CHAPTER 8

Prof. K.’s Storytelling Rules and Tools, Part 1—Structure, Structure, Structure

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

—Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works

When a story isn’t working, usually it’s a function of structural issues. Hence, let’s dive deeper now and enter the world of structure. As we’ve already covered three-act structure and my three-step story development process, what we’ll cover now are further concepts and principles that will allow anyone to make their stories more effective.

When we talk about structure, what we are referencing is the ordering and pacing of the story elements. In other words, which scenes and actions do you need to put in, which do you need to leave out, and in what sequence? To explain this further, let me quote a Hollywood icon. Legend has it that the great film director Billy Wilder, once said that if you have a problem with the ending of your story, then don’t change the ending—revise act one. What this calls attention to is the rule of structure—setting up and paying off. This illustrates the need for every good storyteller to implement the right structural changes so that a story which lacks power suddenly comes to life and works. Here are some easy-to-follow and entertaining rules and tools that anyone can implement:

Be a scene stealer

The quality and order of your scenes, your story moments, your Lego-blocks of narrative, if you will, determine whether your story will really work or not. So, let us not move forward without spending a moment to look at what makes a great scene. In a nutshell, there are no hard and fast rules, but in terms of scene construction, these are my favorites:

1. Get in the scene late and get out of the scene early!

2. Each scene needs its own good raison d’être.

3. Scenes are ruled by causality. (So, every scene is necessary and forces the story forward.)

Simply put, if you choose the right combination of scenes, juxtaposed together in the right order, never losing sight that each scene must push the story forward while combining the main plot elements with sub-plot elements, you can create a truly compelling story. But if you break the story down into a scene/moment outline, you can really see what it is, what is working, and what needs to be fixed.

All the scenes that are included should be essential to furthering the story. Each should have a raison d’être, and there should be some change in the story’s status quo by the end of every scene. As you journey from scene to scene, think of alternating between zeniths and nadirs, high and low moments, happy and sad, interiors and exteriors, so that, like a great symphony, there is a rhythm and musicality to your story.

The snapshot solution

Now, let’s look at the scene itself. If it is feeling flat, think in terms of snapshots. Imagine the scene as a Polaroid. What specific objects in the image would be most telling? You obviously can’t describe it all, so what specifics elements can you describe to bring it all to life? Think viscerally in terms of textures, colors, and the other senses beyond the visual. For instance, I know snapshots don’t have smells, but what smells might add to really bringing the scene to life? Smell is a powerful sense that is often overlooked.

With this deep understanding of the basic chapters/scenes/moments in your story, you should now be on comfortable ground in developing your story. The rest should be fun. You know what scenes you need. You know where the scenes begin and end. All you have to do now is flesh them out.

Listen to the characters’ voices as they talk to each other. Capture the smells and important visual aspects of each moment. If you have a good outline, facing the blank page is not overwhelming because you will not face writer’s block. You know exactly what every scene needs to do when you begin to caress the keyboard. You know where the story is going and it’s up to you to bring each scene to life!

The world’s slowest tailor

A young man went to a tailor shop to get a beautiful custom-made tuxedo for his wedding. The old tailor measured the young man, wrote up the order, and took a deposit. Then the young man said, “I’m getting married in a month, so I need it pretty soon!”

“Well, that’s gonna be tricky. It’s going to take me a while to do it right.”

“I really need it in three weeks or less.”

“Oh. Okay,” the tailor said. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure it’s ready on time.”

Reluctantly, the young man left. Worried the old tailor wouldn’t have his tuxedo finished in time, he called the tailor’s shop once a day to check on the progress. Every day, the tailor assured him that his tuxedo would be ready in time.

A week went by, then two weeks, then three weeks, and every time he called, the young man got the same reply. “It’s not ready yet.”

Finally, on the day before the wedding, the old tailor told the young man to come by to pick it up.

The young man ran over to the shop and, sure enough, his tuxedo was done and it was perfect. He paid the tailor, took his tuxedo, and started to leave, but then stopped at the door. He turned to look at the old tailor and said, “Sir, I have to say this: With all due respect, it took God only seven days to make the whole world, and it took you 31 days to make just one tuxedo.”

The old tailor answered, “Well, look at the world and look at this tuxedo!”

What is the meaning of this story as it relates to narratives?

Well, I think it’s the perfect story for writers to hear and think about. Like the slow tailor, we writers are seeking perfection in a non-perfect world. It’s a long, hard struggle, but one worth doing. There is so little we can control in the world around us, so we actually must hold tightly and be very careful with the words we create, the sentences we craft, and the stories we share with others.

We can’t control whether the type of story we are writing is hot or cold in the industry. We can’t control whether people want big-budget or low-budget projects, but we can control our story.

Our story is the only thing we can control and we must not let it out into the world too soon. One of the biggest mistakes writers make is simply this: They release their work out into the world too soon.

When we are working on a project, we tend to get excited about it and are unable to see if it’s truly finished and ready to be shown to others. So most of us tend to think we are done long before a project should truly be let out into the world.

The key is to hold on and revise. To aid you as you move forward, here are a slew of rules, tools, and methods to help you as you spend hours rewriting and perfecting your art. These are the result of 25 years spent writing and rewriting both my own work and the work of others. They are not in any particular order, but just a smattering of concepts that hopefully will prove to be helpful to you.

Because storytelling can be taught, these rules and tools are more than just fun little lessons; they are essential guidelines for you to implement in order to master the construction of compelling narratives.

The 2 a.m. syndrome

This first one relates to the phenomenon that I just mentioned.

When I am working with someone on their story, I always urge them to slow down and put their document away for a while. Revisit it only when you can read it objectively and with distance. Most of us suffer from what I call the “2 a.m. syndrome.” In other words, many times when we finish writing something around 2 a.m., we will be convinced it is brilliant. But when we wake up the next day and read it, we discover that it is really full of flaws.

It is hard to be objective, truly objective, with one’s own work. This is why I spend a lot of time consulting with others. The truth is that it is usually only others who can see what needs to be done to one’s story to really make it shine. And, of course, this is why every publishing house has editors.

So I urge the people I am working with to put their stories away for a while. Then, when they are ready to revisit them, I suggest they try taking their story through the following checklist of interesting rules and tools. Note, though, this checklist is really just a whole bunch of different criteria that I have collected through the years. Some of it might seem more useful than other parts. That’s okay. The key is to find what works for you. And some of the questions that I want you to ask yourself as you go through this chapter might seem self-evident to you.

Well, that’s good, too. That means that you are already doing a lot of the right things necessary to tell a great story. The main thing is that by going through this process you can weed out the story problems and further develop your story, so once you send it out to the world, it is really sound.

The storyteller and audience’s contract

In the end, with good storytelling, there is a contract. The storyteller says, “I am going to tell you a good story,” and the audience says, “I am going to believe you, connect with you, and suspend my disbelief, but I am only one false line of dialogue or unmotivated action away from re-establishing my disbelief and, instantly, disconnecting from you.”

I am always thinking that this is a possibility. I can lose my audience with one false move. So I am always questioning: Does this story satisfy me intellectually, emotionally, viscerally? Does it move me? Touch me? Where? How?

Tell good stories and always keep revising the weak points in your story so that the audience stays completely immersed in your story world.

The Evelyn Krevolin credo of credibility

Storytelling is about creating an immersive world for your audience, and as I just pointed out, your audience is always one step away from removing themselves from this storytelling-induced trance state. So, you are in trouble the moment the audience thinks, “Hey! Wait a second. C’mon now, this couldn’t happen” or “Wait a second. This feels wrong!”

This credo became clear to me when I used to watch movies with my mother, Evelyn Krevolin. Whenever we’d be sitting in a movie theatre or at home in front of the television, and a hole in the story appeared, she would always slap me on the shoulder and say, “Richie, you’re a storytelling expert. What’s going on here? This makes no sense, right? Right?”

And you know what? She was always correct. Even though she wasn’t a writer, she intuitively sensed a problem in the story. She was initially immersed in the story and then something knocked her out of the story world and, as a result, she reached out to me for an explanation.

In essence, she had initially suspended her disbelief and then, when the storytelling got lazy or took a misstep, she sensed this and was no longer able to suspend her disbelief. Your job as a storyteller is to make sure that this never happens and to construct a consistent, credible world.

The two-by-four wooden plank principle

This phenomenon of people pulling away from a story when they feel like they are being lectured to is an example of what I like to call the two-by-four principle. In other words, nobody likes to feel like they’re being hit on the head with a wooden plank. Your job is to enchant the heart of your audience, whoever that audience may be.

You’ve got to get in under the radar, drop your bomb, and get out. You do that by entertaining people, by enchanting their hearts. The word “recognition” comes from the Latin word for “knowledge,” and so when we “recognize,” we see something we already know in the story. A good storyteller always taps into recognized territory, but he or she does it via a new story, a fresh set of characters or circumstances.

Finally, it’s worth noting that everything I’m talking about here relies upon a consciousness of audience response. Therefore, no matter how good a storyteller you are, there is a need to test and tweak any story you tell. That’s why Hollywood uses test screenings before they release a film, Broadway’s theatrical producers do a series of previews, and many lawyers test their openings and closings by engaging in mock trials with potential jurors in the locale of their upcoming trial. All of these are done to discover how the story being told is affecting the emotional response of the audience. In the end, it’s about them, not you. It’s about the audience, not the storyteller.

And let me be clear: The key thing here is legitimate subtle manipulation. Whether you like it or not, as a storyteller you must be slightly manipulative! It is your job to alter (that is, manipulate) the story in order to create the emotional response you desire. Therefore, please note that I am not referencing manipulation in the negative sense of the word. Nobody likes being manipulated or a person who is a manipulator.

In the end, all storytelling is about manipulation and what differentiates good storytelling from bad is the legitimacy of that manipulation. Did the storyteller move me so I wanted to applaud at the end of the story, or did he/she anger and frustrate me so that I did feel manipulated and, as a result, I wanted to reject the story? A good manipulator knows that those who they are manipulating must never feel manipulated; instead, they need to feel as if they’ve just willingly gone along on a great ride!

Why should the audience care?

The audience cares because they have connected with your characters and story. And to keep them caring, you need to maintain the suspense and tension. The two biggest notes I usually give my clients are “Who cares?” and “Need more tension!”

Your audience needs to care, and they care when there is good tension that keeps them engaged. It is tension that keeps them involved in the story. It is tension that keeps them wanting to know more. And if there is concern for the character, and big stakes, and a fear of failure, and tons of uncertainty, there will be tension.

Yes, all of these factors are necessary, and when combined together, they equal tension and good storytelling.

The Wicked Witch of the West syndrome

Many times stories start out great, but soon sputter. If you are having trouble keeping your story going, look at what was done in The Wizard of Oz. At first, Dorothy wanted to run away from home, and then once she got to Oz she wanted to find the Wizard, and then once she found him, in order to get back home, she had to get the Wicked Witch’s broomstick. Her search for this broomstick drove the rest of the story forward.

So, I always ask my students, what is your broomstick engine? What is it that your main character wants that will drive the story forward? And this want must always be clearly articulated in the story for the audience to care, even if it changes through the course of the story, as it does in The Wizard of Oz.

The never-ending subway train at night law

It is an incredibly difficult thing to maintain a coherent and thematically unified story through 100 pages or, for that matter, through 10 pages. Thus, if your story feels episodic, or if you are told it is episodic, sorry, but your story is in trouble. The best metaphor I ever heard for an episodic story is that it feels like “a never-ending subway train at night.”

So then, how can you insure that your story does not suffer this episodic fate? Well, in an episodic story, the scenes might work on their own, but not together as a whole. Therefore, look at your story. Does each scene raise further questions in the reader’s mind so that they needs to keep reading the next scenes? Are there questions in each scene, which, when they are answered, will inspire further new questions? And are there some larger, overriding questions and story issues that are only answered at the end of the story?

By confronting these questions, you should be well on your way to making your story episodic-proof.

The aide-memoire technique

Here’s a technique I learned in a creative writing class that is very powerful. It is called aide-memoire. This is a process whereby you engage the readers as participants, not merely as spectators. In essence, what you try to do with this technique is strip down your writing so that you don’t ever label any emotions. You merely tell the reader what happens; what things taste, smell, look, or sound like, but not what they mean.

Let me give you an example. Take a look at this sentence: “Frank was stressed out and nervous.”

Grammatically it’s sound, but it tells the reader about Frank’s emotional state without letting the reader determine what that emotional state is.

Now, look at this sentence: “Frank wrapped and unwrapped the telephone cord around his ring finger.”

This sentence conveys the same information as the previous sentence, but the reader has to visualize Frank’s actions and then, as a result of using their imagination, the reader can, on their own, determine that Frank is stressed out and nervous.

In the process, they are drawn into the story, instead of kept at a distance from it. So this technique can help pull readers into the narrative, instead of pushing them away.

The four simplest writing rules ever

Try these on for size! Here are four simple rules that are guaranteed to make your writing, and thus your story, better.

1. Minimize adjectives.

2. Minimize adverbs.

3. Maximize strong action verbs.

4. Place your subject and verb as close together as possible.