Transcription
So you want to tell a story? You have a great story concept, and you have some pretty interesting characters. Now it's time to, you know, write the story. This is where the trouble begins. You sit for hours in front of a blank screen with an increasingly annoying blinking cursor. I have spent many hours of my life in the curs-staring contest with a dreaded blank document, let me tell you.
If you do manage to get through a couple chapters, you inevitably reach a point when you can't pin down what happens next. You know your characters have to get from point A to point B, but you can't figure out how to move them along that path, or you can't figure out how to make that movement interesting. You might have some ideas, but assembling them into a nice, neat story path feels like trying to undo a knot with your eyes closed. The human mind will naturally look for some kind of guide to get out of this miserable state, the formula, if you will.
But here's the ugly truth: there is no formula for telling a story. There just isn't. And if someone tells you there is, and then you follow it, the story you write will be either terrible, or it will be indistinguishable from all the rest of the stories on the shelves these days, most of which are terrible. Following a formula constricts your ability to tell a story. It creates a paved road through a beautiful, dark forest that many have trod before you, and which you then will have no choice but to follow as well. Your storytelling choices will have no choice but to be the same as everyone else's, because your path will be the same as everyone else's. Plot twists will be the same and hit at the same points as everyone else's. Your character arcs will be the same as everyone else's character arcs. The bottom line is, formulas don't produce stories; formulas produce products.
But even if you want to avoid this, you still need a method for telling a story. Sadly, there is no secret foolproof plan. There is no snake oil, no magic computer program, no comprehensive step-by-step tutorial. All of writing is endless, thankless, hard work. But if you know certain principles, then all that endless, thankless, hard work can pretty reliably result in an excellent story. As you learn to write fiction, never waste your time learning formulas or style; always learn technique and principles. Don't study the three-act structure, or Freytag's pyramid, or the hero's journey, or—hang on, I can't remember the others. Seriously, don't bother.
And I'm not saying none of these analyses have any value; they certainly do. But they are by no means a good place from which to start building a plot. And the thing is, too, if you write a story about a hero going on a journey, and you simply plot your story well and map out the action properly, as I will get to in a moment, the end result will probably fit into the general outline of the hero's journey. All of these analyses are meant more for analyzing existing stories, not for building one from scratch. And even then, I personally find them reductive to the point of being harmful to the process of understanding literature.
So, while it's true that a formulaic structure needs to be avoided at all costs, structure itself is crucially important. Architects and structural engineers don't learn how to plan buildings that are merely copies of all the buildings currently standing. No, they learn structural principles and the elements of design. Then they can build anything. They can even make up something new that no one has ever seen before, and it will still be pleasing to the eye and structurally sound, while still abiding by certain expectations we tend to have about buildings, you know, having windows and doors and walls and stuff.
There are a lot of principles and techniques that are important when it comes to storytelling: world-building, realistic characters, good dialogue, etc., etc. But the first, and arguably most important, principle that any storyteller can learn is good pacing. I define pacing a little differently from how it is generally defined by writers and literary critics, and I'm going to get a lot more in-depth here in a minute, but for right now, let me just explain pacing as I've come to understand it, so that we can proceed with the same definition in mind.
So, first of all, let's address the commonly held definition of pacing, and then I'll get into my definition, and then I'll teach you how to use this principle in a way that will improve your storytelling. You can quickly find the common definition of pacing on Wikipedia, which cites Suzanne Flashman's "Tense and Narrativity," in which she defines good pacing as a balance of high-intensity and slower-paced scenes to create a dynamic reading experience. In my opinion, that's a matter of style, not structure. And maybe that does create a dynamic reading experience, but that reading experience is not accomplished with real, true pacing; but rather, it is accomplished with the way in which the individual scenes are written, which is style, not structure. This definition also doesn't have anything to do with whether or not a story is evenly told. Whether or not your story has a balance of rapid, quick scenes and longer, drawn-out scenes isn't really relevant to the metering of the plot. What I'm trying to explain is that the number of words that make up a written scene, or the number of movie minutes that make up a film scene, are not necessarily the controlling factor in tempo, which is why I take issue with that definition of pacing.
So, what is my definition of pacing? Pacing is how a writer presents the events of a plot in sequence, in a way that progresses the story steadily and logically. We'll look at that a lot closer in a minute. Any half-decent storyteller knows that any half-decent story has to have some kind of rhythm. Pacing is the metering of the narrative, the choreography of the plot, if you will. It gives a story a sense of time and even immediacy. The human mind always processes stories as some variation on a progression of time. If things are happening and time is passing, you've got a story. In order to control the flow of the time and the flow of the information, the storyteller has to impose a set rhythm and flow on the story's progression. This is pacing.
Pacing tends to be regarded as a thing that one acquires with practice or experience, or as a simple byproduct of a well-plotted story. I don't often see pacing discussed at all, much less as a basic principle. But of all the individual components of a story, the thing that's doing the most work is pacing. No other aspect of a story will be as constantly visible as pacing. This is the principle, the core technique, that if you can learn it, will get your story actually written, no matter what story choices you want to make. If you want to tell a hero's journey story in a dystopian cyberpunk metropolis within a murder mystery, a formula isn't going to let you do that. But with a firm grasp on the core principle of pacing, you can tell whatever story you want, however you want to.
So now we're going to examine how you go about learning this principle. I'm going to do everything in my power to explain this as clearly as I can. I even have, like, graphs and stuff. Pacing is, at the risk of being overly simplistic, the rhythmic metering of the story. It's the trick by which we convince the reader that the events are happening and the plot is progressing as they're reading. The secret to every good story is the plot's progression. Let me rephrase that: the secret to every well-told story is the plot's progression. A good story idea is obviously a good place to start, your basic initial concept. But the very best story concepts can get lost without good pacing to convey that story to the audience. Great, unique characters are also a very important factor, but they'll have nothing to do and no effective way to do it if the storyteller can't figure out how to progress the plot. And you do that with pacing.
The question, of course, is how. Not to oversell it, but here's the big secret: the stories that have the finest construction and the most pleasing plot progression accomplish successful pacing through a series of mini-arcs. Each mini-arc carries the audience through another very small piece of the plot, yes, but in a smaller and less obvious sense, each also has its own beginning, climax, and end. The mini-climaxes of each mini-arc are the perceptible rhythm of pacing. That's what the audience notices, usually without even realizing it, and then their expectations going forward actually keep to this rhythm, which is why problems with pacing are very distracting. Additionally, as the story moves along, each mini-arc tends to be slightly bigger and more dramatic than the previous one, building and building up to the final climax of the whole story, which is often its own very dramatic mini-arc.
This gradual progression is what gives the idea that a story is a single arc, or perhaps no more than three, as might be suggested by the ubiquitous and very unhelpful three-act structure. But if you treat your story like it's only one arc, you'll be at a loss for how to get your story from this point to this point. I mean, the minutia, the scene-for-scene, chapter-for-chapter decisions you have to make that need to move the story forward. How does Frodo get from Bag End to Mount Doom? It certainly wasn't in one single, arcing act, but many, many, many, many smaller ones. Every single story ever told uses mini-arcs. Mini-arcs, carefully structured, control the flow of the plot's progression. They control the flow of the information. They build rhythm into a story, and they keep the audience engaged and invested.
So, for fun, let's cobble together a very basic and rudimentary example. We should start with a story concept. Um, all right, how about this: Johnny, a safe-cracker, has been hired to rob a bank. But the bank in question is owned by his father. His old friend from high school, Judy, the cop, is a detective who was hunting a famous safe-cracker at large in the city. But she doesn't know that this safe-cracker is actually her friend Johnny from high school. Moreover, Judy the cop is the daughter of the guy who hires Johnny safe-cracker to rob the bank. Yeah, all right, we can work with that.
Now, I am by no means going to sit here and plot out the whole thing. I have my own stories to write, damn it. But let's just get a feel for what I'm talking about. Obviously, with the opening of any story, you need to establish characters and setting to some degree. Since Johnny safe-cracker is our main character, we should open with him. Maybe his opening could be him in the process of cracking another safe somewhere. This is a job he was hired to do, like usual. But halfway through, things go horribly wrong when some random group of thugs shows up to capture him. Turns out these guys work for some kind of villain, maybe a mob boss, because why not? The mob boss offers Johnny a choice: either he can get chopped up into several hundred little pieces, or he can do a job for him. At this point, naturally, Johnny has no choice. He leaves the mob boss with all his fingers and toes intact, but now he has a new, horrible job. And what's that job? He has to rob his father's bank. We've set the scene, we've introduced the main character, a bit of his personality, and the conundrum in which he finds himself. We've introduced the villain, and we've presented a life-or-death situation that will thread tension through the entire rest of the story. Solid start for a first draft.
But let's look a little closer. This entire opening was actually a little tiny mini-arc. We begin with the robbery situation, and then the action crescendos into Johnny being captured and almost disassembled by the big bad. If you think of this opening scene as its own little tiny microscopic story, this serves as its mini-climax. Will Johnny successfully crack this safe? No. Actually, he'll be abducted by villains halfway through. Thereafter, the action will settle down from this mini-climax into Johnny agreeing to take the job, because what choice did he have? But we can't stop there. The story going forward will not, in actuality, be one longer, steeper arc leading up to the moment when Johnny either does or doesn't pull off the bank robbery of his life. Instead, the story will actually be several small arcs, with each being a little bigger and more thrilling than the last.
To continue our example, now that Johnny has this terrible new job, his first order of business is to smooth things over with the person who had hired him to do his last job, the one from which he had been so rudely abducted. So, the next mini-arc will be him trying to evade that previous contractor, and in all likelihood, failing. Maybe the guy is waiting for him in his apartment with a couple of business-class henchmen, I don't know. So maybe Johnny tells the guy the truth about what happened, thinking that if he name-drops the local Don, Gleon, then that'll get him off his case, you know, because Don Corleone is scary. Maybe Johnny's clever, and he tells the guy that he'll pay him a cut when he finishes the job he's currently being forced to do, on the grounds that he doesn't like kneecap him or whatever. The big question is whether or not this guy will agree to let Johnny go. The climax comes when he decides to release him from their previous deal, but only on the grounds that Johnny take as a member of his crew his—I don't know—new son-in-law, because no crime story is complete without a little nepotism. Johnny doesn't want some random nitwit messing up his job, but it's a price he's willing to pay, all things considered.
So we move forward. But again, look closer. This whole situation had its own arc. The action begins with Johnny trying to hide from this other bad guy, then rises a little when he's cornered by him. Finally, the action and drama reaches a mini-climax when he negotiates his way out of being beaten to death, and even gains a possible future ally, as well as a somewhat unwelcome wild card in the person of his random new crew member. Both of these mini-arcs set the stage for the coming drama and action. They establish characters and situations, and they drive the plot steadily forward. But they are also nicely paced because both have stuck to structured, neat mini-arcs. This rhythm is now established in the minds of the audience and can be continued with very little bloodshed on the part of the writer throughout the rest of the story.
Another excellent benefit from this approach to plot-building is that it has, as a natural byproduct, a constant sense that the characters are doing something. That's one of those key points that every storyteller must always remember: no matter what, your characters must always be trying to accomplish something. This is the action of the plot that allows the characters to progress through it. However, one simple or even one massive task for one story will end up being very boring. Sixty thousand words about whether or not Johnny safe-cracker successfully robs his father's bank sounds thrilling on paper, but the meat of the story will be impossible to carve up if you don't break down this monumental undertaking into smaller bites. Johnny is going to have to assemble the crew, which could be one or more mini-arcs depending on how difficult it is to get that done. He'd need to research the bank and its vault. He'd need to either deal with his father or avoid him. He'd need to work out a plan. On top of all that, there's also the character of Judy the cop. She's going to figure out that the safe-cracker she's been hunting for years was kidnapped from one of his own jobs by men who work for her father, which all by itself, that right there is two mini-arcs in one. She learns that the safe-cracker was abducted from the scene of his own robbery, maybe because of a security camera the abductors missed. And in the next arc, she could trace those abductors back to her father, which would lead to a very fascinating mini-climax for sure, one that would probably inform her character and the direction of her personal storyline for the rest of the plot. And those are just the broadest of broad strokes. If you were actually writing the story and you put your nose to the grindstone and really noodled out all the details, you'd be able to assemble a great plot with a lot of interesting moving parts.
So, yes, the characters have a main goal. Frodo has to destroy the ring. John Wick has to get revenge for the murder of his dog. Johnny has to rob his father's bank. But none of that happens all at once. That's the overall arc. Trying to write within such a vast canvas is almost impossible. Breaking up the huge arc into many, many smaller ones will both accomplish pacing and it will help your audience to remain invested. If you're working with the idea that every individual step forward is its own little arc, then you'll write your characters as working towards some small, easily digestible goal, with the mini-climax being either their success or their failure, or sometimes some other unexpected thing might occur that diverts that path.
Using our example of Johnny and Judy, in Johnny's first arc, he's trying to crack that safe. The tension is building as he works towards that goal. The climax hits when he fails because something completely unexpected suddenly happens. In John Wick, the opening arc finds him trying to recover from the loss of his wife, with a bonus goal of trying to adjust to the presence of his new puppy. And just when the audience thinks he's going to accomplish both of these goals, he and we are blindsided by the sudden climax of the home invasion and, crucially, the murder of his dog. Thereafter, the action shifts to everyone's least favorite gangster brat, who is trying to get the car he stole from John Wick clean so it can be legally his. Because this was such a nimble storyteller, this action, this villain mini-arc, was layered with John Wick's next mini-arc, which was him trying to learn the identity of the person who had broken his hard-won peace and killed his dog, and also, you know, get his car back. Neither of these things is terribly exciting, but it carries both of them, but especially the gangster brat, and therefore the audience, to the crucial reveal about the true identity of John Wick, which information was so shocking and terrifying to him that it alone served as a mini-climax.
Action movies are a great way to study the way a series of arcs makes up a plot. That's because action movies tend to be a succession of fights, especially once you get through the opening and get into the meat of the story. And fights are generally choreographed as an arc, leading up to a climax, win or lose, survive or die. And John Wick, after the writers established the characters and the situation with the two opening mini-arcs, the third began the meat of the story with a fight. The gangster brat's father, Vigo, sent a massive team of goons to eliminate John Wick before he could come to kill like everybody, but particularly his son, because he might be the actual scum of the earth, but I guess he's still someone's kid. A good action movie won't just have arbitrary fights. Both opposing parties will be trying to, again, accomplish something within the arc. Vigo, in the person of his men, wants to kill John Wick. John Wick wants to—uh—not die, but I mean, specifically so that he can go and murder the who killed Daisy. Because it's a movie in the action genre, the fight is kind of the point because it has to tell a story. The fight has to move the plot forward. Containing it within a mini-arc in which the characters are working towards a goal with a climax occurring when one or the other wins gives the whole thing rhythm, and that rhythm is pacing.
Video games are another excellent way to study this pacing. Most video games are structured like this: you have a mission, some task you have to accomplish, and just when you reach the conclusion of that mission, or just when you're about to accomplish that task, you have to fight some kind of mini-boss. Having completed that fight, another mission begins, and each successive mission is a little more difficult than the last, leading up to your final fight with the final boss. And while video game structure tends to be more episodic, it's still helpful to note how well that structure keeps the player engaged. It also gives a really pleasant and satisfying rhythm to the actual path of the game.
Let's look at a non-action example. In 2001's classic masterpiece, Ocean's Eleven, the story opens with Danny Ocean trying to get parole. It's simple, straightforward, doesn't take up a lot of narrative space. But this tiny little introductory arc introduces the main character in a way that moves the plot along, because Danny has to accomplish this task in order to be free to plan an exit, execute his epic heist. The climax is very small, but it's there. The audience wants to know: does he or doesn't he convince them to grant him parole? It's the tiniest moment of held breath before the question is answered. As a side note, this demonstrates another great byproduct of focusing on these mini-arcs: already in these first few minutes of the movie, we're a bit invested. We want him to get parole. We want to know if he succeeds. The stakes aren't very high, but the audience wants to know how it turns out. Two minutes in, and we're already invested. If you open the story with a mini-arc, it's almost impossible to fail to get your audience invested. I mean, an audience rarely notices that they're being so deftly manipulated, and even if they did, they wouldn't care, because being invested in a story is fun. I mean, and after all, 80% of all writing is just careful manipulation.
Of course, now that Danny was out, the next phase of his plan was to get the most important person on board: his best friend, Rusty, who was understandably a little reticent, given how disastrous their last job was. But of course, he does agree, providing another very small mini-climax. This one, it's worth pointing out, was kind of accentuated by including details about the heist Danny was planning, which was very bold and audacious. The action then moved to the next most important person they had to convince: Reuben. Their bank, and so on, and so on. Each mini-arc kept the action rolling forward towards Las Vegas and the night they'd rob three casinos, and the succession of one arc after another provided a really pleasing rhythm for the audience to settle into for the rest of the story.
It is true, however, that the more we look at all of these examples, the more the process of pacing out a story can seem overwhelming. Breaking a gigantic plot into tiny pieces can feel like a monumental, almost Sisyphean undertaking. But the thing you have to remember is that every story is simply a matter of one thing happening after another thing after another thing. You plan one mini-arc, and then you plan the next one, one step at a time. Don't get overwhelmed by how much story you have to plan out; just one step at a time.
But it can be really frustrating to finish a mini-arc and have to figure out that ever-elusive "what happens next?" Which leads me to the final, crucially important part of the storytelling principle: each of these mini-arcs must lead to the next. You can't just have one mini-arc, and then the action crests, and then you have another random mini-arc. The events of arc one must lead to arc two. Put a different way, you can easily figure out the events of arc two by asking yourself: what would be the result of the events of arc one?
So, using our previous example, after Johnny safe-cracker was interrupted from finishing one robbery, when he was abducted by a mob boss, what could happen because of that? Well, maybe the guy who hired him to do the first robbery will be a little angry that that job didn't get done, and now you know what your next mini-arc could be. Do you see what I mean? The path is already there; you just have to find it. And there is no one path. The thing that happens next could be one of a hundred equally great choices; that part's up to you, the writer.
A helpful way to remember this is to conclude every arc with "therefore..." You could also use "because of this..." So, for example, you map out arc one and then think to yourself, "Because of this, what could happen?" Like that. The line that connects the events from one arc to the next doesn't have to be completely direct. Johnny safe-cracker was interrupted in his attempt to finish that job he'd been hired to do, and in the course of being abducted, he was caught on a security camera, which he's never personally careless enough to do. Therefore, Judy the cop was able to see not just him, but also the fact that he'd been abducted. Therefore, Judy was able to track the vehicle of the abductors to her mob boss father. Taking it further, Johnny was unable to finish that one job. Therefore, the person who hired him was angry, putting him in even more hot water. Therefore, that person only agreed to let him off the hook if he got in on the bank robbery, and so on, and so on.
Just remember, always connect your arcs in some way with "therefore." And if you're stuck, just ask yourself: if XYZ just happened, what could happen next because of that? If one car gets hit by another car, what could happen as a result of that? Could the first car then hit a guy on a bike? What happens because of that? The guy on the bike collides with a little girl carrying a puppy. What happens because of that? The puppy gets loose and runs into the street. What happens because of that? Always think like this. No part of the plot exists in a vacuum. Everything always leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else.
If you treat each piece of the story like a little mini-arc, you can block out the events as they occur, while also giving yourself a rough first draft of the rhythm and tempo of your finished story. And also keep a close eye on the progression of one arc into the next. Because such a plotting technique is so concise and straightforward, it also allows you to keep an eye on the flow of the plot. If the content of one mini-arc seems a lot longer than all the rest, you could consider breaking it into smaller arcs. You can see whether or not the order of the scenes makes sense, whether or not you've relayed enough information to the audience or relayed it in the right places, or whether one thing does sufficiently lead to another.
So, for your homework, go watch a movie or read a book and jot down the arcs as they happen. Write out the basic framework of the story's pacing. Make a habit of studying this in the stories you watch or read. Make a habit of noticing it. If you can master this core principle, any story you write will be good. You should always avoid formulas and instead stick to general principles like this one. Then you can build whatever story you want, however you want. But if you abide by the principle of pacing, that story will be comprehensible and even probably enjoyable to your audience.
If you have any questions about what I've talked about here today, please let me know in the comments, and I'll see if I can help. If you enjoyed this video or feel like it was helpful, please let me know. I'd like to make more videos along these lines in the future, and I'd love to know what storytelling topics you'd like to know more about. Thanks for watching to the end, and I'll see you next time.