Alan Ackmann

Puzzled Writers, Dramatic Situations

I recently spent the night at a friend’s house, and since I’m almost always the first to get up in the morning I killed a few hours raiding his library. After browsing the shelves of anthologies, journals, and short story collections—several of which were wayward sons and daughters from my own library—I settled on Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt. Published in 2005 by Writer’s Digest books, Story Structure Architect attempts to distill storytelling into a composite list of common plots, incidents, and relationships. The idea is that all stories follow some combination of five dramatic throughlines (i.e. “the character succeeds”, or “the character fails”) six types of conflicts (relational or situational conflicts, for example), eleven master structures (such as episodic, parallel, journey, etc) and a whopping 55 different dramatic situations, which are presented a specific versions of larger conflicts, often in pairs describing both a conflict and its resolution (the dramatic situation of an abduction, for example, has the complementary situation of a reunion, and a daring enterprise has the complement of a healing journey).

The theory is that categorizing situations makes it easier to recognize and implement them. This last category draws heavily from Georges Polti’s 1945 book Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations.

Schmidt’s book is more than just a catalog of conflict, though. According to her, Polti’s work left much of the implementation and embellishment of his situations to inference, and neglected to consider variations on his archetypes as they relate to feminine journeys as well as masculine ones. Her own text is meant to fill in these gaps. Schmidt’s background as a feminist critic comes out in the text, as does her background as a screenwriter, as she is likely to use films as examples rather than short stories or novels. Since she is confining her examination to plot and narrative, however, the crossover of mediums can be indulged.

It’s a dark little secret of mine, but I’ve always enjoyed compendiums like this—for both their theoretical and practical value. Some of my fellow writers have resisted studying narrative archetypes, preferring to develop structure organically, and therefore seeing templates as playing by someone else’s rules and diminishing their own creativity. And I can see the perspective—if followed too rigidly, systematic plot development can become clichéd and predictable. I confess that I’ve never completely accepted the perspective, however, as almost all art sustains itself by manipulating existing conventions, even if it defies those conventions. Furthermore, recognizing common patterns of development can help you anticipate an audience’s expectations for your story, however you might chose to accommodate for those expectations. Greater familiarity with structural overlap between stories therefore helps the writer envision their own work.

And there is nothing wrong with drawing upon existing modes of expression—sonnets, for example, follow specific patterns of development that transcend their content, and many dramatic situations bloom and fade in much the same way. I find that viewing an initially chaotic set of characters or situations (and many of my drafts are quite chaotic) through the lens of previously tested patterns can be quite helpful in clarifying conflict and dramatic structure—in the same way that studying common features in the support systems of existing cathedrals and bridges can help an architect design their own, although their own might be quite different.

The great value of a book like Schmidt’s, then, is its ability to increase a writer’s options regarding what a text can look like. This is especially useful for beginning fiction students, who tend to develop incidents rather than plots, and often struggle with envisioning resolutions. While it shouldn’t become a crutch, therefore, a book like Schmidt’s can be quite empowering if used discerningly.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Apr 3, 02:12 PM.
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