The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

In television, the one-hour drama is based on a four act structure. These acts are defined by the commercial breaks in between them, and usually end on a cliffhanger. The series I am working on now started off life as a hour long television drama pitch, and I did quite a bit of analysis of current shows at the time. Your average television scene is two minutes. If you time it, you’ll almost always get a scene break at every two minute mark. The first and second act have about eight scenes each, the third will have six, and the fourth will have ten. I’m sure there’s some marketing reason for this, more so than a writing choice reason. In television, you have to have your four to five commercial breaks.

I think this structure is useful in writing narratives of all sorts. In act one, the protagonist becomes aware of the problem. In act two, the protagonist becomes entangled, and this complicates the problem. In act three, the protagonist tries to solve the problem, and fails, which usually raises the stakes in some way. In act four, the protagonist must overcome all of this to solve the problem.

This formula is what I don’t like with some television shows. I’ll pick on House since it is very popular right now. At first, I really enjoyed this show. The characters were interesting, House was as sardonic as I am, the stakes in the story were very real to the characters in the story. On the other hand, the stories became so formulaic that I could almost set my watch to the patient’s seizures and the mention of lupus. I don’t watch it anymore, but my wife does, so I’m going to flip on my DVR, and as I veg out, I’ll make some plot notes. Then we can go back and do some analysis.

House notes

Teaser

The patient wakes up on the floor of his front hall with paramedics breaking in, when he comes to, he finds he is outside his house. He panics, punches one and runs back in.

Act 1

Scene 1: Getting the case at the hospital. Patient has headaches, seizures, agoraphobia. Discussion with Cutty in the hall. Some results from preliminary scans.
Scene 2: Going to patient’s house. Patient is locked in. won’t let people in.
Scene 3: Patient on bed, the doctors discuss taking him to the hospital, but he won’t go.
Scene 4: At hospital, House talking about kissing Cutty.
Scene 5: Discussion at the patient’s house.
Scene 6: House brings people to invade the shut-in’s house, in order to provoke a seizure, right on time for the commercial break.

Act 2:

Scene 1: At patient’s house. There is some sort of colon blockage. He won’t leave the house. House tells him that he will find a surgeon that will perform surgery in his home.
Scene 2: Discussion in the hall. House wants to put him under, slip him to the hospital and have him back before he wakes up. Ethical dilemma.
Scene 3: They have set up a surgery, and put him under.
Scene 4: Lunch with Cutty and the doc that she’s actually dating. They talk about her relationship with House.
Scene 5: Cutty finds out about the fake surgery. She won’t let the patient leave the hospital to take him back home before he wakes up, there is too much risk of post-op complications.
Scene 6: Patient wakes up, realizes he isn’t at home. Cue seizures.

Act 3:

Scene 1: Patient, now back home, is suing. Cutty removes the team from the case.
Scene 2: Discussion of whether House and Cutty’s relationship is in the way of the case.
Scene 3: One of the doctors apologizes to the patient.
Scene 4: House and Cutty’s boyfriend talk about the relationship with Cutty.
Scene 5: House on phone talking about surgery in house.
Scene 6: Surgery at home. Gas from his intestine ignites. They are under supervision of the patient’s lawyer.
Scene 7: Docs at home eating take-out. Cue trouble: Patient’s legs are numb.

Act 4:

Scene 1: Stable patient. Diagnosing. Organic toxins? He’s OCD. Cleans his tub with ammonia and bleach. Chlorine poisoning.
Scene 2: At hospital talking about a pacemaker. And the relationship.
Scene 3: House on the phone. The patient is getting worse. They are too late. House says to give him morphine, and hope for whatever may happen.

(Here we have an extra commercial break, but it isn’t the break of a new act, merely a way to make more money. )

Scene 4: Looking at xray, House cuts open the patient’s hip, finds metal in hip from a bullet that had hit him years ago. Talk about rose petals and happiness. He’s pretending he’s happy by shutting himself in.
Scene 5: 2 docs talk about relationship.
Scene 6: House plays guitar at home. Mosquito bite.
Scene 7: Patient leaves home because of House’s accusations of him shutting himself in to avoid conflict due to fear brought on by his mother. House visits Cutty, but can’t bring himself to knock on the door.

Maybe you can piece together the story from that. Sometimes my notes for scenes are only intelligible by me.

So let’s look at this in terms of structure. In act 1 we introduce the problems, both the patient, and that House is macking on Cutty, which is not good news for her relationship with her actual boyfriend. As this is a serial program, this introduces the episode’s problem, but gives us the series storyline of House getting it on with Cutty despite objections from both to the contrary. We have a minor climax, or crisis in the last scene to hold us through the commercial break.

In Act 2, we spend a lot of time diagnosing the problem, performing a surgery, and complicating the relationship issues. Isn’t it funny how I can describe any episode of House in one generalized description? Here we ramp up the level a bit, but things are kind of moving along.

In act 3 we learn that the problem is persistent, and often something they did in act 2 has compromised treatment. We also raise the stakes on the relationship game, finding out the kiss wasn’t so innocent. Another climax at the end of this act, and our graph of structure kind of looks like a hill with speedbumps.

Act 4 resolves everything for the patient, but leaves the story arc open-ended.
Now let’s look at any story that you might have. When you’re a beginning writer, you probably have a mess of a story in front of you. I’m a fan of putting in the actual work in physical writing before setting out, and a beginning writer might feel self-conscious about doing this. Real writers don’t outline like this, do they? It all just comes out of their heads and onto the page and its done, right? I should be able to do it that way too, and all of that pre-writing seems like a lot of work when I should just be getting onto the book.

Let me assure you that plenty of writers do this pre-writing, and for some of us, we have done it in the past, and now we do it all in our heads, which is the art of making it look easy.

So, humor me and do it. Take out a piece of paper and write your beginning on it at the top, or on the left if you want to make it a timeline, or best yet, write it on a notecard, and keep a stack ready.

You have a character, a conflict, a beginning, an end, and a few points in the middle. The first thing to look at is putting these things into a structure. Is your beginning really the inciting incident of the story? Yes? Good, set that down. Do your other points look like climax points, or are they bits of story that lead to climax points? Are there points where the relative power or success of your protagonist and antagonist changes? There probably should be, people like an underdog and a come from behind win. Okay, put those climax points on new cards, or on your paper.

Do these look like a logical sequence? Does a lot happen in the front half of the book, and not as much in the back? What has to come before other events? Does each event seem like an elevation of the conflict? Spending this time right now, before a word is set down is worth the effort. Imagine writing 90,000 words and then realizing that if you had done this now, you would have turned left instead of right at 25,000 and saved yourself all of that writing that will likely never get used. Foresight is having a plan, not seeing just around the corner. I believe that just about every writer who writes without an outline has at least this much planned out before setting down, even if the story ultimately doesn’t head in that direction.

A four act structure has four climaxes, each a complication of the plot and each larger than the last one. This is a simplification of a well-worn structure, but it leads to a structure that can be expanded. I have done some conversion of four act teleplays that I wrote years back into prose, and they wind up being novella length, even with expansion. But if I inserted two or three extra acts, they would easily be a novel. The difficulty is in taking a story as concise as a television episode, and adding things that are critical to the plot, without changing the overall story, because anything you add must be absolutely relevant. A reader can see padding from a mile away. As a writer part of your job is to trim the fat, not add to it.

If you want to write a novel in four acts, as I said before, a TV script has enough scenes to be a novella, but a story can be infinitely long, all that matters is making choices of what stays in and what doesn’t. We can add scenes to our House example that would round out the story quite a bit, and not be irrelevant at all. We can see Cutty thinking about the incident with House. We can have her and her boyfriend arguing about it. Then we have the boyfriend’s reaction. We don’t really see House talking about that incident, or his subconscious desires for a relationship. In the TV series, the story of the relationship plays out slowly, as we move from patient to patient, and we think for an hour that the story is all bout that patient, but over time we realize the story is about House, and that’s what keeps us coming back.

If we wanted to make a book of this one episode, the balance would change. You notice we only get three or four scenes where we deal with House’s relationships, and I’ve already doubled that number without much thought. As we continue to put flesh on that story, the patient becomes more and more of a prop, a symbol, or a foil. It is up to the writer to make the patient’s plot influence the plot of House’s relationships. Often that means that the patient sees what is going on, cuts through the subtext and says it plainly. That’s not original, so as an author, you’d have to write incredibly detailed and quirky characters to carry a less than original plot.

There is the Scott McCloud principle of points in a story to think about. He is a comic writer that has done a lot of theorizing of plot and technique in comic books. He has or had a story on his site where you could put in a number between 1 and 60 and get the same story in a different number of panels. The same thing happens with writing a book. We pick what gets seen and what doesn’t, what is significant and what isn’t.