Hot dogs and story structure
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In last week’s newsletter, I implored y’all to steal my syllabus, and let you know that I’ll be sharing my lesson plans. The first thing we’ll talk about is story structure.
Why do I like to start here? I’ll give you a metaphor. Think of yourself as a story architect, designing story blueprints. You need a solid foundation, or else it all crashes down, regardless of how well thought out the rest of the plans are.
How not to tell a story
Speaking of chaos, let’s start by watching this 30 second clip from an episode of Billy on the Street. The link should take you to 0:55. Watch from there.
Billy Eichner is being super cheeky here. I think we can all agree that this woman wasn’t telling a story, nor was she even trying to. She was a regular person, living her life, when all of a sudden Billy Eichner and the freaking Jonas Brothers suddenly appear before her and shoved a mic in her face. She wasn’t prompted to tell a story, and so she didn’t. She said a fairly boring fact, in a fairly boring way. So Billy and the Jonases ran away. No story, no fun.
If you want to tell a story, you have to be prepared for it.
How to tell a story
So here’s a story that someone was prepared to tell.
I’d like you to listen to “Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning,” a 4-ish minute piece from a 2003 episode of This American Life. This is the opposite of that woman’s fact; Ira Glass and the TAL team set out to create a story. I love “Colonel Mustard.” Not because it’s the best story that TAL has ever done, though I do think it’s done well. But it’s a pure hit of TAL, in just four minutes. Which makes it the perfect candidate for story dissection.I think I’ve used it in every single class I’ve ever taught. I’m confident that I’ve listened to it more times than anyone on the planet, by a wide margin. (I’d estimate 75-100 times.) And I just listened to it again to write this.
As you listen to the piece, write down what you hear. There are no right or wrong answers. This is not a trick question. I just want you to listen and record your thoughts for your own reference later.
What did you write down? When I play this in class, people bring up things like:
The story is told chronologically.
The writing and actualities are often quite visual: “spit clean building,” “old-world hickory smoked,” “bright red,” “weave his way with the uncooked sausages through the maze of passageways,” etc.
The ambi (background noise) from the factory is woven in seamlessly, and so is the music.
Ira finishes the piece with a big, “Here’s what this all means to me.”
Like I said, no wrong answers. Just tuck those away for now, and we’ll revisit them later.
Want, try, get. (Or: The simplest way to think about story structure)
To me, the simplest way to think about story structure is these three words:
Want, try, get.
These three words help me build audio stories that I’m proud of releasing, help me dissect stories as an editor for pros and my students, and even help me understand why I loved Barbie but hated Oppenheimer. (That’s a newsletter for another day, though I’m sure there are some killer essays out there already.)
Here’s what want, try, get means:
A character wants something, they try to get it, do they get it?
For the purposes of this newsletter, I’m focusing on the want. (Try and Get will come in later issues.)
To explain want, let’s break it down into its parts:
A character / wants something
A character
Every story has characters. Usually, there’s a main character, a protagonist whose journey we follow. The great site TV tropes defines characters as:
People in the world you are looking to for entertainment.
It is, the beings that do the actions being narrated by the narrative. Basically one of the most super of tropes in all of fiction. Unless you're writing some sort of abstract poem, it's pretty much impossible to tell a story without characters.
It’s key to develop character properly. Some key character traits to think about include:
What’s their name? (Duh.)
What do they do for a living? Are they white collar or blue collar? Are they good at their jobs? Do they like their jobs?
What’s their family situation? Are they in love, heartbroken, struggling, thriving?
What makes them likable? Are they funny, charming, smart, pathetic?
What makes them unique? Does anything about them stick out or make them memorable?
In The Wizard of Oz, our main character is Dorothy. We learn in the beginning of the movie that she’s a girl from Kansas. She loves her dog, Toto. She hates that mean old rich woman who wants to kill her dog. She doesn’t listen to the adults around her. She’s a great singer. She cares deeply her family. And she’s scared of tornados.
In “Colonel Mustard,” I’d say that the main character is Jim Bodman, the guy who Ira interviews. Here’s how Ira develops him as a character, through Ira’s narration and Jim’s actualities:
He’s chairman of the Vienna Sausage Company
That’s it. Neither Ira nor Jim talk about how he styles his hair, whether or not he has a partner or children, or whether he believe in aliens. We can assume from the context of the story that he cares that the hot dogs aren’t as good in the new plant. But that’s pretty much it.
Jim, of course, is a full fledged human being. These things might matter to him a great deal. He might desperately apply Rogaine every morning because he has anxiety about his male pattern baldness. He might dream up new offenses for his kid’s basketball team because that’s the main way that he connects with her. He might watch Ancient Aliens each night to soothe himself before going to sleep.
But we never learn those things, or anything else. Why not? Because they don’t matter to the story. None of these character traits are essential, or even helpful in advancing the story. In fact, including them would be harmful because they would just confuse us, or even raise more questions. (I’d love to know more about Jim’s obsession with Ancient Aliens, but that’s a whole other story, literally.)
Wants something
Knowing what your character wants is even more important than who they are. This is what motivates your character to go on their hero’s journey. This is a life or death situation — either literally, or metaphorically. In Top Gun, if Tom Crusie doesn’t shoot down the enemy fights, he will literally die. But if he doesn’t get first in his class, or win Kelly McGillis’s love, or beat. Val Kilmer in volleyball, he will metaphorically die. Think back to being a little kid. If you didn’t get that toy car you wanted in the drug store, it felt like life and death to you. Same deal here. These are the stakes of the story.
In The Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy is transported to Oz, she wants to get home. To do that, she needs to follow the Yellow Brick Road. If she doesn’t get to the Wizard of Oz, she won’t be able to get home. What happens if she doesn’t get home? Well, she’ll literally die: The Wicked Witch will murder her. So she’s pretty fucking motivated there. But then there’s her metaphorical death: If she doesn’t get back home, she’ll never experience the true love of home. (Because there’s no place like home.)
In “Colonel Mustard,” Jim wants the hot dogs to be red again. We actually never learn why. We can assume that there is no literal death here — no one will be murdered if the hot dogs stay pink. But it is safe to assume there is a metaphorical death. Is it because sales are dependent on red hot dogs, and the company will go out of business if they don’t fix the color, which will lead to everyone losing their job and Jim losing all of his money leading to ruin? Maybe it’s because Jim has some OCD thing about red.
Notice how we don’t even need to know these stakes. It’s possible that the story would be more compelling if Ira told us about these stakes. But it’s enough — in this story, at least — just to know that Jim wants it.
In closing
Listen to the story again. Focus on Want. How does that change the way you hear the story? Think about:
Who is the main character?
What essential character traits are there?
What do they want?
Why?
What happens if they don’t get it?
Over the next week, I’d like to offer a challenge. In the next podcast you listen to, movie or TV show you watch, or book you read, do this exercise. How does it impact how you consume that story?
Before we wrap up, two things to keep in mind.
First, these aren’t rules, they’re guidelines. They’re helpful markers to determining whether or not your house might cave in. But often, people release amazing stories that bend or break these guidelines. You should play and experiment with them as often as you’d like.
Second, I’m nowhere near the first person to walk through the concepts of storytelling. Humans have been telling stories for many thousands of years. Consider this my take on the same concepts of Western storytelling expounded on by Joseph Campbell, Syd Field, Save the Cat, the story circle, and podcasting resources like Out on the Wire (which I use as my textbook in my Intro to Narrative Podcasting class at AJO). People dedicate their entire lives to studying narratology and exploring concepts like fabula vs. syuzhet. But for now, fuck that noise. Just think about Want.