Briar Rolfe

I’m in the middle of a few planning-stage projects right now, so I’ve been asking these questions myself. Because each story is different (in length, in genre, in terms of what I want it to achieve, and also, because I’m a cartoonist as well as a writer, also in format!) I have to reinvent at least part of the wheel with each project. I’ve learned some constants, though. I’ll try to outline some of them, and rather than just tell you what I do I’ll try to explain what purpose it serves when I do it.

I do think starting small and working up is the right way of learning, because that’s what worked for me, a chronic not-finisher. I sat down and said “okay, what is the shortest thing I can make that I am guaranteed to finish?” and once I had finished that, said “okay, what’s the next longest thing?” and worked my way up. It’s easier to structure a zine than a graphic novel, it’s easier to structure a short story than something with multiple chapters, etc etc… but this isn’t because a longer story has more structure in it so much as that each structural element has to work harder.

HOWEVER, I don’t look at structure until I know what I’m building my structure on. This was the missing piece in my structure learning! So, the things I have in mind when I’m starting a new project are:

What is my genre?

What are my themes?

What is my tone?

Genre is where I get the payoff that I’m working towards. Why do people pick up this kind of story? What’s the most basic appeal of it? I try to keep this as simple as I can, eg:

In romance, the couple have to get together by the end.

In sci-fi, a new discovery poses a new question, which is then resolved

In mystery, the detective has to figure out who committed the crime so that they don’t do it again.

In erotica, the protagonist is liberated from a social norm by a new sexual encounter

In horror, an outside force threatens irrevocable change to everyone who encounters it.

This narrative payoff is (in my opinion) the bumpers on the bowling lane of fiction. If you read a romance where they never got together, an erotica where nobody fucked, a detective story where justice wasn’t done, a horror story where it was no biggie and everyone just walked it off… you’d feel ripped off, right? You’ll see that I’m not saying “in horror there is always a jumpscare” or “in a mystery there is always a red herring,” because I never actually notice if those were missing. Many stories are worse because the author has said to themself “a story like this always has this element.” RIP to all those minor characters who die in fantasy novels during the fight scene at the end of the second act just because Boromir did.

Sticking the landing on that genre promise is what makes a story “feel” complete, and the success of the buildup to that promise is what makes a story feel satisfying in that worth-a-reread way. The overall genre payoff helps me keep my eye on the prize as I’m writing. If I get writer’s block, 99% of the time it’s because I’ve written something that conflicts with it. That’s helpful to keep in mind for editing (awkward scenes/characters/sentences etc are usually also conflicting with the payoff, or at least not helping me get there) and is also helpful to know when I’m doing back of mind narrative debugging while zoning out over the dishes. If I have a character and I want them to end up at that final point in a way that feels natural, what do I have to do to them to make it happen? If they feel stagnant, what beliefs do they have to have at the start that will jar against that end point?

(I believe the Literary phrase for the narrative payoff is the climax, or the catharsis. Catharsis is usually the concept used for horror or for tragedies. But I’m a cartoonist, so it’s easier for me to think of everything as setup for the final payoff of the punchline.)

Also—and this is more my individual philosophy rather than actual advice, but: delivering the payoff matters because it develops my readers’ trust. I’m not owed anyone’s time or attention. In a big world full of competing demands, it’s important to me that my readers know that I appreciate them choosing my work over putting the recycling bin out. And the great thing about reader trust is: it stacks. Trust means a reader is willing to go a bit further out of their comfort zone with me. When someone says “I don’t usually read stories like this, but I gave this a shot because you wrote it,” that’s what I’m talking about. I’m a trans writer who tells silly jokes and tackles weird topics, so I really do appreciate the readers who invest time and attention in me. They’re my 30 sickos, you know, from the tweet?

Anyway. If genre tells me where I’m landing the plane, theme tells me what the jet fuel is. The reason a particular concept is making me insane, aka, my motivation to tell the story at all, is my theme. It’s the question I’m trying to answer. It doesn’t have to be pithy or well articulated—I just have to know the general gist of it. It might just be “it pisses me off when authors do X, so I am going to prove it’s not actually hard to write Y.” What matters is that it’s something I won’t become bored of. My graphic novel, which has been the longest and most involved project of my life, hasn’t bored me once. That’s pretty spectacular seeing as I have ADHD out my ears! I’ve been frustrated, tired, had bad wrists and general creative ennui at points, but “can you have a happy ending if your family doesn’t accept you?” Is a question that hasn’t run out of juice, even though I’ve been answering it for six years now. The theme is often the most powerful if it’s something you don’t know the answer to. When we were talking about whether or not to tackle the marriage equality debate in Australia in my book, my agent told me “you’ll know it’s a good story if writing about it feels like pressing on a bruise.” I think this is what keeps your themes honest. It stops them being preachy and stops them from becoming The Moral Of The Story.

Terry Pratchett said that the first draft is him telling the story to himself, and the subsequent drafts are him figuring out how to tell it to other people. That’s been very helpful to me. Each successive edit will make the themes clearer until I can say “oh, so this is what the story is about.” What I said before about longer stories doing more with each structural element is because of this. Longer stories tend to accrue more themes, usually one per subplot and/or per character relationship. Shorter stories usually address just one. Themes are handy to think about here because if a story looks like it might get too bloated (“no way I can explore this AND this AND this and still stay under 20k words”) you can cut em out and address them somewhere else.

The themes in your fiction are the bit that makes it uniquely yours, like fingerprints in a clay pot. They stop the structure feeling formulaic and make it feel personal. A thousand authors could (and do) write the same premise over and over again, but in their hands each story means something different. If you’ve ever read a story that rings hollow even though it hits all the same notes as other stories you like, I’d say that it’s by an author who hasn’t figured out what interests them in the story they’re telling. Like… there’s a reason Twilight was successful and its many copycats were not. It’s because Meyer had this theme of insane repressed Mormon horniness running through her work, and everyone else just said “ah, so readers like boys who are barely restraining their murder instinct.” No! The murder instinct was juicy because it was thematically complex.

Genre and theme give me an idea of what the tone is, aka what mood I am building. I guess if genre is my destination and theme is my fuel, then tone is my plane. It’s about how the journey feels. Taking a first class flight from A to B is different from taking the same trip in a crop duster. The people on each plane will observe different things throughout the journey. The same events could happen on both flights, but a reader will feel way more anxious about the crop duster encountering turbulence.

Outside my increasingly elaborate metaphor, this is questions like… Is this setting fun and friendly? Are the characters mistrustful of each other? Is the world fundamentally evil? Can anyone die? Am I using colloquial language? Are swears allowed? How hard should the protagonist’s failures hit them, and how sharp should the consequences for their actions be? Is it realistic, or a bit surreal? Is my narrator (or narrative perspective if I’m in second or third person) sincere? Cynical? Trustworthy? Biased? Can they crack jokes?

Once I have an idea of these things, structure usually slots in pretty easily. As I’m in the thinking stage, if I have an idea for a scene (or a joke, more often than not) that I want to include, I’ll put it in a dot point list. Later on, I will look at these dot points and the structure and say “what goes where?” or “what needs to happen before this thing I want to include to make it make sense?”

Short things I use a three act structure, aka Beginning Middle End, where “middle” is whatever events need to happen to shift my character from their opening position to their concluding one. For longer things, I just whack on a seven act structure for whatever genre I’m working in. I often come back to Jami Gold’s romance structure because I write romances a lot, but also because it’s the only structure I’ve ever really seen that maps internal character arcs along with external events—one of the things I found absolutely the hardest to get my head around when I was structuring my graphic novel. If it’s a genre I know less about, I’ll find a structure that specifies examples for the pinch points, because those are ones I usually have trouble brainstorming. The mystery outline I used for my Disco Elysium fanfiction gave me the suggestions that a suspect should escape, which got me out of a huge block.

So: before I write, I’ve thought very hard about genre and tone and theme, and how my characters need to get from their starting positions to one where if bondage doesn’t happen the story will feel narratively incomplete. I’ve pondered my place in the world, I have developed beef with a handful of authors who I’ve decided have Done It Wrong, and I have image searched “mystery structure seven act”. I have probably gone on four or five research sprees where I learn a bunch about medieval demonology and insect genitalia and radio antennae or whatever.

(I should say a lot of that is just what do for fun anyway. I do think writers tend to forget that we do this because it’s fun. If you’re not having fun doing this stuff, then your reader is probably not having fun either. It’s important to figure out what is fun to you and to find a way to make your process mostly the fun stuff.)

Materially, what I have is a maybe a couple of test scenes I’ve written while working out character dynamics and refining my idea of tone, and a list of dot points that reads like:

Wrap up the subplot with that other guy

Heart to heart

Protagonist gets a boner

Exposition about early printing press

Fight scene (to show they care about each other)

Phone call from side character 12

MIDPOINT: Guy goes missing (or is killed with weapon from earlier? Suspected killed, but actually just escaped?)

JOKE

Bring back printing press thing

Bondage obviously

Catch the bad guy

Resolution (come back to this).

The trap for structure for me for YEARS has been assuming that I should be able to sit down and write out the perfect plan. “I’ll be able to write well so long as I know exactly what I’m doing every step of the way.” But… most of the fun of writing for me is figuring out how to address those missing plot elements as I go. I don’t think I’ve ever said this, but I never intended for my Disco Elysium fanfic to end with an explosion. I figured it out once I wrote the interview scene with Felicity, and then I said “okay, so that’s the resolution. Now, what do I need to do to blow this building up?“

The groundwork I’ve laid is helpful because I know what I can’t compromise on. As I’m heading towards my payoff and hitting these beats along the way, I have the wriggle room for flashes of discovery where I go “wait, fuck, you know what’d be cool as?”

Editing is where I get to make sure that everything lines up without contradictions. I’m very irresponsible; I don’t have the patience to wait until the story is finished before I start editing it, so I often go back and make tweaks on a sentence level. This is often how I get myself out of writer’s block. “What did I say back here, and why does it make me feel like I can’t get to the next point on my structure?”

I also tend to write on my phone in notes app documents or in Scrivener, so I can actually make use of the dead times in my day. I pick up my phone all the time to keep my hands busy, but I rarely sit down at a computer without something more important coming up. Only once the document gets long enough to be unwieldy, or once it’s actually finished, will I sit down with the text on a bigger screen. This really helps me stop myself getting overwhelmed by the idea of The Blank Page, too. I can’t see how much I’ve written or look at much text at a time when I’m writing on my phone.

Other favourite structural things, which I add on in successive edits:

Bookending! For when you have a scene displaying the relationship between your protagonist and a secondary character at the start, then bring ‘em back together at the end to show how things have changed. My graphic novel has something like two… wait no now I’m counting it’s more like four bookend scenes, whoops. I guess I really like these! They’re good for when someone reads your draft and says “I don’t know why this character showed up, they didn’t seem that important.” If the character really IS important, they need to come back. This is handy for me specifically because I love big world with lots of secondary characters.

Callbacks: jokes strike again! But you can use this to achieve other moods. In my Silent Hill fic the words “Empty, bleeding, and different in every way” get used first to describe the town, and then again at the end to describe the protagonist. It’s unsettling both times, but the second time I feel as though it is a little bit reassuring, too. Maybe sometimes it’s good to be reinvented.

Foreshadowing: Lay the breadcrumbs! Make that one character stare at the table in the scene where everyone is speculating on the identity of the traitor, draw our attention to the ceramic statue on the mantelpiece. I love to use the rule of three for this, often describing the significant thing last—or to describe two significant things and diffuse any audience suspicion with a joke as the third thing 😈🙏

Well, this has been a very long post! I wonder what my rules for writing are. UM. I know I have them. I’m nothing if not wildly opinionated!

1. Don’t hang out with writers who think that they’re better than their readers. Storytelling is about sharing humanity, not transcending it. Writing is not a divine gift. There is no muse! Not only hang out with people who do not write, but hang out with people who do not read. It keeps you humble.

2. Don’t break format just for the helluvit, but—if you have an idea about how to pull something off and say, scandalised, “oh my god, but is that allowed?” you have to do it.

3. If you’re having fun, your reader is having fun. If you’re bored, your reader is EXTRA bored. So… don’t write the boring bits. If you don’t know what to say in the scene where the character gets the bus between two locations, just cut it and start the next scene with “When she got off the bus.” Christopher Paolini is an example of someone who has never learned this. On one hand he has a lot more money than I do, but on the other hand, I’ve had a lot more gay sex.

4. Hot take: bad books are just as educational as good ones. I love a formulaic or poorly told story because they give me a chance to engage my structure brain. I like to figure out what went wrong and how. It’s never cinema sins bullshit like “WOW! GAPING PLOT HOLE!!!” but more like “weird, the tone of the climax is jarring compared to the rest of the story” or “well that’s the obligatory breakup at the end of the second act, but why did it happen?” I’ve also learned a whole lot about how to write sex scenes by reading ones that made me say “well, certainly not like that.”

5. Learn to recognise ways you make your own writing noncommittal. “He felt,” “she realised,” “they discovered,” “she thought.” Almost, very, really, nearly. These are all things I do way too much. Don’t say he felt it was, say it was.

☀️🌱☀️

Lastly: If you’re hitting a brick wall, if you’re blocked, if writing isn’t fun… stop.

Read something outside your genre. Dig up weeds in the garden. Watch a friend play a game that is too scary for you. Put a weird doll in the corner of your bathroom, go look through second hand shops for cheap treasures, get an outlandish food on your grocery run. Have a nice chat with a guy who is eighty something, make faces at a baby when mum isn’t looking. Learn to tie a useful knot. Badly paint some furniture. Sit out under the stars with a cuppa, listen to the night sounds, enjoy the feeling of being small. What I’m saying is, you should actively distract yourself with the interesting parts of Being Alive. Whatever feels like a waste of time is worth your time. Internet does NOT count! Do not watch a video, do not read a post! Do things that engage your senses. Do things where you use your hands. Make yourself laugh! Be clumsy, be silly, be messy on purpose. Writing is never more important than being alive, and your brain is never more important than your body. You need to fall in love with being alive. You need to be in the world. One day the gears will click into place and you’ll need to start writing again, furiously, like there’s a fire lit inside of you—but you can’t rush it. You need to take the time to be an animal, and animals play.

Here is a photo of Flea, who is a sixteen year old cat. She has no teeth. Here she is having a great time rolling around in the sun.