Difference between revisions of "GRUNT"

From http://www.Reddit.com/r/fantasy_workshop by http://www.Reddit.com/u/grizwald87

'Grizwald's Universal Narrative Theory (G.R.U.N.T.)'

[Warning: spoilers within for Appaloosa, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Bourne Identity, Breaking Bad, Braveheart, The Dark Tower, Edge of Tomorrow, The Fellowship of the Ring, Harrison Bergeron, The Last Kingdom, The Last Samurai, The Last of Us, Slumdog Millionaire, Taken, and The Wire.]

Executive Summary, aka "The Mitochondria is the Powerhouse of the Cell’’’

The best statement I've ever heard on the subject of plot was made by Dave Trottier, who said that if you have a character who has a clear and specific goal, where there is strong opposition to that goal leading to a crisis and an emotionally satisfying ending, your manuscript will be in the upper 5%. While the "science" is much more complex, if this is what you scribble on a scrap of paper and tape to your word processor or writing desk, you can't go that far wrong.

’’’Introduction to Narrative Science’’’

I find almost all traditional plot classifications (the seven basic plots, the hero's journey, the three-act structure, etc.) and modern plot formulations (Dan Harmon's story circle, Frey tags Pyramid, insert random script doctor's patented solution here) unhelpful, because none of them do a very good job of justifying why the elements they claim should be in a story ‘’’must’’’ be in there.

The worst of them resemble dodgy statistical inventories of dissected stories ("all the flying objects I've observed have two wings, so I guess if you want to make something fly, it has to have two wings"), and even the best of them often represent merely a single successful path to a good outcome without showing much understanding of the universal principles upon which that successful path rests ("if you fold a piece of paper this way you can make it float across the room, just trust me" vs. "these are the principles of flight that will allow you to design your own paper airplane, or for that matter, an actual airplane, or for that matter, any object that stays up under its own power").

’’’Grizwald's Universal Narrative Theory’’’ aka G.R.U.N.T. (since everyone likes a fancy name) is an attempt to distill and communicate the universal principles of effective narrative structure in such a way that you can find it on your own in every successful piece of fiction long enough to have a narrative, and that will enable you to diagnose unsuccessful or weak fiction according to the elements of effective narrative structure that fiction lacks or manages poorly.

Core to this exercise is my belief that all stories share certain standard elements, because the commonalities of human nature lead to general agreement on what's satisfying and what's not. Skilled writers are often experts at disguising this structure in much the same way makeup artists are experts at keeping the makeup from looking obvious - but on closer inspection, it’s almost always there.

‘’‘’’Organic Plot Chemistry’’’’’

The basic molecules of a successful story are exposition, tension, and pay-off.

‘’’Exposition’’’

Exposition is the transmission of information to the reader that makes them more interested in the story than they were before they read the exposition. Exposition that makes the reader less interested in the story is dead weight to be hunted down and ruthlessly excised.

‘’’Tension’’’

Tension is the use of exposition to create an unfulfilled desire in the reader. Sometimes the desire in question is to see a concrete plot point resolve favourably ("will the dragon who was minding his own business slay the bothersome knight and continue his nap on his treasure hoard in peace?"). Sometimes the desire is meta-narrative, e.g. wanting to know the truth of who killed Professor Plum in the study with the candlestick, but not much caring what actually happens to the killer. Sometimes the reader's desire is purely emotional or negative, e.g. a reader is getting progressively more creeped out by the story and desires for their nervousness not to turn into full-blown terror (while simultaneously hoping it will, because horror fans are weird, bless them).

‘’’Pay-off’’’

Pay-Off is the emotionally satisfactory resolution of tension. There are often multiple moments of pay-off, equivalent to a comedian getting laughs during a stand-up set, and the writer's knowledge of where the pay-off is in a story is what allows them to manipulate the story's structure and content to maximize the effect of those moments of pay-off.

Note that in a quirk of human psychology, a successful pay-off can deliver emotions other than happiness. Although tastes vary, many love a tragedy, defined broadly here as a story with an unhappy ending for the protagonist. Many (but not all) horror stories are tragedies. The key is ‘’’emotionally satisfying’’’, not "joyful".

These building blocks are so basic to the entertainment of the human mind that they are found in jokes and magic tricks, and are as well-known to comedians and magicians as they should be to writers. An intriguing ‘’’set-up’’’, the introduction of a source of ‘’’tension’’’, and a good ‘’’pay-off ‘’’ s a universal formula not just to telling a story, but to catching, holding, and satisfying the interest of a member of the species homo sapiens.

‘’’Single-Celled Stories’’’

There's no bright line separating short fiction from long fiction, but at the very short end of narrative fiction, the structure is so basic, the resemblance to a magic trick is so strong, that the following speech from John Cutter at the beginning of ‘’’The Prestige’’’, a Nolan film based on a novel by Christopher Priest, provides a helpful vocabulary:

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called '’’’The Pledge.'’’’The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course...it probably isn't. The second act is called '’’’The Turn.'’’’ The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret...but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call '’’’The Prestige.'’’’

It's language that describes making a bird disappear and then bringing it back, but it's also the same language you'd use to describe the anatomy of a joke:

‘’’Pledge’’’

Two hunters are out in the woods...

‘’’Turn’’’:

...when one of them collapses. He’s not breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911.

“I think my friend is dead!” he yells. “What can I do?”

The operator says, “Calm down. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

‘’’Prestige’’’

There’s a silence, then a shot. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?”

I put to you that there is no fundamental difference between’’’"pledge, turn, and prestige"’’’ and ‘’’"exposition, tension, and pay-off"’’’, and you can see the resemblance to a basic story structure. The ‘’’pledge’’’ is the introduction to the world of the story and its rules: ‘’’exposition’’’. The ‘’’turn’’’ is the introduction of ‘’’tension’’’ to that world, and the ‘’’prestige’’’ is the climactic release of that tension, the ‘’’pay-off’’’.

Consider the 1,095-word short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, the ultimate flash fiction:

‘’’Pledge’’’ : we are introduced to Vonnegut's future world, and by description, to the characters of Diana Moon Glampers and Harrison Bergeron.

‘’’Turn’’’: We are informed that Harrison has escaped from captivity. He subsequently breaks into the film studio.

‘’’Prestige’’’: Harrison and the prima ballerina engage in a single, glorious dance before being shot to death by Diana Moon Glampers.

‘’’Multi-Cellular Narrative Organisms’’’

There is no fundamental difference between Vonnegut's 1,000 word masterpiece and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which when completed will likely clock in around 2.5 million words. Focus your literary microscope closely enough, and you'll see that ASOIAF is just exposition, tension, and pay-off as deep as you care to look, layer after layer of it in a complex fractal pattern all building to one giant emotional pay-off that some doubt he'll ever be able to successfully land.

That said, what we can discuss in the context of long fiction is the latticework those fractal patterns have to form in order to withstand the strain of holding reader interest for days, weeks, sometimes years, instead of the few minutes required to get through flash fiction or the seconds required for a joke.

A note here on movies, which I enjoy referencing: a "feature film", which might not even be 90 minutes long or might be triple that length, may resemble a short story at the simple end or a novel at the epic end. The more the film resembles a short story, the more the anatomical structures I discuss in the ensuing section are likely to exist in a much less complex form, in some cases the most basic fractal of all: pledge, turn, prestige.

What follows is an attempt at a universal anatomy of fiction - organs composed of "ETP" that all fictional life require to function. It's possible to depart from this anatomy, but I would predict major problems as a result. If a story isn’t working, the existence, strength, and pacing of the following narrative elements is where I’d start my diagnosis.

'’’Cephalization’’’

The longer the fiction, the stronger the narrative pressure for it to have at least one ‘’’protagonist’’’, i.e. ‘’’a character who the audience enjoys reading about’’’. They can be objectively good or evil, strong or weak, smart or stupid, and you can use all kinds of different perspectives to connect the reader to them (first person, third person distant, etc.), but the first principle is that the longer the story, the harder it is to convince readers to care about mere descriptions of things or sequences of events: the necessity of a focus on people, and on their actions and struggles becomes ever-greater. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is the only work I can recall that comes close to escaping from this principle, and even it is (i) framed by a conversation between a protagonist, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan, and (ii) only about 25,000 words.

(Note that I often use the word "hero" instead of protagonist because it's easier to type and less of a mouthful to read, even though it's technically not accurate. Mea culpa.)

The elements of a compelling protagonist are not the focus of this essay (GRUNT/Elements of a Compelling Character), but suffice it to say for now that the best protagonists lend themselves to the introduction of exposition and the maintenance of tension: they assist the exposition by being intriguing, empathetic, and enjoyable to read about, and they have character traits that make them good material on which to load tension, e.g. by having a tendency to take action, however foolhardy, instead of merely moaning about their troubles. Sometimes the "point of view" character is not actually the protagonist, but merely a sort of living camera trained on the protagonist, although this is difficult to do well.

In keeping with the concept of fractal growth, the story of each protagonist will likely contain both major and minor moments of exposition, tension, and pay-off, and you can stack protagonists, each with their own exposition, tension, and pay-off, into an even larger version of the same, as GRRM is doing with the intertwining stories of a dozen-odd protagonists in ASOIAF.

Study of the Organs

Equilibrium: everything in your story - every character, every piece of the world - has an equilibrium when your story starts, which is the normal course of its existence. Establishing your story's equilibrium in a compelling manner is often the most difficult act of exposition a writer will ever face.

In some cases, the plot will not affect the equilibrium of certain parts of the world at all, but it's still necessary to register the general characteristics to establish just how impactful the events in the story are on your hero and their social and physical environment, and in what way they are impactful. If the story involves your hero being in battle or in love, the reader needs to know whether this is his first time or his hundredth.

We are especially concerned here about the hero's equilibrium, because, having established that in all but the shortest fiction, protagonists and their issues drive reader interest, it is the disturbance of the protagonist's equilibrium that is of most import.

The "anatomical relevance" of equilibrium does not dictate its length, merely its presence, either explicit or implied.

On the very "quick" end, you may choose to establish the equilibrium retroactively, e.g. via snippets dropped into the dialogue. In the movie Fury by David Ayer, about an American tank crew trying to survive on the Western Front in the dying days of WW2, we’re introduced to the backstory of our hero Norman Ellison as follows:

Ellison: First Sergeant Collier?

Collier: Maybe. What the fuck are you?

Ellison: Private Ellison. I was told to report to you … I’m your new assistant driver?

Collier: (sizing Ellison up) No, you are not.

Ellison: Yes I am-

Collier: God damn it. Who told you this?

Ellison: Master Sergeant with the clipboard-

Collier: Bullshit!

Ellison: -right there. He’s…

[awkward silence]

Collier: What’s your name?

Ellison: Norman.

Collier: How long you been in the Army?

Ellison: Eight weeks.

…

[In the next scene, Norman meets the rest of Collier’s veteran crew]

…

Swan: You go to tank school?

Ellison: Tank school? I’ve never even seen the inside of a tank. I’m a clerk typist. I was heading to Fifth Corps HQ, they pulled me off the truck.

In addition to being excellent, “truthy” dialogue, that’s everything the audience needs to know about the hero’s backstory in less than 100 words: he’s a clerk typist who’s been in the army for eight weeks. As a bonus, Ayer has efficiently established a strong inciting incident, discussed in more detail below: Ellison has been pulled out of his normal routine and given a dangerous job he's not qualified for.

Consider The Last Kingdom as an example of a story that successfully takes its sweet time getting to its inciting incident, which is Kjartan burning down Uhtred's house with Uhtred's adopted family still inside. This was possible because the equilibrium section, though lengthy, was structured like a short story itself, with smaller cycles of exposition, tension, and pay-off of its own that kept the audience's interest (Uhtred's capture in battle by Ragnar the Fearless, his struggle to adapt to life as a slave after previously being a prince, and finally, his bonding with and adoption by Ragnar). Fractals everywhere!

Inciting Incident

Inciting Incident: the normal course of the hero’s life is interrupted. This is the yodel in avalanche country. The purpose of having one of these is to force action to occur. It’s possible to have multiple inciting incidents on the page or none, but the key is to answer the question, “why can’t everything just stay the way it is? Why does the hero have to act?” If the hero can at any time simply decide to return to equilibrium, you may experience problems with motivation and tension later in the story.

An inciting incident is a specific form of introduction of tension, specifically tension introduced to motivate a protagonist. Shorter stories need not have inciting incidents (and may even lack identifiable protagonists), but the emotional commitment required of a reader for a longer work demands somebody take action, which demands that somebody's life depart from equilibrium.

Note that I've been referring to the inciting incident coercively (force action, have to act), but it's possible for an inciting incident to be aspirational, i.e. the protagonist simply wanting something and throwing their life out of equilibrium to get it. This does not, however, avoid the risk that leads to the underlying narrative purpose of an inciting incident in the first place: having an answer for the reader who asks why the protagonist can't just give up and go home once the going gets tough.

Often writers who have protagonists with aspirational, self-motivated inciting incidents avoid this problem by quickly creating a point of no return where action burns the bridge behind the hero, e.g. Neo taking the red pill early in The Matrix, which prevented him from ever returning to a normal life (this also doubled as an iconic "commitment", discussed below). Burning the bridge behind an aspirational hero is not strictly necessary, though, as long the writer has firmly established the intensity of the hero's aspiration.

Commitment

Commitment: the hero decides to resolve the problem caused by the inciting incident. This is the moment when the story stops happening to the hero, and the hero instead starts happening to the story. Having a moment of commitment ensures that the hero isn’t just getting dragged through the story like a fish with a hook through its lip, which the audience tends to dislike.

In The Lord of the Rings, the inciting incident is Frodo inheriting a magic ring from his uncle, which destroys Frodo’s equilibrium: it turns out the ring is the property of a dark lord, and he finds himself hunted by ghoulish horsemen intent on seizing the ring from him. Frodo reaches a safe haven, where he’s told that the ring must be cast into a certain volcano to prevent the rising of the dark lord. When Frodo agrees to transport the ring to the volcano instead of washing his hands of the matter, that’s the commitment. Although a commitment does not necessarily have to act as a "shut the door" moment, it often does and is more effective for doing so. In this case, once Frodo departs the safe haven with the magic ring, there's no easy way past that point for Frodo to say "screw this" and return to the Shire.

On the other hand, consider Ocean's Eleven as an example of a story that also does everything right, while looking very different doing so. When we open the movie, Danny Ocean is a prisoner up for parole, and the parole board hearing scene succinctly informs us of his equilibrium: he's a career criminal who got caught for the first time because his wife left him, which emotionally destroyed him and caused him to get sloppy. But here's where it gets interesting: the inciting incident and commitment have already occurred before the opening scene. Ocean has already decided to break his equilibrium by robbing his ex's new boyfriend and getting his wife back, and he's evidently, unambiguously committed to doing so from the start; so intensely committed that it never occurs to the audience that Ocean might at any point just choose to give up.

Note, though, that none of these structural choices are an issue, because much like it didn't matter in Fury that the protagonist's equilibrium was established retroactively and in passing, it's more important here that the inciting incident and commitment exist, not that they form core scenes around which the story is paced.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis: in the course of resolving the problem caused by the inciting incident, the hero either grows into someone capable of solving the problem or reveals that they were worthy all along. This is perhaps the most difficult to explain, because it seems the least technically relevant: after all, you've got something forcing the hero to act, and you've presumably got opposition to their action in the form of crisis, discussed below. Isn't that good enough?

In short stories, it can be, because the emotional investment you're asking the audience to make is quite limited, and as a result, a pay-off doesn't have to be very substantial to satisfy them that they got their "money's worth", either literally or in terms of time and interest committed. A metamorphosis is possible but unnecessary, or may be sufficiently satisfying given the length of the story that it forms the climax itself.

By contrast, long fiction requires a significant emotional investment (or at minimum, a significant time investment) and tension to match, and it's extremely difficult to establish that tension if the audience believes that the hero has begun the tale already equal to the task created by the inciting incident. "Just another day on the job" is a framework that can function in short fiction, but I've never seen it pulled off (or even attempted) in long fiction.

The closest I can envision are the latter two Bourne movies, which are essentially Bourne at the height of his powers and on a rampage. But even then, the inciting incidents presented by each film are more Superman-esque: the challenge isn't how much ass Bourne can kick, it's whether in kicking that ass he'll come any closer to emotional resolution regarding the death of his girlfriend, closure with his past, and peace in his future. His ability to rampage is enjoyable and unmatched, but it's never clear until the climax whether all those ass-whuppings have achieved the resolution he was hoping for.

While growth and revelation might seem distinct from each other, they are two sides of the same coin in that they both represent a tension between what the hero appears to be capable of and what the hero proves to be capable of. When metamorphosis is achieved through growth, the character is confirmed to be initially insufficient to the challenge posed by the inciting incident, but eventually adapts and becomes worthy. When metamorphosis is achieved through revelation, the audience discovers that their initial assessment of the hero's worth was flawed. In both cases, growth and revelation fulfill the same emotional function by improving the audience's perception of the character, thus resolving the tension created by their seeming inadequacy to the task.

Note that a metamorphosis can be, and often is, a mix of both growth and revelation, e.g. The Last Samurai, in which the alcoholic, PTSD-haunted army veteran first proves to be made of sterner moral stuff than we first supposed (revelation) and then also becomes martially and linguistically adept within his captor's society (growth).

The most cliché invocation of growth is the training montage, but it’s used so often precisely because it’s reliably emotionally powerful. In fact, it’s so powerful that you can build an entire story around it: see for example Edge of Tomorrow, in which the cowardly, inexperienced hero is forced to relive a disastrous sci-fi version of the Normandy landings over and over until, now a supremely skilled combat veteran with ice-water in his veins, he finds a way to lead his army to victory.

Whereas growth can be as crassly obvious as putting on muscle or developing a skill, revelation is more like Michelangelo revealing David in the block of marble. It's harder to do well because it involves playing a trick on the audience: making them think they're looking at a schmuck when in fact they're looking at someone who deserves to resolve the inciting incident. Taken is an excellent example of this: we think Liam Neeson's character is a washed up, neurotic nobody, but as the story progresses, we realize with every crisis he adeptly handles that he's an incredible badass. The Bourne Identity novel by Robert Ludlum relies on the same mechanism, in which powers of supreme badassery are discovered to be within the hero all along, in that case initially disguised by amnesia (the novel, in fact, has a much more interesting metamorphic tension related to the hero's revelations, because the hero doesn't know if he used to be a CIA officer or a heartless assassin for most of the story).

Nor is metamorphosis confined to action movies. Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, is an extremely powerful use of metamorphosis by revelation. An impoverished Indian teenager manages to win the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to be a Millionaire because, it is gradually revealed, his Odysseus-like life experiences have serendipitously armed him with answers to all the game show's questions.

In a tragedy (where the climax is failure of the protagonist), the metamorphosis is often reversed: it still occurs, but instead of the character growing, they may be systematically destroyed by events, and instead of revelation of virtue, their character is revealed to be corrupt. A Lovecraftian story about a detective driven insane during his investigation is a good example of the former; Moby Dick is an excellent example of the latter: Ahab, who is introduced as a man who used to be deeply concerned for the lives of his men, becomes maniacally obsessed with the white whale, to the exclusion of his responsibilities to his crew, which sets up the tragic climax of the destruction of the ship.

Both positive and negative metamorphoses may be present in a story. Breaking Bad's brilliance lies in part in its contrasting of Walter White's positive growth as a competent drug trafficker with the negative revelation of just what a terrible person he had always been beneath his former mild-mannered demeanour, which led to an appropriately emotionally complex climax.

Crisis

Crisis: the hero’s attempt to resolve the problem introduced by the inciting incident (their commitment) leads to an obstacle that threatens a bad outcome if not resolved. A crisis is the purest expression of tension in a narrative.

In a very simple story, there may only be one crisis, and its solution or the hero's failure to overcome it will resolve the inciting incident. Inevitably there are many crises in a work of long fiction. In order to build tension and maintain pacing, most stories move towards ever-larger crises with ever-larger stakes, until at last everything comes to a head, and the hero is staring down the barrel of the most serious risk of failure and adverse consequences.

Crisis and metamorphosis are substantially intertwined: e.g., inciting incidents and acts of commitment might lead to an initial crisis, which leads to a metamorphosis, which will likely in turn lead to another crisis and another metamorphosis.

Note that the most satisfactory type of crisis for a reader is typically one that arises organically from the consequences of the hero's previous actions in the story. This creates the impression of a "living world" that is responding to the hero's behavior, instead of a set of props manipulated for the audience's benefit. George R.R. Martin is famous in A Song of Ice and Fire for constantly tying old actions into current circumstances to achieve this effect, as exemplified by the slow transformation of a certain crossroads inn by the events of the world around it: a transformation that ultimately feeds back into and influences the plot at multiple junctures.

In Braveheart, William Wallace is a common Scotsman just returned from an education in Europe (equilibrium) whose wife is murdered by the local English garrison (inciting incident), which shifts him from his formerly pacifist attitude and motivates him to fight back (commitment). As the hero's rebellion grows in size and competence (metamorphosis), the English respond by attempting to kill Wallace in a variety of ways: with assassins, in open battle with an army, and by turning the Scottish nobility against him. Ecce consequences and crisis.

Climax

Climax: You have to deliver an emotionally satisfying ending: the climax is the moment of maximum pay-off. In long fiction, this invariably involves the resolution of the inciting incident for the protagonist, but it can often be more than that: it's the pay-off to every piece of tension the writer has developed over the course of the story, which can involve more than simply the outcome for the protagonist: it's a cascade of pay-offs. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver an ending that leaves the reader feeling like the time they invested finding out what happened was worthwhile.

Chekhov famously said that if you put a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act, you must fire it in the third act. My interpretation of this maxim is that you must satisfy the reader’s intrigue; you must not leave unfinished business - even if you don’t provide all the factual answers to the questions you’ve raised, you must provide emotional answers.

In the game The Last of Us, the protagonist Joel selfishly chooses to save the life of his surrogate daughter Ellie at the cost of preventing the formulation of a cure for a virus that’s shattered human society. Joel lies to Ellie about the choice he made and on some level she knows he lied and feels a form of survivor’s guilt. You can’t call it a happy ending and we don't find out what becomes of Joel and Ellie and their relationship in the long term, but it was emotionally satisfying: it was true to the characters and to the plot, and although the price was terrible, the hero achieved his initial goal of safeguarding Ellie. [edit: a sequel has since been released, but the story was intended to stand alone, so the point remains valid]

Sometimes an emotionally satisfying ending is heartbreaking, if you’re writing a romance. When you’re writing in the horror genre, a satisfying ending is often objectively horrific. Stephen King ends his Dark Tower saga by revealing that the hero has attempted to slay the villain before, and is trapped in a Sisyphean hunt that repeats endlessly. The last line of the last novel is the same as the first line of the first novel: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It’s the reader you’re attempting to emotionally satisfy, not the characters. Love, fear, and sadness aren’t opposites, they’re siblings - the opposite of all of them is apathy and frustration. What you cannot do is write an ending that says “screw the reader for caring enough to read this.”

New equilibrium

New equilibrium: this is your hero’s life as the story ends, showing the lasting effects of the story on the characters and environment and giving the reader the opportunity to compare what life was like for the hero before and after the inciting incident. It’s often appreciated by the reader to give them a space to reflect on the journey they’ve just been on. Not essential and should not be overlong where employed, but extremely powerful when employed properly: it's pure pay-off.

The last season of The Wire ends with a series of short scenes showing how everything has come full circle since the start of the first season. While the characters are all in radically different places from where they started, the cumulative effect is to make the audience realize that what they’ve been observing over the course of 60 hours of television is not merely a loose collection of individual stories, but the life cycle of an entire city, which has now come full circle and is about to begin again. For example (and this is only part of it), when we first started watching, Carver and Sydnor were rookie cops, McNulty was the embittered black sheep, Daniels the steady veteran, Pearlman the go-getting prosecutor, Phelan the new judge. In the final episode, we realize that Carver has become Daniels, Sydnor has become McNulty, Daniels has become Pearlman, Pearlman has joined Phelan on the bench, McNulty has exited stage right, new rookie cops have replaced Carver and Sydnor, and the whole drama is about to start another Sisyphean cycle.

Intelligent Design, aka Pacing Advice

Pacing refers to the skill with which exposition, tension, and pay-off are balanced in order to maintain reader interest, and nothing that I have just written tells you much about how to pace your story. This is because each story is profoundly idiosyncratic: there are so many ways to assemble all the foregoing components into a whole. The inciting incident is going to have to happen somewhere near the beginning and the climax is going to have to happen somewhere near the end, but how you get from A to B is intensely specific to your story.

For example, Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker (and film adaptation) features badass gunslinging sheriff for hire Virgil and his loyal deputy/sidekick Everett. At one point, Virgil tells Everett he'll never be as good a gunman as Virgil because Everett lets his feelings do his thinking for him and Virgil does not. Mere minutes before the end of the movie, Everett recognizes that the besotted Virgil's lover is cheating on him with the villain. He cold-bloodedly solves the problem by resigning as deputy, killing the villain in a duel that's one short step removed from murder, and riding off into the sunset, the textbook gunslinger. It's a powerful metamorphic revelation, and it would be a gross disservice to that story and to aspiring writers to tell them "the metamorphosis (singular) should occur 60% of the way into the story for pacing reasons".

It's egregious overreach to tell writers that if they simply line certain scenes up in the right order at the right intervals they'll have got the pacing right, when pacing can rush or drag inside a single scene. The only way to become skilled at pacing is to develop an instinct over the course of hundreds of thousands of words of drafting and critique for whether you've got the reader in hand or not.

reply from http://www.Reddit.com/u/MPCaton

I think that this is reasonable advice for writing genre fiction, and applying it will probably strengthen most work that is submitted on this sub. However, I don't think it works as a universal theory of narrative.

Core to this exercise is my belief that all stories share certain standard elements, because the commonalities of human nature lead to general agreement on what's satisfying and what's not. Skilled writers are often experts at disguising this structure in much the same way makeup artists are experts at keeping the makeup from looking obvious - but on closer inspection, it’s almost always there.

I really disagree with this premise. If we look at the history of literature, there are clearly big differences in what people saw as good stories, across time and place but also class and other factors. One of the clearest examples in my mind is the contested ending of Shakespeare's King Lear - between roughly 1680 and 1840, King Lear was usually performed with a totally different, bowdlerised ending by Nahum Tate involving all the "good" characters surviving and living happily, because most audiences of that time thought the original ending was terrible. That was partly an aesthetic choice but it was also normative - there was a perception that the original ending was too amoral. (Some critics of the time, like Addison and Hazlitt, disagreed, but others, like Dr Johnson, were great defenders of the bowdlerised version.)

I think that we currently have a relatively consistent set of narrative principles for modern genre fiction but they don't apply to a lot of literature that I've read outside of that setting, including both non-Western/pre-modern fiction and also Western postmodern fiction. In fact, I think that a lot of what postmodern fiction does is intentionally subverting these expectations - such stories go nowhere, end without a conclusion, never identify character motivation, and so on, partly to prove literary points about how stories can work. I'll put some examples in at the end of this post.

you'll see that ASOIAF is just pledge, turn, and prestige as deep as you care to look, layer after layer of PTP in a complex fractal pattern all building to one massive prestige, one giant emotional pay-off that some doubt he'll be able to successfully land.

I think there's an issue with this as an approach to analysing fiction. On the one hand, because the premise-turn-prestige cycle you have identified is so simple, you can see it in anything. On the other hand, that means that hugely complex works like ASOIAF will look like they have it in such dense layers that I'm not sure it really helps you analyse what makes the story work.

This reminds me of Karl Popper's critique of Marx and Freud. In both cases, the thinker identified a fundamental framework that they claimed could explain all human experience (class struggle and subconscious neurosis respectively). The problem with that, Popper argued, is that such analysis can explain anything and everything with yet more layers of class struggle (most famously when Lenin explained the continued stable growth of capitalism by identifying the meta-class struggle stage of imperialism) or subconscious neurosis (most famously when Freud / undergrad philosophy students accused detractors of reacting badly to his theories due to their own subconscious neuroses).

If something works in a way that doesn't seem like PTP, you can just read yet more PTP into it until it fits, so I'm not sure how helpful it is to analyse complex fiction

Examples that I don’t think have your overall structure: I'm going to caveat that as I said above, you can definitely read PTP cycles etc into a lot of these, but I don't think that they are what make the story good. Spoilers ahead but tagged.

Water Margin (Shi Nai'an) - One of the all time great Chinese "novels", the plot revolves around a huge number of sometimes-indistinguishable characters, who are caught up in fate and forced to become bandits. Many of these characters appear episodically but do not really come together for a long time, making the stakes unclear and not establishing the sort of emotional investment that a modern audience would expect.

The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) - The story is told as a series of diary entries, with an almost completely powerless protagonist who reflects on how she has come to be where she is and the society around her. SPOILER

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K Dick) - This book is an interweaving of different narrative strands SPOILER

The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro) - talked about this before on a different TFW thread Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco) - One of my all-time favourite books, I would particularly highlight this as a postmodern novel that mocks conventional modern narrative's attempts to provide clarity and finality. The plot revolves around characters' uncertain search for meaning, in deeper and deeper literary readings, until SPOILER

The Iliad - Despite its huge and lasting influence on the Western canon, the Iliad differs from what one would expect in many ways. On first reading it, I was very surprised to discover how little is resolved during the poem. The war doesn't start or end, and Achilles doesn't even die. The poem feels like a fragment, an inconclusive episode of a wider narrative which is repeatedly punctured by the gods to the point where it feels like the mortal protagonists barely have any agency. Achilles is almost the opposite of what you'd expect from a good protagonist: he is almost completely invulnerable (and during the events of the poem he is invulnerable, only suffering even minor inconvenience when gods intervene directly against him), but he has no clear goals for most of the poem, choosing to sulk in his tent for something that the narrative presents as a pretty stupid reason.

Greek tragedy as a genre - the overall tension/resolution cycle is there, but the protagonist doesn't grow and the ending normally works in a way that I can't describe as satisyfing to a modern reader/watcher (is Oedipus blinding himself with his mother's hairpins satisfying?).

The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse) - Like Foucault's Pendulum, I read the ending of this book to be almost provocatively unrewarding. The book is written as a fake biography, so we never really get a sense that we fully know what motivates the main character, and when the main crisis of the book arrives,SPOILER

The Great Gatsby (F Scott-Fitzgerald) - Most of the characters doesn't really have clear goals, and those that do don't get anywhere with them (SPOILER). The book feels set up to me to generate a feeling of meaninglessness, that what we are reaching for cannot be reached. I think it's a great book, but not because of having a clear narrative.

The Wake (Paul Kingsnorth) - Another postmodern book that I think revolts against any sense of narrative meaning. As we think we are progressing with the plot, we are consistently undermined by SPOILER (I don't think it's an amazing book, but my objections to it aren't really anything to do with the narrative, which I think is pretty cool.)

Also going to add that I think The Dark Tower has the worst ending of any book/series I’ve ever read - the quality of the books declined hugely and it seemed to me that King was out of his depth with the epic narrative, resorting to lame gimmicks like SPOILER in order to keep raising the stakes.

reply by Grizwald87

Amazing reply. I have to respond in pieces because I can't process it all at once.

The Dark Tower has the worst ending of any book/series I’ve ever read - the quality of the books declined hugely

Oh, they're totally unreadable by the last few novels, but the ending itself? The Sisyphean moment of cosmic horror? Delightful.

The Wake

As we think we are progressing with the plot, we are consistently undermined by the POV character's descent into madness, until finally the ending reveals that he was in fact always mad, and we cannot be certain that anything really took place as reported.

Unreliable narrators are fantastic, but I shit on the head of any story that ends with anything even remotely along the lines of "it was all a dream" or in this case, "it was all a madman's hallucination". It's the biggest middle finger a writer could possibly raise to a reader, because it thoroughly undermines the emotional stakes previously established. It declares the reader a fool for caring, which is the most profound insult a writer can deliver. To be clear, unreliable narrators are great (Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler being an all-timer), and an unreliable narrator who's a madman can also be top shelf, see Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, but "it was all a dream" can die in a fire.

I am going to have more to say about this later responding with respect to the Hesse and Eco suggestions.

The Iliad and Water Margin I have an awkward question about: are they great because they're timelessly good? Or are they great the way Battleship Potemkin or a football player from the leatherhead era is great: as a shining example of the the best of its era, but that perhaps doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny? I haven't read Water Margin, but I have read The Iliad, and I was hyper aware as I was reading that every frustration it caused me came with a big fat asterisk, which is that this is one of the oldest stories ever told, and experiencing it is therefore more like handling a piece of living antiquity than, say, enjoying a story for the sake of the story. Let's be honest, if someone handed you The Iliad as a modern work for critique and you didn't know its provenance, you would tear it to shreds.

Greek tragedy as a genre - the overall tension/resolution cycle is there, but the protagonist doesn't grow and the ending normally works in a way that I can't describe as satisyfing to a modern reader/watcher (is Oedipus blinding himself with his mother's hairpins satisfying?).

Remember that growth is only one aspect of metamorphosis: the other aspect is revelation, and I came to that recognition particularly on consideration of myth, in which the hero is generally revealed to be of worthy character by the trials placed before him. As for the endings, I think many myths (Biblical, Greek, etc.) are primordial horror stories at heart. Leaving the reader with ghoulish thrills and chills is absolutely emotionally satisfying, which is the criteria for a good prestige, not necessarily "happy". Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt / Orpheus looking over his shoulder at the last minute is epic campfire material, even today.

Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco) - One of my all-time favourite books, I would particularly highlight this as a postmodern novel that mocks conventional modern narrative's attempts to provide clarity and finality. The plot revolves around characters' uncertain search for meaning, in deeper and deeper literary readings, until

finally it all unravels and the characters are killed in a conspiracy that they know to be predicated on meaningless nonsense. It ends with the POV character, running for his life from mad cultists, discovering that his friend may have even fabricated the entire project they worked on in an attempt to recover the sense of meaning he briefly had as a child, and leaves the reader uncertain whether the POV character escapes his would-be assassins or even whether they are actually chasing him.

Full disclosure, I haven't read it, but let's apply GRUNT, which I will never get tired of saying, to Foucault's Pendulum and see how it performs.

The book opens with narrator Casaubon hiding in the Parisian technical museum Musée des Arts et Métiers after closing time. He believes that members of a secret society have kidnapped his friend Jacopo Belbo and are now after him. Most of the novel is then told in flashback as Casaubon waits in the museum.

Okay, pretty standard "prologue": we are given a taste of tension in order to hold us over during the more expository phase of the work.

In 1970s Milan, Casaubon is studying the history of the Knights Templar

Equilibrium.

Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon become submerged in occult manuscripts that draw flimsy connections between historical events

Inciting incident.

and have the idea to develop their own as a game.

Commitment.

The three increasingly become involved in The Plan and begin to wonder if it could be true.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis. This is an interesting point and I'm going to revise OP to make it, but in a tragedy (a type of fiction which I think includes most of the horror genre) the metamorphosis is often reversed: it still occurs, but instead of the character growing, they may be systematically destroyed by events, and instead of revelation of virtue, their character is revealed to be corrupt. A Lovecraftian story about a protagonist driven insane during his search is a good example of the former; Moby Dick is an excellent example of the latter: Ahab, who is introduced as a man who used to be deeply concerned for the lives of his men, is slowly revealed to be maniacally obsessed with the white whale, to the exclusion of his responsibilities to his crew, which sets up the tragic climax of the destruction of the ship.

Although the main plot does detail a conspiratorial "Plan", the book focuses on the development of the characters, and their slow transition from skeptical editors, mocking the Manutius manuscripts to credulous Diabolicals themselves

In Foucault's Pendulum, Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon are experiencing a metamorphosis, it's just a negative one: a descent into paranoia and delusion.

In 'the present as Casaubon hides in the museum, a group of people gather around the pendulum for an arcane ritual. Belbo is questioned but he refuses to reveal what he knows, inciting a riot...

Crisis

Casaubon escapes the museum through the Paris sewers, eventually fleeing to the countryside villa where Belbo had grown up.

While waiting in the villa, Casaubon finds an old manuscript by Belbo that relates a mystical experience he had when he was twelve, in which he perceived ultimate meaning beyond signs and semiotics. He realizes that much of Belbo's behavior and possibly his creation of the Plan and even his death was inspired by Belbo's desire to recapture that lost meaning.

Climax.

Have I misunderstood anything about the structure of the book? I get that it has lots of profound things to say, but as a piece of fiction, it seems pretty straightforward: the protagonist is a scholar who creates an occult conspiracy for fun, only to be caught up in his own hoax and nearly destroyed by it. That's a great plot!

leaves the reader uncertain whether the POV character escapes his would-be assassins or even whether they are actually chasing him.

This isn't a problem: as I explained in OP, the question is whether the climax of the story is emotionally satisfying, not whether it ties off every factual question the reader has. Joe Abercrombie ends The Last Argument of Kings with his protagonist jumping out a high window to escape an attempt to murder him, and we have no idea if he even survives impact. Didn't matter, because the factual question of whether he survived wasn't what was relevant to a successful climax, it was the emotional question "what becomes of Logen Ninefingers?", and the emotional answer is both tragic and slightly comedic: he ends as he began the story, friendless and on the run due to his character flaws. And that was satisfying.

I really disagree with this premise. If we look at the history of literature, there are clearly big differences in what people saw as good stories, across time and place but also class and other factors. One of the clearest examples in my mind is the contested ending of Shakespeare's King Lear - between roughly 1680 and 1840, King Lear was usually performed with a totally different, bowdlerised ending by Nahum Tate involving all the "good" characters surviving and living happily, because most audiences of that time thought the original ending was terrible. That was partly an aesthetic choice but it was also normative - there was a perception that the original ending was too amoral. (Some critics of the time, like Addison and Hazlitt, disagreed, but others, like Dr Johnson, were great defenders of the bowdlerised version.)

I don't think audiences of the time thought the ending was terrible. Tate came along 75 years later and did what we all do with old fiction, which is modify it to make it something that works better for us and for our particular crowd. That tastes vary and tastes change doesn't affect the underlying technical skill involved.

"a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that [he] soon perceiv'd [he] had seiz'd a Treasure"

That doesn't sound like someone who thought he was fixing a disaster. Why can't the answer be that the ending was too tragic for the taste of many and Tate's version too saccharine, but each were objectively good? Tate's version dominated for over a century, and Shakespeare's version has proved equally enduring (notice that we tend to reproduce bastardizations of his work so warped it would put Tate to shame). Why can't they both be good takes on the same story, the same way Sean Connery and Daniel Craig are both considered good but very different takes on James Bond?

I think that a lot of what postmodern fiction does is intentionally subverting these expectations - such stories go nowhere, end without a conclusion, never identify character motivation, and so on, partly to prove literary points about how stories can work.

I think a lot of postmodern fiction (and postmodern art) is destructive of literary norms in a not particularly thoughtful way. Yes, running around knocking out the walls is all well and fun and it does turn out you can open up some spectacular views that way, but like, some of those walls are load-bearing, man.

Infinite Jest is a pretty good example. Genius prose. Some of the best individual chapters of writing that I have ever read, but it all came together to form a mediocre novel, because DFW thought he was too good for such mortal concerns as pacing and tension.

reply by MPCaton

I don't think audiences of the time thought the ending was terrible. Tate came along 75 years later and did what we all do with old fiction, which is modify it to make it something that works better for us and for our particular crowd. That tastes vary and tastes change doesn't affect the underlying technical skill involved.

This is basically what I'm trying to say, except that I would extend it to say that the underlying technical skill is so inevitably linked to the cultural values of what good literature is that it's inseparable. So I agree that the ending was too tragic for some tastes, and Tate's too saccharine for others, but that doesn't mean that they're both "objectively" good - I think it helps illustrate that no literature is objectively good, it's always a subjective issue of taste dictated by your cultural context.

The Iliad and Water Margin I have an awkward question about: are they great because they're timelessly good? Or are they great the way Battleship Potemkin or a football player from the leatherhead era is great: as a shining example of the the best of its era, but that perhaps doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny? // Let's be honest, if someone handed you the Iliad as a modern work for critique and you didn't know its provenance, you would tear it to shreds.

I wouldn't see it as well put together to be a modern work, but that's the thing - it's not a modern work. It's not even a novel. It's an epic poem with a totally different set of aims and assumptions. It's not that we've got better at telling stories since Homer, we're just telling totally different stories for different people and different situations.

We know that the Iliad, even if it were the work of one man, was the product of a long literary tradition. The incredibly stylised form and incomplete narrative make a compelling case that it was composed for a knowing audience, familiar with both the story's underlying myth and its epic poetic format. So what makes it so great, such that it was praised by the Greeks as their greatest work of literature? (Moreover why did they praise it more than the Odyssey, which fits our modern taste so much more easily?)

I think we can only conclude that they weren't looking for the same things as us in the story. It wasn't about suspense, resolution or character growth, but rather about the depth of emotion conveyed, the epic tone of the heroic battles, the cleverness of the poetic metaphors, the foreshadowing of Achilles' death and Troy's fall. These, after all, are the areas where it may surpass the Odyssey, whereas in narrative completeness, character development and suspense/revelation it does not.

On postmodernism, I can only say that the sheer controversy over it almost proves the point - there is no one perspective on what makes stories work, and the stories that challenge how stories work have the widest array of perspectives of all. Clearly a huge proportion of people cannot stand abstract art or deconstructed literature, but the people who produce such art and literature aren't trying to make something that everyone will like. (I haven't read Infinite Jest, so can't comment any further there.)

grizwald

I think there's an issue with this as an approach to analysing fiction. On the one hand, because the premise-turn-prestige cycle you have identified is so simple, you can see it in anything. On the other hand, that means that hugely complex works like ASOIAF will look like they have it in such dense layers that I'm not sure it really helps you analyse what makes the story work.

This reminds me of Karl Popper's critique of Marx and Freud. In both cases, the thinker identified a fundamental framework that they claimed could explain all human experience (class struggle and subconscious neurosis respectively). The problem with that, Popper argued, is that such analysis can explain anything and everything with yet more layers of class struggle (most famously when Lenin explained the continued stable growth of capitalism by identifying the meta-class struggle stage of imperialism) or subconscious neurosis (most famously when Freud / undergrad philosophy students accused detractors of reacting badly to his theories due to their own subconscious neuroses).

I think the extreme simplicity of an observation is no necessary indictment of its truth, profundity, or utility. Once we recognize that both a scene and a novel are predicated on the success of exposition, tension, and pay-off, it can absolutely help understand why that scene or novel does or does not work.

The problem with Marx's framework is that it was overextended into matters to which it didn't apply, and there was no way for his adherents to know that they'd done so. The problem with Freud is that he was simply wrong about most of his hypotheses. The problem with both is that is was impossible to disprove either the truth or efficacy of their diagnoses/proposed solutions.

By contrast, if you have a problem with the application of GRUNT, it's easy enough to figure out whether it's flawed: either it helps us understand why fiction works or it fails to do so.

cyanmagentacyan

I don't think there are any universal rules of narrative, though there are things that work much, much better than others, especially where you want to drag your reader by the nose into the book and leave them emerging, shaking and thrilled at the last page, realising it's two in the morning and they have work tomorrow - no, today. That is, if you're writing genre fiction, which at its sharpest can be a high-speed emotional drug, though it can be more gentle in flow and delivery while keeping the same mechanisms in place. I do agree with you that structure guides that state what to do and not why are intensely annoying, because they give no logical means to extrapolate or experiment with fresh methods of achieving the same things - but then I have mostly come across these guides second hand, and things rarely gain from condensed repetition, so I may be doing some an injustice. The core thing here though is what is useful during writing; many of these analyses are easiest applied after.

There are perhaps universal guidelines, which you can depart from carefully and with choice, but which straying from too often or carelessly will weaken a story.

Literary fiction is meant to be savoured and considered - analysed even - and so here experimenting with the structure will be consciously appreciated by the reader as part of that slow consideration, with its own elements of meaning, as variation on structure interacts with story. Mind you, I think that sort of deconstruction is relatively recent, and doesn't always apply to most books now regarded as classics: Anna Karenina I sat and read for three days straight, and failed to hand in a university essay as a result. Also, if something can be so easily seen as a variation, it is clearly a variation on something: the general guidelines.

Ah, now I have thought of a successful 'failure' of narrative structure as far back as the nineteenth century. Bleak House is notable in that its two major plot threads butt up against each other and yet never fully interact - it's been criticised for it, but in my opinion it's one of the strengths of the book, whether fully intentional on Dicken's part or not. Bleak House is so full of death, of unfulfilment, of things not turning out well or never being completed (Jarndyce v Jarndyce, I'm looking at you), even a person going up in smoke, that it is entirely appropriate to the mood and intention of the book for the plots never to fully join, but instead work out their separate, almost-linked resolutions.

Troilus and Cressida is arguably another such, with three separate endings tacked on one after the other, so the play stutters out. Again, it's a play about cynicism, reputation, observation, in which the Iliad is played as small and sordid - made up of little betrayals, petty squabbles and manipulation. Again the end of the play is sometimes seen as a weakness, but its failure and fragmentation is surely deliberate, just as Helen only appears in a single scene, halfway through, and the way that scene is written makes the whole story rotten at its physical core. I got to know it quite well when trying to abridge it for a local drama group. Complete disaster, rather fittingly.

On a different level, in response to your comment about

dodgy statistical inventories of dissected stories

have you read Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale? If I wanted to be dismissive, I could say this is precisely what this is: Propp conducted a structural analysis of the Russian fairy story and discovered to his surprise that there were a relatively small number of elements present, many of which occur in a exact order. They need not all be present but they follow on in predictable sequence. It does get to the point near the end of the work where he starts to make allowances by invoking multiple narrative cycles to justify repetitions, and things get a little weak. However, I came to the conclusion he was definitely on to something, something transferable into other contexts, and understanding elements which 'naturally' pair and follow in their original environment can inform modern use of similar elements. And you will find you have used them. There are some very familiar narrative tropes here.

The test, followed by a gift;

temptation from the enemy leading to a broken interdiction;

the flight of the hero, pursued.

I suspect their universality in such an old form means most readers will have assimilated versions of them in childhood, and if you use them well, then you have your reader by the hindbrain. Again, the way Propp's elements interact come back to my thoughts above: universal guidelines, of which parts can be omitted or varied here and there without harm - or with positive benefit in some cases - but go too far and things will start to crumple.

Finally, thanks for the reference to Harrison Bergeron. That story has been part of my mental furniture for years, but I came across it in a sci-fi collection we studied at school, I had forgotten both the name of the story and author, and never got around to looking it up. It's good to have it correctly labelled at last.

grizwald

Bleak House is notable in that its two major plot threads butt up against each other and yet never fully interact - it's been criticised for it, but in my opinion it's one of the strengths of the book, whether fully intentional on Dicken's part or not. Bleak House is so full of death, of unfulfilment, of things not turning out well or never being completed (Jarndyce v Jarndyce, I'm looking at you), even a person going up in smoke, that it is entirely appropriate to the mood and intention of the book for the plots never to fully join, but instead work out their separate, almost-linked resolutions.

Does having two major plot threads that never fully interact contradict GRUNT (hehe I love that acronym, it feels very Calvin and Hobbes-y)? I can see it creating issues with pacing and tension if not handled carefully, but there's nothing inherently bad about multiple threads that don't link up.

Troilus and Cressida is arguably another such, with three separate endings tacked on one after the other, so the play stutters out. Again, it's a play about cynicism, reputation, observation, in which the Iliad is played as small and sordid - made up of little betrayals, petty squabbles and manipulation. Again the end of the play is sometimes seen as a weakness, but its failure and fragmentation is surely deliberate, just as Helen only appears in a single scene, halfway through, and the way that scene is written makes the whole story rotten at its physical core. I got to know it quite well when trying to abridge it for a local drama group. Complete disaster, rather fittingly.

I think it's perhaps worth pointing out here that as near as historians can tell, the play was performed either once or not at all in Shakespeare's lifetime, and it's not exactly considered one of the Bard's bangers even today. The list of modern revivals is notable for its omission of the sort of usual hopeful phrases for works not appreciated in their own lifetime, like "people began to see it for its true genius". It seems normal rather than exceptional that it melted down on your local drama group.

Occam's Razor suggests that it's just a bad play by a good playwright, and the prospect doesn't shock me much: I think we understand that most great SFF writers (for example) who have long publication histories have a few duds lurking in their back catalogue. As I mentioned to u/MPCaton in discussing The Iliad, there's a warping effect of history on our perception of quality. Certain works and writers take on a sort of sanctified teflon reputation that I don't think is necessarily helpful to a cold assessment of the strengths and flaws in their work.

And you will find you have used them.

Aha! But have I? The example you gave is something I was very much aware of and sought to avoid:

The test, followed by a gift; temptation from the enemy leading to a broken interdiction; the flight of the hero, pursued.

Test? Gift? Temptation? Flight? Pursuit? These are clearly elements, I would suggest, that are not universally transferable.

What I've sought is something than can be transferred, precisely because I didn't just take inventory, I looked for the narrative purpose behind what I found. Reading about Propp, I feel like he circled around the same issue without taking the final step and searching for purpose: does he ever explain why any of those 31 elements he identified must be in there, or is he simply satisfied to have identified them?

Cyanmagentacyan

Hello, I've found a chance to reply at last.

Let's see: re Bleak House - you implied very strongly in your assessment of how the end of ASOIAF ought to work if we ever see it that plot threads should all come together at the end. If that's not a core part of your theory, fair enough.

Troilus and Cressida isn't a dud. It's a bit erratic, but the reason for its failure to be popular as far as I can see is more that it's pretty grimdark, with not a hero in sight in Troy itself; what's supposed to be the most heroic locus in the Western canon. Cynicism that rolls in the dirt of metaphors invoking sexual decay, disorder, mistrust - it's hardly going to be everyone's cup of tea. But I've been into it in some detail and there's quality there, and structural innovation (a scene of betrayal, overheard, with yet another person commenting on the reactions of those overhearing comes to mind). It's just deeply not nice. Edward Bond's modern retelling of Lear is pretty similar, and was my introduction to the concept. He's the hero, I thought - no, she must be - and at last, I understood there wasn't one. That was a pretty big revelation at the time.

Incidentally, the drama group problem was solely due to the people available - many people had unexpected commitments that summer, and the play we did eventually go with, with a smaller cast, I had to cast largely gender-blind to keep us in business.

And on Propp: the elements he discusses are within the Russian fairy tale. Some are more transferable than you might think. I was reading and laughing as I recognised them within my manuscript, highly amused because I had not set out to write a Russian fairy tale, but clearly in part, I had. But what I really meant to emphasise in my previous comment (I failed, I was very tired) was that, to have recourse to metaphor yet again, while your theory is providing architects' plans, or structural engineers' recommendations, Propp is looking at the building blocks and how they fit together physically, and I do think some familiarity with this helps with narrative instinct.

Perhaps you will dislike the word instinct, but there is always more than one way to do something, even if one were to abide scrupulously by the rules you lay out, and structure is dependent on substance as well as on - I will continue the architectural metaphor further - the load-bearing walls and transferal of forces of narrative tension and resolution.

Propp specifically did not seek for purpose. His analysis was structuralist and intended as an exercise in clarity of classification. He was concerned that prior analyses had muddied the waters with subjective classification of stories by theme rather than physical structure and was attempting to move away from that. He stated he was astonished to find the fundamental similarities between the stories that emerged. I do however think that purpose and narrative structure are implicit in the way he found the pieces came together.

grizwald

while your theory is providing architects' plans, or structural engineers' recommendations, Propp is looking at the building blocks and how they fit together physically, and I do think some familiarity with this helps with narrative instinct.

Propp specifically did not seek for purpose. His analysis was structuralist and intended as an exercise in clarity of classification. He was concerned that prior analyses had muddied the waters with subjective classification of stories by theme rather than physical structure and was attempting to move away from that.

I think I see your point, but what I'd suggest is that Propp is classifying fiction according to a different purpose. His is academic and (I assume) anthropological, whereas mine is, as you neatly put it, architectural.

So for Propp, what matters is not why the thing is present, but merely that it is present. Propp isn't looking to make a story of his own with the staying power of a fable. He doesn't need or want an instruction manual on how to put one together, whereas I'm looking at functional stories to figure out how they function so that those principles can be applied to a fresh construction.

Perhaps you will dislike the word instinct, but there is always more than one way to do something, even if one were to abide scrupulously by the rules you lay out, and structure is dependent on substance as well as on - I will continue the architectural metaphor further - the load-bearing walls and transferal of forces of narrative tension and resolution.

To switch to a biology metaphor for a moment, I suspect that if you sat Propp and I down and asked us whether a bird wing and a dragonfly wing were the same, he might say no, whereas I would say yes. While the underlying physical structure is different, he might say, I would reply that they both use the same principles to achieve the same purpose.

There are many ways to do something, but I think it's selling GRUNT short to suggest it denies that. What GRUNT does is attempt find the "somethings" that are essential to the telling of a good story. GRUNT is an attempt to get writers to look at a narrative structure the way an engineer would look at a house: whereas others might see a nice-looking room, the engineer is identifying the load-bearing walls, whether they're adequately doing their job, and how they might be better placed to perform that task.

What GRUNT suggests is that whether you're constructing an emergency lean-to or a skyscraper, the same principles apply, and awareness of them will allow you to figure out why your structure is working or not, and how to improve it. GRUNT doesn't suggest, though, that you must do things a certain way in order to achieve a positive result. It's partially diagnostic (this is why your building fell down) and partially suggestive (here are some rules of thumb that will, if followed, make it less likely that your building will fall down). Like, I suppose it's possible to build a structure without load-bearing walls, but in all probability you're going to have some, and you should know which ones they are.

tartifloutte

This is some great insights Grizwald, and definitely nice to see the effort that went into this post!

grizwald

If anyone thinks they've spotted a hole in this, I'd love to hear it. Likewise (maybe more so), if you can think of a piece of fiction that successfully flies in the face of this, let me know about it!

Wes-F-89

I'll post something my instructor taught me in my Advanced Fiction course that may also help people.

To break it down to it's simplest model: Every novel should be made up of dozens, if not hundreds, of "scenes and sequels." Which is a balance between plot and story, action and reaction . Scene is where stuff happens

Sequel is the reaction.

Scene is where the tension is built up

Sequel is the release of tension.

This doesn't have to be tension of life or death. It's not like your protagonist should run into a life or death situation in every chapter. That would be redundant. But the tension can be small and simple. Such as showing up late somewhere; or missing an important phone call. It is these short scene and sequels which help build tension and conflict throughout the novel

Then the author should focus on keeping reader's interest. This is done through escalation. A murder threat on page 10 turns into an actual murder on page 40.

Then there's narrative pacing. This is controlling time in your novel by using proper transitions. If you have a scene full of suspense and conflict resulting in rising tension, don't dive deep into a character's thoughts about when he/she was a child, etc etc.

Use foreshadowing and Chekhov's gun. Reader's like to think they may have guessed a future plot point early in the book. They noticed something on page 5 that sticks in their heads, so when page 70 comes around and they learn they were right about the foreshadowing, they become that much more involved in the story, as if they were a part of the story.

Snappy_Dave

The Iliad and Water Margin I have an awkward question about: are they great because they're timelessly good? Or are they great the way Battleship Potemkin or a football player from the leatherhead era is great: as a shining example of the the best of its era, but that perhaps doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny? I haven't read Water Margin, but I have read The Iliad, and I was hyper aware as I was reading that every frustration it caused me came with a big fat asterisk, which is that this is one of the oldest stories ever told, and experiencing it is therefore more like handling a piece of living antiquity than, say, enjoying a story for the sake of the story. Let's be honest, if someone handed you The Iliad as a modern work for critique and you didn't know its provenance, you would tear it to shreds.

This conversation got so long I couldn't figure out where to properly reply so I'm sticking this at the bottom.

First of all, I have no problem with G.R.U.N.T. I think it does it's stated purpose well enough. This is more just my response to the increasingly derailed conversation.

I think you're implying that there's a progression to story-telling. That people in the Classical area weren't as good of story tellers. I'm concluding this from your comparison using leatherhead footballs players and the "modern scrutiny" statement.

I believe there's some argument to be made for progression in a narrow sense. For example, I think the Sword of Shanaara, while entertaining, is mediocre at best; it just happened to be the right thing at the right time to prove that adult epic fantasy was a profitable market.

But I'm not a fan of applying "universal" across all cultures and times. We, as English-speaking Westerners in 2020, have been conditioned by a massive intake of media into liking certain things. We can't say for certain what people in Classical Greece liked, but apparently the Iliad resonated with them.

Other examples of works that may be considered very atypical that are well-acclaimed:

1. War and Peace

2. American Psycho

3. Dante's Inferno

4. Possibly the Mahabarata (I haven't read it though so maybe I'm wrong)

Indeed, in a lot of medieval and ancient literature, this seems to apply:

I think we can only conclude that they weren't looking for the same things as us in the story. It wasn't about suspense, resolution or character growth, but rather about the depth of emotion conveyed, the epic tone of the heroic battles, the cleverness of the poetic metaphors, the foreshadowing of Achilles' death and Troy's fall. These, after all, are the areas where it may surpass the Odyssey, whereas in narrative completeness, character development and suspense/revelation it does not.

I don't see story-telling as a progression from primitive to more advanced. Rather, it's a reflection of what a society values, of the technology available, and of many other factors I don't feel like getting into.

Also, I admit my understanding of non-Western literature is next to none, so I can't go into any depth, but I wouldn't be surprised if many Chinese, Indian, and Japanese stories would seem really off to Westerners.