I suppose I should preface this with a few words about copying. Some people seem to have the idea that it is always bad to attempt to copy someone else's creation. This is a crippling misconception. We learn by doing - if you want to learn how to create a good story, or a good painting, or any other kind of art you first need to know, in detail, what a good story or a good painting is. And the best way to do this is to find one or more examples of good work, analyze them, and attempt to emulate them. The value of emulation is that if you go wrong you have a reference to compare to so you can figure out what is lacking in your own attempt. Of course, if you want to go to the extreme of copying a story word for word or a picture line for line it would be illegal to sell the result (unless it's something old enough that the copyright has expired - then you could sell it if you marked it as an imitation). But exact copying is not the point. The goal is to understand how all those words or lines add up to 'good', and you learn that by experimenting - replacing one part of the original with your own variation and seeing if your variation serves the same function, or whether it doesn't work because you didn't understand one of the traits or functions of the original part. So, assuming that we have established the educational value of analyzing and emulating a story, how exactly do we perform this technique? Well, I've spoken a bit in my developer juornal about general techniques for analyzing a novel, and gave an example of analyzing and emulating a character. But characters are useless without plot, and a novel is a large unwieldy form in which to study plot. So here I'm going to focus on analyzing the myth or fairy tale (and take the opportunity to summarize what I've learned from the Levi-Strauss I've been wading through these past few months.) Originally I intended to make this a myth writing contest, but since the last mix of lesson and contest went over so poorly I thought about it and decided the lesson was the important part. So I'll do my best to explain how to perform this technique, but I'll leave it up to you all whether you actually want to use the technique to produce a myth or fairy tale. If you do I'll critique it, if you don't maybe you'll attempt it some other month or year when it's more immediately useful to you. This post has gotten long enough, I'll start on the meat of the subject in my next post.

The first step, of course, is to select one or more examples to analyze. If you are going to select more than one example it is important that they be similar. Not similar in plot structure, since we are trying to study plot structure and it will be useful to study variations, not similar in tropes used or ethnic origin, but instead similar in theme and premise - in other words, we want a batch of stories which are performing the same function so we can analyze how they perform that function. So, if you have a particular project in mind you can look for examples with the same theme, or if you don't have a particular project in mind you can make a list of your favorite stories and try to figure out if some of them have a common theme. Me, I knew that I wanted to look at stories where a teenager who does not fit into their native culture joins a different culture and, after a struggle to adapt, finds an adult role in society and a mate there. I drew examples from all over the place - a native american children's book, 2 disney movies, a traditional variant of the same fairy tale one of the disney movies was based on, a (short) fantasy romance novel, and some school story anime series. You could use videogames equally well, it's just somewhat difficult to review the plot so you can make an accurate outline of it.

Some common types of myths are:
- The origin story. These may describe the origin of the world, the origin of humanity, and/or the origin of a particular object or custom. These are often paired with an end of the world story, which describes how the world and/or humanity will be unmade.
- The trickster story. Focusing on ambition/desire and justice/revenge, these stories generally describe an interaction between two characters where one attempts to cheat the other in some way.
- The greed/transformation story. This type of story describes an unsustainable situation which worsens until exhaustion of resources or rebellion of neighbors forces a change. For example, ogres which eat or torment people must be killed by a hero; a person who is always hungry and can never get fed enough will turn into a star or a stone; a person who is cursed to be a bad hunter must find a cure to the curse; a person who cannot obey the rules of a culture is transformed into an animal or monster.

Once you have your example(s), the first thing to do is make a plot outline. Instead of looking at literal details, try to focus more on the symbolic meaning of characters, items, and events. If you have more then one example compare these plot outlines with each other to see if anything looks similar.

Now, construct your own plot outline. You can use an example one as-is, modify it to suit your taste, or combine pieces from several examples.

Since this outline is very vague, in order to turn it back into a story you have to add your own details. This is where most of the originality in writing comes in. If you are doing something like creating your own myth system as part of the culture-building for an RPG or MMORPG you will be creating your own vocabulary of characters, philosophical/religious concepts, and items. If you are creating an episode of a series you will have an established set of characters and an established world, so you have to assign what you have to appropriate roles in your outline, and then introduce a few new characters or items as necessary.

However, this outline will probably not be appropriate for a movie or a novel, because those forms require a more complex plot structure than a myth or fairy tale can provide. One of the reasons you always hear about the heroic journey type of myth as the basis of movies, games, and novels, is that it is an epic myth, made up of several episodes, and these can be stretched to a longer format by adding more episodes and describing each episode in great detail. Modern episodic stories also add length by multiplying the hero into an adventuring party and having episodes focusing on different characters. But the episodicity which makes it conveniently extensible also means it is a weak plot structure lacking in unity. Some stronger plot structures suitable for a longer format like a movie or novel are:

The mystery or ingenuity story - in both of these sorts of stories the author starts by thinking of a revelation which will take place at the climax, then goes back and sets up a problem at the beginning and drops clues and misdirections throughout the middle.

The romance-adventure - this type of story gets its length from telling two stories at the same time about the same pair of characters. One story is the development of the relationship between the characters, and the other story is the confict between one or both characters and an outside antagonist (which may be a person or group of people but may also be an environment).

The thriller - this type of story usually has some sort of ticking time bomb - a series of escalating threats or murders, a hostage situation, a villain who is getting visibly crazier, or a decaying environment such as a sinking ship, a war where the enemy keeps coming up with new strategies which do damage before the defenders can adapt to them, or a literal ticking bomb. This is usually combined with some type of emotional story: a romance, a buddy story, a revenge story, or a reestablishing tarnished reputation story.


(I'm exhausted, I'm going to take a nap and maybe come back and add examples and stuff to this later. Meanwhile feel free to ask questions of make suggestions if you have any.)

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Me, I knew that I wanted to look at stories where a teenager who does not fit into their native culture joins a different culture and, after a struggle to adapt, finds an adult role in society and a mate there. I drew examples from all over the place - a native american children's book, 2 disney movies, a traditional variant of the same fairy tale one of the disney movies was based on, a (short) fantasy romance novel, and some school story anime series. You could use videogames equally well, it's just somewhat difficult to review the plot so you can make an accurate outline of it.

Ugly Duckling, anyone?

Quote: Original post by Fournicolas

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Me, I knew that I wanted to look at stories where a teenager who does not fit into their native culture joins a different culture and, after a struggle to adapt, finds an adult role in society and a mate there. I drew examples from all over the place - a native american children's book, 2 disney movies, a traditional variant of the same fairy tale one of the disney movies was based on, a (short) fantasy romance novel, and some school story anime series. You could use videogames equally well, it's just somewhat difficult to review the plot so you can make an accurate outline of it.

Ugly Duckling, anyone?

I did consider that one, but I decided it was so simple and straightforward that there wasn't any additional insight into it to be gained by analyzing it.

Okay, an example of how to summarize a myth to emphasize its symbolism and remove extraneous detail. I'll go with Beauty and the Beast because most of you will hopefully be familiar with at least two different versions of this story, the classic version and the Disney version.

The core plot of both stories is: a beautiful girl becomes the prisoner of a beastly-looking man; she is initially afraid of and angy at him, but over time comes to fall in love with him. To this core is added a frame which provides a time limit. The beast-form is a curse tied to a rose (symbol of love and, like all flowers, a symbol of a fleeting period of bloom followed by decay) If the man cannot love and be loved before the last petal falls, he will be a beast forever (or in some variations he will die). Of course he does learn to love and be loved in the nick of time, so just as the last petal falls he regains his human form. To further intensify the drama of this time limit, most versions of the story have the beast show that he has come to love the girl by permitting her to return to her father; she remains away from the beast for three days, during which time she almost forgets about him while he suffers from lovesickness (or the flower's time-limit coming close to expiring) until he is near death. But then she sees his suffering in a magic mirror, realizes she loves him, rushes back to his side, and breaks the curse (again, just as the last petal falls).

That's the essence of the myth. Anthropologically, the myth is connected to the idea that young women were often traded in an arranged marriage to a foreign, warlike, older, or otherwise frightening man who might initially seem 'beastly' to them, but whom they would be better off if they could learn to love.

Now let's look at what the Disney version adds: the prince was transformed into the beast for acting arrogant and ungenerous; he must learn to be civil before he can hope to get the girl to love him. A villain, Gaston, provides contrast by being a handsome human who acts beastly, much like the prince before he was cursed; his pursuit of the girl as an object he wants to own is the dark side of the beast's need for the girl to break the spell. The girl is given additional characterization - instead of the traditional emphasis on her self-sacrifice and humble modesty, the Disney version characterizes her as a dreamer who longs for a more cosmopolitan life. IMHO this was a weak choice, because the rest of the story has little to do with culture or society, she spends the rest of the story more or less alone in a castle with the beast, who in point of fact turns out to barely be able to read.

It might have been stronger if they used a beginning like that of Disney's Mulan, where the heroine is characterized as being kind and someone who would naturally be open to unusual events and people. That would have shifted Beauty's internal conflict from simply learning to accept the unusual to actively learning to use the enchanted castle (like Mulan learning to be a soldier) and assertively insisting that the beast be polite to her. In both traditional and Disney versions of the story Beauty falls in love with the beast simply because she sees that he cares for her and pities his suffering; they don't actually seem to have anything in common. In a strong romance each character will have a flaw that the other character, having a complementary strength, can help them with. But the traditional Beauty lacks only money to give to her father; Disney's Beauty lacks only physical and political strength to protect herself against wolves and the villain. She is essentially a perfect character with no real lesson she needs to learn; a flat character rather than a dynamic one. Similarly Mulan is a more active character because she chooses to secretly join the army in her father's place, whereas Beauty merely agrees to be traded for her father when the beast proposes it.

Essentially, the traditional version of the story demonstrates simply that men who appear beastly may turn out to be loveable after all; the movie-ized version adds characterization to convey an additional related moral about how beastly behavior is punished and kind behavior is rewarded with love.

None of this really gets at my interest in a character who travels from a society where they don't fit to a different society where they can learn to fit. The 'differentness' of the beast's society is mostly shown in the fact that he has a castle, which is usually enchanted. It's not very obvious in this story though, it only became more obvious when I compared the story with other examples which focused more on a tense diplomatic relationship between the two societies and the main character learning to use special abilities and objects which belong to the second society, proving her right to belong to this society by her skillful use of these abilities.

So, questions? Anyone think any of this is interesting or useful?

Your ideas are really interesting. In folklorology there is actually something called an Aarne Thompson Tale Type, whic essetnailly breaks down a fairy tale or myth into essential motifs. They are actually faily useful too, because they provide the minimilistic underlying form to what your story can be. Using fairy tales is also useful because they in the first few words most people can complete the entire story. For example, if a story begins with a little girl in a red cloack carring a basket of food into a forest, we already can guess her destiation, her obstacle and her out come. This creates a lot of room to play with our expectations and have fun with doing the story in new ways. (Hopefully not in the rashoman style so recently attempted).

Not sure why I keep posting here if I don't get any replies, but...

I had an interesting abstract dream this morning about the process of analytically breaking things down into their simplest particles and coming to a thorough understanding of those and the structure they are arranged in so you can masterfully create your own structures with your own selection of elements. I've talked about this fundamental design technique in relation to concept art before, but I don't think I ever really spelled it out in relation to writing.

It's more complicated to understand as it relates to fiction, because a story has a many-dimensional structure whereas an image has only a few dimensions. Consider, if you will, a woman wearing a bikini. A bikini is a simple, fundamental outfit of clothing. Visually, it neatly divides the woman into several simple, primally attractive shapes: legs, pelvis, stomach, breasts, arms, and head. This is exactly what plot structure does for a story, but it's harder to see because plot happens over time, so we can't see the whole plot structure unless we deliberately draw a diagram of it.

I had this dream because yesterday I noticed something interesting: recently I had made two plot outlined for graphic novel scripts, and I suddenly noticed that they had exactly the same structure: prologue, 9 scenes, epilogue. Does this mean anything? I don't know, I havent had time to compare the two scene-by-scene yet. If there is a pattern, it may be more my personal pattern than a universal one. But it's possible that the distribution of the scenes will correspond to a 3 or 5 act play structure.

What was the point of this post? I guess just that analyzing stories might seem too much like work, but I really think it's worth the effort because you can learn so much about how stories are put together, the concrete details of your vague intuitive goals and preferences, and how to put together that story you yearn to create.

I think the only way to gain the skills you're talking about using is to actually do the work of analyzing texts and either receive feedback on the analysis or read critical analyses by trained analysts. However, in the spirit of exploration, let's consider an alternative useful path: doing the analyses in the context of a working relationship between a writer and critic.

In particular, it would be useful to look at how a critical reader or editor works in order to augment this idea of analyzing stories and emulating them.

In my experience, when you are asked to give a "crit" of a work - be it short story, novel, script, or any other literary form - you can take a variety of approaches. My personal approach has worked for both writers' groups and in individual relationships with struggling writers. Most of the time I read the story once for "scope" and then read it a second time for details; I usually make notes on the second pass, but if I am feeling particularly lazy, I will actually begin to construct my crit directly during that second read. Once I have notes put together, I give the whole thing a third pass, tying the notes more specifically to story sections, reviewing the notes to see if they hold up on further exploration, and elaborating where necessary. This pass has also been useful for finding broader issues in a work - subplots which don't hang together, character inconsistencies, setting elements which don't work or don't seem to flow with other setting elements, and so on.

Given this final set of notes, usually embedded e-mail or Usenet style in a chopped-up version of the original story, I either create a coherent crit divorced of the content, or I send the embedded version back to the writer.

Occasionally, I'll simply edit a story as I see fit, rewriting bits as I read. As most people who've done significant amounts of editing & critting probably know, this feels great while you're doing it but is a far less useful form of feedback for the writer. Nowadays I only do this when I can basically restrict myself to cutting material. Most decent writers know what they're getting at, but they do things like employ passive verbs, irrelevant introductory material, and excess description. Removing chaff has a twofold benefit: First, it makes the story more interesting to read. Second, it focuses the work. In the extreme case of this activity, this more focused version becomes the type of analysis we're discussing here.

Well, we learn pretty much everything by a mixture of watching others do it, trying to do it ourselves, and reading or hearing theory about it. Although fiction analysis has the additional interesting possibility of seeing other people analyze something we have made.

When I edit a novel manuscript or partial I request a synopsis, and read it so that I understand generally what the reader is trying to accomplish and where they are going with the story. Knowing th pattern of the whole plot helps me analyze whether material is presented in the right order, each chapter is pulling its weight, etc. So I do my editing in two steps - the asking for large-scale rearrangements and rewrites step, and only after I get a revised manuscript back do I edit indifidual sentences, word choice, punctuation, and other small-scale problems.

I agree that re-writing someone's stuff is easier and way less educational for them - I only do this if the writing is for a business purpose rather than an artistic purpose, or if I'm being paid to ghostwrite.

I've never had the experience of having someone analyze a complete story of mine because it's usually the outline stage I want feedback on, not the actual manuscript or script - that seems to be the opposite of what most writers want though. Anyway, the analysis people have done of my goals and motives has given me interesting insight into what audiences are getting out of my story, but I haven't really learned much about writing technique or structure this way.

Interesting. So maybe another path could be to ask readers to present you with a "synopsis" of your own works. I'm assuming that's part of what you're getting at in terms of people analyzing the things you've made, but it deserves particular highlight here because it can help you identify basic problems in translation from the realm of high-concept to delivered writing.

I realize that's a little off the main point in terms of emulation, but I think that it's important to understand both the abstract and concrete levels of composition. If a writer can come up with great plots and characters but cannot put words together in a compelling way to present those components, they will be handicapped. Again, this augments your ideas rather than replacing them.

I've found for myself that I tend to emulate writerly style more than I do high-concept stuff. That's probably because my main interest is in speculative fiction, where the ideas themselves usually have to be relatively original, and also where there are a couple of alternative approaches to composition - in particular, "gimmick fiction", where the creation of some new technology is the central hook, and "societal fiction", where a small number of simple but powerful changes to society are posited and the effects thereof are explored. Of the two, it turns out that the latter usually brings out a better story, and it fits more cleanly with classical techniques about generating the world your characters inhabit.