From ‘Fargo’ to Fiction: Telling Stories Differently

Whom is the story about? How is it told? These are the biggest questions a writer faces.

The first is obvious. You can’t have a story without characters.

The second — how is the story structured — is less obvious. On TV there is an assumption that every story will start at the beginning and end at the end. We are stuck in real time, scene after scene — this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Stories, like time, tend to move only in one direction. The occasional flashback aside, television dramas (and, to a lesser degree, feature films) suffer from a lack of imagination when it comes to how their stories are told.

The novel, with its ability to move fluidly through time, to shift point of view and enter poetic or essayistic states, lends itself far better to structural innovation. But why is playing with structure important? First, consider the sheer volume of stories available for us to consume; at this instant, you can, from the comfort of your home, watch every television show ever made — including the 400-plus current TV dramas in production — see every film ever produced, and download and read every book, newspaper, magazine, and blog ever written. We are literally drowning in stories, most of them told in real time. And by watching and reading so much we have become experts at predicting what happens next.

The moment you begin to experiment with structure, however, with the order and style with which you tell the story, that predictability vanishes.

What this means for writers and filmmakers is that you can either struggle to tell a different story or simply tell a story differently.

My rule as a storyteller is that the structure of a story should reflect the content of a story. For example, in my new novel, Before the Fall, a private plane crashes into the Atlantic. Only two of the 13 passengers survive. Why the plane went down is a mystery. There are many ways to solve a mystery, but the method I chose was by solving the characters. I structured the book so that as you read the linear story following our two survivors, you find yourself jumping back in time for standalone chapters that delve into the lives of the other 11 passengers, both humanizing them and introducing clues and threats that may have made them targets for attack.

Who these people were becomes the key to why they died. By pulling the reader out of the linear narrative and experimenting with the way information is delivered, I hoped to create a literary experience where plot, character, and theme were all of equal value.

Playing with structure is also a key element of my other job, as writer and showrunner of the FX series ‘Fargo.’

In that show, I am crafting an homage to the movie Fargo, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. I defy you to find a storyteller in any medium who is as inventive with the way stories are told as Joel and Ethan. From the ten-minute voiceover montage that begins

Raising Arizona to the parable of the goy’s teeth in A Serious Man, the Coens know that the way a story is told is just as important as what the story is, and that by playing with structure you can not only create something unpredictable (a difficult task for audiences who have consumed literally thousands of stories in their lives), but you can also bypass the rational part of the viewer’s brain to create an experience that defies linearity, one where the mixture of tone and theme and suspense constructs a mind-space belonging to that film alone.

Whatever the medium, I’m a firm believer that a story told differently will stick with a reader or viewer more deeply and for longer than a traditional tale told one step at a time, moving deliberately, inevitably towards its end.

Noah Hawley’s novel, Before the Fall, is out now from Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2016 Noah Hawley.

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