Since last month’s post singing the praises of synopsis templates as story development tools I took my own advice and applied the first two I mentioned – Jeff Lyons’ premise line and Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid – to my work-in-progress.
Things didn’t go entirely as expected.
First up, Jeff Lyons has totally overhauled his plotting system since I read about in 2013, so it was his current, more complex, character-based ideas I’ve been exploring rather than the short, plot-based outline I described here last month.
[I have a niggling suspicious that some of us would have liked him to keep the old within the new, but there we go.]
Secondly, I worked out why I couldn’t explain Story Grid succinctly last month: I had misremembered it as an outlining tool, when in fact it is a dynamic structure to guide progressions within a well-developed story idea.
In fact, being unable to fill out the Story Grid’s Act-level boxes for my B-plot proved where I needed more detailed plotting and character development. Gaps in a grid showed where the story had holes. Duh.
Anyhow, rather than waffle generically about another three templates as planned, I thought this month I’d fess up and look at what went wrong and what went right – and change the title of this mini-series to the present tense from the past.
Before we get going properly, though, I will say one more thing.
Thus far, I stand by my underlying premise that tried and trustworthy story forms – expressed as synopsis templates – offer pathways into more imaginative content than stumbling into a story more or less blind.
Applying different templates to my draft outline has been super useful in terms of drilling down into the details of the dual plotlines, and a sharp reminder about the amount of plotting I’ve still got to do before embarking on a full draft.
But that’s the point, right? Better to know your map and compass are duff before heading into the woods.
So...
Working with an outline for my B-plot – one which had already established the basic plot and character components of Beth’s storyline – Shawn Coyne’s Foolscap Story Grid suggested her tale fitted best with his internal genre of Redemption.
That in turn gave Beth a Story Value of selfishness versus altruism.
[As mentioned last month, you do have to buy into Coyne’s and McKee’s concepts about Story Value as the engine driving scenes before embarking on this process. Very crudely, the flip from the value to its opposite and back again in every scene maintains energy and suspense.]
Designing scenes and sequences that force Beth to choose between selfish and altruistic outcomes is a clear, dynamic and plot-able driver of dramatic tension, one I doubt would have occurred to me had I (as planned) focussed on her personality profile, or, indeed, on any of the character archetypes out there in writing guru-land.
Thinking about plotting in Coyne’s technical way was also a useful reminder that characters aren’t people and that stories aren’t real life. Yes, a character’s psychology and emotions must be believable and coherent, but a plot is about more than people getting lost in their problems.
When planning this exercise in synopsis templates, it had seemed logical to work sequentially from an outline to a development synopsis, then amalgamate that with a Big Five personality trait-based character arc, plus a classic ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis, to create the necessary ingredients for a long-form narrative synopsis and/or to start writing draft one.
In practice, however, working iteratively with Story Grid and Jeff Lyons’ updated premise line – which now rests heavily on an internal ‘moral’ driver for the protagonist – proved surprisingly productive.
By comparing and contrasting these two systems, and feeding ideas from one to the other, I began to get a feel for how far and how fast they might take the development process, either separately or together, and more importantly how deeply they drew me into the story, the idea being, after all, to use these templates as accelerants of imagination, not cut-and-paste story designs.
Certainly, both systems flagged up areas where more research of fact and imagination are needed. They also demonstrated how important it is to integrate the different story components highlighted when following each process.
Let me explain that last point in a bit more detail.
When planning this post, I tried to think of a metaphor to illustrate what I’m attempting to say about synopses and story development. I imagined someone preparing to prune a bonsai tree, with the plant sitting on a revolving table surrounded by a glass box.
Each synopsis template – outline, development, psychological and structural – represents one side of the box; each one offers a distinct way of viewing the tree.
I intended to suggest the glass box lets us see the whole tree in 3D, and what it might eventually look like before one picked up the secateurs.
Now, however, I’m not sure I like that metaphor.
For one thing, you have to have a tree to start with. That is, a clear outline of the story as a whole. But then we are talking about development tools, so let’s assume that we do have a basic story outline ready to go.
[This is where I think Jeff Lyons’ 2013 Premise Line was really helpful, even if his updated version is more thorough.]
Another problem with the glass box metaphor is its implication that each window onto the tree remains separate when, as noted above, they need to be integrated.
This was brought home when I was reading Jeff Lyons’ Rapid Story Development which builds comprehensively on his updated Anatomy of a Premise Line.
I like this book at lot. Its moral internal driver and structural design for a strong middle are especially alluring, even though I don’t buy into its commitment to Enneagrams as the answer to (basically all) problems about creating characters.
Ironically, though, studying this comprehensive story development programme alongside Story Grid highlighted an obvious benefit of using multiple plotting templates, i.e. the opportunity for cherry-picking.
For example, Jeff’s moral driver exposed a weakness with my own (much loved) tables for plotting epiphanies based on the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
It turns out (sob) that I had been trying to overlay my ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis with a chain of Big Five-related epiphanies which were causally related to key plot points, but not driving them.
That, I now realise, is how I plotted The Goose Road, with Angelique’s staged process of maturation the result of her experiences on her journey. Her character arc was in that sense bolted onto the journey plot.
As Jeff’s analysis identified, that made Angelique reactive to events: she is a passive protagonist. (Argh!) Yes, she decides to take her geese north to save the family farm, but it is the journey that changes her; she doesn’t drive the change herself.
If I want my seventeenth century A-plot protagonist Tom to be truly proactive, to create his own predicaments as well as get himself out of them, his personality must be more central to his tale than Angelique’s was to hers.
Thanks, Jeff. Grrr...
[If your eyes are rolling at this point, bear with. The work-in-progress is based on historical evidence for a witch trial so key events in it are fixed. The challenge is to tell a good yarn that makes the points I want to make without abandoning historical credibility.]
My next plotting task would seem to be to rethink Tom and his Big Five personality profile.
But that’s good, because now I’m not only wondering what epiphanies he will have, which is where I was at the start of the month, I’m also imagining which epiphanies he will resist like fury. In other words, a whole new avenue of imagination has opened up.
By next month – hopefully – I will have more of this stuff worked out, and can move onto other synopsis templates which are helping to develop the story.
Meanwhile, spring is around the corner! Ye-ha. Thank you for reading this far.
Twitter: @HouseRowena
Facebook: Rowena House Author
Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com
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