Fictional Engineering 2: Story Foundations and Sub-Stories

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction. You can see part one, if you are special and very, very, brave, here.

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Scenes and Sub-Stories

Stories are not made of scenes.  Stories are made of sub-stories that may span several scenes and overlap.  A scene still has a structure, but that structure serves the advancement of the sub-stories.  Note that sub-stories are not necessarily sub-plots.  They may be, but not always.  A story is defined by the conflict stated in the premise and the ultimate resolution of that conflict.  A sub-story is about one or more of the character conflicts and their resolutions.  The difference between this and what most think of as a subplot is that a subplot is concerned with characters and events that are secondary to the core of the story, while substories are chunks of action that may make up a main plot or a subplot.

For example, suppose our lovers start out with potential conflict stated above, and the PI comes in and stirs the pot.  He successfully manipulates their inner doubts and suspicions and causes the lovers to split.  This is one sub-story.  It started with a potential conflict and it resulted in a kinetic resolution to that conflict.  But that is not the end of the story.  The audience knows that the split was based on misunderstanding and miscommunication, and they want that to be fixed.  The PI starts a relationship with the woman, but he is hiding the secret to why they are together now.  Meanwhile, the ex-lover decides to give up on love and returns to the country where he was imprisoned.  He has renewed his dedication to the cause, but his pain has also made him a little fatalistic.  

We now have a new sub-story.  It has two potential outer conflicts: (1) the new lovers have founded their relationship on a lie which we all know will come to light at some point and (2) the ex-lover is in a character vs situation conflict where is new work may hurt or kill him.  There are also lots of new inner conflicts: the woman is now even more suspicious, the PI starts feeling guilt over his actions, and the ex-lover wonders whether he’s really dedicated to the cause or has just developed a death wish.  Note that the situation is more dire than the potential conflict which began the story.  As a rule, the consequences of the potential conflicts which began the story have got to be much worse then they at first appeared.

The relationship between this and the previous sub-story is not the same as the relationship between a main and subplot.  These substories are sequential and advance the main plot.  A subplot occurs in parallel with the main plot and would involve something like the woman having to deal with her suspicions that her mother had something to do with her father’s early death.  A subplot starts out with no relationship to the main plot, although it usually has to be brought in at some point or why else is it there?  

There are some exceptions, such as small, quickly resolved subplots that help to illustrate character traits or subplots that help to balance the dramatic weight of the main plot.  A typical example of the latter is when you give minor characters a happy ending to balance the unhappy ending of the primary characters.  If you want to write a tragedy, then maybe the ex-lover dies in that dangerous country and the woman never finds love again.  However, you may want to balance this by letting the woman’s quirky sister find true love.  Or something equally cloying.  Television shows do this a lot to maintain sexual tension.  A classic TV plot is to create main characters that live in a perpetual “will they/won’t they” state (Booth and Bones).  Even if that tension ultimately finds resolution, it can wear on viewers after a few seasons.  Writers often through the audience a bone in the form of minor characters that do fall in love (Angie and Hodgins).  

Start writing a story by picking a substory.  It doesn’t have to be one implied by the premise or one of the primary character conflicts.  It’s even likely that it can’t be one of those, because their introduction probably depends on some other more minor substory.  So we start with one that has no dependencies.  We write that substory from front to back and then pick another, which may or may not be dependent on the first.  The rest follows by induction.  Entire novels can be written this way.  

The key to finishing an entire substory before continuing with another is that they are short.  Ideally, a story of any length is made up of substories of roughly uniform length.  If we have an idea for a substory that seems to long or complex to finish in one go, then it may be that we have concatenated several substories into one and we need to break it up.  The key to do that is to keep it concrete.  That is, try to stick as much as possible to describing conflicts, resolutions and unifiers in terms of physical actions that specific characters take.  The more we think in these terms, the easier it is to decompose bigger pieces into smaller chunks.

If we write in terms of sub-stories, then we always have something that resembles a complete and functional story.  Someone could always pick it up and read it and have some sense of where it is going.  This might be analogous to watching a few episodes of series with a story arch that spans a season.  They leave a sense that there is much more going on beyond those few episodes, but they also have a feeling of internal completeness.  There are unanswered questions, but there aren’t lots of hanging wires and dead drops where someone forgot to put the stairs.  A find that this helps with motivation and brainstorming, especially with a large story.  Substories help you to keep momentum and maintain orientation within the larger whole.  They also provide more agility if you decide to shift course midstream.

Substories are about implementation, not planning or design.  We tend to categorize authors as either discovery writers or outliners.  This intent behind this classification is meaningful, but it presents a false dichotomy.  Discovery writers are supposed to fly by the seat of their pants, jotting down scenes and seeing where their characters take them.  Outliners are suppose to plan everything from the top down so that by the time they start to write the actual scenes, they know exactly what’s going to happen in each.  However, every successful writer must employ both brainstorming and organization.  Without brainstorming, there is no creative spark.  Even so-called outliners must pass through a phase where they let their thoughts roam free.  And without organization, there is no sense.  Even so-called discovery writers must reach a time when they stick their hands in that pile of pages and start reordering and editing.  The difference between these two types of writers, and everyone in between, is which activity happens when in the process.  

I think that the substory approach is amenable to both ends of the spectrum.  One could outline in terms of substories.  Once the outline for each substory is complete, then the scene writing can take place.  On the other hand, one could just outline the characters and then start writing scenes, discovering new characters and conflicts along the way.  This latter type of person may benefit from the use of a backlog.  You may find in the course of writing a substory that we have ideas for new substories.  Following the ideal of finishing a substory before starting another, this author can add an outline of the new substory to a backlog.  The nice thing about a backlog is that if you grow it as you go along, you can always dip into it to find more work.  And you can beat the writing blue by dipping into it in any order.  Just pick another substory and go.

Keep in mind that through all of this scenes are just containers for substories.  They are not the structure for the story.  And a scene may contain several substories.