#2 Story Structure - The Journey Without and Within

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#2 Story Structure - The Journey Without and Within

Monday, August 13th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

Writing a Structured Story

I remember one of my good friends approaching me after completing a story - the first of his that went on to get published - and saying, in a state of awe and wonder, ‘Structure is everything.’ He had a point. It was certainly addressing structure that had changed his writing from promising to published.

Structure is the weak component of many stories and covers a multitude of sins. Symptoms include:
1. an unidentifiable main character (readers asking, ‘Whose story is this?’)
2. poor scene-setting
3. lack of coherent conflict
4. premature scene climaxes
5. protagonist/plot mismatch, in which the main character’s internal/emotional dynamic would never allow him to do what the external dynamic of the plot requires him to do - or it would allow him to do everything easily, without experiencing much of an internal struggle.

To address these problems, it’s important to drop the idea of structure as a cage you erect around your story to stop it wandering off. It’s not a formula, but a map that you and your reader can use to explore the issues that your story broaches. Maps answer the questions, ‘Where are we?’ ‘What obstacles are around the corner?’ and ‘How are we going to get out of here?’ Your story poses similar questions. Your main character, and your character alone, has to find the answers.

Asking the Right Questions

Most of our understanding of story structure has been gleaned from our own reading. Good stories sweep us along. We rarely become conscious of the story’s underlying structure. It’s only when a story goes wrong that you notice the nuts and bolots sticking through. But it is often difficult to see the nuts and bolts sticking out in your own writing. Analysing the structure of a story can feel forced and unnatural. That’s when it can be helpful to get outside help and critques from other writers in a community like Edit Red.

In an attempt to find a more organic approach to structuring a story, Chris Volger developed the ‘Writer’s Journey’ in which the main character makes his way through a highly-charged (meaningful) sequence of life-shaping events. This led to a ‘12-step’ approach which is often cited by Hollywood scriptwriting courses. The journey in question is really a psychological one, mapping the changes someone we care about has to go through to overcome conflict and reach a goal. So the questions we need to ask are:

1. What does she need to overcome?
2. How does she need to change?
3. What conflicts must be resolved?

In popular fiction the protagonist’s journey is often one that leads to greater maturity, self-knowledge or happiness. In literary fiction the journey might well lead to despair, alienation or disillusion, but will still involve personal change. The protagonist has learnt to do something that she couldn’t at the story’s opening, or has earned something valuable like love, self-acceptance or a home.

It’s easy in stepped plans to miss out a couple of steps and mash a few together - at least it’s easy for me - but this doesn’t really matter. Why not? Because we’re not trying to create a formula to churn out stories. We’re trying to maintain our focus on the main purpose of the plot: to provide your main character with a reason to change or resist change.

For example, your complex detective novel would need to be more than a puzzle for your readers - they have suduko for that. It is the account of your character’s journey toward growth and change. When we are forced to go through personal change, we draw on resrves of strength, endurance and courage. These qualities give meaning to our story, and help our readers identify with the characters we have created and the sruggles they go through. We are all creatures of habit. Novels are not long descriptions of habits. They are a dynamic illustration of a character’s development from one set of habits and values to a set of entirely new habit and values. We track the change, scene by scene, showing our readers how our hero copes with each obstacle on the the way.

Suddenly our story is full of impetus and purpose.

The Internal Journey of the Protagonist

Let’s take a look at how this can work in practice. Remember our priest who was forced into solving the murder of a cardinal in #6: ‘Dull Beginning, Sagging Middle, Lame End’? The murder took place in a cathedral, and the cardinal’s body was discovered just after Mass, as our priest made his exit through the sanctuary. So you already have three powerful ingredient in place:

1. Premise - murder in a cathedral (not that uncommon through the ages, but always fraught with controversy and political tension)
2. Situation - the hierarchy of the Catholic church (the archetype for all stuffy, corrupt institutions and the abuse of power)
3. Plot - a cardinal murdered by a bishop who hoped to be named as his replacement (power corrupts…)

The whole story is to be tied together by the character of the priest who discovered the cardinal’s body. His goal: to identify the perpetrator. His motivation: justice.

So our priest is questioned by the police and gets close to their initial investigations when they suddenly arrest a homeless teenager. Although the police seem satisfied that the case is closed, the priest is far from convinced. He starts to do some digging of his own, and before long an attempt is made on his life - now he knows he’s on to something. He narrows the list of suspects down to a member of the archdiocese then finds a way to get all the main suspects together, in classic Agatha Christie fashion, and tricks the murderer into giving himself away.

Mmm. All the external components for our story are in place: premise, plot and situation. But there’s something missing… something to make us care. We need some emotional involvement. We need to send our priest on an emotional and psychological journey. And we need to be there with him. In short, this has to be more than a blip in the priest’s life that we get to share. It has to be a life-changing experience.

That’s where the internal conflict comes in - whatever internal issue or problem the plot forces the protagonist to confront. This adds an additional layer to your story as well as greater coherence and plausibility. After all, most people aren’t driven to risk their lives to unmask a murderer - that’s why we pay for a police force. Our priest has to have a good reason, however unconscious, for putting his own life on the line.

Coherence - Knitting the Internal and External Factors Together

The overall thrust of story coherence is to have everything in the story working together to create a profound overall effect. This is served when the events in the story are developed to bring the priest’s own unique internal conflict to the surface. This won’t affect the external structure - he will still hunt for clues, put them together and solve the murder. However, each scene will take on greater significance and emotional charge as the story not only progresses toward solving the murder, but also reveals and resolves the priest’s internal conflict.

It is this internal conflict that shapes the course of the plot - his journey - and serves to heighten the dramatic tension of each scene. So the question remains, how can we do this in this story?

The trick, once again, is to ask the right questions. In this case,

1. How is the priest going to be affected internally by this story?
2. What character will be most profoundly affected by the events we have outlined above?

Our story seems to be about challenging authority: firstly, the bishop brings down the cardinal by murdering him and usurping his position. Secondly, the priest disregards the authority of the police and brings down the bishop. The type of person to be least affected by this would be a rebellious type. Such a man would be following his own natural mistrust of authority figures: no internal conflict, no need to change, no dramatic tension. Boring.

So who would be most profoundly affected in this case? Someone who trusts authority. Someone who adheres to the rules laid down by those above. Someone who believes in the underlying goodness of the system. The former altar boy, turned priest, who wants nothing more than to rise to a high position in the institution he venerates. Such a person is going to be wrestling with himself in a story like this one. Such a person is going to have a terrible time. Such a person is goint to have to change.

The priest is loyal to the church, to the hierarchy and to the bishop. In fact, we could tighten his ties to the bishop by making him the bishop’s own personal prodigy. The bishop has hand-picked him form the streets as a boy, nurtured him through seminarium and given him his first position as a priest - a position much higher than a novice would be expected to fill. In return he has earned the priest’s fierce loyalty - a heroic quality in itself. But in this case, it is loyalty that makes the priest prejudiced in favour of the bishop - the murderer!

Now we have the seeds to create plenty of conflict and get plenty of dramatic tension into our scenes. All we need to do now is to knit the internal and external events of the plot together. In other words, we need to have the external events provoke the internal conflict in the priest in order to drive him to challenge his views and feelings for the bishop, the church and authority itself. We need to provoke Peripetia.

The Turnaround - Peripetia

Peripetia is Aristotle’s term for the turnaround. It occurs in a story when everything that seemed to be true turns out to be false; good turns out to be bad; right, wrong. The dramatic tension, the character’s internal struggle, peaks at the moment of peripetia. Everything he believed in turns out to be false; who he is and his place in the scheme of things is exposed as naive and false. Scary stuff.

What we want to achieve is a total turnaround. To make this effective, again we have to knit external and internal elements together. We have to experience the priest’s loyalty and respect for authority before we force him to betray everything he believes in. So, when the police are investigating, perhaps the priest is outraged at the questions that are being asked of his mentor. So what if his surplice was found at the scene of the crime? Our priest can become embroiled in the investigation because he rushes to the defense of the bishop. Then he begins to uncover a few pieces of ambiguous evidence. Things stop fitting the bishop’s story. Still he refuses to believe that his mentor could be guilty. But it’s already too late. He’s already on a road strewn with conflict and suffering. Bad for him, but great for the drama in our story.

In fact, it would be good for our story if he came close to proving the bishop’s innocence. He could quash his own doubts and help everyone else in the case do the same: the cleaner was in a hurry that day and admits she might have dropped the surplice on the floor, herself. The heated conversation between the bishop and the cardinal moments before his death, which was overheard by the teenager shooting up in the confessional, might well have been about football. The teenager was in no fit state to say. By the middle of the book the priest looks as though he has saved his bishop, the reader is thinking, ‘So it was just the junkie after all,’ when he learns something that turns everything on its head - the moment of peripetia.

Now, he can keep quiet and save his mentor, or he can speak up and save the junkie. But the bishop isn’t the man he seemed to be. And the priest’s faith in his own belief system has been challenged. The key dilemma: does he place his deep-felt loyalty above the truth?

It’s important to point out that it’s not the bishop who has changed. He can still be an essentially good man worthy of devotion and respect, who is in the grip of the powerful institution that has corrupted him. Or it may have been an accident, and the bishop’s only real crime is in trying to cover the whole thing up and implicate the junkie to save the good name of the church - two problems solved in one, as it were. And in the heat of the moment… well, you get the idea. The bishop is not evil. It is the priest who has to confront his own internal daemons, and this is where the drama of the story lies.

The choice the priest makes will cause fundamental changes in his identity. If he turns in the bishop, he has come to value truth over loyalty and justice over authority. Thus, the outcome of his choice will determine the answers to the central questions posed by both the internal and external plot questions.

At the end of the story, the events carry a much greater portent than the bringing to justice of another murderer. We witnessed the fundamental change in our protagonist. He can never go back to being the man he was before. We have managed to transform an admittedly complex sequence of events into a real story that resonates deeply on both an individual and universal level. It is by combining character and plot (the internal and external journeys) that we have arrived at the essential stucture of our story.