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

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.