Something I’ve been trying the past couple of weeks (and maybe this makes this a #HacksawDraft thing) is repeatedly compressing and decompressing a novel outline.
I just realized this is sort of like folding steel or kneading bread.
Let me explain WTF I am on about in a thread on narrative. (🧵–>)
(NB!: This ‘mini-essay’ type thing was originally a thread on Bluesky, here: https://bsky.app/profile/foozzzball.bsky.social/post/3lnx5mnzkhk2v )
Narratives exist on multiple levels of fidelity simultaneously.
I view The Hero’s Journey/Monomyth as a kind of cognitive illusion built on this – a method of blurring our vision until all stories resemble each other in some way.
At the most blurry, fuzzy level, all stories are about causality.
Causality, in short, is ‘Things are like this. Something happens, and because of that things are different now – like this.’
People will tell you the roots of storytelling are in conflict or stakes or personal growth, but that’s all cultural manifestations. People will tell you (exhaustively) that storytelling is a pyramid, or a circle, or some other schema that they can use to explain why a bestselling story ‘works’. They will lay claim to neurology and evolutionary psychology, they will complexify matters and then provide simple guides with paint-by-numbers scenes to fill in.
The fact that all of these gurus are saying different things and getting relatively similar results should be the first clue that they’re all wrong – the infamous Hero’s Journey/Monomyth memo that gave us Star Wars, followed precisely, results in fairly cookie-cutter stories.
But if you take a good story, any good story, and you blur your eyes sufficiently… suddenly it starts looking like that memo. It starts looking like a pyramid, a circle, a schema from a scriptwriting handbook.
What gives?
Stories are built out of causality. ‘Things changed, now it’s like this.’
That’s the absolutely highest level view you can get, and digging into the weeds, one can quibble with it, but it looks like every story you’ve ever heard – from religious epics to Little Red Riding Hood to every blockbuster that ever existed.
When you reverse the blur, you don’t get the image.
When we reduce Star Wars to the Monomyth, and try and write from the Monomyth, you don’t get Star Wars – you get a cheap knockoff.
(Monomyth, for those being introduced for the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey – TL;DR, badly attempted comparative mythology to say all myth is linked.)
So what is the POINT of the monomyth, of blurring a story down to causality? Dark End recently mentioned grappling with the old advice of ‘reduce your story to a sentence’ ( See: https://bsky.app/profile/dark-end.bsky.social/post/3lnqzqw6mqc2s ) and got me thinking about that, again.
A lot of writers talk about that kind of thing – ‘finding the strapline’ – as a kind of guidestone, a way to keep course.
The Three/Five Act structure, as some may have heard me said before, is to my mind not an innate quality of narrative, but rather a mnemonic schema – a method of memorization.
Learning a story by rote is hard.
’Once upon a time’ helps, in that it’s both a tradition – which becomes repeated enough we can all remember – but also a memorization ritual of sorts. A way to begin the process of memory recall of a whole class of stories we know. We know the start – ‘Once upon a time’ – the end ‘happily ever after’ – and in theory, even if we forget something, so long as we can get from one to the other we’ve successfully told a version of the European folktales best popularized by the brothers Grimm – who, if you didn’t know, literally went around getting people to tell them stories and wrote them down verbatim, cleaned them up a little, and published what they got out of that process. If you don’t believe me, check out The Golden Key.
These schemas become both a way to remember the main parts of a story, but also to construct the framework in such a way the teller can effectively improvise their way between them while keeping the story intact.
The details blur – How many traits of the wolf did Little Red Riding Hood go ‘oh what <adjective> <noun> you have grandmama’ over? Sharp teeth, big paws, hairy chin? – but the actual structure remains intact.
We remember where things start out. We remember where they change. We remember what they change to.
We remember the causality of the story – and if the causality remains intact, the story remains intact. This is why it is possible to so meaningfully reimagine stories and retell and adapt them.
Sometimes, adaptations do things the original work didn’t. Whether that’s a television or animated adaptation of a book or graphic novel, or a timeless classic given the Disney treatment, functionally it’s seldom about changing the story – changing the causal chains – it’s about engaging with it.
The example at the top of my head for this is the adaptation of Invincible versus the comic run. In the animated adaptation, the protagonist’s friend William is an openly gay young man. In the comic, William is bro-ey and when he comes out as gay it’s a total whiplash moment.
Pros and cons to both.
But what’s really striking is that by making the shift to being openly gay in the adaptation, William is free to have much deeper emotional resonances and connections with other characters in a fraction of the time. It discards narrative motion in favour of giving the character immediate engagement.
None of that changes the fundamental causality of the story – but it does allow rearranging individual scenes to place other realizations and events around William’s boyfriend being turned into a zombie robot soldier much earlier in the storyline with much more impact.
To work on a large narrative, you must be able to recall it. If you attempt to do this on a word-by-word, event-by-event basis, you often ‘lock down’ those events and words in your memory and in relation to each other. You can’t change one character a bit, because the knock-on impacts ripple through the narrative, making your mental model harder to hold onto.
Rearranging one scene necessitates rearranging every scene – because you are working on the narrative as the individual links in an intricate chain.
At this level of ‘fidelity’, there is no blur – every time you re-tell the story to yourself, it is the exact same story, page by page.
When you break a story’s events down into scenes – larger links in the causal chain – it becomes more flexible. In the same way ‘once upon a time’ and ‘they lived happily ever after’ are the two points you’re navigating between, each scene becomes a ‘block’ where you can re-imagine the details so long as whatever the scene is doing gets done. Some scenes become so archetypal in a particular story genre (or franchise!) that they can be interpreted and retold in so many ways that these lynchpins start becoming the only scenes that matter.
In Batman, protagonist Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are gunned down outside an opera by a criminal mugger, inspiring his lifelong pursuit of justice (and often his distate for killing).
In Batman Begins, the Nolan version, Bruce views himself as responsible for the event because he was afraid of bat-like dancers and asked to leave the performance early, so they were alone in that alley.
In Batman (1989), the Tim Burton version, Bruce is blameless – but he and his family are ominously stalked for several blocks after departing the show (I think it’s a film), foreshadowing the eventual menace of the Joker.
This scene has been reinterpreted so often that some adaptations are brave enough to leave it out, merely referring to Bruce’s later mourning.
The constant reinterpretation of this scene has turned it into a mythic archetype within the franchise – it can be retold a thousand ways, so long as it puts Bruce Wayne onto the path of being Batman.
By ‘blurring’ the narrative fidelity of this scene down to its simplest form, we get the one line version. The strapline. ‘A murder inspires a hero to ensure it never happens again’. And played flat, it sucks – it feels imitative and tasteless.
‘Reinventing’ it in the retelling is the key. But if we get hung up on the fine detail, we cannot retell it differently. It must be blurred before we gain the freedom to play with the narrative, it must be blurred to reduce the specifics of the narrative down to those most visible elements, which if we manage to hit, allow us an unbridled freedom to innovate and build and play with that scene. To make it over again, new.
If you slavishly follow the Monomyth, the Three Act Structure, the writing guide for ‘how stories work’, you will likely fail to make use of the joyous freedom of storytelling. You will likely treat them as inflexible necessities rather than loose directions.
These approaches blur a story beyond its scenes and into key points of change, the tallest trees in the forest of the storyline. Usually these points will be scenes – but scenes that become far more flexible, and can be rearranged to change the way a story feels, even if the story itself does not actually change.
A three act structure – roughly, introduction, rise to confront a crisis, and the crisis is resolved – is really, really blurry. But it’s also really stretchy – you can make the introduction really long, really short, you can repeat the intro/rise/fall cycle multiple times, you can replace acts.
When you blur a story down that far, almost any story can fit the structure. And as a result… almost any story becomes a ‘once upon a time’ to ‘happily ever after’ series of landmarks to improvise between.
Which returns me to compressing/decompressing a novel.
I like complicated narratives. But they are a pain in the ass to work with. Little details become fixed points in a finely wrought narrative chain. Things get inflexible and I lose my ability to innovate.
Eg: There’s a cool car chase and it’s related to a heist! And therefore, the stolen MacGuffin.
In THEORY, the chase and the heist can be any chase and heist. The MacGuffin being stolen doesn’t matter too much – swap it out for another one, right?
In PRACTICE, because of all the specific details, I find myself stumbling over ‘but if the MacGuffin is too big they can’t walk out to the car for the car chase on the street, so they have to be picked up in an alley…’ type details.
And that means I spend thirty minutes trying to work out the layout of this alley and how to get the scene to still match up to some other part of this intricately woven web of events…
… when I COULD have spent thirty minutes figuring out that if I cut out the MacGuffin from the scene entirely, then the car chase could still happen because a gangster who was at the heist (now six scenes beforehand) has spotted the protagonist and erroneously think the protagonist still has this MacGuffin!
I get more flexibility by considering the story from this blurred out perspective. And once I do, once I blur it, and then start fitting my little details back into it AFTER I’ve simplified the story down to key beats, I open up room to retell my story – to re-adapt it – to turn the components of my story into a self contained mythos where I have the freedom to explore thirty different ways of doing this chase scene, and thirty different ways of making it emotionally resonant with the rest of the storyline, instead of getting hung up on thirty ways to get my protagonist into the car.
Literally, I spent time writing the complex narrative out as 12 beats, then 8 beats, then 6, simplifying and simplifying and simplifying, and that doesn’t change the actual story at all.
It just gets very picky about what I choose for the landmarks I use as mnemonics and the stuff between those landmarks can be exactly the same, or different, as I choose.
And that means that even as I’m simplifying, reducing it down to a few beats, I’m still filling in all the complex stuff between those beats.
But because I’m looking at it ‘blurrier’, I can work on larger structural elements of the story MUCH more easily. I can make decisions about the larger story framework by thinking about those six beats and how they link up, rather than the 30-50 individual scenes or the dozens of individual components/beats of those scenes.
And every time I repeat the process – go simple, fill in the gaps and make it complex, go simple again, fill in the gaps again – I’m not just re-telling my story to myself, I’m stress testing it the way classic stories get stress tested.
Generations start with ‘Once upon a time’ and find out what the path to ‘happily ever after’ is, and every time the story is retold, the details the storyteller likes best and responds most strongly to are the ones they remember most strongly. Those moments become the highest trees in the forest, those moments become the story’s lynchpin, and finding those moments, creating them, refining them, is a huge part of the art of storytelling that is so hard to describe and teach that instead of that people will create lists of those scenes and try to sell them to you as a recipe to follow.
It’s not a recipe.
It’s a map, and it’s a journey you have to take yourself. The more shortcuts you take, the less you’re going to be able to tell a story you’re proud of.
