How to Write a Story, Part 3: Throwing Rocks at Your Hero

Okay, so you've been finding your writing chair and sitting in it for at least thirty minutes to an hour each day.  Very good!  And now, in addition to your list of awesome ideas, you know who your hero is.  Maybe she's a talking a bear who wants to be an accountant, a bad guy trying to turn good, or a princess who is desperate to escape from her castle.  It matters not at all, as long as you've decided on a hero and given him or her a problem to solve (or get beaten by).

Like architecture, ship building and rocket construction, stories have a basic structure.  The great news about this structure is that it is totally easy to understand.  As a matter of fact, it takes about one blog posting to get the essentials down.

The bare bones are these:

It's probably easiest to talk about story structure in movie terms.  Movies almost always have three three acts, and these acts have names.  Act One is called the Set Up.  Act Two is the Confrontation.  And Act Three is the Resolution.

In a two hour movie, this breaks down to roughly 30 minutes for Act I, 60 minutes for Act II, and 30 minutes for Act III.  Screenplays are about a minute of movie time per page, so they wind up being around 120 pages.  These are just rules of thumb, but what's important is the basic math of it.  The beginning is about 25% of your story, the middle is 50%, and the end is also 25%.

Here's what you do in each act.

Act 1:  Tell your audience who your hero is, how they live at the start of the movie, and then stick 'em with the problem.

Act 2:  Torment your character with their problem.  Have them use logical methods (the ones that occur to you) to get out of their fix.  And with every new attempt to solve the problem, make it worse.  Of course, you need to give your audience hope that things are just about to get better, but in Act II they won't (or else your story will be over).

The end of Act 2 should be the worst moment of all.  The last attempt to fix things should totally backfire and cost them everything; their hope, their possessions, their friends, and all else that matters in their world.  This is the low point of the whole story, so really make it awful.

Act 3:  Solve the problem in a cool and unexpected way, then show how your character lives now that she has overcome her struggle.

There's a little more to it, but this more than enough to get you started organizing the ideas you've brainstormed into the appropriate spots in your story.  And don't feel like your story has to be a movie or two hours long, or any of that.  Just use the math we discussed to break your plot into it's basic pieces.

And finally, there is a real easy way to remember all of this is:  In the first act you chase your character up a tree, in the second act you throw rocks at them, and in the third act help them climb down.  

That's it!  Now off to your writing chair.

How to Write a Story, Part 2: The Secret of All Story Telling

Okay, so I'm about to tell you the secret of all story telling.  No need to thank me, or even to keep this secret.  It's so simple, after I tell you you'll think, "Why didn't I already know that?"

Here it is:  All stories are about a character with a problem and how they solve that problem (or get beaten by it).  Generally speaking, if the character gets beaten by their problem, you are watching (or reading) a tragedy.  If the character overcomes their problem, well, it's probably a regular - meaning, "It all works out in the end." - drama or a comedy.

Some examples of tragedies are "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Perfect Storm."  Here the characters are faced with something like forbidden love or a massive tidal wave.  They struggle against these forces for the entire movie, play or book and ultimately lose.  Then we leave the theater feeling terribly sad, but perhaps illuminated about the nature of something - maybe love, petty vendettas, greed or... even nature.

In almost every other kind of story the hero wins in the end.  So... let's talk about that kind for a second.

The hero (our worm from yesterday) is just the main character of the story.  A fancy term for this character is the protagonist.  Conversely, the villain is called the antagonist (but more on that in another post).  The way to identify the hero in the movies you watch is to figure out who has the central problem, the one the whole movie revolves around.  For example, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy needs to find the Wizard so that she can get back to Kansas.  Sure, the Lion wants courage, the Scarecrow wants a brain, and the Tin Man wants a heart, but the reason we're on the Yellow Brick Road in the first place is because Dorothy needs to get home and only the Wizard can help her.  Any of her traveling companions could give up and slink back into the forest and we would still follow Dorothy to Oz to find out if she solves her problem.

Now the key to a good story is to make sure that hero is doing almost all of the work to solve his or her problem.  If they're not, then it will feel like they're just along for the ride.  And interestingly, if someone else is doing most of the problem solving work, the problem itself, and therefore the movie, is actually theirs.  Meaning, they are the hero, not the original problem stricken soul.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Okay, the very last thing to consider regarding your hero and their problem is this:  The problem needs to be big enough to sustain your story.  If your protagonist only has to walk to the end of the driveway to get the paper, well, that's too easy to sustain an audience's interest.  Now if they walk to the end of the driveway and a monster starts chasing them - then we're getting somewhere.  And if that monster turns out to be their long lost father, I think we may have the beginnings of a movie!

Alright, think about your hero while you're doing your brainstorming.  Let the ideas flow and write them all down, but while you're gathering these story telling elements ask yourself, "Who is my hero, and how do these fabulous new ideas I'm having affect or define her problem?"

And remember, make sure to find your writing chair for thirty minutes to an hour today!

Happy writing!

How to Write a Story, Part 1: Getting Started

Filmmaker and conspiracy theorist, Oliver Stone, apparently has a sign above his desk which reads, "Writing equals butt plus chair."  That pretty much says it all about writing.  Happily, though, this equation, some paper and a pencil are all you need to get started.  As a matter of fact, it's all you will ever need (though you will eventually require more paper).

Finding the time to write can be daunting.  There's a million other things to do, all of which seem like more fun.  But unlike many of the other arts, no expensive equipment is required (though I use a laptop, and you probably will too), nor any grueling training.  There are some basic rules of story telling, which we'll get into in tomorrow's post, but for now, all you need is something to catch the ideas as they occur to you, and a willingness to get crackin'.

So, what to write about?  Well, every subject is potentially a great one; and, conversely, each can turn out to be not so great.  A great story can be told from simply watching your dog play, and it's possible to write a real snoozer about robot dinosaurs in a shootout with zombie cowboys (Hold on, I may actually use that.).  The thing that makes you interesting and unique - your personality and point of view - is what will make your writing stand apart from everyone else's.  What will make it good is your willingness to continue finding that chair and completing Oliver Stone's equation.

"Okay, already" you may be saying, "just tell me how to get going and I'll take it from there."  Outstanding, here's five quick steps to starting your story:

1.  Find a quiet place and sit down with paper and pencil.  You will need thirty minutes to an hour, and a promise not to judge anything you write.  All ideas are good ones at this point, even if you don't know yet what you want to write about. 

2.  Let your mind wander.  This isn't math so there are no correct answers.  Concepts don't even have to be related yet.  Just jot down everything that occurs to you.  A flower, an ocean, a seagull, a rocketship.  It's all good, and you never know how these ideas may start to attach to each other.

3.  Start thinking about a hero.  Your hero doesn't need to have super powers, or even to be heroic.  If you want to do the superhero thing, then great, but you don't have to.  He or she can be a rock star, a tree, a worm, or a whale.  You just need a main character for all of your fantastic ideas to swirl around.

4.  Find out what your hero likes (and dislikes).  Interview your hero.  The amazing thing about writing - and I never would have believed this before I started doing it - is that eventually your characters will start talking to you.  Just like if you owned a real talking worm, your make-believe worm will begin telling you about itself; where it lives, what it likes to eat, who its friends are, and what kind of car it drives.  At this stage, just listen, and write it all down.  We'll send him off on a journey soon enough.

5.  Find your chair tomorrow.  When you're done writing for the day, leave your work alone.  Don't go back over it until tomorrow.  Remember that it's way, way, way too early to decide what's good and what's not.  At this point you are a farmer and your ideas are seeds.  And just as there's no way to look at a bag of apple seeds and decide which one will be the most beautiful tree with the most delicious apples, well...  You get the idea.

The most important thing is to just find that chair tomorrow, if only for a half an hour, sit down and keep grabbing ideas.  We'll get further down the road in the next post.

Hello, Young Writers!

S.E. Hinton

In 1965, S.E. Hinton was a sixteen year old living in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  She had been writing since grade school and decided to try her hand at a novel.  The book she started, and published two years later when she was a freshman at Oklahoma State University, was The Outsiders.  Today there are 14 million copies in print and it still sells more than 500,000 a year.

When I heard about this, I was fourteen and sitting in my freshman English class in Edmond, Oklahoma.  The Outsiders movie had just come out (and been a huge hit) and here we were about to study it like Shakespeare.  When the teacher told us S.E. Hinton wasn't even an adult when she wrote this book, I thought, "Hey, there might actually be a reason to pay attention in school!"  And the fact the she lived just an hour and a half down the road was almost too exciting to be true.

Well, I have followed that excitement about writing ever since, and have made a career writing all kinds of stuff, including novels, screenplays for movies and television, a couple of plays, blogs, and even a magazine article or two.

It's never too early to start taking your writing seriously, and I want to help you improve.  In this blog I'll offer advice on getting started, refining your work, and finding the central themes of your stories.  It's easier than you think.  And the great thing is, it's basically the same process whether you're writing a book, a screenplay, a college essay, an assignment for class, or just telling a story to a friend.

Writing is fun, and not terribly difficult to learn to do well.  Check in here a couple times a week for new posts, and if you need some tutoring help, I'm available for that as well (You can get my contact information on the sidebar.).

That's all for now.  Happy writing!