Thinking about your story’s structure

When you’re thinking about your story’s structure—the way a story unfolds and why it’s so compelling —it can help to watch movies, not only because it takes less time to watch a movie than to read a book, but because sometimes you can see a story’s structure, the bones of the plot, more clearly on the screen than on the page.

Over the past few weeks I’ve searched for something to watch after finishing Season 6 of All Creatures Great and Small (which I highly recommend), and found myself watching four films that turned out to have unexpectedly similar structural elements. 

The four films are: 1) Sea of Love with Al Pacino, a murder mystery written by Richard Price set in NYC; 2) Ghosts of Mississippi with Alec Baldwin and Whoopi Goldberg, a courtroom drama produced by Rob Reiner about justice pursued for the murder of Medgar Evers; 3) Harriet Tubman with Cynthia Erivo, a story of the heroic slave who manages to escape slavery in the South and who then returns to help others escape slavery; and 4) The Marksman with Liam Neeson, a story of a decorated Marine sharpshooter who vows to help a Mexican boy seeking safety in the US. 

What do each of these films have in common?

Although each film is set in different time periods and different locations, and follows a different plot, each film’s main character must overcome challenges that life has thrust upon him or her due to circumstances beyond their control.

Pacino plays a NYC homicide detective who needs to solve a murder before he or anyone else becomes the next victim. 

Baldwin plays a prosecuting attorney in Mississippi who, despite disapproval from his wife, family, community, and colleagues, needs to right a wrong done thirty years before when civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered. 

Erivo plays a slave who needs to escape slavery in Maryland and then wants to return to rescue all those she loves who are still enslaved. 

And Neeson, a decorated Marine corp marksman, needs to take a boy who is wanted by the Mexican drug cartel to safety despite the threats to his own life.

And the question that I kept asking myself as I watched each film was how do these characters succeed at the seemingly impossible task they’re committed to performing?

Each film’s plot builds tension in similar ways. The higher the stakes, the more to be risked. Or, put another way, the more to lose, the higher the tension. You couldn’t help notice that the greater the possibility of failure, the greater the relief and sense of completion when success was achieved.

The basic structure of each story (at least as I saw it), regardless of the setting, whether NYC, Mississippi, Maryland, or Arizona, and regardless of the gender, age, or race of the main character, was built on the premise that the main character faced a problem. 

What was the problem? And how could the character obtain what he or she wanted or needed? 

The plot showed, step by step, how he or she overcame obstacle after obstacle to solve the problem and get what he or she wanted or needed.

(Warning: Spoiler alerts) 

Pacino’s character finds the murderer, but not before almost being killed himself. By uncovering the murderer, who turns out to be the ex-husband of the woman who Pacino suspects of the murders (the woman who he is falling in love with), he not only solves the crime, but clears the way for possible romance. 

Baldwin’s character is willing to pursue justice despite risking his legal career and losing his wife (due to her inability to understand what he’s doing). He is relentless in his efforts to overcome the lack of evidence, and ultimately he is able to discover more evidence, enough in the end to take his case to trial and win a long-sought verdict of guilty for the murderer.

Erivo’s character is willing to risk dying in order to live as a free woman. Once she escapes to the north (Philadelphia), she returns south again and again to help others escape, even as the risks grow greater and more dangerous with each return as the reward for her capture increases and as the enslavers seek more and ways to capture her.

And Neeson’s character has vowed to a dying mother to help her son after she’s gunned down on his land along the Mexican border by members of the Cartel gang seeking revenge for her cousin’s theft of money. In defending her and her son, Neeson inadvertently kills one of the gang members’ brothers and ends up with a target on his back, too. He has a choice to make. Hand over the boy to border patrol, who will send him back to Mexico where the Cartel will likely kill him, or else help him reach his family in Chicago. Neeson decides to drive him north to safety while being chased by the cartel gang members wanting to kill them both.

Each of the main characters in these four films shows courage, determination, and a fierce loyalty to solving their unique problems. 

Each is willing to risk physical harm, loss of friends, home, family, all for the sake of truth and justice.

The next time you’re thinking about your story's structure, you might consider these questions: 

1) What does your main character want or need?

2) What are the obstacles preventing her from getting what she wants?

3) What does she risk losing?

4) How does she overcome these obstacles?

5) How is she changed as a result of her journey?

Let us know the way you think about your story’s structure. Is there any advice you’d like to share with other writers struggling to understand their own story’s structure and plot? Please feel free to send us your suggestions. 

Where do you go from here?

Where do you go 

from here? How do you 

know which path to take?

What if you can't see a path 

yet? How do you know how

to carve a new one?

Where does this knowledge

come from? When did you learn

to have faith in yourself

so you could dive into

the unknown

thinking--

believing--

you could discover

pearls hidden beneath 

the surface?

Pearls that you find on occasion, 

not every time you dive,

yet you keep diving

keep hoping  

you'll find more 

waiting for you 

by the time 

you reach the bottom 

of the page? 

Gazing Inward

“In the depths of winter I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”   -Albert Camus 

“To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.” – Orhan Pamuk 

So often if we want to write stories, we are told to look and listen for them as if they are “out there” waiting for us to discover them.

And it’s true, if you’re a reporter looking for a story, you might go to the library or the Department of Public Works or the Police Department and check in with the borough administrator or the police captain and read the daily log. And you might find a story waiting for you.

But if you’re sitting alone in your room trying to write fiction, the story that you are looking for isn’t “out there” but rather “inside” you, and it isn’t waiting to be discovered so much as it is a seed growing at its own pace. When ready, the seed will blossom, and you’ll see it -- you can’t help but see it--if you're paying attention, even if the blossom is so tiny that it’s almost invisible, even if the blossom only lasts a moment before it fades from view.

Sometimes, if you are paying very close attention, you can feel the seed of a story before seeing it. You can sense it putting out roots. And sometimes we may struggle to describe the story before it is fully formed and—here’s the miracle of writing—in trying to describe it, we help shape it into being, our words bringing the story into full bloom.

How do you learn to direct your gaze inward, to go where the stories are growing inside you?

It’s like breathing: inhale air into your lungs and exhale it out again.

On your next in-breath, look “inside” to the space into which you draw air and oxygen, nourishing your imagination.

Focus your gaze just below your heart.

Imagine your heart pumping blood into your arms and legs, and feel the pulse of the muscle, and follow the pulse to the tips of your fingers and toes, and relax as you sit in your chair or lie on your bed.

Just breathe, and close your eyes, and let whatever images appear flow across the darkened screen of your eyelids as if you are watching a movie.

Breathe gently, release the tension in your neck, your abdomen. Unclench your teeth, let your tongue rest motionless in the bed of your jaw.

In the process of gazing inward, you’ll find that the outer world melts away, and there before you, waiting for you to explore it, is an inner world filled with stories.

It’s a world filled with memories and experiences and unknown stories waiting to be felt and told.

All you have to do is close your eyes and let your imagination take flight.

For more information on turning your gaze inward to write, visit:

http://www.derickwjtan.me/category/just-a-quote/why-i-write/

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html

http://kristastevens.com/2010/12/07/on-essay-writing-turning-the-mind-inward/

http://www.speakingtree.in/spiritual-blogs/masters/meditation/pratyahara-turning-the-gaze-inwards

Finding Water

Writers stumble upon water in unexpected ways.  

Sometimes it takes months (often years) to find our stories, the ones that we need to tell, even when we don’t yet know what it is we need to say. 

For some it’s a long search through the desert, a dry, parched journey until they find the story that’s waiting for them in the cool waters of an oasis just beyond the next sand dune. 

Others find their way to water quickly, although still in mysterious fashion, drawn perhaps by the sound of waves, or the trickle of a creek, or some inner divining rod that draws them closer and closer to the pool of water where they find their story.

And for other writers finding water is a bit like getting caught in a thunderstorm. There’s a flash of lightening, and the story—like the rain that comes with the sudden storm—washes over them, drenching them in emotions and images and words.

Leslea Newman found herself in the midst of such an unexpected storm on a trip to Wyoming in 1998. 

It was a storm that drenched her to the bone and soaked her heart.

She spent the next decade thinking about what happened on that trip before beginning to write October Mourning, the collection of poems that she has  written to honor the memory of Matthew Shepard, the gay student who was murdered only days before Newman was scheduled to give the keynote address to begin Gay Awareness Week at the University of Wyoming.

She knew what had happened to Shepard before her arrival in Laramie, but she couldn’t have known how the emotional impact of what she learned about Shepard’s death during her visit would bleed into her imagination and lead her to a source of inspiration that she hadn’t expected to find when she stepped off the plane at the airport.

“Why was I feeling so emotional?” Newman writes in the afterward. “Why did I care so much about Matthew Shepard? I had never met him or even heard his name until a few days before my arrival.”

What seemed to fill her with the deepest "unspeakable sadness" and "a touch of fear" was knowing that Shepard had planned on attending her lecture.

After her talk, as she shook hands with the students who had come to hear her speak, Newman says she realized how much the students had "needed to see an out, proud lesbian, right before their very eyes.”  Her presence, she felt, sent an important message. If her life was possible, she writes, then their lives as gay or bisexual or transgendered people was possible, too.

At the airport Newman wore a yellow armband in memory of Shepard and had to explain the armband to a woman who shared the same tram with her heading to Terminal C. Newman relates the woman’s response: “Her eyes filled with tears. ‘His poor parents,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine what they’re going through.’”

Those words—I can’t imagine—repeated themselves in Newman’s mind for hours and days because so many others had used the same words. 

Perhaps it was Newman’s emotional response to Shepard’s death or to the events of her time in Laramie or to the words of so many people that suggested to her that if no one could imagine the horror, then she would try to imagine it.

“As a poet, I know it’s part of my job to use my imagination. It’s part of my job as a human being, too.” 

The poems that found their way to the pages of October Mourning are raw, brutal, and powerful reminders of our humanity, no matter what our sexual orientation or gender. 

In writing these poems, Newman reminds us as writers and as human beings to remain vigilant and alert because a writer never knows when she might stumble upon water or find herself caught in the kind of bone-soaking storm that Newman found herself in when she stepped off the plane in Laramie in 1998.

For more information about Newman and October Mourning, visit:

http://www.lesleanewman.com/upcoming.htm

http://community.alan-ya.org/ALANsPicks/Blogs/BlogViewer/?BlogKey=58c9cd31-be16-4cfb-b892-8959d94666f4

http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2012/04/5q-poet-interview-series-leslea-newman.html

http://bookends.booklistonline.com/2012/07/13/october-mourning-a-song-for-matthew-shepard-by-leslea-newman/