Post #198 January 13 2020

“Get in late, get out early”

For our study of Point #9 in the storylab listing of good storytelling practices, I refer back to Post #189 and thank the website storysci.com for this advice…

“Start as late as possible in your scene or story to provide both audience interest and optimal conflict, and then end the scene as soon the conflict has run its course. This doesn’t mean truncating valuable exposition or foregoing a beginning, but it does mean opening where the vital information starts. And once the scene or story has said all there is that needs to be said, get out! Don’t hang around and dawdle or you will be diluting your story’s final punch. For example, the audience doesn’t need to witness an entire 4-hour board meeting. They only need to see the handful of minutes that count. In short: focus on where the action is happening.”

1. This is all about grabbing the reader immediately and keeping him (or her) hooked by concentrating in your story on what is most important.

I like to start a story right in the middle of the action.  For example, in my sf short story ‘Second Sun,’ this is the opening paragraph:

Not everyone was happy about having a second Sun.  That’s why the Guardians sent me to Bernini in the first place.  Kisan Malakel, engineering inspector 1^st class for the Concordance.  I had an official job to do and that was to make sure everything aboard station Bernini was up to spec…the gas pulses streaming off Saturn’s atmosphere were coming in on schedule…the deflector controls were receiving and diverting the pulses properly into Jupiter’s atmosphere…the King of Planets was bulking up on schedule so the thing could be ignited on time…that all aspects of the Second Sun project were proceeding according to calculations.  Oh, I had a job all right.  But my real job was to sabotage the whole works, sabotage the deflector system, and get away before station Bernini was likely destroyed by an incoming pulse.

 

Say what you will, this paragraph grabs you right away.  The premise itself is fairly unique.  And we learn in the last sentence that the narrator is there to sabotage the whole works.

1. Hook the reader’s interest early.  Use conflict.  Something unique.  Some memorable or unexpected details of setting or character.  The storysci.com advice is well intentioned. Ask yourself what you like to read when a story opens.   Do you want to read the entire minutes of a four-hour board meeting?  Or do you want to know why the CEO has a loaded gun in his lap and what he plans to do with it?  Will he murder the entire board?  Threaten everyone to get better quarterly results?  Take out his frustrations on the HR guy?  Just the suspense alone in the situation I’ve sketched should keep a reader turning the pages.  That’s what you want.
2. The advice to get in late and get out early is really about doing whatever it takes to advance the story…and only that.  Unless it’s germane to the story, sets up motivation, reveals character or something like this, leave the rest out.  Remember what ultimately drives a story forward: Your hero has a problem and wants to solve it; people or situations or life gets in the way solving the problem and conflict develops; tension rises as the hero is continuously frustrated; just when your hero is about to blow his stack, he solves the problem or at least fails magnificently and the problem is resolved. Every single word in your story should be traceable back to one of these elements.  If it can’t be, take it out.
3. Focus on the action.  Your characters should be doing something to solve their problem, not just sitting around bitching and moaning.  When you convey to your wife what happened at the office today, do you drop every last detail on her or do you give her the highlights and the most dramatic parts?  It’s the same with storytelling.

Picture this: Og and Grog are sitting around the campfire one evening after a dinner of mammoth meat and tree roots.  Og is sharpening his spear points.  Grog is skinning a hide.  Og grunts and gestures at Grog: “If you had followed my orders, you wouldn’t have been injured by that mammoth, you stupid dolt.”  After some loud arguing back and forth, and few threats, Slamdok intervenes and, using more gestures and grunts, recounts the events of the day that led to Grog’s injury and tonight’s dinner.  Some modifications are made to the account and after awhile, after everyone is stuffed with enough mammoth meat and some fermented berries that Slamdok’s wife made, everybody agrees that this is what happened.  The day’s hunt goes down in the annals of the tribe as “the way things happened.”

It becomes a legend.  Later, maybe a myth.

Man is preeminently a storytelling animal.  We don’t know if this is how stories began but we do know, from research, that stories have for generations served a profoundly important evolutionary purpose.

I have posted about this before.  Why does our brain love stories so much?  In an article from the Greater Good Science Center (University of California, Berkeley) in December 2013, neurobiologist Paul Zak says this:

“The first part of the answer is that as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.

“Think of this as the “car accident effect.” You don’t really want to see injured people, but you just have to sneak a peek as you drive by. Brain mechanisms engage saying there might be something valuable for you to learn, since car accidents are rarely seen by most of us but involve an activity we do daily. That is why you feel compelled to rubberneck.

“To understand how this works in the brain, we have intensively studied brain response that watching (compelling video) produces. We have used this to build a predictive model that explains why after watching the video, about half of viewers donate to a charity. We want to know why some people respond to a story while others do not, and how to create highly engaging stories.

“We discovered that there are two key aspects to an effective story. First, it must capture and hold our attention. The second thing an effective story does is “transport” us into the characters’ world.”

Grabbing and maintaining attention and building empathy for your characters are thus two critically important jobs that any storyteller has to complete.  There is now strong neural evidence to support this.

Get in late, get out early.  Leave your readers gasping for more, to know more, to learn what happens.  One of the best ways to do that is to follow point #9. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 20.  This post will cover the final point in our storylab sequence: ‘Characters, characters, characters.’

See you then.

Phil B.