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. 

Cracking Open Your Words

When we revise our work, it is often difficult to see past the polished prose that we’ve spent so much time burnishing to a high gloss.

And that’s the problem.

Words that are too polished can provide the illusion of completion while hiding the flaws of a story beneath the glimmer and shine of the polish.

When you revise your work, you have to look differently at your words. You have to look past them. You have to feel your way under them.

Even though it may be painful, you have to crack them open, like cracking eggs, to see what’s inside.

It’s not just the emotional content of the words that we’re curious about but the structure of the story on which the words are overlaid.

Is the structure sturdy? Is it built to last?

How can we tell for sure?

When you re-read each successive draft of a story, you want to make sure each scene contains a beginning, middle, and end, and you want to re-assure yourself that each scene moves the story forward, one scene not just leading to another but causing another.

And you want to know if the words in each scene show the reader a clear, concrete picture instead of describing the picture in an abstract, general sort of way. You want a sharply focused picture rather than one that's blurry and indistinct.

As you’ll discover when you begin cracking open your words, it takes a good amount of discipline, not to say courage, to pull up words like pulling up bricks that you’ve already laid down with such patience and precision.

Cracking open the words that you’ve set down with such care on the page can feel as painful as tearing apart a beautiful mosaic floor.

But you have to pull apart the words if you want to see what’s beneath them.

And cracking open each draft is the only way that way you can know if your story is poorly constructed and in danger of collapsing or built solidly on a sturdy foundation.

Weaving Currents

In A Long Walk to Water, Linda Sue Park uses two narrative threads—the story of Salva fleeing his village in war-torn Sudan and the story of Nya, years later, making daily trips to a pond to fetch water for her family—to craft a compelling story about survival and hope.

Based on the childhood experiences of Salva Dut, one of the thousands of Lost Boys of Sudan, Park tells two separate stories side-by-side, and, as a reader, we turn the pages hoping and wondering how the two stories will eventually converge.

In addition to the basic questions about whether the main characters will survive, what compels us to keep turning pages are questions about the structure of this novel. How will the two stories meet? When will they converge? And why did the author choose this particular device to tell her story about Nya and Salva?

The alternating sequence begins in the Southern Sudan in 2008: 

Going was easy.

Going, the big plastic container held only air. Tall for her eleven years, Nya could switch the handle from one hand to the other, swing the container by her side, or cradle it in both arms. She could even drag it behind her, bumping it against the ground and raising a tiny cloud of dust with each step.

There was little weight, going. There was only heat, the sun already baking the air, even though it was long before noon. It would take her half the morning if she didn’t stop on the way.

Heat. Time. And thorns.

And then Park switches to Southern Sudan, 1985: 

Salva sat cross-legged on the bench. He kept his head turned toward the front, hands folded, back perfectly straight. Everything about him was paying attention to the teacher—everything except his head and mind.

His eyes kept flicking toward the window, through which he could see the road. The road home. Just a little while longer—a few minutes more—and he would be walking on that road. 

Park gives her reader a sense of place and time almost immediately, not merely with the heading “Southern Sudan, 2008,” but with her description of Nya’s daily trek for water.

The same is true for the picture she presents of Salva, though the details appear a few paragraphs into his story: 

He and his brothers, along with the sons of his father’s other wives, would walk with the herds to the water holes, where there was good grazing. Their responsibilities depended on how old they were. Salva’s younger brother, Kuol, was taking care of just one cow; like his brothers before him, he would be in charge of more cows every year. Before Salva had begun going to school, he had helped look after the entire herd, and his younger brother as well. 

From each of these excerpts (and from the book’s title), a reader begins to understand that water is crucial to life in Sudan.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, water becomes the link between these two stories and these two characters.

If you’d like to study how an author weaves together two stories into one, take a look at A Long Walk To Water, a novel that you’ll find expertly crafted from two distinct strands into one.

For more info on Linda Sue Park, visit her website: http://www.lindasuepark.com

For more info on A Long Walk to Water, take a look at: http://www.lindasuepark.com/books/longwalk/longwalk.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkxkisRUmMM

Shifts in Emotional Equilibrium

In Helen Frost's new verse novel, Hidden, only Wren and Darra, two teenage girls in the same bunk at camp, know they share a secret.

It was Darra’s father who stole a car with eight year-old Wren hidden in the back six years earlier. Wren survived by staying out of sight until she could find a way to escape.

The only person who knew Wren was hidden in the garage where the car was parked, and who brought her food and water to help her endure the nightmare, was Darra.

Until this summer, neither girl has ever seen the other, except for the images of Wren that Darra watched on the TV news at the time. But that changes when the girls, both fourteen now, discover that they are bunk mates sharing nearby beds at the same summer camp.

Each girl tells the story from her own perspective, with Frost crafting two distinct poetic forms for each girl’s voice.

To capture Wren’s inner world, beginning with Wren’s story at the time of the car hijack, Frost relies on free verse. “The placement of the words on the page,” Frost says, “is something like musical notation.”

For Darra’s voice, Frost creates an entirely different poetic form, adding hidden messages for the reader to decode at the end of the long lines to shed a bit more light on Darra’s story.

These shifts in voice and perspective give the reader an insider's view into each girl’s emotional state from moment to moment so that the reader is made immediately aware of the slightest shift in emotional equilibrium.

These subtle shifts in emotional equilibrium are at the heart of the story, and as the plot unfolds the reader is able to see clearly how each girl’s emotional state propels the story forward.

Here’s an example of how Wren’s shift in emotional balance propels the story forward at the start:

I was a happy little girl wearing a pink dress,
Sitting in our gold minivan,
Dancing with my doll, Kamara.

These are the story’s opening lines, and they reveal a girl who remembers herself in a different time-frame, a different emotional state. Happiness existed, and then, because of what happened, she lost it.

And the question, from the very first line of this story, is established in the reader’s mind: will Wren find happiness again, or, if not happiness, will she find a way to come to peace with the event that turned her life upside-down?

And here’s an example of a shift in emotional balance propelling the story forward from Darra’s perspective:

For six years, I’ve tried to figure out what happened. Dad swears he
didn’t know Wren was in the garage, and Mom
claims she didn’t either. Which one of them has
lied to me for almost half my life? Someone had to let her out. I didn’t
think it was Mom, and I couldn’t get Dad to admit
it was him–so I stopped asking.

Doubt and uncertainty have haunted Darra since the incident, and she still doesn’t know the truth of what happened that day. She is living with the “lie” that she believes one of her parents told her.

Again, Frost has planted the seed of a question in the reader’s mind: will Darra find a way to resolve her uncertainty, her doubts? Will she, like Wren, ever find a way to come to peace with what happened?

Again and again, you hear writers say that you need to find the emotional core of your story’s main characters. Why? Because it’s this search for emotional resolution--this deep need to find emotional equilibrium--that compels your characters to keep searching and your reader to keep reading.

Hidden progresses from Wren’s fear and anger to compassion and understanding, and from Darra’s uncertainty and doubts to trust and friendship.

It’s a masterful example of how an author can construct a story out of the emotional needs and desires of her characters.

For more information about Frost’s Hidden, visit:http://www.helenfrost.net/item.php?postid=30

And for more information on emotional resolution in fiction, visit:
http://www.freewebs.com/alabamaworley/Emotional%20Filter%20Exercise.htm
http://www.tameri.com/write/plotnstory.html
http://www.trutor.net/struc.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_2095687_use-resolution-writing.html
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/creative1/shortstory/
http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/emotion/

Diving Deeper

In response to last week’s post, J. Irvin Kuns, the author of While You Were Out (Dutton, 2004, a Junior Library Guild selection), wrote:

As so often happens when following the links offered on wordswimmer, I find myself diving deeper and deeper into the various related articles, interviews and exercises provided at the end of each post. It happened again with last week's link to storyfix.com. After doing the exercise recommended by author Larry Brooks, I noticed an e-book he wrote called Story Structure - Demystified. Since structure has always been my nemesis, I took the bait and ordered the book. I always suspected there was a book on structure out there somewhere that was different from all the rest. For me, this is that book.

Normally, whenever I pick up a book on structure and see those jagged mountain graphics that are supposed to represent rising and falling action, with the peaks growing taller and steeper and looking more and more ominous as they cross the plain of the page, I immediately shelve the book and run. I just cannot get my right-brained head around that kind of approach. Also with most books on structure there seems to be this underlying assumption that all writers understand what such things as plot points, turning points, midpoints, and pinch points (what are pinch points?!?!) represent and how they all relate to each other. I will readily admit I am not one of those people.

In this book, Brooks kindly, gently, and patiently leads us, using helpful analogies, towards a real understanding of what it is a writer must do to make a manuscript work. In the storyfix.com exercise that got me into all of this in the first place, Brooks suggests listening to three specific songs as a sort of meditation and inspiration to help draw you back to the page. One of those songs is "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley. It is a beautiful and haunting song and I have listened to it several times over the last couple of days. But it was Brooks' book on structure that really drew me back to my work-in-progress, this time feeling cautiously optimistic that I finally (finally, finally!) have a clue about how to approach it. Hallelujah, indeed!

For more information about Brooks’ book on structure, visit:
http://storyfix.com/infusing-your-fiction-with-heart-and-soul-an-exercise

And to read more on writing from J. Irvins Kuns, visit:
http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2006/01/one-writers-process-j-irvin-kuns.html

Invisible Nets

You can get caught in invisible nets when trying to revise if you’re not careful, if you look too closely at the words instead of pulling back and looking at the larger picture. Words will trap you, keep you from seeing the structure–or lack of structure–of your story.

A few weeks ago I discovered that I was caught in an invisible net as I was revising my latest draft of a 40,000 word manuscript. One of the chapters had ballooned to twice the size of the other chapters, but I hadn’t noticed it until my editor asked for a word count.

Chapter by chapter, I tallied the words. When I was done, I discovered that the larger chapter stood out the way a lighthouse stands out on shore, the tallest structure for miles.

And I knew that I needed to cut the chapter somehow, and I focused on the words, thinking that I could find a way to delete enough to shrink the chapter in half.

Only cutting away words wasn’t what the chapter needed.

Not until I stopped looking at the words and looked instead beyond the words at the ideas underlying the chapter–at the concepts on which the chapter had been constructed–could I detect the problem.

Why was it such a large chapter? Without knowing it, I’d unwittingly combined two ideas into one. The ideas behind the words showed me where the chapter should be divided and helped me escape from the invisible net blocking my view.

It’s easy to find yourself trapped in the invisible net of your own words.

Sometimes when you revise, you have to let go of the words, look past them, and see the underlying structure of ideas if you hope to avoid getting caught in invisible nets.

For more on revision--radical, global, and other strategies--take a look at:
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/1788
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource_topic/revision
http://www.writers-place.com/rev-thg.htm
http://www.shortstreet.net/WRsec5.htm
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~lbrady/208edit.html
http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/3.1/news/paradigm/revifrms.htm
http://www.ccsf.edu/Departments/English/cyberia/guide/revising.htm

The Empty Bowl Theory

I’m wondering if one of the essential principles of structure is the empty bowl theory: start with a character who has an emotional need (an empty bowl) that needs to be healed (or filled)?

In Patricia Reilly Giff's Pictures of Hollis Woods, the main character's empty bowl is offered to the reader at the start of the story.

The moment a teacher spoils Hollis' most treasured possession--a picture of a family--the reader immediately understands on an emotional level what’s important to Hollis and what she wants most: a family to call her own.

It’s this longing for a family that drives her story forward.

In order to build the story's momentum, Giff sends two story lines running simultaneously down different tracks (call them story-line A and story-line B).

Story-line A is told in the present as Hollis’ life unfolds with Josie (her current family), while story-line B is told through the pictures that Hollis made when she was living with Steven, the Old Man, and Izzy (her past family).

By offering tantalizing clues about what happened in the past, Giff draws the tension taut in the present... and raises our expectations for the future... expertly interweaving the two story-lines without letting the lines cross until Chapter 8, when the two lines come together with the shock and power of two trains colliding into one another.

Throughout the story, Giff reminds us of Hollis' empty bowl: her need for a family. Each scene enables her to fill that bowl a little more. With each step that Hollis takes toward her goal, the reader watches her carry her bowl from past to present and back again, praying that she won't spill its contents.

By the story's conclusion, Giff has brought Hollis (and the reader) full circle.

Hollis has filled her empty-bowl to the brim and found what she most wanted when the story began.

For more about Patricia Giff, visit:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE7DB1E31F933A1575AC0A96E958260&scp=1&sq=Patricia+Reilly+Giff%2C+&st=nyt

http://www.bookpage.com/0411bp/patricia_reilly_giff.html
http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-giff-patricia-reilly.asp
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/patriciareillygiff/patriciagiff.htm
http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385326551&view=tg

On Emotional Arcs

Almost every story has an emotional arc, a trajectory that the reader can trace–like the flight of an arrow–as the character makes his or her journey through the story.

This arc is the spine of the story, the backbone that gives the story its shape as the action rises and falls, depending on how near or far the character is to reaching her heart’s desire.

Sometimes you can chart the trajectory of the arc by following the opening sentences or scenes in each chapter.

Here, for instance, are the opening sentences of each chapter in Catherine Bateson’s Being Bee, an insightful portrait of a young girl whose father has recently started dating seriously.

By studying these sentences and weighing the emotional content contained in them, you may be able to get a sense of how Bateson has structured her story to underscore Bee’s emotional journey.

So, let’s start with the first sentence in Chapter 1, which sets the emotional arc of the story in motion:

I didn’t mean to shove Lulu, my guinea pig, at Jazzi, my dad’s girlfiend, which is what she told Dad.

The narrator–Bee, or Beatrice, as Jazzi, her Dad’s girlfriend, prefers to call her (much to Bee’s chagrin)–makes it plain from the start how she feels about Jazzi.

Each chapter then builds on Bee’s emotional response to her Dad’s decision to date Jazzi.

By the second chapter, Bee's conversation with her friends reveals one of the story’s central issues: her displacement in Dad’s life as a result of this woman:

“It’s not that I don’t like her,” I told Lucy and Sally at recess. “She’s okay. It’s just that Dad’s different when she’s around, and he wants to do things with her and not with me. They kiss all the time, too.”

By the start of chapter three, Bateson shows us Bee softening a little, the arc leveling out a bit in its rise toward its apogee:

As it turned out, Jazzi’s idea of cleaning out the guinea pig hutch myself wasn’t all that bad. Jazzi was at our place more and more and cleaning up after Fifi and Lulu gave me something to do while she and Dad gazed into each other’s eyes, held hands, and drank endless cups of tea. At least with Jazzi around so much, the guinea pigs never ran out of apples or celery or broccoli.

Bee’s not exactly warming to Jazzi, but she’s beginning to accept her presence as something outside her control...something that her father wants–and perhaps needs, as Nana suggests–even if Bee doesn’t quite understand why.

By chapter four, Jazzi is picking up Bea from school:

When Jazzi picked me up from school later that week she wasn’t smiling.

And by chapter five, you can clearly identify the rising arc as Bee’s friends begin referring to Jazzi as her step-mother:

“So, you’ve got a stepmum now?” Sally said at lunch-time. “Is she nice?”
“Jazzi’s not my stepmum.”
“Well, she’s picked you up every afternoon this week, so that means she must be living at your place, and that means she’s your stepmum.

Of course, Lucy and Sally have got it all wrong. Jazzi hasn’t moved in ...yet. The last thing that Bee wants is a stepmum, and, yet, not wanting a stepmum is a reflection of what she deeply wants but knows she can’t have: her mother who died of cancer.

So... there is a part of her that’s missing her mom... and the love and encouragement a mother might give her... which means, in terms of emotional arc, that Bee is looking/longing for that closeness again... and it’s possible that Jazzi–if she and Bee can come to terms with each other–might be the one who can provide it, even if Jazzi’s not her mom.

The next chapter shows the emotional arc rising again:

I stayed with Nana on the weekend because Dad and Jazzi wanted to go away. I suggested they take me, too, but Dad laughed and tugged my hair and said that wouldn’t be the most romantic thing now would it?

Which leads to the next step in the following chapter:

I didn’t want to tell Sally and Lucy at school that Jazzi was going to be my stepmother, but Jazzi told them herself.
“Well, here we are,” she said when she picked me up. “Hello, Sally, hello, Lucy. Has Beatrice told you the news?”
“No,” Sally said. “Beatrice hasn’t.”
“I’m moving in with Beatrice’s father, Nick, so the first thing we must do is to celebrate that by you girls coming over for a play as soon as I’ve settled in.”

In the next chapter, the arc rises even higher:

Almost as soon as she’d moved in, Jazzi started cleaning.

And in the next chapter, Jazzi prepares a dinner to celebrate her move:

Just before seven o’clock, Jazzi lit the candles. She wore a silky top with flowers on it almost the exact pink of the daisies, and she’d brushed her hair up to a knot on the top of her head, combed her eyebrows, and put on dark red glittery earrings. She’d persuaded Dad to change out of his weekend work-around-the-house clothes into a soft, dark blue shirt I’d never seen before. I felt drab beside them, still in my jeans and a t-shirt that was almost too small for me.
“Come on, Bee,” Jazzi said, looking me up and down. “Do you want me to do your hair?”

Here’s where the reader notices Jazzi calling Beatrice by her preferred name: Bee. And, also, that the tone of Bee’s description has softened. She sees Jazzi in ways that she didn’t before and has come to know and, perhaps, trust her in ways that she couldn’t at the start of the story.

In the next chapter you can begin to see the arc turning toward the story’s resolution:

I wanted to be happy because Dad was happy and Nanna told me to be happy and even I could see that Jazzi had brought some good things into our life.

But it’s not a smooth descent... as we learn in the next chapter, which provides the emotional climax: Bee decides to run away after learning that Jazzi, in her efforts to clean up the house, has tossed out one of Bee’s most treasured possessions: a box containing things that her mom had given to her.

I raised the issue with Jazzi. That’s what we did in our house now. We didn’t just talk about things. We raised issues.

And, finally, the resolution appears in the final chapter:

Dad didn’t even know I’d gone and Jazzi asked me not to tell him because she thought he’d think badly of Harley for not coming straight home with me.

“I was so scared,” she said. “I thought, if anything has happened to Bee, I’ll never ever ever forgive myself. I’m so so sorry, Bee, so very sorry, about the box and you seeing Harley like that and everything.”

It’s with this admission that Jazzi finds her way into Bee’s heart, and we watch as Bee’s heart melts with acceptance of Jazzi and as she comes to understand that Jazzi is someone who will be there for her, not just for her Dad.

By reviewing the incremental stages of Bee’s emotional arc, we can begin to see the underlying structure of the story, as well as the issues that serve as the foundation stones for that structure.

Notice how other authors use incremental stages to build their stories, and, as you revise your own work, try to define the steps in your own character's emotional arc.

For more information on emotional arcs visit:
http://www.asuen.com/w.ms.arc.html
http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Structure&Plot.htm
http://www.darcypattison.com/revision/connecting-emotional-and-narrative-arcs/
http://www.triggerstreet.com/gyrobase/TriggerDigest?oid=1480573

For information about Catherine Bateson, visit her website:
http://www.catherine-bateson.com/

Cat's Cradle

What does making a Cat's Cradle--a game that children play with string--have to do with writing (aside from serving as yet another way to procrastinate)?

Well, a few weeks ago, while preparing a lesson for my local library's young writers workshop, I was looking for a way to help the children better understand the structure of stories.

Exploring structure, I felt, would give the children a chance to look at their own stories and help them figure out why a story did or didn't work.

We began our discussion by talking about movies (because the session fell just after the winter break), and I asked the children what made them want to stay in their seats to watch a movie.

I wanted the children to think about what makes a movie compelling. And, as I'd hoped, the conversation eventually turned to plot and what a character wants, and, ultimately, to structure.

Once we began talking about movies, though, I realized there was an even better way to talk about structure. Instead of asking what the children found compelling about movies, I asked if they'd seen any movie previews that looked interesting.

Movie previews--those short teasers that appear before the start of the main movie--are a wonderful way to examine structure. That's because in the brief clips, movie makers try to hook viewers instantly. And to hook a viewer, they must reveal the essential elements of their story's structure.

So, I asked the children to think about how movie-makers create compelling previews. How do they capture a viewer's interest and condense the story-line and the character's struggle into, say, three or four minutes? (Even the marvelous short clip of Steve Martin, who poses as Inspector Clouseau and shows great irritation when his cell phone rings before realizing it's his own, is an interesting example of a story-line with a strong structure.)

In order to succeed, movie makers need to understand the structure of a story and how tension holds the elements of a story in place... just as the tension of string holds a Cat's Cradle in place.

"If the tension is too loose," I explained to the children, weaving a circle of string in my hands into a loose Cat's Cradle, "then the cradle falls off your fingers, just as your attention wanders if there's too little tension or suspense in your story."

"And if the tension is too taut," I said, pushing my hands apart to tighten the string, "well, then the cradle can break... just as the tension in a story, when it's too taut, can cause a reader to stop believing in the story because it's too incredible."

Using segments that I cut from a skein of colorful yarn, we played with Cat's Cradles, exploring together how to get the tension just right... not too taut, not too loose.

And after a while, we moved back to pens and paper to experiment with creating tension--not too much, not too little--in our stories.

It was an unusual way to approach the subject, but that simple piece of string helped the children learn a new way to think about writing suspenseful stories...stories with structure.

The next time you're stuck on a story--maybe because you don't feel there's enough tension, maybe because there's too much--why not take out a piece of string and start playing with it?

You never know... the act of working the string in your fingers may, in fact, be all you need to free your imagination so you can uncover the hidden structure of your story.

For information on how to play Cat's Cradle, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_cradle
http://www.alysion.org/figures/catcradle.htm
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/hebrew/personal/toolbox/acm/string/string.html

And for a few more games to play with string, check out:
http://www.momsminivan.com/article-stringfigures.html
http://www.squidoo.com/string-games
http://www.gardendigest.com/string/
http://www.isfa.org/

And for more information about structure and tension in stories, take a look at:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/tension.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/module15p
http://www.helium.com/tm/197378/scene-sequel-fictionscene-sequel