Preparation or Spontaneity?

When wild words are present... the elements of the story are familiar enough to reassure the reader or audience. The plot speaks to their condition, more so for its simplicity and clarity. They are grounded and oriented by the clear setting, and can visualise it in their mind’s eye. They are engaged with the journey of the hero. They are on the edge of their seats because know what the hero has to lose if they doesn’t complete their quest. They recognise the terrifying threat that the opponent represents, and they fear it no less than the hero. They cheer and cry as successive rounds are won and lost by the hero. They are consumed and enchanted by the story, absorbed until the last word.

Tracking The Wild Words

When you’ve come up with your story idea largely from an instinctual place, the next thing is to ensure it has all the elements it needs to make it canter, roar, and, all in all, leap off the page.  

There can be a myth amongst storytellers, especially novel writers, that if you are a storyteller worth your salt, you will be able to sit down and just write the next War and Peace. This, in my experience is very rarely, if ever true. Almost all the greatest storytellers honed the tools of their craft over many years. And those that didn’t were usually doing something that would later help their writing- for example, spending time observing nature or human nature in another context. It may appear that someone becomes an overnight success. It only appears so when we aren’t aware of the six unpublished novels they’ve written before, and the thousands of solitary hours they spent locked in their office.  

The Fears

Storytellers and would-be storytellers who come to my courses attracted by the notion that we are natural or instinctual storytellers sometimes balk at the idea of working consciously with structure. However,  instinct doesn’t come from no-where, it has to be trained. It may look like a small child learns to speak easily, but analyse that process and observe the many thousands of times they practice making each sound. It may look like the bird catches prey in flight effortlessly, but observe the young sea gull drop a stick and swoop to catch it time and time again.

Writers sometimes fear that putting in place a structure for a story before writing it results in a story that is dry, and unoriginal. This is a confusion of the stages of the writing process. Considering basic structure is only the very first stage. It’s like the skeleton of the animal, before the flesh, blood, muscles, and individual character goes on. It’s like the framework of the house before you add wallpaper, furniture etc. The best structural work doesn’t limit you, quite the opposite. Held lightly, it provides you with the safety to follow your instinctual urges, and to let go into the creative flow.

The film writer and director David Mamet uses the analogy of building a house when he talks about the process of storytelling (in this case screenwriting):

I live in a house that’s two hundred years old. Barring some sort of man-made catastrophe, it will be standing in another two hundred years…it’s very difficult to shore up something that has been done badly. You’d better do your planning up front’.

-David Mamet, On Directing Film

Ignore the confidence that structural guidelines can provide you with at your peril. And if that hasn’t convinced you, perhaps this will: Structure is beautiful. It’s the pattern we hold in our bodies and minds that always orients us towards health, the repeated activation and discharge of the nervous system of the hero, as experienced by the writer and therefore the listener/reader.  In storytelling terms it’s like the mathematic laws of the universe. Perfect. Profound. A joy to explore and work with.

Fear On The Page

Wild words that have no appropriately supporting structure live in a cage. They sit terrified in the back of the restrictive space, not feeling safe enough to come out. Our page remains blank. Or, conversely, with nothing to contain them, they rampage across the page destroying the beauty of the form of the story or poem. The storyteller finds they have written 200,000 words instead of the 50,000 they intended- and they’re still only setting the scene! They’ve already used up all their energy and more, so they stop writing, exhausted. They are accompanied by ongoing distress because they haven’t told the story they needed to tell. The book never gets finished.

Becoming The Wild Writer

So now, to give you the safety net and confidence you’ll need to dive into the first draft, we’re going to use structural elements to ensure that your story foundations are rock solid. Remember the Five Elements? Here they are, fleshed out a little more.

The Five Elements

Situation: A specific place and date for your story. Decide this in advance. Even the difference of a few months can change the political and social environment immensely.

Character: This refers to your lead character, your hero or heroine. The best way to tell any story is to use this character’s journey as the backbone of your story. Follow them on their adventure. Set up the audience/reader’s identification with the hero. Once you’ve hooked them you’ll keep them for the rest of the story. The reader doesn’t have to like the hero, but they have to understand what motivates her/him and care about what happens to them.

Objective: Decide what the hero’s goal is, then take her or him step by step on a journey towards that goal. This is the throughline for the story.

There should only be one hero. If there are two people, or more, at the centre of your story, (for example a ‘buddy movie’), then choose one of them to be the hero. Remember, this is for ease of designing the structure. Later in the process you can play with the point of view of the listener or reader and create all sorts of effects. But for now- choose one hero.

A hero works best if they are passionate about what she is trying to get. If this is the case, and the reader/audience are identified with them, then you have a gripping story on your hands! If your story is about a woman who thinks about climbing Everest but doesn’t really mind either way whether she does it, then your audience probably won’t mind much either. If, on the other hand, she’s obsessed with climbing Everest, that’s a much better hook for your audience.

Take the hero step by step towards their goal. At each stage of his journey, we’ll be bearing their overall aim in mind, and asking,

What do they want?

What gets in the way?

Do they succeed or fail?

What gets in the way, at each stage, is the opponent.

Opponent: Also called the antagonist or ‘baddie’. They are what get in the way of what your hero is trying to achieve. It can be a person, a force of nature (such as a tornado), or even a part of the hero themselves (as in stories about mental illness). The important thing is that it is an immovable force. It does not weaken unless or until it is defeated at the end of the story. The hero and the antagonist can be likened to two armies going to war.

Have only ONE opponent. If you split the opponent you weaken the story. The opponent can, however, have servants/minions etc. In Star Wars, for example, Darth Vader is clearly the opponent, although he has many soldiers doing his dirty work for him.

If the opponent is part of the protagonist themselves, this is known as an internal antagonist. An example of this would be a character in a story about mental illness who is doing battle with their internal demons. Internal antagonists are more difficult to write, as they can get easily confused with the protagonist part of themselves. Unless you’re very clear that’s the path for you, stick to an external antagonist.

Disaster: By this I mean ‘what is the disaster for the hero?’ i.e. if they fail to do what they have set out to achieve what do they have to lose? It could be their job, their life, their health or many other things. It needs to be something that is very important to the hero. This is why the listener, reader or audience are invested in them succeeding. They know how much they have to lose if they fail.

These five elements are vital to have in your story idea if you want it to ensnare the reader or audience. These are elements that, as natural storytellers, we know how to insert unconsciously. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that they always appear unbeckoned in our stories. As you know, various things can block the creative flow of our storytelling, resulting in the story hatching half-formed.

When you sit down at the desk, or on your favourite tree stump, ready to start your day’s writing, it’s imperative that you have confidence in your project.  For that reason, as well as cultivating our ability to use the key elements instinctually, it’s helpful to look at these elements with the rational mind, and consider whether your story idea has all of them present.  This is a safeguard to make sure you never begin the writing stage of a project without total confidence in its tiger-like strength. Over time, and with the practice afforded, you’ll be less and less likely to unconsciously sabotage your natural storyteller. You’ll increasingly notice how these structural checks, are just that, checks. You’ll be working increasingly from instinct.

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