The plot centers around Ranjit Subramanian, a math student at a university in Sri Lanka. The first act of the book sets up some of the later characters, but I’m going to focus on Ranjit. Plus, I don’t remember most of their names (shows how memorable they were) and I’ve loaned the book out. The second plot-line features a race of super beings called the Super Galactics who decide the humans on Earth are a threat and need to eliminate them. They send some races there to observe while they send in their henchmen. We’ll discuss some of the races of aliens in a bit. The first act doesn’t really do much in reality, so we’ll move to act 2. In the setup parts of act one, a family friend gets into some trouble, and disappears, leaving a family behind.

Act 2 focuses on Ranjit reuniting them, and finding out that he is now working as a pirate. Ranjit winds up as a hostage on a cruise ship, watching the children and teaching them maths tricks. Eventually the ship is liberated, but Ranjit is held prisoner, during which time he solves Fermat’s last theorem. Shortly after he memorizes his proof, his ransom is met, and he is freed. It is worth mentioning that a new weapon is used to fight the pirates, a non-lethal weapon, and this kind of weapon is interesting to the races rushing to destroy the human race, after all, if they can fight their battles without killing, they aren’t a threat anymore.

Act 3 begins with an ethical dilemma. There is a new weapon on Earth and it is used first on North Korea. The weapon is kind of like an EMP which disables all electronics and weapons in a given area. The group that is in charge of this weapon is part of the U.N. Ranjit is asked to be a part of the group by a childhood friend who is now working on codes and the like for some intelligence services. Ranjit decides not to join.

This is the point where I’ll stop giving you plot details because this is where for all intents and purposes, the plot ends. Ranjit spends the rest of the book, something like 60% of it, watching the world as he gets older, has kids, watches the space elevator get built on Sri Lanka, and teaches at a university. And that’s the real problem with the book, halfway through, the main character walks away from the conflict. Had Ranjit taken the job, and been entwined in the ethical issues presented by the weapon, there would have been a book there.

Fred Pohl indicates that by the time the book was handed to him, Clarke was getting spotty, and so he had to interpret and invent a little bit to get the book right. Problem is, the main character is as much of a spectator as the reader. This is emphasized by how much business Pohl had to invent for Ranjit to do while watching. He has problems figuring out how to be a good professor, he reads a lot of newspapers. He has some personal business to attend to. Nothing that makes for an interesting book. You keep hoping that this is just a lull that is leading to something else, but it never does.

Another disappointing element of the book is the aliens. They can fly millions of light years, and then they get here and ask some of the dumbest questions, like “Why do you live in certain areas of the planet, instead of spreading strictly evenly about the world?” Apparently their planet is evenly rosy and beautiful all over.

They also describe some of the aliens and they make little sense. There’s a race called “The nine limbeds” that are so called because htey have eight limbs that they walk on, kind of like a centipede, and one on their butt that they use to do all of the rest of their “business”. I’m tired of the notion that aliens are stranger than we can imagine, and certainly not beings with two arms and two legs like us and every Star Trek episode. I’m more of the idea that there’s a good chance that they are. We evolved this way for a reason, because it is an efficient model for what we need to do to survive. I think there’s a reason that throughout our planet’s history, the larger animals had four limbs, and it isn’t directly related to a common ancestor with four limbs, and the rest of us are just variations on a theme. The menagerie of aliens in this book reads like a spore creature designer on a little too much acid, and not enough good design sense.

So my review of the book is this: a promising act one, no conflict, dumb and poorly designed aliens, flat characters, and a book that could have been much better.

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.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

This is the notes for the Compulsive Writer’s Support Group for 11-15-08. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, use this link:

http://www.mindofbryan.com/cwsg/feed/podcast/

Writers in general are a curious bunch of people, especially when it comes to another writer’s process. The curiosity is most often centered on outlining versus freewriting, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.

We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.

My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75 pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle, but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story, and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue, but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a good writer.

Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the process is much more on paper.

With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages, my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five comic pages. It blew him away.

I really consider this my first draft. My friends who are writers can’t even make heads or tails out of it, but it all makes sense to me. When I write my first attempt at a finished product, I don’t look at this as a rigid outline at all. Sometimes scenes merge, sometimes they drop out, sometimes they move. I keep a mind on it being an organic story with real characters who don’t necessarily act as they were expected in the outline phase. This is a fear of organic writers, that the outline will force them into a plot that is not natural. If we remember that the outline is mutable, we lose that worry. We can keep asking ourselves “what would this character do next?” but it might be rephrased, “is this really what this character does next?”

I often hear the questions, “I have a middle and no beginning or end, what do I do?” or “I have a world and a few scenes and characters, but I don’t know what to do with them.” My suggestion is to arrange what you have, either in a file or if you prefer to work more concretely, on note cards, and try to write the scene in either direction. As that question, where does this go? How do these link up? What does this character do next? What led to this scene? When we come up with ideas for books, the first plot points we come up with are the big ones. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example, since it is one of the most universal cultural events that is worth analyzing. I’m going to put money on the notion that Lucas didn’t get a great idea about picking two robots out of a line-up, in particular one that can speak to moisture vaporators, and the rest of the story came from that point. It is a mundane scene that serves only to get the droids to Luke. I’m guessing Lucas started with points like the Death Star blowing up and rescue of Leia, and then filled in between.

Now, it seems to me that most beginning writers don’t think about structure, and this is because they don’t teach structure in a lot of classes. We all remember, probably, the rising structure of the story. We start with an inciting incident, build it slowly, but with certain acceleration to a climax, and then have a slight denouement. It looks something like one delta wave cycle, or maybe a saw wave. I think this is one structure, and the most basic. It works for short pieces, and in larger pieces, on a whole. If we look at a famous story, the first Star Wars movie, we start with the inciting incident—Leia’s ship being boarded. Then we drop to this small unwitting desert planet, and rise to the inevitable big battle that blows up the Death Star. There are other climax points, though. We rise in tension until Dantooine is blown up. Then we hit the first climax, the fight in the prison block. The escape is another little climax, and then we get to the big battle.

I think there are other structures. My next book is based on a spiral, or more to the point, a fractal, and The Hidden is also. The first sequences in these books are a microscale version of the rest of the book. In the Hidden Malcolm wakes up, finds he is being attacked by a demon. He discovers what is happening, has a brief confrontation and then  dispatches the offender. Then the story moves on, and the pattern repeats a couple times on an ever grander scale. In Inside, my next book, Michael has an art showing, his sister comes in with trouble, his parents come to visit, the protest happens outside, the showing is infiltrated and attacked, with some innocent people caught in the crossfire, and we are all left standing wondering why this has to happen. This expands into a plot where similar events happen as the conflict grows and the stakes get higher until the final climax of the book.

In part two of this article, I’ll cover several other structures in writing from various mediums that can be applied to any type of narrative writing.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

This is part two of notes from a planned podcast called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. It will be available on my official website, www.mindofbryan.com, as well as via a link here. In this section I’m going to talk about the three-act structure of film. I believe this might be a good way to give structure to a novel, especially a shorter Nanowrimo sized novel.

Screenwriters and filmmakers employ a couple different structures: acts and reels. These are simultaneous structures, and I’m much more used to thinking in acts.

In terms of reels, let’s imagine that every movie is 90-120 minutes. This number works for most films. There is a physical limit to how much film we can load onto a projector, and that’s something like 20 minutes. That is a reel. I hear reels being used more in pitching a movie, and producers like to hear very significant things about the first reel, explosions, car chases, a body, whatever really gets the action going. Most acts wind up being two reels in length. If we think about it, most movies have a very significant plot point 15-20 minutes in. Maybe this is a good number for the average movie viewer, the point where we make a decision whether this movie is worth another hour or so, and so we put something major here, just to keep the viewer interested. After this point, we’ve got them.I don’t think we can as writers of novels think in reels, but there are lessons to be learned in the reel. First, the inciting incident needs to come early. There is no better way to lose readers than to bog them down with exposition early. Second, as a smaller division of time, we can think about whether we have the right balance of action, story, character development and plot for a given breakdown of time or pages.

Let’s move on to acts.

There are almost invariably three acts to every screenplay. I suppose you could make a case that Brazil has a fourth act tacked on, and there might be others, but this is the exception to the rule. Acts can be thought of in terms of action, or they can be thought of thematically, or you can think about them as they apply to a character’s development. Thinking about one will often lead you to the others, or you can think of them in conjunction. If you want some support for the theory of a fractal story structure, a film script has three acts, and larger stories that are written at one time are most often trilogies.

There are basic standards for what each act does, however, and knowing them gives us our story’s main structure. Act One is introduction. It introduces the world, the characters, the relationships of those characters, and the problem. Act two is complication. We put more obstacles in front of our hero. Act three is resolution.

Once I have thought about those, I’ll come up with actions and themes to lay over them.

So let’s look at our standard model, Star Wars, for some structural analysis. In terms of on screen actions, the first act of Star Wars establishes the entire series. Since we have a three-fold plot (Empire, Rebellion and Force) we have three main story lines in each act. In act one, Leia gets captured, which in this case represents both the Empire and Rebellion storyline. The Force reaches out in the form of two droids who bring the secret plans to Luke and Obiwan. We meet Han and Chewie, and we escape from Tatooine. We end the act with Luke beginning his training in the Force, and the destruction of Alderaan. I choose this point because it brings us to see the larger conflict, back to the Rebellion and the Empire, and we see just what is at stake. Up to this point, the conflict is hinted at, but not fully elucidated. This keeps the viewer interested in something that was at the time a very foreign idea, and through what is kind of dull in many respects, even though it is necessary storytelling.

The first act is about foundation and problem. We establish all of the characters, lay out the problem of the story, and set the characters on  their way. There are mechanical elements of the story, the plot, and there’s a higher goal, theme. A free writer who has a basic story in their heads might be able to write a three word outline, with a single word for each act, and that might provide sufficient guidance and structure to move on. For example, in terms of theme in the first act of Star Wars, I’d call it initiation. The story is getting going, Luke is initiated into the Force, Han is brought into the Rebellion, the viewer is being initiated into the universe. The viewer is a very important consideration. Remember that in 1977, this kind of movie was unheard of. If Lucas had moved too quickly over this part of the movie, the viewer might have been turned off. Walls had to be broken down in order for us to understand and care for these characters.

In terms of Character, I’ll argue that the whole series is about Luke. In this act, Luke is isolated both geographically (or well, spatially) from the rest of the universe, and mentally. He has no connection with the conflict, nor with the Force.

Let’s not forget to mention that this act has a small climax in the escape from Mos Eisely. It is a little climax, because we don’t want to blow our load just yet, there is a lot more story to tell.

The second act is about complication. A simple mission, fly a couple of people and a couple of droids somewhere, becomes a save our butt and rescue the princess operation.

In the second act, the conflicts meet head to head as Luke and Han are captured by the Death Star, infiltrate, rescue Leia, escape, and Obi-wan is killed. There is a three part story here as well, Obi-wan disarms the Tractor beams, Luke and Han save the princess, and the droids man the computers. This is the action. Our second climax of the movie is the escape.

Thematically, we go much more dark in this act, as we find out how ruthless the Empire is. Escape is the action, the theme is defiance of tyranny. If the only hope is to get off the Death Star with the plans, success is the only option.

In terms of Luke, the story is entanglement. He suddenly finds himself an integral part of the struggle for the galaxy, a position he wanted to be in. He also finds out how difficult it can be to be in this position. He has just grown a little bit more into a man, and he gets a lot less whiney and becomes more forceful (no pun intended). These are examples of how the character develops.

The third act becomes conflict resolution and climax. The third act is where the story turn from being captured and chased to the Rebellion going on the offensive. The attack on the Death Star is planned.

Thematically, this act is about turning the tables around. We see that the Rebellion is capable and formidable, and the antithesis of the Empire in every way.

For Luke, he grows from erstwhile farm hand turned adventurer into a warrior.

When we write, our first hints of story are often world, character, or conflict. Thinking about this seedling in three parts can definitely give an early bit of structure that won’t get in the way of the organic writer, and is a first step towards the outline for the structure writer. I believe that this three act structure can be applied to nearly any book, film, game, or story. For the beginning writer, thinking about this is not second nature. I was never taught structure like this in college. We spent more time on character, dialogue, setting, all important things, but in the ten week terms we had, we never got into anything larger than short stories, and so we talked about larger scale structures. I had to learn this from screenwriting books and apply it to long form writing. Thinking in terms of these kinds of acts will help a story jump from a directionless and shapeless story to a dynamic tale. Also, for somebody about to take on their first project of length, knowing this simple shape might help the book feel shorter just by way of being a map to the end.

Now that you know this structure, as you watch movies, you’ll be able to pick up on the moments that make up the three acts.

Now, I’m not saying that we need to be a slave to three acts in our books like a writer is in a screenplay. Turn in a book with five acts, and a publisher will judge it on its own merit. Turn in a screenplay with five acts and a producer will throw you out of the office as an amateur. What is most important to this line of thinking is that each act starts in one place, goes someplace else, and ends on a significant turning point event. Sometimes an understanding of this can be just what a writer needs to go ahead and write a book.

To put this in terms of something I’m writing now, Inside, I’m not sure how many acts I have in any of the three books. I’m guessing it is more like four rather than three. They are each designed with a rise in action to a specific point at which the conflict is returned to a baseline point, and it all begins anew, and as I outlined, I always had the next major plot event in mind. That was the direction I wrote in. I’m not somebody who can start in the middle and work out. I always start at the beginning and work to the end. It’s just my way.

In part three, I’ll look at some structures borrowed from the theatre.