Hope and Fear and Figuring Out a Story

Yesterday, I wrote 979 words on Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. Finished up right about the point where my beloved fell asleep after suffering an epic bout of insomnia, so I wrote up today’s edition of Notes from the Brain Jar, watched Dream Dangerously, the documentary about Neil Gaiman’s last signing tour, and thought very hard about processes and writer goals for an hour or two so I didn’t disturb her. Notes were made. Pens and notebooks were deployed. It was, for perhaps the first time, I worked until the battery on the Macbook Air ran out.

I’ve never outworked the MacBook before, outside of the occasional day where I’ve forgotten to charge it overnight. It’s battery power has been remarkable, compared to other laptops I’ve owned and battered into submission. Today feels remarkably accomplished, even thought not all that battery power was expended on the act of writing.

It’s interesting to work on this particular story, because I’m finally doing something with an idea I’ve kicked around for the better part of three years. Partially the desire to work on it is a response to something I read in Robin Laws Beating the Story, which offers a slightly different take on the thing writers generally think of as conflict.

Any fictional situation we as audience members identify with at all hangs between hope and fear. Any story moment, here called a beat, holds us in suspense between two possible outcomes: one we want to see happen, and another we don’t.

A girl teeters on a tight rope.

• We hope she makes it to the other side.
• We fear that she won’t.

A man yearns for love.

• We hope he finds the partner he seeks.
• We fear that he’ll wind up alone.

A woman seeks independence from her prattling chauvinist of a husband.

• We hope she’ll escape from him into a happier situation.
• We fear that the social constraints of Victorian Sweden will leave her trapped in an unhappy life.

(Laws, Robin D. Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative)

Most writing advice frames this aspect of storytelling through the character’s point of view, charting the things they think they want against the thing they truly desire. Laws moves it into the states you’re trying to invoke in the reader, which is a small but subtle difference in terms of figuring out what belongs in the story and what can be discarded.

The other thing that I’m coming to appreciate his how well this model scales. You can apply it to the macro-story, connecting it to the thesis and antithesis that marks the first two acts of the three act structure. You can also narrow it down to a particular scene of moment – what do we hope will happen when the PI walks into the crowded bar? What do we fear will happen instead, if they aren’t careful when asking questions?

In the case of Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser, it was an idea where I could map the conflict and what I’d like to happen, but not with sufficient detail where I had the emotional journey for the reader in mind. Laws’ book gave me the nudge to the storytelling mindset, while a few weeks of pondering the question of exposition gave me something to experiment with and that always makes the process considerably more fun.

And naturally, having done all that, it’s morphed into a very different thing than the story that lived in my head. The magic is more overt than it was, and there’s considerably more intimacies explored than I thought there would be.

You really should go read Robin Laws’ book. It’s not the only book on narrative structure that you’ll ever need–I doubt one book ever will be–but it’s full of cool tools to explore and consider, and it’s built by someone whose analysis of story is often predicated on replicating their effects in things other than fiction. It’s the kind of perspective that adds nuance, and a precision I haven’t seen before in a whole bunch of books on structure.