


It would be useful to ask, why do amateur writers use the something-happens loop instinctively?  My guess is because they are trying to imitate the source of their fiction, which are usually television programs and comics in serial format, and they are translating aspects of those stories into written fiction straight across.  If this sounds familiar, you must know the differences between these media.

The narrative structure in chapters of most written stories is very different from the structure of chapters of most serialized comic books or the structure of most television episodes, but the difference is not immediately obvious.  This difference is simple: narrative structure in written stories, which are mostly not serialized, link forward more than those equivalent structures in serialized media.  What this means is that a narrative unit (a scene, a chapter) in a book are designed to make the reader want to continue immediately after she hits the end of that unit, but the same unit (an episode, a comic book) in a series is designed to satisfy the reader until the next installment.

This difference comes from the expected availability of these media.  In any story, the reader expects to be satisfied (by the answer of the story question, of course) at the end of the work.  When the reader sees a written story, the author expects her to have read it from the beginning, and he's trying to carry her to the end in one sitting before she gets bored of the story and quits.  Especially in online fiction, but even in printed fiction, the author expects the reader to have the rest of the story on hand, whether because she knows where the story's posted or simply because she bought the entire book and not just the chapter she's on.  Because the entire work is on hand, what matters is sweeping the reader along from beginning to end, so that she doesn't stop in the middle.  In a serialized work the situation's different; the author doesn't know if the reader will see the next episode or buy the next piece, so he'll structure the current installment of the story to stand alone.  Yes, there's an overarching plotline in serialized media, but the individual units are more discrete, because while the author can have a cliffhanger or a miniseries inside the story, he can't keep leaving the reader wanting for long before she gets angry.  It might be a long time before she sees another part of the story, since finding back episodes and old comic books is hard and expensive and new ones come out only slowly and regularly, so each part needs to be good enough by themselves, and that means more independence.  Sometimes, the independence is so strong the episode or chapter isn't integral to the plot; we've all seen series where we could've drop an episode or two, or even jumble some out of order, and still follow the story perfectly well.  What's important is that the reader is happy with the current installment, and there's just enough linking forward to intrigue her into getting the next.

Amateur writers often see this in action and unconsciously try to imitate it in their writing.  Where they go wrong is since they're writing fanfiction, they're probably fans and probably know the entire story, and without training in narrative structure they don't know that serialized media are trying to satisfy the reader every episode or book.  Instead, they see the entire story as a whole, except it looks like it's been split into... well... something happens.  Then something else happens. Something else.  Something else.  They don't link forward as they should in non-serialized fiction, but they don't satisfy as they should in serialized fiction either.  The worst of both worlds, but it's this improper translation between media that leads to amateur writers adopting the something-happens loop model of plot.  Luckily, switching to the story-question model, or any other better plotting method, is an easy fix.


So how do you use the story question to interest your reader and center your story?  You pose the question clearly to the reader, with a preferred wording if necessary, and then have the goals of your major characters all revolve around it, and make the scenes about those goals.  The most important thing to do is to clearly state the question regularly in the story itself, so that you and your reader and your characters all know what the question is.  It sounds heavy-handed, but if it means somebody has to ask the question out loud every scene, then that is what should be done.  You'll stay on track, have a direction, and finish your story.

[Jason_Miao]

Finishing Your Stories
<The problem>

<Defining the problem as "writer's block">

<Defining "writer's block">

<No wait, "writer's block" is not REALLY the problem.  It's something else>

Much too long, and you haven't even started yet.

Rigorous scientific observation suggests most of them don't know what a story is in the first place.

And the data for your rigorous scientific observation?  Your methods?  Reports?  I somehow doubt that you actually formed a falsifiable hypothesis, compiled data from hundreds or thousands of fanfics, and tested the strength of that data against the hypothesis.  So...pick a more accurate phrase.


The actual advice is not bad.  But there's too much ancillary filler in the setup.  Squash all of that into one paragraph.

Yes, that will make your essay much shorter.  Contrary to what academia teaches, this is a good thing.  People who actually want to read your material for advice will want to know what to do, not "what their problem isn't".

[KLSymph]

And the data for your rigorous scientific observation? Your methods? Reports? I somehow doubt that you actually formed a falsifiable hypothesis, compiled data from hundreds or thousands of fanfics, and tested the strength of that data against the hypothesis. So...pick a more accurate phrase.

Hyperbole, man, hyperbole. But you're right, it's not the right way to put it.

Much too long, and you haven't even started yet. ... The actual advice is not bad. But there's too much ancillary filler in the setup. Squash all of that into one paragraph. Yes, that will make your essay much shorter. Contrary to what academia teaches, this is a good thing. People who actually want to read your material for advice will want to know what to do, not "what their problem isn't".

Quite so. I have taken out the lead-in fluffery. However, it seems I like writing endlessly, so after I took out the filler, I replaced it with a pile more subject discussion. Hopefully it's at least more helpful.

[KLSymph]

Making Sense

A story must make sense, because every story needs credibility.  Credibility is the basis for reader interest and immersion.  If you want your story to connect with the reader, you must make sense.

And not just some sense.  Maybe you've heard the saying, "life is stranger than fiction"?  Fiction must make more sense than reality.  In real life a reader accepts nonsense.  She has to.  She can't put reality down and disbelieve it.  But if that same nonsense occurs in a story, she can and she will throw it away.

Making sense in a story is different from making sense in reality.  The writer must create a fictional illusion.  And how do you make that illusion?

A story makes sense when it has a clear and continuous chain of cause and effect.

A story makes sense when every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause, and the reader understands the connection.

A story makes sense when each cause and each effect is external.

Why cause and effect?  Why is a story with aliens, or magic, or blatant violations of physics and real-world logic, a story that totally makes its own rules, completely sensible to its reader despite lacking realism?  Why do real-life events make no sense when transcribed onto a page, even though those events are verifiably true?  Whether we like it or not, the real world is a complicated and confusing place, and even though we live in it, we'll never see all the details or all of the reasons for anything.  Reality has a chain of cause and effect (I think!), but it's not a clear chain; no, it's a webby-knotty tangle of thousands of chains, each branching off itself and changing the dynamics of thousands of neighbors.  Not so in stories; in stories, we as readers look for the kind of awareness and meaning that we never get in reality.  This is why cause and effect are important.  It is a fundamental relationship between events--things that happen--that is reliable and understandable, which is why we base the scientific method on clearly measuring that relationship.

Applying cause and effect isn't as simple as it sounds.  "Clear and continuous" isn't in the point above for decoration.  First, it forces you away from coincidence as a plot device.  Readers demand that serious events happen in stories because of plot-relevant reasons, not from dumb luck.  Second, it forces you to spell things out.  Often, a writer will skip showing the reader a cause's effect or an effect's cause because "it's obvious", and often that omission is a tiny detail that the reader won't notice consciously but erodes the story's credibility--assuming, of course, that the omission is in fact small to both the writer and the reader.  Sometimes the omission is small; maybe a detail was written to set the stage and then the writer wrote out the scene and simply forgot that the characters are playing chess, so the reader wonders why the hero is keep chatting instead of responding to his opponent's opening move and why the opponent doesn't tell him to go already.  When the omission is large, and some story-impactful cause or effect is just missing, it's called a "plot hole", and might drive the reader insane.

Does every cause need an effect and ever effect a cause?  Yes.  Not only yes, but the effect of every cause is probably a cause itself, and has its own effect, which is why it makes a chain.  On the other hand, it probably isn't too important that every link in the chain has a bunch of branches--every cause doesn't need many effects despite realism--we need the chain to be clear, after all.  The links of the chain are the plot-important relations between events, so you should clip the rest.  Then do you need to show the reader every cause and every effect, every link?  Mostly.  You'll want many of them, but there are exceptions.  The chain must start and end, so sometimes "it's obvious" has to rule the day.  This usually happens if the chain extends outside the current scene; you'll show the movement of the pieces while the scene runs, and leave the reader to assume that something led to the characters having that chess match, or that it will finish sometime.  But even if you don't show these links to the reader in the story, you should consider them in the story's plot.  The chain needs to be there even if actually narrating it isn't important.

Just showing the causes and effects isn't enough, though; the reader must understand the connection, and this requires an ear for obviousness.  Sometimes, the opponent checks the hero, so the hero moves his king one square to the left--nothing else needs to be said.  Other times, the opponent checks the hero, so the hero moves his bishop to the other side of the board--some explanation is needed.  When cause and effect aren't immediately clear, the writer needs to show the reader explicitly.  A corollary is that the relation between a cause and its effect usually needs more explanation the farther away they are in story time.  The more displaced the cause is from the effect, the less immediately clear their connection.

Causes and effects must be external; in a scene, they must be played out on the stage--they can't be in the actor's mind.  You punching me is a cause, but me becoming angry because you punched me is not an effect.  If I scowled because you punched me, then that is an effect of the punch, because scowling is an external reaction, while "becoming angry" means nothing externally, and for the reader there is no sensible difference between "becoming angry" with no outward reaction and "no effect", which makes no sense--if someone punched you, you expect a effect.  Similarly, "I've been angry all day" is no cause for me to bite your head off in a story, but you punching me, and therefore setting me off, is a cause.  Causes and effects are external;  the relation between them is often internal.  Keep the difference in mind.

But what if you don't want the reader to know a cause, effect, or relation because I want it to be a mystery at that point in the story?  The answer is to have an empty cause, effect, or relationship--you show that the link in the chain is there, but deny readers information about it.  But what you must remember is that an empty link is still a link; it is a cause and it must have an effect.  If I fail to react to your punch, that lack of reaction will cause you to wonder why, and the reader will demand an answer.  You must give an answer eventually, or clearly point out that the answer is missing--and beware: when you leave an empty spot in your story, your make story about that empty spot.  Your reader's attention will be drawn to it, and they will focus on it even if you don't want that focus.

You could ignore that, and ignore making sense in general, but then you have no cause for complaint when your reader concludes that you're a poor writer and what you wrote was a mistake.

[Edward]

I'm going to agree with your basic premise – 'Fiction must make more sense than reality', but disagree on some details.

As you point out, real life does not always provide us with 'a clear and continuous chain of cause and effect', nor are these causes always clear.  Coincidence does have its place in real life.

And it has its place in literature as well.  Ryouga just happens to find a man who tells him about the Shishi Hokoudan technique and just happens to pop Bugs-Bunnylike out of the earth in front of Ranma.  The illiterate Capulet servant just happens to ask Romeo to read him the written list of people invited to the ball, which just happens to be a masquerade so Romeo know about it and can attend.  Uncle Owen just happens to buy C-3PO, and when he isn't going to buy R2-D2, the other droid just happens to break down spectacularly.

But coincidence is often over used.  And it works best at the start a story, as in my examples.  Coincidence also works best in comedies, or at least comedic scenes, which are founded on more improbable events anyway.

Nor does the reader always need to clearly see causes and effects.  This is especially true in horror, where that very lack of clarity can add to the mood.  Of course, this doesn't mean there aren't underlying causes and effects.

And with the caveat that they are not to be overused, and in fact should be used much less than in real life, uses of coincidence and not clearly spelling out all causes and effects to the reader can make the story more real.  The key is trust.  If the author has established he does not depend on coincidence further his plot and that he does use cause and effect, than the reader will keep reading when there is the occasional coincidence, and will trust the author even if he doesn't explain everything.

There's also a good deal more to making sense than what you list.

"Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel." – H.P.Lovecraft.

http://fantastichorror.com/00/lovecraft-notesonwritingweirdfiction.html

Put simply, the bar is set higher for fiction that deals with the fantastic.  Just because you have time travelers give AK-47's to the Confederacy doesn't mean that they can be used to win a real battle where firepower did not matter, or that a separated Confederate Army can effortlessly reform and maneuver through terrain where whole Army Corps got lost in real life.  Just because you have cinematic martial artists doesn't mean that bars are full of people who have obviously been drinking for an extended period of time, but it's only late morning.  Nor is hot the optimum temperature for good sake and it isn't drunk out of a glass.  Don't use 'sensei' when you mean 'sempai'.

This means doing your research.  When an author gets the everyday details wrong, they have lost the reader long before they get to the fantastic part.  Mark Twain has a wonderful essay on the works of James Fenimore Cooper

http://ww3.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html

Getting the details right definitely includes characterization.  Not only should the characters act consistently, but if you are dealing with established characters, whether they are historical figures, such as Napoleon, or fictional creations, such as Sherlock Holmes, their actions need to conform to their already established character.  That's an added burden for both fanfic and historical fiction, yet I've seen Abraham Lincoln replaced with fanon-Shinji and Nabiki Tendo replaced with Nanami Jinnai.

Then there is the fantastic and here the key is consistency.  The Ranma cast is better at roof-hopping than the cast of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  If the latter suddenly start being able to make three story leaps, the audience is at best puzzled.  If they start vaulting into the clouds, traveling hundreds of miles through the air, and leaping back to earth, like the Monkey King in Journey to the West, then the audience will just give up.

Not that consistency should be ignored outside the fantastic.  As Mark Twain put it – "...when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.".  Or as I pointed out to a fanfic writer in a far less pithy manner they had a non-native character miss a 'the' and screw up a verb tense, but render the rest of the elaborate sentence (almost 50 words, multiple clauses, multiple idioms) correctly.  Or that Genma would not use the word 'précis' in his thoughts, nor 'discourse'.  He's a martial artist, not literature professor.  At least Cooper had being dead 40 years as an excuse for not following Twain's advice.

Another consistency issue when dealing with fanfics is when the author wants to put real-world things into a setting where they have not been present before.  For example, police in Ranma setting should already been involved multiple times if they are anything like real world police.  So if you add them, you have to explain away their previous absence and provide a credible reason why they are involved this time.

[Jason_Miao]

If you want your story to connect with the reader, you must make sense.

Or not.

In fact, I'm going to go further and say that I disagree with your basic premise.  I've never particularly cared that the particulars causing Phillip's journey in Demoiselle D'Ys is never fully explained.  Despite reading it many times, and despite (or should I say "because of") its simplicity, I still consider it one of my favorites.  And one of the more powerful stories I've ever read, The Cold Equations, simply doesn't make any sense from its basic premise: precision loading (this phrase will make sense if/when you read the story).  Knowledge of the "flaw" does nothing to detract from the ending's impact.

Perhaps I have a vested interest in discussing this point.  It was never "obvious" in the context of my fics why there should be Elder Cats, or why Kodachi visited the Cursed Springs and chose that one particular spring as the vehicle of her revenge.  The one essay I've ever written - "The Essay Essay", is intended to be satirical nonsense and I sincerely hope that no one has tried to apply any "lesson" that it imparts.  But my response would be that in all the examples I've given, loading down the reader with the wherefores and whens would not only be unnecessary, but actually counterproductive.  The writings connect with the reader because they reach out to fundamental drives of the reader - "sense" does not factor into it.

I won't say that full fledged logical connections are unnecessary in all stories.  That would be as false as a blanket assumption that it is necessary in all stories.  The best I will say (without writing my own essay - I assure you that few would not enjoy the final product) is that you're tackling an issue in a few paragraphs that likely requires a thesis (and a transcript of your thesis defense) for just treatment.