Basics of a the Meta-Story
Meta-Story
This is the level of storytelling that gets you a loyal fan base. The basic goal of the meta-story is to make your reader fantasize about your universe long after they've finished reading your story.
A: A good idea
Anyone who thinks of themself as a writer and tells people that they're a writer has heard someone say, 'I have this great idea for a story.'
Most of us are, frankly, tired of hearing it. It isn't that we don't believe that they have a great idea, it's that we've already got plenty of ideas. The problem isn't coming up with an idea, it's moving an idea from stage one 'I have a great idea!' to stage thirty seven, 'I have a completed novel based on my great idea!' Well, that and the fact that most of us don't like sharing credit for our work. It's the difference between being able to say 'I have my first house!' and 'I'm renting a room in someone else's first house!'
Pitfalls:
-Forcing the idea: Sometimes as a writer I come up with a really great idea, but find myself, three days later, not passionate about the project. First, there's nothing wrong with that, it happens to everybody (probably). You don't have to finish every idea, and even the ones you do finish, you don't have to finish in order, in fact, I think that there are some times when it's best set one aside for a while. I have several story concepts that I don't trust myself to do yet because I'm just not skilled enough to pull them off the way they need to be done. While it's important to be able to make yourself write even when you're not motivated, it's also important not to burn yourself out on a good story. Be prepared to walk away from a project, even if only for a little while.
-Making an idea to fit a darling: Ideas for stories can come from anywhere. I've had stories that came about from a single line of dialogue that popped into my head. I've had ideas that are based on an idea for the cover of a novel. I've had ideas that exist because of something that I hate about another book. Ideas come from everywhere and come off of everything. But don't force the idea, and don't think that you have to keep the thing that started the process. Too often I find myself trying to fight the natural course of a story because I want to reach a specific moment, a moment that I think is too wonderful to skip. Experience has taught me that the moment can be moved to another story. Or it can be discarded altogether. A story is one cohesive thing, a body, and if some part of it harms the whole, cut it off.
Exercises:
-The lists: A lot of really good ideas come to us piecemeal. Whether it's a line of dialogue that we can't fit anywhere, or a basic story outline that we know we aren't ready to write, or even just a cute title that doesn't have an outline to fit it yet, we find ourselves worried that we'll lose something precious if we don't do anything with it now. So do something with it. Write it down. Keep a folder full of ideas that you want to work on. It's useful both to prevent you from losing what you love so much, and as fodder for the imagination when you're going through writer's block. I keep a notebook with a list of the projects I want to do, and when I'm feeling unmotivated, unsure what to do, I have something to flip through, something to think about. It doesn't always help, but it hasn't hurt yet.
-Cut and paste: We've all been there, we've written the first fifteen pages of a novel and realized that, around page five, we took a wrong turn. Our main character should have skipped out on his wife's baby shower and gone drinking instead. But we have ten pages of hard work that don't fit the new course of the story. Ten pages with great descriptions and a hilarious scene involving a dog and a pigeon. We can't just get rid of all of that, can we? Dude. Cut and paste. One of the authors in my writing group keeps a file full of sections of his work that he's had to set aside for the sake of the story. It's easier to cut and paste it than to delete, and sometimes he can find new places for some of his scenes. If he can't, well, trust me when I say this, it's a lot easier to delete ten pages of work after you've completed the hundred and eighty page manuscript than when you're only two chapters in.
B: Universe Building
Universe building is a subtle artform. It's about creating a reality that is interesting, and surprising, but also consistent. It's about knowing more than you tell, and knowing how much to tell. One of the best authors I've read for universe building is Carol Berg. I'd advise both reading her books, and, if possible, attending one of her lectures on universe building.
1. Physical world
You'll note in a lot of fantasy books that the author will have a map of their world, or at leasat the country most central to the story, in the first couple of pages. When you have any kind of saga which involves a lot of running from town to town, or questing through various jungles and mountains, making a map to work off of is often a good idea. Even if you find that you have to change the map to make the story work, being able to look at a physical representation of your characters' journey. It keeps the writer honest by forcing them to work with a set universe that doesn't twist to suit their needs. It also helps some readers stay grounded.
2. Social world
When you're building a world from the ground up, it's important to think of the interactions of the various classes and economic positions. It's also important to consider why they would interact in particular ways. Is money the most important thing in your society? If the religious elite need the support of the wealthy to build religious structures, or to support their lavish lifestyles, then the interactions between merchants and priests will be very different than in a society where public reproval by a representative of a particular god can cause townspeople to shun that person. If a king commands absolute loyalty from his subjects, then the world will be a very different place, than one where a soldier's allegiance depends on how much he's getting paid.
3. Systems
i. Social systems
Social systems is in a separate category from the social world because most of the issues in the social world are things that you should probably make explicit in your writing. What I'm referring to with regards to social systems are the systems that you may or may not choose to reveal to your reader. Whether it is the structure of a guild, or the bureaucracy of a religious order, there are various facets of your world which you need to think through for the sake of your writing. How long does it take information to go from someone with no discernible power, to the leader of an organization? Is there an intrinsic trust and unity between the members of this group, or is there a constant struggle for power? Keep in mind that in the world of your story, like in the real world, things are happening whether or not your reader is watching them. What is important is to know what you need to tell your reader, and what you can keep from them. That's something best learned with practice, but I will give you this rule of thumb: if there is a change in a social system that effects your story, such as a new leader takes over the guild of assassins and rescinds the bounty on your protagonists head, you should probably address the change, or else you just seem inconsistent.
ii. Magic systems
The key to magical systems, or technological systems, or psionic systems, is consistency. My advice is to make yourself a sheet of paper describing exactly how the system works, and holding yourself to that.
4. Plants and animals
My advice, unless you're an expert on these things, is to avoid getting too elaborate. Stick with real animals as much as you can. If you are interjecting your own animals keep in mind that you are putting them into an ecosystem. Your animals must eat. Your animals must poop. Your animals probably have to die at some point, which means that something has to eat them. They compete for food, they defend their territory . . . same with plants. New creatures do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in our world, which means they have to survive in it.
C: Story Arc
The first time someone explained story arc and the various parts of a story to me, I was annoyed. Offended, even. From my perspective, it was as though somebody had come up to me after I finished painting a canvas and chastised me for putting the colors on the wrong sections. Writing, I felt, was art, and art shouldn't be bound by so much form.
Well, yes and no. Having had some time to think about it and explore the ins and outs of writing, I think that many writers follow too rigid a structure, but now I see writing as being closer to designing a building than painting a canvas. There is endless opportunity for variation and creation, there are thousands of concepts that have not been fully explored, millions of ideas to play with, but while you're working on the art, you also need to keep in mind that the structure is going to need to be stable enough to stay standing while people walk through it oohing and ahing. That's what the story arc is for. Keep in mind that when you're writing a story, you're telling A story. Singular. The story arc is meant to keep you on task, attached to that one story, that one idea, and to make sure that the reader stays involved in it.
1. Normal World to Inciting incident
With few exceptions, stories are about solving or resolving a problem, or series of problems. Whether it's the bully at school who keeps stealing your main character's lunch money, or an interstellar incident that must be managed before war breaks out, stories are usually set around a specific problem and a specific goal. The establishment of the conflict around which the story is based, and pursuit of the solution is a moment called the 'inciting incident.' Traditionally, the inciting incident comes very early in the book, usually in the frist chapter, usually following the establishment of the 'ordinary world.' The purpose of establishing the ordinary world is to show the reader that the inciting incident changes things, that a new conflict has arisen that wasn't there before, and thus the stakes for the protagonist have become higher than they were when things were 'normal.' While the typical format is to spend a few pages establishing the ordinary world before setting up the inciting incident, many authors prefer to begin with the inciting incident and establish the ordinary world through flashbacks or contrast (that is to say, we can tell what the character would normally do from how people interact with him/her, as contrasted to what he/she is doing based on the new situation). This method is particularly useful for the writer who wants to be certain they draw the reader in immediately. The longer a writer takes getting to the inciting incident, the more likely the reader is to become bored with the book and set it down. Conversely, if a writer is good enough, an extended section dedicated to establishing the ordinary world can make the reader more heavily invested in 'normalcy,' thus more effected when that normalcy is stripped away.
2. Inciting Incident to First turning point
The inciting incident has given your story fuel. Your protagonist has a goal and has begun moving towards that goal. The turning point is where something changes. Perhaps it is something small, like the boy who is tired of having his lunch money stolen finds out that the bully has been taking the lunch money from half the kids in school; or it can be something that changes the story altogether, like the protagonist in your space opera finding out that the interstellar incident was staged specifically to start a massive war. Something is uncovered that changes either the protagonists goal, or how he intends to get there. The turning point is meant to increase the tension and keep the reader interested. A turning point forces your main character to adapt, whether it is a major change or a small one it makes the reader ask the all-important question, 'what will he/she do now?'
3. First turning point to Second turning point (rinse and repeat)
The number of turning points you have in a story are up to you, keep in mind, however, that the longer the story, the more tension you need, and turning points are excellent for adding tension. Also keep in mind that the most powerful turning points are the one where you challenge the established nature of your character. If you show us in chapter one that the boy whose lunch money has been stolen over and over again was raised to believe that violence is never the answer, then having a turning point where the only way out seems to be violence will make the reader more interested, as they are curious to see if the main character will stick to his values, or abandon them in the face of adversity.
4. Final turning point to Black moment
The final turning point is basically the Final Revelation. When your main character discovers something that shows him the actual truth of the situation. For example, if your protagonist whose lunch money is being stolen discovers that the bully who has been taking it has been trying to save up to help pay for his sick mother's surgery. Whether it is a large revelation or a small one it tells us the truth and gives the protagonist one last choice to make. That last choice leads us to the Black Moment. The black moment, or the 'all for naught' moment is when all appears to be lost. All of the protagonists hard work seems to be for nothing, and the worst has finally happened. Sometimes the black moment is the final turning point, when the main character realizes some mistake or misunderstanding too late to change anything. How black the black moment is depends on who you are writing for as much as anything else. Most writers won't be quite as dark in a story for fifth graders as they will in a story meant for highschool seniors. Also, if you're writing a horror, you'll want to end it on the black moment. In most cases, however, the point of that dark and dreadful moment is to make the resolution all the more resplendant.
5. Black moment to Climax
The black moment gives way to the climax. Most of the time the black moment gives way to the Climax almost immediately, though in some cases the author may choose to take a chapter or two to build up to their final confrontation. After the sad moment of certain defeat, the climax is the resurgence of hope, whether it is brought about by sudden revelation, or by a forgotten choice of the protagonist from chapter 2, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that something established earlier in your writing has finally come to fruition and your main character finds their situation improved from hopeless to . . . well, not hopeless.
6. Climax to Resolution
The resolution is simply the tying of loose threads. There are, inevitably, questions that arise in the course of a story. You don't have to answer ALL of the questions, especially if you are working on a series, but you do need to give the reader some sense of closure. Your readers have invested time and energy into your book, and now you owe it to them to give them that catharsis, that emotional release that they've been lookin for.
D: Cohesive Story
1. One story
Stories can go to some crazy places, and sometimes as a writer you end up where you didn't expect to be. But no matter how many side trips and detours you take, your end has to answer the question that you posed at the beginning. If your protagonist flies to the edges of the universe to find a singular flower to win the heart of his beloved, but in the course of his adventure finds himself entwined in a conspiracy to clone an ancient race of warriors to destroy the galactic empire, that's fine. But at the end of the story you need to address a singular flower and the love story that started it all. Even if your main character simply acknowledges that he doesn't remember his former love's face, and frankly has no interest in returning home, your ending must address your beginning.
2. Suspension of disbelief consistent
If a man ran up to you in a store and told you that he was a time traveler from the distant future and that the fate of mankind and an alien race depended on you, chances are you'd be a bit skeptical. I'm not saying you'd reject their supposition right off the bat, but chances are you wouldn't jump on the back of their go-cart and let them take you to the spaceship they claim they've got stashed at the junkyard. I'm just saying. But in a book, movie, t.v. show, story, what-have-you, the reader is willing to suspend that natural disbelief (thus the term) and just go with it.
That said, there are a few things that you as the writer can do to make that suspension of disbelief easier for your reader.
Pitfalls:
-Characters who accept too much too easily: Suspension of disbelief is an act taken by the reader. But one of the hardest things for a reader to suspend disbelief over is unrealistic behavior by the characters. The characters aren't supposed to suspend their disbelief. The aren't supposed to accept that the man telling them that he's from the future is really from the future. You have to find a way to convince them. You have to make them believe.
-Deus Ex Machina (God from out of the machine): God from the machine was originally used to describe a tool used by some ancient greek playwrites who would resolve the problems of their works by having characters playing the Gods descend into the story and sort things out. Now the term is used to refer to an excessively serendipitous event which shows up at just the right time and place to solve the problems of a character. Remember, the more you make your character suffer and work, the more empathy the reader feels for them. If your character desperately needs two hundred dollars, and only has one dollar left, and they spend it on a lotto ticket and win two hundred dollars, that isn't a sympathetic character, that's a lucky bastard.
-The genre switch: There is, in the course of any story, a certain amount of time in which the reader will pretty much accept anything you put forward. Magic is real? No problem. The ancient Gods of Greece walk among us? Fantastic. The cast of the Brady Bunch spent their vacation time defending the world from an alien invasion? Cool. But at a certain point in your story you need to have established just how bizarre your world really is. And from that point on, don't make it more bizarre. You can decrease the level of suspension of disbelief. If the character in chapters one through seven who claims to be from the future turns out to be mentally ill, the reader will probably roll with it, but avoid going in the other direction. If you've established that you're writing a murder mystery where a wealthy senator with an ignoble past was murdered, then after two hundred pages of political intrigue and manipulation you tell us that this is actually a science fiction story, and the man was murdered by aliens, you're probably going to piss a few readers off. Well, there are ways around that, but you usually need to sew the seeds for that switch early on.
Exercises:
-Elementary, my dear Watson: Take an established character from one genre and move them to another. What would it take to convince a man of science and logic, like, just by way of example, Sherlock Holmes, that magic is real? How would you convince a man from the stone ages that science isn't magic?
-The Genre Tango: One of the finer tricks of writing is making your reader uncertain what is real and what isn't. It is perfectly possible to establish a shifting level of suspension of disbelief in a book. By creating a particular tone and establishing ambiguous scenes you can establish with the reader that they need to be willing to accept the possibility of a high level of suspension of disbelief, or a low level. Take a scene in the beginning of a book and try to rewrite it so that it is unclear what genre the story is coming from. Another technique for leaving yourself open to a switch in levels of suspension of disbelief is what I like to call the genrefication of characters. If you can establish certain characters as viewing the world in very different ways, you can create ambiguity as to which characters see the world for what it really is, and which ones see it as they want/fear. The trick, of course, is not to get too far into anybody's head. The more certain your reader becomes about the state of the world, the harder it will be for them to accept a shift in that reality.
3. Internal consistency
In some ways every book is a mystery. Sometimes the question is how it will end, other times the reader knows how it will end from the very beginning, the only question is how we're going to get there. The point is, throughout the course of most stories, the reader is trying to solve something. They're trying to get ahead of the writer and figure out how various problems will be overcome. Thus, in a way, your story is a game, and while you can make up a lot of the rules, your readers will become very upset if you cheat. Don't hide facts from your readers. If the key to figuring out who killed Uncle Simon revolves around knowing that Mrs. Bobbin's poodle was dyed green on Christmas eve, you can't hide the fact that the poodle was dyed green on Christmas eve. You don't have to harp on the fact, but you can't wait until the end of the story to tell the reader something that is blatantly obvious to your characters. Now, having your characters understand the meaning of information that your reader might not understand, that's another matter. If your main character happens to know that, unlike most dogs, poodles have one, not two coats of fur, and that fact is relevant to the case, that's fine, as long as the facts that you did not introduce are actual facts, which the reader could have known or found out for themselves. Although, for the record, if the knowledge is too specialized you run the risk of alienating your reader and creating a niche book only appealing to people in rarified professions or interest groups.
a. Twists and turns
Though subverting the expectations of the reader by having characters lie, or by having your characters face false leads and ambiguous information is often useful in keeping the reader engaged, be wary of making your stories too convoluted. If your stories are, by their nature, complicated and twisted, keep careful track of the established facts. Many good stories are ruined when the reader finds an inconsistency. Know your facts, and stick to them.
b. Foreshadowing and parallels
One of the differences I've found between good books and great books, can be found in the second reading. The subtle usage of foreshadowing and parallels can give a story the ability to flow more smoothly and read more naturally. It's one of the more advanced skills in writing, and one which I do not claim to be intimately familiar with.
c. Bookends, etc
Bookends are one of many tools that can be used too make your story flow more smoothly. If you can connect the end of a story back to the beginning, your reader is likely to feel a greater since of satisfaction. An example would be if you start a book with a woman in labor, and end it with another woman announcing that she's pregnant. Or if a story starts with a character reading a letter from a loved one, and ends with that character writing a letter to that same person. Though not as subtle as many other kinds of parallels, use of bookends gives the feeling of completion, or conversely tells the reader that though they may not be observing it anymore, life in this little world is carrying on.