Hello all, I'm back with a long post about stuff I learnt that I wanna share with fellow creators. I hope this helps someone~ Again all of my notes here are derived from my notes on Story by Robert Mckee. All the definitions given are direct quotes, more or less.
A "Good Story" means something worth telling that the world wants to hear, and I mean hear on a core Human level. A master Storyteller is one who can, from infinite possibilities, select but a few moments of a Character's life story and give us a lifetime.
Thus Story Structure is the choices a storyteller makes about what and how Story gets told.
According to Robert McKee, Structure is a selection of events from the characters' life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.
This sounds broad, but the key word here is specific. Ninety percent of stories flop and waste away because they're built around stereotypical, generic, and superficial characters, interactions, and events. Oddly enough, the more specific you are with the depth of your character and the message you want to dramatize, the more like you are to touch your audience and be relatable.
Side note about 'Message'. You don't start a story knowing your message; this restricts creativity and new ideas. You start the story knowing your premise or open-ended idea.
In exploring the story and characters in an expansive imaginative way, the story reveals to you the message you want to send, Invariably, if you stay honest to yourself, the message revealed will be something you deeply believe in, and it may even surprise you.
Structure at its most basic is a selection of events.
Events create meaningful change in the life situation of a Character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a Value.
The key word here is meaningful. That means the change that happens has to be something that affects the Character in a positive or negative manner. Otherwise, nothing truly happens and that's not the point of a good story.
Now, what are Values?
Story Values are the universal qualities of Human experience that may shift from positive to negative or vice versa, from one moment to the next.
Examples include: Alive/Dead, Love/Hate, Freedom/Slavery, Truth/Lies, Courage/Cowardice, Loyalty/Betrayal, etc
Anything that can be expressed in this binary manner can be a Value upon which the life situation of the Character can turn.
Expanding on the previous definition, how can the Value be turned from negative to positive and vice versa? Through Conflict.
Based on the above, here we have a full definition:
A Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a Value and achieved through Conflict.
Now we come to the segments that all stories can be divided into. The standard unit of Story is the Scene.
A Scene is an action made through conflict in more-or-less continuous time and space that turns at least one Value-charge condition of a character's life with a degree of perceptible significance.
Ideally, every Scene should be a Story Event. Meaning each scene involves some type of change from beginning to end that takes one of the story values and turns it to some degree. The amount the value shifts depends on the Scene, as I'll explain in a bit.
A sub-unit of Scenes is the Beat.
A Beat is an exchange of behavior in Action/Reaction. Beat by Beat, these changing behaviors shape the turning of the scene.
Example: A fight scene.
Character A punches and B reacts with a block.
Character A then has to change their behavior and do something different, to which B has to react yet again.
This ping-ponging builds the scene where ultimately the two characters end up in a place different than they started and you should be able to identify the value that changed.
An example of changed Value (here, Victory/Defeat): Chara A is stronger than B, and has won before, but at the end of the scene B outwits A and wins. Or they draw. Or something else so long as it's not A winning in the exact same manner as before because then nothing will have changed.
Scenes turn the Story Value in small but significant ways. So minor changes.
So now we know Beats >> Scenes. What's next? Sequences.
A Sequence is a series of Scenes (2 to 5) that culminate with a Scene that turns the Story Value in a moderate and impactful way, more than any previous scene on its own.
The difference between a basic Scene and say a Scene that climaxes a Sequence is the degree of change in the Story Value.
Now we have Beats (Action/Reaction behaviors) >> Scenes (minor significant change) >> Sequence (moderate impactful change).
This leads us to the biggest chunk of a Story's Structure: Acts.
An Act is a series of Sequences that peaks in a Climactic Scene which causes a Major reversal of Values, more powerful in its impact than any previous Sequence or Scene.
So you see that things tend to Build up gradually and then with increasing impact.
Now a Series of Acts is what creates A Story, which of course has a Story Climax where there is a Final Reversal of Values that is absolute and irreversible. If a Story does not end in a meaningfully different place than when it started, you don't have a story, you have a series of interconnected happenings.
Because the Story is just one massive Event, and allow me to remind you:
A Story Event is a meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a Value and achieved through Conflict.
Thus we have:
Beats (Action/Reaction) >> Scenes (Minor Turn) >> Sequences (Moderate turn) >> Acts (Major Turns) >> Story (Irreversable and Absolute Turn).
Depending on the story, the size of Scenes, Sequences, and Acts vary. Even the number of Acts can vary from 2 to as many as 6 or more.
There are also different Designs for stories that can be called Archetypal (Classical Design), MiniPlot (Minimalism), and Antiplot (Anti-Structure (which is kind of a structure in and of itself)), which the book Story goes into but because I'm only interested in Archplot/Classical Design stories, I didn't take notes on this part.
I sure hope this helps someone understand the basics of Story Structure. Remember that there is immense variation in stories but this is a tried and true framework that will help you discern if your Story is actually building up to a meaningful change or not.
Just remember, Change is Vital. Know the binary value you're expressing in your story, and it can be anything at all, and let yourself play with it. See what you can do to turn it from negative to positive and positive to negative.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if you'd like me to clarify something.
As always, if you want to learn more about this in depth, I recommend Story by Rober McKee; this man doesn't sugarcoat anything so studying the book is not for the faint of heart.
It takes dedication and a lot of love for Story to become good at what we do and I really wish for the best of any creator who is putting in their all for their comic or novel. I hope sharing what I am also still studying will help others.
Links to other posts:
What Makes a Story?