101 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
101 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
# Story Skeletons
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Three traditions for narrative structure, deliberately heterogeneous (they disagree about what stories are):
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- **Emma Coats** — Pixar's 22 Story Basics (Twitter, May 2011). Working principles from Pixar's story room.
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- **George Saunders** — *A Swim in a Pond in the Rain* (Random House, 2021). Stories as escalating-stakes engines, learned by close reading Russian short fiction.
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- **Ursula K. Le Guin** — "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1986). Argument *against* conflict-driven shape; *for* fiction as container.
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This file deliberately omits **Hero's Journey / Save the Cat / Story Circle / Three-Act**. Real traditions but so widely formulaic-ized in screenwriting and self-help-adjacent writing that invoking them tends to produce slop.
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## When to use
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| Situation | Reach for |
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|---|---|
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| Story has no shape, need a fast spine | Coats #4 |
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| Stuck in early draft | Coats #9, #11, #12 |
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| Draft isn't working, don't know why | Saunders attention to "what does the story now want?" |
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| Conflict-arc is producing forced or shallow work | Le Guin's carrier bag |
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| Writing about a community / place / duration not a hero | Le Guin's carrier bag |
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| Writing literary short fiction | Saunders |
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| Commercial-feature-length narrative | Coats |
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## Don't use when
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- Pure lyric or expository work (no narrative)
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- Writing for a market that demands the formula (Hero's Journey may apply; Saunders/Le Guin will read as eccentric)
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- You don't have material yet — these shape; they don't generate
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## Coats's 22 (the load-bearing ones)
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The full list is widely circulated. Most-cited:
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**#4 — Pixar Pitch (the spine):**
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> *Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.*
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Six-clause skeleton: stable normalcy → disrupting event → cascading consequences → resolution. Fits most narratives.
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**#6** — What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them.
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**#7** — Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Endings are hard.
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**#9** — When stuck, make a list of what wouldn't happen next. Lots of times the material to get unstuck shows up.
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**#12** — Discount the first thing that comes to mind. And the second, third, fourth, fifth — get the obvious out of the way.
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**#13** — Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to write, but it's poison to the audience.
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**#14** — Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you? That's the heart of it.
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**#16** — What are the stakes? What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.
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**#19** — Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out are cheating.
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**#20** — Take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like?
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**#22** — What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling? Build out from there.
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## Saunders — three operating moves
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**Stories are escalation.** Each scene must increase stakes — emotional, moral, situational. Stagnation kills. Even quiet stories must escalate.
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**Specificity is the engine.** Generic verbs, generic nouns, generic adjectives produce stories that don't escalate because nothing specific is happening to anyone in particular.
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**The story knows more than the writer.** Strong stories are built by *responsiveness*: draft, read what you wrote, ask "what does this story now want?", write the next sentence to fulfill that want. The writer is in service to the story.
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This contrasts directly with formula-driven writing.
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## Le Guin — carrier bag
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Anthropology has long focused on the *spear* and the *blade* as the early human inventions defining narrative — hunter-warrior stories. The actually-more-important invention was the *container*: the bag, the basket, the sling. Human survival was overwhelmingly gathering, not hunting. The hunting story has rising action and climax. The gathering story has accretion.
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> *The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. ... A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.*
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For ideation: when the conflict-arc is forcing you to flatten the work, use Le Guin. The carrier-bag novel is shaped not as a hero confronting an obstacle on a journey but as a container holding many specific things in particular relation. *Always Coming Home* (1985) is the model — multi-form anthropology of an imagined people: oral histories, recipes, songs, maps, alongside (not subordinated to) the conventional narrative.
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Use when:
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- Work is essayistic, anthropological, polyvocal
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- About a place, a community, a duration, a way of life
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- "Hero with an obstacle" frame collapses what makes the work specific
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## Procedure
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### Shaping a story you have material for
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1. Try Coats #4 spine. Can you fill in six blanks? If not, you may not have the spine yet.
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2. Apply Saunders attention. Read sentence by sentence; ask "what does this now want?" at each transition.
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3. Ask Le Guin's question: is the conflict-arc actually right for this material, or am I forcing it?
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### Diagnosing a stalled draft
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- Coats #16: What are the stakes? If absent, surface them.
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- Saunders: where does the energy stop being introduced? Find the dead zone.
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- Coats #13: Are characters passive? If yes, that's the problem.
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- Le Guin: is this story trying to be a hero-journey but doesn't want to be?
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## Anti-slop notes
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- Don't default to Hero's Journey. It's overused and flattens everything into Joseph Campbell shape.
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- Don't generate fake "Coats-style" tips. Use the actual 22.
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- Saunders writes against self-help-adjacent registers. Don't drift into "the writer's journey" tone.
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- Don't apply Le Guin's carrier bag superficially. It's a serious argument with politics. Using it as "and now my story is a bag of stuff" without engaging the underlying argument is dilution.
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Sources: Coats, Pixar story rules tweets (May 2011); Saunders, *A Swim in a Pond in the Rain* (Random House, 2021); Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" in *Dancing at the Edge of the World* (Grove, 1989).
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