Exercise #12: The Novel-Shaped Story
Blake Snyder, Stephen Graham Jones, Jesse Ball, Aimee Bender, Chana Porter, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sophie Mackintosh, Tracy O'Neill, Charles Yu, Deb Olin Unferth, Amber Sparks, Jess Walter...
Hi friends,
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2021 and good riddance to 2020! I hope that you and yours had the happiest holiday season you could, given what a challenging year this was, and I hope that the new year brings better things for us all.
One of my 2020 goals was to read at least one short story every day of the year, an effort that began with Bryan Washington’s “Lot” and ended, miraculously, with Denis Johnson’s “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.” It was an incredible year of reading, and I ended up being so glad to have had that daily practice already in place when the pandemic and stay-at-home began and my reading attention became temporarily harder to sustain. Some days I read a one-page story because it was all I could get done, but every day I read something, and I appreciated the chance to take a long sustained dive into the short story. If you’re at all curious to see the full list of stories I read this year, there’s a text version at my website (under the 2020 books list) and a version with photos and links on Twitter. There’s a lot of good reading there!
I’ve spent December doing some planning and prep for starting a second draft of my next novel; this month’s exercise emerged from my wondering how some of what I’ve learned about plot at the novel scale might be returned to the scale of the story. I hope it’s useful! You’ll also see that this month’s “What I’m Reading” section has been swapped out for a simple list highlighting some of my favorite books of the year: if you haven’t read some of these books, I hope you’ll check them out in 2021, as every 2020 book deserves more love than it received during this distracting and difficult year.
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this month, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
Some of My Favorite New Books of 2020 (and two from late 2019, read this year):
Exercise #12: The Novel-Shaped Story
One of the first things I discovered about writing novels is that properly structuring the plot of a novel is incredibly hard to do in advance—at least for me. Despite sometimes wishing it were otherwise, I’ve never been the kind of person who successfully begins from an outline detailing the entirety of the plot: my first drafts are experimental, exploratory efforts, which end up book length, even book-shaped, but not quite books. Those first drafts have been crucial—so much of what ended up being most surprising about each of my novels was discovered this way—but eventually I need to do the work of making sure the story is structured the best it can be, which I do by outlining the first draft, then revising that outline into a plan for a better second draft.
I’m in the midst of that process now with what will hopefully be my next novel: I’ve got a 300-page first draft, ending and all, but with some scenes I know are missing, plus some big structural questions I need to answer. Making the draft-to-draft transition is often daunting, but I’ve found that outlining at this stage (and often only at this stage) works well for me, as do certain kinds of scene analysis.
One technique I’ve found to get started on this post-draft outline is to take any popular screenwriting book or “How to Write Your Novel in 30 Days” tome or even something more “highbrow” like Meander Spiral Explode and try to map my existing draft to the craft book’s “this is how the best novels/movies work” scheme. For the novel I’m working on now, I chose Blake Snyder’s famous screenwriting book Save the Cat, which offers the following fairly rigid beat sheet (with each stage’s location and duration noted here in pages of screenplay):
Opening Image (1)
Theme Stated (5)
Set-Up (1-10)
Catalyst (12)
Debate (12-25)
Break into Two (25)
B Story (30)
Fun and Games (30-55)
Midpoint (55)
Bad Guys Close In (55-75)
All Is Lost (75)
Dark Night of the Soul (75-85)
Break into Three (85)
Finale (85-110)
Final Image (110)
I won’t explain all of these beats here: most of them are fairly self-explanatory, but it’s worth popping over to Snyder’s website or grabbing his book to read about any unfamiliar terms or to give yourself a refresher on how he’s thinking about these stages. (There’s another explainer here, which might be helpful.) My own favorite stage in this scheme is “Fun and Games,” which Snyder says provides “the promise of the premise,” and is where “most of the trailer moments of a movie are found.” (A very fun phase to keep an eye out for the next time you’re watching movies: I’ve got Return of the Jedi on as I write this, and almost the entirety of the Jabba’s Palace rescue fits inside this part of that movie...)
“Save the Cat” is obviously a scheme for a three-act structure, which may or not be the right fit for my book or for yours, but that fit or not-fit isn’t that important to me at this stage in my own process. What is important is that in trying to adapt my draft to this scheme, I discover much of what my book is missing or that is disproportioned in some way: maybe I don’t have a clear break into a second act, for instance, or maybe I do, but it comes far too late, and so on. Eventually, I always abandon whatever beat sheet or suggested structure I’ve been working with to move toward my novel’s own best structure, but by then the scheme has already done what it can to help me get there.
So what does this have to do with the novel-shaped stories the exercise title above promises? Well, as I’ve been working on my outline/second-draft plan for my new novel, I’ve also been thinking that what it would be like to write a short story that included all of these beats, in as tight a package as possible. Might that make for an expansive feeling short story, one that contained as much plot as possible? Given that plot is one of the things my students and even professional writer friends routinely say they struggle to understand or create, might this be a way of practicing building conventional plot structures at a smaller scale than the novel?
Let’s find out.
Your exercise this month is to write a 110-sentence short story whose sentences correspond in content and placement to the fifteen points from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat sheet. In other words, you have ten sentences to complete the setup of your story, in which you must also have a strong opening image (in sentence 1), and a probably subtle but still clear thematic statement (in sentence 5). The catalyst (or inciting incident, in more standard fiction writing terms) will come in sentence 12, and the first act of the story will give way to the second in sentence 25. And so on!
For the purposes of this exercise, stick as closely as possible to the outline the beat sheet provides for the entirety of your first draft. Likely you’ll adjust proportions or go another way in a second, but forcing yourself to hit Snyder’s beats exactly at least once will provide a generative constraint that will propel you through the drafting and likely create a surprising amount of unexpected material. Sticking to the beats will also accomplish the secondary goal of this exercise, which is to refamiliarize yourself with the most typical plot moments many readers (and viewers) might expect in longer works, in the hope that those moves will then come to you even more naturally in the future.
Since I’ve not yet tried this exercise, I did a quick check to see how feasible this idea was: the title story of my last collection has 207 sentences, and is about 6000 words long. So, if you write sentences like mine, a 110-sentence story might end up being about 3000 words or so? Perhaps aim for that. But remember that length is less important than sentence count: aim for exactly 110 sentences! I’m excited to see how much plot you can jam into such a small space: in doing so, perhaps you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how propulsive the resulting story might turn out to be.
Good luck! See you next month!
P.S. When I think of stories that could’ve been novels, the first one that always comes to mind is Anthony Doerr’s masterpiece “The Caretaker” (from his book The Shell Collector), which has more great set pieces than many books. I’d be curious to analyze it with Snyder’s beat sheet to see how it works!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.