Shape of a Tale; Exploration

The story has been introduced. We know the main characters, we understand the premise, the inciting incident has kicked off the plot, now what?

Now we start moving toward the more amorphous, “middle” of the plot, that inspired me to try and find more of a solid structure to work from to begin with. And what’s the best thing to do when you’re entering an unknown area?

Exploration.

There’s a rule of thumb with writing that says every scene should be moving the plot forward in some way, and any scene not contributing to that should be cut. This rule is one I generally agree with, but neither do I think that “moving the plot forward” should be the primary purpose of scenes for this phase of the story. An important secondary purpose, yes. But not the primary.

When lighting happens, it isn’t just a single bolt. Not at first. When you see a lightning strike slowed down far enough there’s lines of charge that scatter outwards first, finding possible paths before one of those feelers makes contact with the ground. The process takes fractions of a second, fast enough the flash of lightning itself seems ponderously slow in comparison, but the full strike doesn’t happen until a suitable path is found.

Think of this part of the story like sending out those feelers. The heroes know what they want to accomplish but they don’t yet know how to get there, so the natural thing to do is look for options. Line up suspects to interview, gather intel, seek out allies, that sort of thing. Eventually one will prove to be the path forward and the characters will focus on that like the true strike of lightning, but they need to find it.

That also makes the perfect time to add depth to the story by exploring themes, ideas, concepts introduced. If the introduction revealed that a character can throw fireballs at will but can only do it five times a day, then now’s the time to explore why that limit exists. Have something happen that pushes them to the limit, or have them explaining to another character how they’re close to figuring out a way to increase it to six, or encounter another character who tried to break the limit but lost control and burnt off their own arm. If a relationship is forbidden, have a similar relationship come to light and be punished.

A good recent (ish) example is from the first Iron Man film of the MCU, when Tony spends several scenes doing R&D for the repulser tech for his suit. From when he returns home to when he sees the photos of Stark weapons in use by the bad guys is pure exploration. Tony’s only goal at this point is he doesn’t want to produce weapons anymore, and he’s had the idea of a personal flight suit. (It would be a better exploration phase if they’d also put some time into why Tony is being protective of the mini-arc reactor tech, the film only gives a handwaive of Tony not thinking it’s “ready yet” while working on the suit, but you get the idea).

Roadblocks

Sarah wants to get to the appointment, so she gets in her car and drives down the freeway. It should be a straight drive there, but there’s a roadblock ahead. Construction work, detour going into side streets. Her goal hasn’t changed, but she needs to go off in a different direction to get her back there now.

Arthur wants to have a go at pulling the sword from the stone. He goes to try, but he can’t get near it because there’s nobles and guards crowding the place who won’t let anyone past without a sponsor. So now Arthur has to go get a sponsor so they can let him try the sword.

The idea of roadblock scenes are pretty straightforward. The character encounters something that prevents them achieving their goal until they deal with a smaller goal.

Often the smaller goal winds up being something the character can’t complete, making the roadblock a complete end point to that approach. An example of this might be a character trying to get into a building, and finding the security is tightened so they can’t get in without prior authorization and they can’t get that now. Or the character accomplishes what they were trying to do, but finds it doesn’t get the results they were looking for - they do the favour for the guard, only to discover his shift is now over and a different guard has taken his place.

Roadblocks basically stop the plot from taking the direct route to the solution and force it into tangents, which helps with making other exploration scenes keep the plot moving forward. A scene where characters stop and talk for a while can feel out of place when there’s a time limit, unless they’ve hit a roadblock that requires them to wait around until morning.

Humanizing Scenes

This is the type I have struggled with fitting into plot structure the most in the past.

Using roadblocks or bringing in more minor characters are good ways to flesh out the world and play with established mechanics, but they also still lean fairly heavily toward “lets move the plot forward”.

Humanizing Scenes (as I’m calling them) are more the opposite. They’re a break from the plot. Might be mixed in with the other types, might be some information dropped during the scene that becomes important afterwards. But the core focus of a humanizing scene is just… making the characters feel like humans.

I mostly became conscious of this from reading Skullduggary Pleasent, which does this far more often than most stories I’ve read. Slowing down the plot to just have the characters banter with each other for half a page when nothing else is happening besides traveling somewhere. Often with no lore being slipped in, no world-building, scenes that could largely be cut entirely without impacting the plot itself, but the story would definitely be losing something.

Those types of scenes fit best into the exploration phase, because the phase is by far the slowest moving. Soon enough the pressure will be up and it will get harder to make it feel natural for characters to stop and just shoot the breeze (with one major exception I’ll mention in that part).

Shared meals are another example of this I’ve noticed is fairly common once I started looking for it. A group of characters sitting around a table for dinner, or a campfire, and just seeing everyone interact for a few without being directly about the plot. It’s an opportunity to see more of the characters, make them feel more fleshed out, and make readers care about them.

Another type of this scene that happens a lot in anime is a bathing scene. It’s often played as a fan-service thing for obvious reasons which is honestly a shame. Many cultures around the world view nudity as a sign of innocence and vulnerability, rather than something sexual, and from that perspective a scene of characters sharing a bath in a hot spring is an obvious choice for a scene where the cast let their guard down and connect with each other. No, not connect like that, get your mind out of the gutter, sheesh…

I’ll eventually dive deeper into the scene/sequel style of structuring that Jim Butcher has spoken about a few times from his books, which I absolutely love and it builds these moments of humanity into the natural flow of the story. But any good story has overlapping layers, like different instruments in a song, and it’s one thing to have a constant drum beat but it’s another entirely to have a dramatic drum solo after a verse.

As a note, like with the introduction it’s best to be raising more questions than answered here, but with a shift. The introduction wants to answer the big “what is the story about” questions and replace them with questions about the world. The explore phase wants to answer questions about the world, but raise more questions about the characters and the plot itself.