Notebook to Narrative 03
Structure and Story Beats
Having chosen a subject to craft a story around and then refined your idea by assigning the most suitable emotional arc for a hero within it, subsequent thought should have flagged one or more possible themes to explore.
You might well have more than one possible protagonist lurking in the shadows like possible draft picks and that’s okay. The more you think about your tale, the greater clarity it acquires, and with this comes focus to define your idea with shape and edges.
That, of course, suggests possible character flaws and which primary personality traits would best suit them. You’re not choosing them here, only creating a short list that should be kept handy so you can see how selecting one over another impacts your story.
More on this later, when your choice will be more obvious and far less stressful. But like Elijah, your protagonist should, by now, be more than a silhouette.
The emotional arc informs the plot line and allows Elijah to define himself. ‘Rushing the Rapture’ is not just a story of a televangelist competing for Sunday morning airtime — I have to make it personal.
Elijah Storm’s two ideals of success are diametrically opposed. He wants to be the physical embodiment of God’s Will, but he desperately wants the wealth and popularity enjoyed by his well-known rival, Joshua Cardinal.
Storm’s emotional arc, ‘Cinderella,’ is perfect for him. Just as the fairytale character works towards her chance to attend the ball, Elijah makes the most of Keddah’s offer to surpass his rival. Cinderella loses the prince and Elijah must face his choice of success as wealth or acting in God’s interest when he discovers Keddah’s intent.
Elijah chooses God, thereby losing his fame and fortune. Keddah and Cardinal have stuffed the holds of a cargo ship with their ‘raptured’ victims now infested by demons intended as an army to battle the Nephilim’s brothers and pave the way to open the Portal to Perdition.
It’s a long, steep slide back to the bottom, so where just the day before, Elijah dined on lobster, today he’s a stowaway stealing kitchen scraps, drinking fouled water, and thinking how badly he has failed God.
Somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, Elijah is roused from his depression when he realizes that Keddah’s plan will succeed unless he, Elijah Storm, thinks of a way to intervene.
There are two facets to his change of heart. Also onboard as a stowaway is Keddah’s wife, intent on rescuing her son. Now, her repulsion to Elijah has softened during their forced confinement across the Atlantic and he has shown her what Keddah never could.
Elijah’s initial motivation is to please her, but then he learns the ship cannot dock at the town near the portal. The ship will pass by the portal on its way to where it can disembark its evil army, so Elijah leaps into the sea (what if he can’t swim)?
When he jumps off the ship, Elijah begins his climb to his goal. It won’t be easy. After all, he can’t swim, but Keddah’s wife throws him something that floats. When he gets to shore, no one believes the disheveled refugee before them is really the famous Herald of the Rapture. It doesn’t help that he can’t do his parlour tricks. Nor do any of them speak English well enough to understand him.
But, there is a small monastery above the cliff hosting the portal. Though these monks are sworn to silence, they share knowing glances as Elijah tries to explain what’s coming. And so, in small, tenuous steps, Elijah drags himself up the slope of redemption.
At the climax, Elijah’s hopes for love and faith seem ruined and he chooses a desperate act of self-sacrifice that fails — or does it? His failure is the last step he must take to become what he needs to be, the Will of God made physical.
Elijah’s emotional arc rises, falls, and rises again, defined roughly by a sequence of story beats. He starts as a failure, is recruited by Keddah, and achieves wealth and success. Then he learns what lies behind his success and surrenders it to stop Keddah. This sends him onto the ship to spy but the ship leaves with him and Keddah’s wife as stowaways. The trip across the ocean lays his failure out for him to see, but then love sparks his route to redemption, which is not easy but he’s determined.
3 Acts to Follow
When you’re happy with how your story has begun to have a squidgy mass and you know the emotional markers your hero must overcome, what theme will infuse your tale with soul and you can almost glimpse your hero in your peripheral vision, it is time to drape your story over the 3-act narrative structure.
Chances are, it’s going to be all wrong. Doesn’t matter. What’s important now is to simply understand that it will fit, eventually.
The three-act structure is nothing more than a way to quantify a story’s beginning, middle, and end, as well as to measure and pace your hero’s emotional growth through his physical journey.
The need to tell a complete story in approximately two hours means that films must adhere to this structure more closely than long-form fiction, but every story must tick off the essential story markers.
Many writers have told me ‘That’s not how I write,’ and the choice to ignore it is theirs, but trust me, if you’re intent on maximizing your chances for success, master this structure first and then mess around with it.
Act One
Act One is where you introduce your story — where it’s set when it happens and any anomalies (reality tweaks). Here we meet our hero in his current life in a situation that foreshadows his need for emotional growth. We meet the antagonist in his element and the hero’s main supporting cast.
Think of Act One as if you’re standing on the lip of a diving board, your toes curled over the edge and you can feel the potential energy poised in the spring of the board itself as you ready to launch yourself.
In ‘Rapture,’ you meet Elijah watching a news report of Joshua Cardinal’s acquisition of a second jet on a screen on the seat back of the regional aircraft and criticizing his rivals faults with the guy sitting next to him, whose mother gives to Joshua’s ministry every month.
In case you empathize with our hero, though, we follow him to his cheap hotel room where he sees that same report repeated on a larger screen. A whiskey from the mini bar isn’t quite enough, so when Keddah appears in his angel disguise, our hero has cleaned out the selection of bottles and is sleeping on top of the covers, dressed as he arrived.
In keeping with his ‘Cinderella’ emotional arc, Elijah must start at the bottom — depressed and angry.
Your hero is offered a chance to begin his emotional arc, but he often refuses (not always), only to find himself forced to start by an event known as the Inciting Incident.
The Inciting Incident is the transition into Act Two. This event challenges your hero’s flaw and forces him to respond, thus initiating his journey.
Elijah jumps at Keddah’s invitation to become the Herald of the Rapture, but that is not the inciting incident. This occurs the next day when Elijah saves some pedestrians from a falling crane and when interviewed by a TV crew, he introduces himself and claims he saw it in a dream. He also announces the imminent Rapture and from that moment on he rises.
Here is also where you meet the antagonist. I plan to use three scenes with Keddah in Act One, and each time he will be very different, but I will come back to this.
Act Two
This part is usually two-thirds to three-quarters of the story’s length and contains the ‘meat’ of the story. It is in Act Two that your hero faces a series of obstacles or makes repeated attempts to reach his goal in which he learns of his flaw (or trauma), ignores it and fails, devises a way around it, and fails spectacularly. Here is your hero’s turning point. Defeated and disenchanted, he is ready to give up when an event or something he hears or sees brings his dilemma back to the fore but now he views it differently and takes his first step towards his goal.
Usually, a story has ‘reveals’ offered as a takeaway from each failure of your hero, though these should be presented in chaotic order to keep your audience guessing. Often, the Halfway Point features a major reveal that changes how your audience sees the hero or lets them know a crucial detail regarding the hero’s trauma.
The blue line in the graphic above represents Elijah’s emotional arc. In Act One, Elijah is low. At the end of the act, he meets Keddah, but it is the crane event that initiates his meteoric rise to fame.
A story is often unbalanced, as I show here. The first half of Act Two has a lot of story, as does the latter half. At the mid-point, though, not much happens. The mid-point twist is when Elijah learns of the demon army and is stuck on the ship. Crossing the Atlantic doesn’t need a lot of space. Elijah learns of his flaw and Keddah’s real plan, but he can do little other than hide, so this part is about atmosphere and penance.
When, at the bottom of his arc around the 50 minute mark, he decides that if he rescues the child, he will win the wife’s love. Shortly after that, he learns the ship must sail past their destination and suddenly he has a chance to warn the Nephilim.
Act Three
This act opens with the moment the hero signals ‘go’ to his team and the events leading to the climax begin.
The hero is committed now, their all-or-nothing strategy or gamble or whatever cannot be stopped, but there are things large and small that threaten to derail it, and the more the merrier.
In ‘Rapture,’ Elijah rises slowly the second time but gathers pace with each minor victory. He rediscovers the exuberant energy he showed onstage as his success grew, but now he has shed the fragile edge of doubt that it once held. He finds his leadership.
Of course, I have to make it as challenging for him as I can so as the climax begins with the demon assault, it seems every defensive tactic is barely effective or fails until a spontaneous tweak is made.
Just as the demons seem on the verge of defeating the Nephilim guards, unexpected allies delay and distract the possessed, but even so, Keddah has planned for this; the brothers struggle against their oldest sibling and give ground. Then Keddah holds his son upside down by a leg and places a knife against the child’s neck. Elijah tries to save the child but earns what should be a fatal wound and goes down.
Keddah’s wife rushes Keddah from behind, stalling his killing cut and she is thrown aside. It is time enough, though, for Elijah rises. He is different — slightly taller, less wrinkled and worn, and his wound has stopped bleeding, but the most severe change is in his black eyes.
The climax has its own choreography of fractional victories echoing between protagonist and antagonist, and really great climactic waltzes encourage the audience to believe the hero is lost — until he isn’t.
The Bad News: Since the outset of 2023, Medium has seen fit to steadily reduce the distribution of my articles, so where I had 1,000+ views a day, now I’m lucky to hit 20. I believe it has to do with my personal politics, but that changes nothing.
I will upload this article and the next few to see if these re-ignite my viewing numbers, but I suspect they will not (and the first three in this sequence witnessed a further drop).
Nevertheless, I think I shall focus my future efforts on substack.com, where I may combine my stories with a forum to answer questions and regular opportunities to chat.
My newsletter on substack.com is titled ‘What’s Your Story?’ and is free to subscribe to, so please, try it out. Your voice will be heard, your opinions will help refine and improve the experience to make us better storytellers of us all.
ps. I tried to add the link, but couldn’t make it work. It’s easily found if you look, though.
