FMP Blog 7: What’s the story?
It’s taken me a long while to get back on this blog because I hit a major roadblock and was struggling to circumvent it. The plot. I drafted and re-drafted the story for my final picture book and was surprised at how difficult it proved to be. The first idea I wrote up and deemed worthy enough to show my supervisor was in retrospect predictable and dull. It was the first time I realised that writing for small children can easily slide into subpar storytelling, and I felt I wasn’t respecting my audience enough by offering up something so bland.
The problem was, I just couldn’t get out of it.
I was also more interested in exploring the story structure of kishōtenketsu: a Japanese four-part story structure that originated in China and is prevalent in traditional Korean literature too. I further explore western ideals and Asian perspectives, the story structure I am most familiar with is the one Three Acts, where a protagonist journeys through their character’s development, reaches the climax of the story — usually a conflict with the antagonist — and learns some kind of moral, concluding with falling action. Set-up, confrontation, resolution (Fig 1).
In the diagram above, Soares de Lima outlines the Three-Act structure used in narratives be it film, literature or gaming (2019). We can see that the confrontation is the juicy bit, where tension rises significantly and comes to an apex.
The structure of kishōtenketsu — a Four-Act structure — turns this on its head, exchanging a conflict for a twist (Fig 2).
The idea is that, thanks to the twist, the latter part of the story is turned on its head, breaking the status quo of the first.
Another method that I accidentally stumbled upon while trying to rewrite my dry initial story was actually sketching out some of the scenes. I inadvertently drew one of the characters more abstract than intended and ended up with what looked like a completely different creature (Fig 3).
The burglar I was developing suddenly looked like a supernatural being thanks to the botched job I did of his stocking mask. I toyed with the idea of developing the guy into a forest spirit, and suddenly the ideas started flowing.
The final thing I changed to fight the writer’s block was to change the main canine in the story. I had my heart set on including my own dog as the lead. My other dog, Jack, was already the star of one of my earlier projects (Jack’s Journey), so naturally it should have been Twinky’s turn. But I just could not take the story forward. I think it’s that I know her too well, and I know that she would not behave in the way that the dog in this story is supposed to behave. So instead I returned to the map of dog friends I had made and asked a friend if it would be alright if one of her dogs was the star of this book. I had met him and heard countless stories about him, so it felt like it clicked. Thankfully, she granted permission. Not long after that, the story finally started striding forward.
References
KEZ. 2020. ‘Kishōtenketsu’. Kez October 2020. Available at: https://www.kez.ie/notes/kishotenketsu/ [accessed 7 February 2024].
SOARES DE LIMA, E., Feijó, B., Furtado, A. 2019. ‘Procedural Generation of Quests for Games Using Genetic Algorithms and Automated Planning’. Paper presented at the XVIII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment, SBGames 2019. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 28–31 October 2019. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8924855 [accessed 7 February 2024].
