{"id":1739,"date":"2018-02-24T09:56:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-24T14:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=1739"},"modified":"2022-06-15T15:35:42","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T19:35:42","slug":"and-then-is-the-key-to-writing-shitty-stories-that-dont-hold-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2018\/02\/and-then-is-the-key-to-writing-shitty-stories-that-dont-hold-together\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;And then&#8221; is the key to writing shitty stories that don&#8217;t hold together (UPDATED on Feb 24, 2018)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Key\u00a0takeaway:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0If the beats on your story outline can only be conjoined with &#8220;and then&#8221;, you are fucked. They need to be joined by &#8220;but&#8221; or &#8220;and therefore.&#8221;\u00a0 By forcing yourself to use &#8220;but&#8221; and &#8220;and therefore,&#8221; you force yourself to go into the heads of your characters and actually pin down\u00a0<em>why<\/em> they are doing what they do\u2014which is a thing readers want to understand, and will be cranky if they can&#8217;t figure out.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theafw.com\/blog\/south-park-writers-share-their-writing-rule-1\/#.\">Watch this<\/a> for details:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Writing Advice from Matt Stone &amp; Trey Parker @ NYU | MTVU&#039;s &quot;Stand In&quot;\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vGUNqq3jVLg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong><small>UPDATED February 24, 2018<\/small><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Just to clarify, this is <em>exactly<\/em> what folks are talking about when they talk about character&#8217;s <em>&#8220;<strong>motivations<\/strong><\/em>.<em>&#8220;<\/em> If the characters&#8217; motivations aren&#8217;t clear to the audience, it&#8217;s either because:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>You don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s motivating your characters to do what they do or<\/li>\n<li>You haven&#8217;t put those motivations on the screen\/page<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Subsequently, all the audience can figure out is &#8220;This happened and then that happened and then the other thing happened&#8221;\u2014and unless they are willing to work overtime to dowse those motivations\u00a0by reverse engineering them from the results, they are not going to be able to figure them out (and, even if they <em>do<\/em> figure out this unnecessary puzzle, they have every right to be pissed at you, because solving plot\/motivation riddles isn&#8217;t their job; they&#8217;ve paid <em>you<\/em> to entertain\u00a0<em>them<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>This is the <em>Number One<\/em>\u00a0problem that I see hobbling (or, more often <em>crippling<\/em>) otherwise solid storytelling\u2014especially in film\u00a0(where, for a variety of cultural and economic reasons, a lot of the writers are really\u00a0just barely cutting their storytelling teeth): the story gets\u00a0lost because the plot goes slack because characters are just <em>doing stuff<\/em> for no discernible reason.\u00a0 The result is that the audience gets bored\u2014and\u00a0subsequently angry, because you have wasted their money and time.<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I were watching a horror movie the other day that perfectly illustrated the value of\u00a0making sure you&#8217;ve got\u00a0a story held together by\u00a0<em><strong>&#8220;but&#8221;\/&#8221;and therefore&#8221;<\/strong><\/em>, not <strong><em>&#8220;and then&#8221;<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0The movie ended, and\u00a0we\u00a0were lost for a second, trying to figure out what had just happend.\u00a0 Then\u00a0it all clicked together.\u00a0 The story, I realized, fit together really nicely\u2014in fact,\u00a0it fit together more then nicely, it fit together <em>gratifyingly<\/em>\u2014but\u00a0in many individual scenes, the character&#8217;s didn&#8217;t seem to be motivated to do what they were doing.\u00a0 From the audience&#8217;s perspective, the scenes were stitched together by\u00a0<strong><em>&#8220;and then&#8221;<\/em><\/strong>s, instead of<em><strong>&#8220;but&#8221;\/&#8221;and therefore&#8221;<\/strong><\/em>s. The <strong><em>story<\/em><\/strong> was solid, but the\u00a0<em><strong>plot<\/strong><\/em> was muddled because understanding a <em><strong>plot<\/strong><\/em> requires understanding the causality at the heart of the story and understanding\u00a0<em>that<\/em> necessitates understanding why folks do what they do\u2014i.e., their <em><strong>motivations<\/strong><\/em>. (For the canonical bit on <em><strong>story vs. plot<\/strong><\/em>, check out E.M. Forster&#8217;s <em>Aspects of the Novel<\/em> or just <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aerogrammestudio.com\/2013\/03\/04\/e-m-forster-the-difference-between-story-and-plot\/\">read this<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>(Incidentally, the horror movie in question was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hulu.com\/watch\/1047427\"><em>The Gateway<\/em>,\u00a0streaming on\u00a0Hulu <\/a>[originally titled\u00a0<em>The Curtain<\/em>\u2014which is, for a variety of reasons, a much better title]. Despite what I&#8217;ve just said, I really did dig this movie; if you like quirky non-Euclidean horror, give it a whirl.)<\/p>\n<p>So, how do you avoid pissing off your audience this way?\u00a0 One trick I know a lot of writers use (I think I first heard it from Jeff Vandermeer, who calls it <em><strong>&#8220;reverse outlining&#8221;<\/strong><\/em>) is to take the offending story and then re-outline it.\u00a0 9 times out of 10, just writing it out in outline form, beat-by-beat, will surface problems in the logic or pacing of the story (even if you aren&#8217;t an outliner usually\u2014I almost never write from an outline, but reverse outlining can often help me see where I&#8217;ve messed up, in much the same way as art students used to be taught to critique drawings by first flipping them upside-down).\u00a0 Once you have that outline, step through it and make sure each element can be connected to the next by either a <em><strong>&#8220;but&#8221;<\/strong><\/em> or an <em><strong>&#8220;and therefore&#8221;<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Flag any line\u00a0items that you can&#8217;t almost immediately link in this way, and then go back and look at them.\u00a0 <em><strong>pro-tip<\/strong><\/em>:\u00a0Many of this, you&#8217;ll find, can\u00a0just be cut\u2014turns out they&#8217;re\u00a0meaningless little skin-tags marring the smooth skin of your plot.\u00a0 Others, you&#8217;ll need to sort out and rewrite, but even there, you&#8217;ll be shocked at how often the\u00a0<em><strong>&#8220;but&#8221;\/<\/strong><\/em><em><strong>&#8220;and therefore&#8221; <\/strong><\/em>pop out once you\u00a0clean the crud out of there.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong><small>UPDATED June 15, 2022<\/small><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Fixed broken video and link<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Key\u00a0takeaway:\u00a0If the beats on your story outline can only be conjoined with &#8220;and then&#8221;, you are fucked. They need to be joined by &#8220;but&#8221; or &#8220;and therefore.&#8221;\u00a0 By forcing yourself to use &#8220;but&#8221; and &#8220;and therefore,&#8221; you force yourself to go into the heads of your characters and actually pin down\u00a0why they are doing what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2018\/02\/and-then-is-the-key-to-writing-shitty-stories-that-dont-hold-together\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8220;And then&#8221; is the key to writing shitty stories that don&#8217;t hold together (UPDATED on Feb 24, 2018)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11,8,3],"tags":[107,55,39,253,254,25],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1739"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3054,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions\/3054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}