The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

So I’m going to start a writing game here and at the Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. Once a week, maybe during Write Chat on Sundays on Twitter, I’ll post something to describe in one or two sentences here, on Facebook and on twitter. I’ll let my writer friends respond to it, and we’ll post the best responses on my blogs. It’s kind of like scenes from a hat but for writers.

The idea is to spur some creative juices, and expand the creativity of writers and readers alike, quickly and simply. The writers will be able to have a link to their site from here, and so everybody gets some publicity. Should be fun. Pay attention to my posts for more information. Send me a friend request or follow me to get in on the game.

Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

So what can I give you about all of this? Everything I write has a different structure and a different process, a way of thinking that is unique unto itself. No one structure can be used for everything, but everything has some kind of structure.

I like to think of novels in terms of an indefinite number of acts. As I am in my freest writing mode, I tend to look at major events, and write myself towards the next act goal. Some day I’d like to tackle a five-act Elizabethan style play, but that’s a way’s off into the future, I think. For right now, I’ll stick to books.

For a beginning writer, I hope that this small amount of thought can give you a little more fortitude to get through your project. I’ll cover outlining styles at some point, but I have never really seen anybody’s outlines but my own. Writers aren’t very prone to revealing their very early work on a story since it pales in comparison to the final product. Maybe they seem to think this will undermine them in the mind of the reader.

My point in all this description of acts is to think about the major movements of the work, and make sure there are several, there is a logical flow through them, with reversals and rises and falls. If you have to divide a book up, you’ll want to plan these points to coincide with act movements, but there is a strategy to it.

As I plan out a narrative, acts are my major units, and I’ll look at the overall shape to plan out how the story will progress. I look at whether the action generally rises or falls, or if it is a bumpy progression. Any of those is sufficient as a structure to tell a story, I don’t limit myself to following any classical model unless it is by design, but straying from the models should be done consciously.

I have a lot of time at work to listen to podcast books, and one I am currently listening to is J.C. Huthins 7th Son trilogy. I listened to the first book and put it down because it is a long story, and too much of anything can be a bad thing. I think the story is good, well conceived, and most factors I consider when judging a book were very good, though there was something that lingered in my mind as unsatisfying about the first book. It took me a while to put my finger on it. Story was good, characters were rich and colorful, the villain was a solid villain, the story has hooks, but there was something lacking. Then I realized that the first book isn’t the first book at all. It’s the first act. There is a single distinct rise, a single distinct climax, no reversal, and no resolution.

7th Son in its three parts is a long book in its totality, and it makes up for it when you get into book two, but if I were J.C.’s editor (and he probably didn’t have an editor when he recorded it), I would have put the end of the first book at chapter nine or so in book two, leave the audience with a cliffhanger, and probably developed a bit more of a turning point early in book one to give it a full three acts. As it stands, book one feels like an overdeveloped short story.

This is not to denigrate the work as it stands. The stopping point of the first book is a choice, and being a podcaster myself, I know that it is a lot of work to get these things out, and so when J.C. got to his first climax, it was a probably good point to take a break and coordinate the marketing strategy for book two. It is more logical than the place I chose to take a break in that context, and it really is a killer book.

But I’ll pull in an example of why structure is important from another branch of entertainment. The new Rachael Yamagata album is a double-disk album that chose a different structure than the usual album. Now I knew Rachael when she was in Chicago, and spent many hours at her old band’s shows, so as a solo artist, I got on her bandwagon pretty early. I even have a demo that is so early it was burned on her home computer and has a black permanent marker cover.  Her first Ep and album have a great structure to them, they go from her slower darker moodier stuff to rockers, and it gives every song a very individual feel, and makes listening a series of emotional movements. When you put together an album, you arrange songs in an order to accomplish this. On her double disk, she put all of the slow moody stuff on one disk, and the rockers on the second disk. This means that one is consistently upbeat and the other a consistent downer. The net result is that the first disk feels like one really long song, and I couldn’t hum a melody from any one of them, even though individually, they are as strong as any work she has put out.

Same thing happened with Stabbing Westward’s Darkest Days album. This is another band I knew back in the day. The songs were arranged in four movements, and the slow dark part of the album is a long and dull blur.

What these lack is the highs and lows. As an experience, they are consistent, and it doesn’t matter how high and intense they are on average, we’ll still become familiar with the level, and familiarity really does breed contempt. This is also the reason that Bergman films are fairly unpalatable to American audiences. They are just long and dull no matter how artistic they may be.

So as I look at my act structure, change is my friend, consistency in narrative is the enemy. Remember this is a shape, it is a story arc, not a flat. Think about sailing around the world with Magellan, a story in and of itself. The wind is never consistent, but sailors in the doldrums do nothing and get bored, but with the inconsistency of wind and weather always keeps them busy.

Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

Aristotle’s poetics is the earliest document I’m aware of that covers literary structure. Yes, this is Aristotle the philosopher and not an Aristotle imposter. There are a few forms of Greek drama to be aware of. We are most conscious of the tragedies, what evolved into theatre. There were also comical plays that were shorter that would show along with the tragedies to lighten the mood. It was only later that comedies became plays of their own, largely under the playwright Aristophanes. Aristotle also used philosophic dialogs which were much more like closet dramas, an exercise in academics that isn’t meant to be performed so much as be an instructional tool.

The tragedies were a high form of drama that were both a matter of competition between playwrights and their wealthy patrons as they were a near religious experience. I can go into plenty of detail on the evolution of drama under the Greeks, but as a brief foray, the term scene comes from the background setting called the skene, the term deus ex machina comes from a machine that would be used to lift an actor over the skene dressed as a god to fix everything (I know, if somebody asks if you are a god, you say “yes”). Thespis was the first actor to step out of the chorus and deliver a solo line, giving us the term thespian, thereby enabling us to fool conservative politicians whose daughters are actors.

Aristotle gave us a seminal work called Aesthetics, in which he attempts to categorize writing into genres, first in Poetics and Rhetoric, then dividing Poetics into epos (epic poetry), lyrical poetry, and tragedy. In some ways this is kind of similar to novels, short stories, and drama, but this is an oversimplification. It is interesting to see how he identifies so many elements of story in this work, any one of which could be an issue of this blog/podcast, including plot, character, reversals, spectacle, diction, and action. I think his thought on character are a very good basic understanding for a writer, absolutely still applicable today to any fictional writing.

In a first nod to structure, he describes every plot as having a beginning, middle and end. This may be a primitive version of the three act structure, or it may be the well, duh part of the work.

What I really want to cover here is his rules for tragedy. His thinking and analysis is really quite remarkable for a man looking at literature in such a primitive state of development.

According to Aristotle, “the structure of the best tragedy should be not simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity–for that is peculiar to this form of art.” The hero suffers a reversal of fortune that is the result of a tragic flaw. His definition of flaw isn’t quite what we think of as a tragic flaw, his word, “Hamartia”, translates more to “missing the mark”. There are some qualifications on this flaw that aren’t really relevant in modern times, so I won’t delve too far into them, but as an example, if the character isn’t noble, or the reversal of fortune happens because of social forces, this disqualifies the work as a tragedy. These rules certainly applied in the dramatic competitions of Aristotle’s times, but would disqualify such works as Death of a Salesman.

Aristotle defined the unities, rules for tragedies. These are the rules that delineate whether a tragedy qualifies as Aristotelian or not. They are:

1. The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.
2. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
3. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.

You’ll notice right away that these cover some of our basic questions, what, where and when.

Let’s look at action more closely. First, he was keen enough to tell us to stick to the plot, that subplots were a distraction. He also was keen enough to recognize a sub-plot. In drama, where time, measured in human terms of how long an actor or audience member can go between relieving the bladder, is a consideration. Remember, the actors had large costumes and masks. So, stay focused. In a novel where you have unlimited pages, this is still important, but the story can be much larger.

When we think about place, what he describes is having one setting, and one setting only. News can come from off the stage by messengers, but the story must take place in one location. This forces us to go deeply into the character’s head for development and analysis, and not get distracted by action. Action supports character, never supplants it.

And finally time. You have a character with everything in the world going for him, and then it all crashes down within 24 hours, or thereabouts.  This concentrates the character development and catharsis (which is yet another term he coined in this work).

Of course, once these rules were defined, others immediately broke them, and literature continued to evolve and develop. The Aristotelian rules were never more in effect than in the 17th century, when a fresh copy of them was translated, and it given a certain neo-classicism element of the enlightenment, people started adhering to the unities like nobody had before, even in Aristotle’s time.

Still, an interesting set of structures to think about, and an interesting challenge to your abilities. Take from it what you will.