Building on the Bones, or: Why Structure Doesn’t Have to be Boring

[The following post contains references to STORY STRUCTURE. This concept is known to the State of California to cause people’s heads to explode. But who cares what California thinks anyway? Hippies.]

You know what’s fun? Watching movies after you’ve learned about three-act struture. Specifically the bit about the first plot point appearing at exactly twenty-five percent of the running time. It’s like magic. Try it sometime. Look up the total running time of the movie, divide by four, then sit back and wait for the midden to hit the windmill. It never fails.

You’ll be able to amaze your friends and family. Pretty soon they’ll be so amazed by your seemingly-psychic ability to predict the path of the movie they’ll have stopped watching movies with you entirely. Those brave enough to stick it out will remark in wonder, “Are you going to do this for every movie we watch?”

Okay, so maybe this isn’t the best way to endear yourself to your friends. But understanding structure is vitally important to composing long-form fiction of any kind.

However structure can be a bit of a brier patch when you’re first wading into it. For instance you might be tempted to say to yourself, “The first twenty-five percent of the book is spent on this boring ‘getting to know you’ crap? What kind of snooze-fest do you want me to write?”

Well, today I thought I’d share an example from a book I’ve been reading recently that follows the formula of structure to perfection and yet showcases the amazing amount of latitude afforded us writers within the confines of what structure dictates.

The book in question is Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. If you have even passed by this book in the store or at the library chances are you had to fight just to escape the gravitational pull generated by the sheer mass of the thing. Weighing in at over a thousand pages it’s easily the longest book I’ve read since the time I decided that Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations might make for an entertaining afternoon browse.

If you’re like me at this point you’re wondering, how in the heck is anyone going to spend two hundred and fifty pages just on setup? Surely when you’re writing a book this long you can skip ahead to the good stuff right?

And for a while it seems like that’s exactly what Stephenson has done. By somewhere around page one hundred we already have a bona fide bad guy on the scene and our heroes are off on a high stakes adventure. But then, just as you’re settling into the flow of the story, at almost exactly the two-hundred-and-fifty page mark everything is turned on its head. The placeholder bad-guy is unceremoniously killed off and the real Big Boss Troublemaker enters the narrative.

Right. On. Schedule.

It is only then that we learn that all the stuff with the hackers, the Russian Mafia, the ex-military security consultants, all of it was 100% pure unfiltered setup for the “real” conflict. And it wasn’t boring.

The takeaway here is that just because structure dictates that the first quarter of the book should be dedicated to setting up the story, that doesn’t mean that it has to be a total snooze-fest. It can and should have conflict. It can even have bad guys. You’re just not allowed to introduce the bad guy until that magical twenty-five percent mark.

There’s lots more I could say here, but the  main point I’m trying to make is that the three act structure is more flexible than it appears at first glance. I understand why writers balk at the concept of being “constrained” by structure, but for me learning these principles has been a altogether liberating experience. And whether I’m watching a movie or reading a book, it’s always fascinating to see how so many stories work within these basic principles.

With InBoCoLuCy (International Book Composing Lunar Cycle) just around the corner I think my fellow authors would be well served to have the fundamentals of structure at least knocking around somewhere in the back of our heads as we wade into the sea of words.

Don’t let structure tie you down. Let it set you free.

One Apocalypse To Go, Hold the Zombies

Several months ago I talked about the zombie apocalypse and how to survive it. It was a lot of fun for me to write about the end of the world at the hands of the living dead, but I’m gonna let you all in on a little secret.

I’m pretty sure that’s not very likely to happen in real life.

But today I want to talk to you about a disaster that may affect you in the coming months and years. Economic disaster.

I’m not an economist. I do not have a degree in this. But I have made this something of a topic of personal interest, to learn about what makes the economic world function. I’ve read a number of books on the topic (most notably Adam Smith’s doorstopper The Wealth of Nations) and over the years it’s become something of an increasing concern to me that the population at large doesn’t understand the basics of economics. So today I’m doing my own small part to remedy that.

Specifically I want to talk to you today about inflation. Inflation is what happens when money becomes less valuable.

“Hold on a second, Albert,” you might be saying. “Do we need to go and get that jacket with the extra long sleeves again? Money can’t become less valuable. It’s money. One dollar is always worth one dollar.”

Ah, yes. Let me explain. You see, dollars have no inherent value at all. You can’t eat them. You can’t live in them. And if you light your cigars with them you just look like a snob.

Dollars only mean something if you can trade them for other things. Things like bread, and houses, and Zippo lighters. When I talk about dollars becoming less valuable I mean that you can’t trade them for as much stuff. For instance you can’t buy as much bread for one dollar today as you could in 1980. Why? It’s not because the bread we have today is so much more valuable than the bread we had in 1980. It’s because the dollars are less valuable.

“Wait a minute, Albert,” you might be asking. “How does this happen? Do dollars have some kind of half-life that causes them to lose value over time?”

No indeed. The factors that cause the value of dollars change are the same factors that cause the value of anything else to change. One the one hand we have “supply” and over here we have his brother “demand”. You may have heard of them.

Supply is how much of something there is. Demand is how badly people want it.

If supply does down, value goes up. If I’m the last guy in the world with a glass of water you had better believe that glass of water is going to be valuable.

But when supply goes up, value goes down. If the earth is covered in a deluge of drinking water, I’m not gonna have much luck trying to pawn off my one little measly glass of water to the guy in the next boat over.

If demand goes up, value goes up and vice versa. The more people want something, the more it’s worth.

The value of the dollar has been going down pretty steadily over the last eighty years or so because the Federal Reserve has been adding to the money supply a little at a time.

Why have they been doing this? Because they don’t want the dollar to become more valuable (there are a number of reasons for this and we can’t get into them here for the sake of length.)

“Okay Albert, so what’s the big deal? The value of the dollar has been going down steadily over the years which means that prices have gone up a little at a time. This does not seem like that big of a deal.”

And on the whole I’d say you’re right. Except.

Lately the Federal Reserve has been doing its money creation thing way faster than normal. Again, the reasons for this are kinda complicated, but remember what we said about what happens when supply goes up? Value goes down. That means that your dollar won’t buy as much as it used to.

You’re probably seeing it already, in the price of groceries. I know I have. The increased supply of dollars is creating lower money value which translates into higher prices.

Meanwhile, the US government is experiencing financial difficulties. That means that other governments are giving us the sideways eye, wondering what’s going to happen to the US economy. Result?

The demand for dollars in other countries could drop, and anything we get from overseas (which is almost everything these days) will necessarily cost more.

Now comes the scary part. You see increased prices now at the grocery story, but it’s possible things could get much worse, and if they do, it’s likely it could happen very fast. In other countries where this kind of thing has happened, prices of basic commodities would skyrocket in a matter of months or even weeks.

So what can you do? Not much. But if you have investments, it might be a good idea to take stock and see if they’re likely to hold their value as the dollar takes a plunge. I also recommend owning your own home, because if you can weather the storm of inflation, the mortgage you’ll be paying on the other side will be worth way less than it was before the whole thing collapsed.

Oh, and on the bright side, your paycheck will probably go up eventually. It won’t mean anything because the dollars will be worth less, but it’ll feel good. So that’s something.

And maybe none of this will ever happen. As I said before, I’m not an expert. And I’m certainly not a prophet. My main goal is that you all be informed, that you understand how money works. So you can watch the headlines and decide for yourself how likely all of this is.

You know what they say: Knowing is half the battle.

The other half is superior numbers and overwhelming firepower.

233 Years Old and Still Fresh

Yesterday I finished reading Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and I have to say, wow. Just wow. That book feels like it could have been written yesterday (except for the clunky Victorian prose). There are economic and political observations there that are nearly shocking in their similarities to what we see in our own politics and economy. Never have I so felt the true weight of the maxim “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Everyone needs to read this book. Politicians and policy makers should be forcedto read it. It covers everything from the fallacy of trade deficits (Mercantilism didn’t work back then and it still doesn’t today) up to the ultimately ruinous cycle governments can put themselves into by taking on debt for what Smith calls “extraordinary expenses” such as wars (Smith makes the case that if we had to pay for wars directly out of our taxes we would likely be far more judicious about which wars we were willing to enter, and unlikely to drag those wars out over long periods of time).
There’s a lot there, and I could keep going, but I urge you to pick up the book and read it for yourself. It will change the way you look at the world.