Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Looking at MicroStructure in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Evil Robot Monkey”

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY is a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, available for free on her website (in html, PDF, and audio) and included in her short collection, Word Puppets. It’s a little over 900 words long (or 6 minutes of audio); a complete story in a single scene, and it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across for explain the way story beats works. 

The premise of this story is simple: uplifted monkey wants to sculpt clay as a escape from his not-so-pleasant existence; circumstances conspire to keep him from doing this. That’s the guiding macro-structure, but it’s the individual beats that give the piece an incredible amount of nuance for its word-count.

FOUR BEAT PATTERN

There’s a lot of argument about what gets classified as a beat in a story, but for my purposes I’m looking at a specific pattern: we get a clash when two characters wants are in conflict, they each deploy a tactic to try and resolve things, and those tactics see the scene reach a new equilibrium–a moment when the characters involved pause and take a new tack, based upon the information they received in the prior beat. That pause–and the decision to try something new–marks the end of the beat. 

With this in mind, Kowal’s story builds around four basic beats. Beat One begins with the protagonist, Sly, sculpting in his enclosure. A bunch of school children bang on the side and ruin his current work, triggering the opposed wants. The important thing in this beat is the tactical response–aggression–and it’s escalation throughout the beat. At first Sly flings clay like poop, but it doesn’t have the desired consequences. The kids mock him further, which results in bared teeth and writing “ass” on his enclosure walls, which brings in the teacher as a source of authority to hurry the kid away.

The beat ends with Sly getting what he wanted–the kids are gone–but as the beat comes to close Sly regroups and realises things are going to get worse:

Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.

Damn.

Evil Robot Monkey, Mary Robinette Kowal

Which brings us to beat two. While the first beat was dominated by contrition, this one sees Sly change his tactics, deploying contrition and instilling guilt to get what he wants.

Kowal kicks things off by restating the broader goal for the story–Sly just wants to make pottery–and the threat kicks in the moment Vern walks into the enclosure to punish Sly for his actions. Vern comes into this beat with a tactical approach as well: he’s coming at Sly like a friend, leading off with “are you okay?” before talking about the incident and getting closer to Sly than many other handlers would.

The genius of this beat is the way it does a complete one-eighty from the opening. We’ve gone from Sly acting in anger to contrition and instilling guilt in his antagonist; we’ve gone from school children who see Sly as an exhibit to someone who treats him as a friend. The spectre of the exhibit remains between them, but the beat is moving towards a particular equilibrium–the pair of them joined together by a moment of laughter, giving Sly a sense of connection and humanity that was taken from him in beat one.

Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’”

Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

Evil Robot Monkey, Mary Robinette Kowal

And in Beat Three, that equilibrium is almost immediately shattered: Vern brings up the fact that he needs to punish Sly on orders from his boss. His tactic in this beat is all about deferring responsibility–it’s not his choice–and Sly’s first impulse is to go back to the anger of the first beat. What escalates the tension this time is the lessons of Beat Two–if he goes to rage in this beat, he loses his friend and a part of himself–so Sly focuses on his pottery in an attempt to regain some calm.

And, in the end, he’s “rewarded” at the close of the beat by Vern’s regret offering to put the vase in the kiln.

Which brings things to the final beat in the scene: the denouement wherein Sly’s fight to stay in control of his anger brings hope out of tragedy. Sly’s initial tactic here is to descend into regret and pain about what he’s losing once his clay is taken away; Vern’s tactic is offering his friend hope in the form of the admonishment “I’m not cleaning up your mess.”

The beat–and the story–moves towards its final equilibrium of Sly working with the small amount of clay that remains to him, dubbing it “enough” for the moment.

SOME OTHER THINGS WORTH NOTICING

Four Beats Make a Story

The four-beat pattern that plays out in this story is interesting, because those beats (perhaps unsurprisingly) are a microcosm of the three-act structure

The first beat is Act One, giving us the character in their ordinary world and showcasing the they want (to sculpt clay) and the thing they need (a sense of connection). It presents us with a thesis, in the form of Sly being intelligent and still treated like an exhibit.

The second beat launches us into Act Two, delivering a subplot (Sly’s relationship with Vern) and exploring the antithesis of the world in the opening act. It builds towards the stories moment of loss and crisis in the revelation that Sly is going to lose is clay as punishment, which is the pivot on which the entire story terns.

The Third beat is the second half of act two, where characters start learning the applying the lessons of the second act to the problems of the first. Sly’s instinct is to use anger, but he uses the humanity and connection he experienced in beat two to control his impulses.

And the forth beat, obviously, is the final act: we build towards the conclusion and the moment of moral choice at the climax, demonstrated when Vern chooses to manipulate his orders and give his friend some semblance of comfort via the “mess” he leaves behind.

Humour as a Shorthand For Connection

Years ago, at a writers festival on the Gold Coast, I sat in the audience as Anna Campbell explained that one of the most important moments in a romance story comes when they laugh together for the first time. 

There’s two reasons for this. The first is that humour is predicated on the breaking of tension–a lot of the techniques of comedy are about setting up patterns and cause-and-effect to build up tension, then break it in an unexpected way. The tension primes you for a response, and laughter provides you with release.

The second reason is that humour is very personal–what one person finds funny will leave another person cold. When two people share laughter, it shows that they share similar world views in a way that other actions do not. 

This isn’t a romance story, but it is a love story in that’s it’s all about connection…and here, at the end of the third beat, the moment of connection is forged when the pair share a laugh about the teacher and the “evil robot monkey.”

Repeating the Key Motifs

While the individual beats are varied in their tactics, Kowal keeps the story coming back to the core motivation: Sly just wants to sculpt and people keep stopping him. His first vase is ruined by the school children, the second by Vern’s arrival when Sly chooses to stop working and the vase crumples; his third vase, in the third beat, is successfully finished…but it marks the point where he’s going to lose everything because Vern is taking the clay away.

Repetitions matter in fiction because they establish a pattern. The first time something happens, it’s just an event. The second time you go back to it, it could be coincidence. The third time is when you can see how things have changed, because we’ve seen details play out twice before and can extrapolate forward with confidence.

But it’s not the only motif that’s played out again and again: the other story here, the deeper story, is the relationship between the uplifted animal and his human creators.

This means you get little mirrors throughout the scene, moments where an action that marks Sly as an animal in the opening (flinging “poop”) are repeated in Vern’s desire to fling poop in the closing. The same tactic that Sly uses to drive people away in the beginning–anger–is used by Vern to disguise the way he’s cutting Sly a break at the end of the story. 

There’s also a tactile component to the metaphor being played out here: compare the way the metals and glass are described throughout the story with the descriptions of the more “natural” clay that Sly works with, particularly in the third beat where he’s trying to control his anger.

Controlled Escalation & Doubling Down On A Tactic

The thin I really admire in Kowal’s story–and part of the reason she’s able to pack a lot of emotion into 900-odd words–comes down to the controlled escalation of the problem.

While there are occasional instances of someone doubling-down on a tactic in a particular beat, they’re done for particular effect–Sly doubles down on his anger and escalates in the first beat because it’s necessary for the story and the aforementioned pattern of threes.

Deploying anger as a default tactic twice in the opening beat means it doesn’t need to come up as a feasible tactic until Beat Three. Without that doubling down in beat one, the anger in scene three would seem weaker or it would need to be deployed as a response to Vern’s tactics in beat two. 

That early double-down means the scene can escalate through the shifts in emotion and tactics–and we get to see both major characters deploy at least three tactical choices over the course of the story.

This means we’re seeing them in three different contexts, despite the short length, and their tactical choices in response to the situation give them nuance and complexity. 

FURTHER READING

Shawn Coyne on Beats at The Story Grid: As I mentioned yesterday, this is a great resource for wrapping your head around Beats. It’s not necessarily a structure that needs to be consciously applied, but learning it (and mapping out something like Evil Robot Monkey using the pattern) is a great way to get into the habit of seeing beats in fiction.

In much the same way that we did not see Blue in the world until the production of blue dyes made the word necessary, the structure of beats feels invisible until you have your attention called to the patterns.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s Story Planning Method: If you’ve read to this point, you’re probably a process wonk when it comes to writing, so you’re also likely to enjoy the extremely detailed breakdown Kowal did of her own process earlier in the year, walking readers through everything from the brainstorming to the final draft.

Writing Excuses Podcast Episode 3:14–The Four Principles of Puppetry: Kowal again, guesting on the Writing Excuses podcast back in 2009, prior to becoming a regular on the series. Easily one of the best fifteen minutes you can invest if you’re interested in writing.

Understanding the Micro-Structure of Scenes

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) advice about making sure each involves conflict and changes/advances the overall story.

Which is a pity,  because understanding the microstructure of a scene is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your toolkit as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to resolve particularly thorny narrative problems. It’s one thing to say that a scene is built around two characters coming into conflict, and another to see how writers use that to generate specific effect

Shawn Coyne gives a neat outline of beats within a scene in The Story Grid; Robin Law’s Beating the Story offers some useful frameworks when he breaks stories (and scenes) into alternating patterns of the things you hope will happen and the things you fear will occur, coupling it with the concept that a scene/beat begins when a petitioner wants something from someone who may-or-may not grant their request. 

I’ve pointed people–students especially–to both over the last twelve months, but I keep trying to refine my thinking. Trying to boil it down to a core idea that’s easier to explain.

This is where I’m at: scenes begin when two characters come into conflict; the beats within the scene are the ways we trace the tactics they use to achieve their goals, and the way those tactics change in response to the other person.

Each beat is a moment where the petitioner driving the scene realises their tactic isn’t working, and we shift into the new beat as they adjust their choices in response to that information. 

Beats are the things that make characters–and scenes–feel dynamic, and their as important for making fiction work as the macro-structure stuff. 

 

Taking a Look at Hoth and the Transition to the Second Act

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Last year, my friend Kevin opened a can of worms a while back when he started a Facebook thread about the Rebel’s retreat from Hoth in Empire Strikes Back, suggesting it should be thought of as a win. The rebels  were beaten, he argued, but they’re a guerrilla force up against a considerably larger and more well-equipped army – in this context, fleeing in an orderly fashion and getting the bulk of their forces away counts was textbook planning for a guerrilla army in that position.

Lots of people argued it was a loss: the rebels were routed, barely escaped, and were largely scattered. 

I kept out of the thread initially because what I know about military strategy was learned by playing Command and Conquer, but someone else brought up the the fact that the narrative demanded a defeat at the beginning of the second act and suddenly, lo, I knew things.

I hadn’t ever taken a close look at the narrative structure of Empire, but when I did I was surprised by how well it actually sets up that transition within the larger structure of the movie.

HERE’S THE THING ABOUT TRANSITIONS INTO THE SECOND ACT

In narrative terms, defeat and victory are meaningless, because you’re talking about a transition between two approaches to a problem. Mostly, that transition means moving away from an approach that’s comfortable, and towards a course of action that will actually resolve things. 

Consider Luke in the first act of Star Wars. He dreams big, but when Obi Wan says “you must come to Alderaan, and be a Jedi like your father,” and Luke immediately being all “LOL, soz, no. I gotta go farm water.”

Adventure is offered–the thing he dreams of and needs–but he doesn’t want to go because it seems a mite uncomfortable. That’s the basic gist of your first act in a nutshell. 

The transition into act 2 is usually marked by something that appears to be a defeat, but it’s actually a  critical event that tips the scales for the hero and teaches them what they need. In narrative terms, its less ‘defeat’ and more ‘object lesson.’

In Star Wars, that transition is simple: Luke tries to ignore the problem and his family is wiped out by stormtroopers looking for droids, literally leaving him with no other choice but to go with Obi Wan. 

In Empire, the metaphoric lesson for Luke is much the same: he’s gotten comfortable staying with the Rebels and playing soldier, being part of the larger army that’s waging war against the empire. He’s the hero of the Alliance, the Ace Pilot. He’s the guy who killed the Death Star, an inspiration to those around him.

The attack on Hoth is the object lesson that teaches him he cannot stay that guy. 

At its core, the original Star Wars trilogy is all about the actions of individuals. They may field huge armies of fighters to wage war, but it’s a handful of extraordinary people who do everything meaningful. In story terms, victory is only possible if Luke goes to Degoba and embraces his destiny as a Jedi.

At the same time, Empire gives us a version of Luke who got what he wanted way back in the beginning of Star Wars: He’s the ace pilot of the alliance. He’s right there, in the thick of things, in charge and great at what he does. He’s not progressing his training after Obi-Wan’s death, just fighting the fight alongside his fellow Rebels. 

In this respect, the attack on Hoth isn’t about a narrative victory or loss. It’s about showing the futility of Luke staying the Ace Rebel Pilot. No matter how good he is, being part of the army is never going to cut it. The Empire will find them, and it will chase them, even without the death star. Victory is impossible without him learning the ways of the Jedi. 

Wiping out Hoth is the death of Beru and Owen all over again, taking away options so “there is nothing for me here,” that freeing Luke up to take another path.

Is this a defeat? Maybe. This is the nature of second act transitions: they’re going to feel like a defeat for all the major characters, ’cause their method of dealing with things for the entire first act has just been roundly disproved. For Empire, particularly, the movie does’t want them anywhere near a military hierarchy. That’s not what the story is about, and any debate about whether Hoth is a victory or a loss is going to struggle to overcome that basic fact. There’s not enough data, because the story isn’t focused on that aspect of the world. 

WHAT’S INTERESTING ABOUT EMPIRE FROM THIS PERSPECTIVE

What’s really interesting about Empire is the way it builds to this lesson: within the first act Luke has already learned one lesson about the perils of being the Ace Rebel Pilot (it gets you attacked by Wampas), and the only way out of that problem was embracing his Jedi half and force-grabbing his lightsaber to cut himself free.

At the same time, it also reminds us why Luke, Ace Rebel Pilot matters: he’s the kid who inspired an act of bravery in Han back in Star Wars, overcoming Han’s mercenary impulses and bringing him into the fight to destroy the Death Star. And when Luke, Ace Rebel Pilot, goes missing, he inspires Han again. Han disregards orders and heads out into the snow, determine to bring back his thread.

This is important because ultimately, at the end of Return of the Jedi, it’s not Jedi-Luke who saves the goddamn universe. It’s his ability to connect with his father and bring him back fro the dark side. Literally, he’s invoking the kid and the desire he had way back in act one of Star Wars. 

Right now, though, we’re seeing the threat of not becoming a Jedi. More importantly, we’re seeing this moment play out because training to be a Jedi will risk that aspect of who Luke is. He will be asked to forgo his friends and set aside attachments. Empire is setting us up for this moment, because we’ve already been shown that the Luke who is attached and with his friends can’t get the job done.

He may fight a rear-guard action on Hoth, allowing the rebels to escape, but he can’t claim an outright victory and save the universe (Heck, even the rear-guard action only goes as well as it does because the lightsaber comes out).

And this is as it should be: if you get narrative structure right, the character ends up being a combination of who they are at the beginning and who the second act wants them to be. Who they were is as important to that victory as what they learn in the second act.

Empire gives us a taste of both before making the decision critical at the end of the film, and all of that feeds into the final act of the trilogy. Ace Pilot Luke would never have been brought before Vader and the Empire, Jedi Luke would never have gotten his father to turn. 

ONE FINAL TANGENTAL POINT

The attack on Hoth is also an excuse to lock Leia and Han in the same tin-can in space, where the duties of command/concerns about bounty hunters are no longer something that will keep them from admitting they have feelings. It takes away the tool they’d been using to stay in a place of comfort–the alliance hierarchy–and puts them in a new context. This is necessary, because anything that kept them with the rebel forces would have necessitated keeping them as part of the narrative, which means that a lot of the folks who argued “but the Rebel’s were routed and scattered,” are right, but the scattering was narratively necessary.