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Subject: Week 1, Lesson 3 - how to start your story the right way
Act I
Narrative techniques to start your story in the right way
For the rest of this week, we’re going to divide the story up into its classic three act
structure. Act I covers the introduction and inciting incident of a story, Act II covers the bulk
of the action, and Act III takes us to the climax and the denouement.
By the way, what is it with this structure anyway? Well, there’s a science to it, of sorts, and
of course a history. It emerged out of the Greek dramatic form put down by Aristotle. He
talked about complicating and then un-complicating things in a story. Through the next
centuries stories performed on stage were divided into acts (although not necessarily
three). And eventually, a German dramatist called Gustav Freytag defined what we call
the dramatic arc. This actually had five stages.
Anyway, we stick onto it because it is a very simple way of dividing the movements of
a story up: a beginning (a story has to start somewhere); a middle (something has to
happen); and an end (that something has to be resolved).
As we’ll see, it remains a mere guide, and is not a template. Your story can have as many
acts as you damn well please! If you’re wondering how this structure applies to your own
work, don’t worry, I’ll give plenty of examples across different media and genres.
Suck ‘em in and spit ‘em out
Act I must achieve the first bit: it must suck people in. I cannot emphasise how important
this section is to your story. It’s quite important in any story in any medium, but on the
web, it is make or break.
Here’s a statistic you may or may not have read before: on any given YouTube video, 20%
of viewers click away within the first ten seconds. They’re still registered as views though,
so you can bet that if a video has one million views, 200,000 of those didn’t see past the opening
titles or the first sentence. Ouch.
Articles, podcasts and other digital media face the same tough crowd. You don’t need me to tell you
how the economics of the internet have changed things. The days of betting on a reader or viewer
who will sit through your story are over.
Twitter and Facebook have fragmented your audience’s attention, meanwhile Buzzfeed, Quartz
and Cracked.com are competing for it. That’s before another email arrives in their inbox, which their
dopamine hungry brain convinces them to click on (we’ll talk about the influence of dopamine in a
later lesson).
The only chance of winning attention is quality. The Internet is the great leveller, and only the
remarkable rises to the top. No matter how remarkable your story, it’s for nothing if the beginning of
your story doesn’t convince us.
Key elements to consider in Act I are:
- the headline
- the first paragraph, the first image or the first ten seconds
- introducing the key ingredients: character, plot, theme and the world
- approaching the inciting incident
In today’s attached PDF, we’ll look at these in much greater depth, with some impressive examples.
Tomorrow: onto Act II - the difficult second album.
Until then, don’t forget you can email me straight back with any questions. Just click reply, and I’ll get
back to you as soon as I can!
Adam
© Adam Westbrook & Marc Thomas.
http://storydesign.insidethestory.org
storydesign.insidethestory.org
Lesson FOUR
Act I
PDF 1
The headline
Headline writing has always been a craft, but it is taking on new
importance online. Websites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and Thought
Catalog put huge amounts of effort into the writing of headlines. They
know their articles live or die by them.
Here are some typical headlines from these kind of sites. You might not
think these guys do good storytelling, but they do write good headlines.
Buzzfeed: “This is the best Twitter conversation you will read today.”
Upworthy: “You’d be a feminist too if you experienced what she did.”
Quartz: “The four ways to fix education (that no-one wants to hear).”
Upworthy: “This face is the most famous nobody you’ve ever never
heard of.”
In fact that last one is interesting, because the article links to an
independent web documentary on Vimeo by Andrew David Watson.
The actual title he gave his film: “The most quoted man in news” - and
it’s about a guy who’s been quoted more times by journalists than
anyone else, by exploiting pressures of the news cycle.
Be honest, which of those two titles would you click on?
So what’s the trick here? Well, in subtly different ways, all these
headlines highlight what we called a Knowledge Gap - or to you and
me: something we don’t know.
The psychology to this is fascinating, but to put it simply, our brains
hate gaps in our knowledge. The brain is constantly fighting to close all
gaps either by assumption or by investigation.
To compare how the filmmaker and Upworthy treated the same
headline, we ask ourselves which one opens a knowledge gap?
Upworthy’s, albeit wordy headline, “This face is the most famous
nobody you’ve ever never heard of ” accompanies a photograph of the
subject of the film, Greg Packer. As we look at his face, a gap in our
knowledge is opened: ‘Who is this guy? If he’s famous, why don’t I
recognise him? And if he’s a nobody, why is he famous?’ These gaps are
not easy to close, and we feel compelled to find out.
Meanwhile the original title “The most quoted man in news” not only
fails to open any gaps, it spoils the ending! It’s about a guy who gets
quoted lots in the news. If you work in news you might be interested,
but otherwise, my brain can guess the rest.
a
H
One print story, that I’ve cited several times already, achieves
the same effect with a stunning headline: “Here’s what happens
when you cast Lindsay Lohan to be in your movie”. What
happens? Is it good or bad? I bet it’s bad…but I want to know!
Similarly, another familiar example, that YouTube film
“Childbirth vs Getting Kicked in the Balls” directly challenges
a gap in our knowledge.
The first paragraph, image or ten seconds.
The headline isn’t enough. Your audience have given you a click, but
that’s meaningless to everyone (except advertisers of course) unless
people go onto read.
There are of course many ways to achieve this, and new ones are
invented all the time. Here are a few tried and tested approaches to the
first ten seconds:
Anecdote
We’ve got a big lesson on anecdotes and how to create them later on,
but suffice to say an anecdote is a powerful way to open a story. It is
vivid, told in colourful detail and describes one, tangible moment. This
kicks our imagination into gear and puts us in the scene before we have
time to click away.
A
The audio slideshow ‘Hirst v UK” opens with John Hirst
telling the story of the night he hacked his landlady to death
with an axe. “I hit her two or three times” he says “but the
police say it was more like fourteen or fifteen times”. It is told in
sharp detail, you can’t resist finding out what happens next.
Surprise
Again, lots more to say about mastering the craft of surprise in a later
lesson, but it means doing something unexpected. For lots of fascinating
survival based reasons it focuses our attention - at least temporarily.
C
In the RadioLab episode “A Very Lucky Wind” the presenters
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich open with a story about a
bizarre coincidence that doesn’t seem possible.
This is unexpected and demands our attention.
The best bit
If all else fails, just stick your best stuff first. That could be your best
quote, your best image, your best audio, the best sequence from your
film. It’s a crude approach, but it does impose some structure, and it
means if people do click away, at least they saw your best stuff before
they did so.
Here’s how New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary explained this
approach in Inside the Story:
b
“When you’re building a digital story, the best hack/shortcut
to greatness is simple: put your best bit first. Whether it is an
audio clip, a still image, a video, or even a question— start
immediately with the piece of your reporting you love the most,
the one you’re telling your friends about at the bar. Don’t be
afraid to confuse your audience; suck them in with one gorgeous
moment and use the rest of your piece to explain what the heck it
was they just saw.
“If you’re stuck on structure, your best bit is a great place to
begin. And as a bonus, you can develop some pretty original
story structures working backwards from your single best
moment. Besides, this is how real life works. We’re surprised by
the world, and become human in our struggle to make sense of
it. Your stories can work like that too.”
Introducing the world
There are no rules about how long the introduction should last. In
movies it generally lasts about 25 pages of a screenplay, roughly quarter.
But in non-fiction (and especially when our content is shorter than a
two-hour movie) it can be shorter than that.
If you have a character and journey based story, the introduction needs
to last long enough for us to give a damn about the character, so we care
about the journey.
H
In “Last Minutes With Oden”, we spend the first act getting
to know both Jason, a recovering addict and are introduced to
his world - his bike, his apartment and his dog. This takes 1’48
seconds - roughly 25% of the documentary.
a
In the Lindsay Lohan piece there is no introduction - the
article begins with the Inciting Incident, a meeting between
director Paul Schrader and Lohan. Introductory elements are
then woven throughout the story as exposition.
If you’re telling a story for a non-profit organisation, a problem-solution
structure is popular. The introduction sets up the problem (poverty or
lack of water for example) and introduces us to real people affected by
us. Again, don’t introduce the solution until you’re sure we care about
the outcome.
If you have a more explanatory based piece of non-fiction - an explainer,
or educational piece, then the introduction serves to give explanation to
the wider issue or begin with the facts we do know, before starting to
close the gap of knowledge later on.
With all stories, don’t begin the story until you’re sure we’re invested in
the characters and their world.
Nailing the Inciting Incident
You already know what the inciting incident is. Here are the important
things you should know about it.
Firstly, it has to happen first-hand. In video that means we need to see
it happen. In a podcast we need to hear it. In a text article, we’re going
to want a colourful, vivid, ideally first-hand anecdote.
This dramatic element still has a place in non-fiction storytelling,
although it raises a problem, particularly for those making
documentaries. As expert Karen Everett puts it:
b
“Frequently, by the time a documentary filmmaker gets
interested in a film, the inciting incident has already happened.
Equally problematic, this rousing scene was probably not caught
on film.” In other words, no inciting incident, no story, which
means as a journalist you won’t even know about it until after
that’s happened.”
You can tackle this in a few ways: one is archive - if it was caught on
tape you can use that. Interviews make the other obvious solution - you
can get an eye witness, or several eye witnesses to piece together the
scene and tell it as vividly as possible. Either way, it needs to be strong:
strong interviewees, and well paced narrative.
Recognise the inciting incident in your structure by giving it the screen
time and attention it deserves.
O
In the New York Times interactive, Tomato Can Blues, which
blends text with animated graphics the inciting incident
is delivered via a key character. In the first movement we
hear about a local fighter, killed in a car accident. Just a few
paragraphs later the real Inciting Incident arrives “It was the
late Charlie Rowan, back from the dead.”
The second principle is that the Inciting Incident ought to raise the
central question of the plot.
Christopher Goffard, a journalist with the LA Times put it this way, for
the Nieman Story Lab:
b
“For a few years now I’ve been thinking consciously about how
to apply the idea of giving stories the engines they need. The
same thing that’s going to make people sit through a movie will
make them sit through a 10,000-word series. If it’s a murder
story, you want to know who did it. If it’s a medical story, you
want to know whether the surgery worked.”
This is the central question. This engine is what you’ll need to power
through the treacherous Act II.
a
In Do No Harm, the first story published by the science
magazine Matter, we’re introduced to David, a man
determined to amputate a perfectly healthy leg. The inciting
incident kicks the central question into gear. We want to know
“will he get the surgery done?”
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