Todd Robert Petersen's Pyramid Problems

In the 13th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Todd Robert Petersen, author of It Needs to Look LIke We Tried (Counterpoint), explains how turning to an alternative concept of story structure liberated his work.

A couple of summers ago, while I was struggling to revise two key stories in a linked collection, my twelve-year-old asked me for writing help. He had to bring a story to workshop at a writing camp for teens. He had ideas but no structure for them. I wanted to help, but I was living under the shadow of an email I’d just received from my agent, who liked the last round of revisions, in general. “But somehow,” he wrote, in as kind a way as possible, “You’ve managed to make two of these stories worse.” I re-read those stories while I stalled with my kid, and I saw immediately that my agent was correct. They were a whole lot worse, but I didn’t know exactly what I’d done to them. Individually the stories seemed to work fine, but as a group, the stories were throwing off the pace and breaking down the flow of the manuscript.

So, even though my kid needed help, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I didn’t want to admit that I apparently had no idea what I was doing, so I boned up on the basics and walked him through the standard stuff I’d taught and been taught. He got an earful of: exposition, inciting action, conflict, climax, denouement, and resolution. I told him how stories worked like little steam engines, and I even drew a little Freytag’s Pyramid and traced it over and over again with a capped pen.

When I finished my seminar and sent my son off to write, I started doubting everything I’d just told him. Almost immediately, I asked myself, “why does action rise? I mean, couldn’t it go down, or just fall apart?” Then I started wondering why the climax is always in the middle of the diagram, suggesting a symmetry that isn’t there. The more I thought about stories, the more I started seeing problems with the pyramid, and the more I thought about these problems, the more I realized that my rotten revisions were coming from my attempts to Freytag them. Because I was working on a novel in stories, having each story fully resolve at the end kept the book from moving forward. This made the next story strain to get going. I was creating entropy instead of velocity.

Now, this was a fine enough epiphany, but it didn’t come with instructions for what to do next. The pyramid story structure was so common and natural I couldn’t see past it. I took a couple fruitless passes, then I set the revisions aside to work on some Noh theater research for another project. This reading soon led me to the concept of kishōtenketsu, a narrative structure that comes from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature. The more I read, the more I wished I’d learned about this twenty years ago. It was the answer to my problems, but it was also a sad indictment of the limits of my education.

Kishōtenketsu: A different kind of structure

Kishōtenketsu is a deceptively simple structure, based on four narrative units or stages represented by the syllables in the term: Introduction (ki), Development (shō), Twist (ten), and Conclusion (ketsu). Instead of relying on Western ideas of conflict and resolution, kishōtenketsu is driven by change and contrast. It provides a much more natural perspective than Freytag’s mechanical one. The first two narrative stages have you establish and develop the story, and in the third, you invert or twist what's been established, very much like the third line of a haiku. After the surprise twist, the fourth unit brings unification, connection, and possibility. Resolution isn't necessary.

Straight away, I wrote these four stages on four separate note cards with a Sharpie, flipped them over, and with a ballpoint pen re-organized the worst of the bad revisions. I kept much of the same story material, but the new structure pushed everything in new directions as I hunted for a surprise rather than a climax. The characters deepened. The plot became more interesting. The pacing grew slower but more focused.

Once I moved onto drafting, I realized kishōtenketsu also worked at progressively smaller levels. This fractal quality helped me re-structure scenes, paragraphs, and images. I rewrote the other troublesome stories this way and sent in another round of revisions. A few weeks later, my agent wrote and said he liked them and wanted to send out the manuscript. Problem solved, but by that time I’d gone crazy, using kishōtenketsu for everything: syllabi, lesson plans, Tweets, and even blog posts. It seemed like there was no problem these four steps couldn't solve. Because life so often follows art, I've begun reframing the way I think of conflict and tension in my relationships at work and at home. I’m now revisiting a lot of what I thought I knew about telling stories. Perhaps this is my midlife crisis.

This year, when my son asked for help with his writing camp pages, I didn’t give him a seminar. Instead, I took a breath and said, “Okay, you need to set up your characters, then expand. Once you have everything established, give us a big surprise. At the end, connect the dots.” He paused for a second, then he told me how his story would go.

John McManus Rebuilds from the Ground up

In the 44th in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, John McManus, author of Fox Tooth Heart (Sarabande Books), tells about a novel he boiled down to a story.

Describe your revision process. 

Sometimes my revision process goes as follows. Step one: I decide to write three thousand words a day for two months until I’ve got a new novel, because Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks and hey, I’ve learned from my mistakes the last ten times I tried writing novels this way. Two months later I wind up with 200,000 words. By now I can perceive some logic problems in the story. I rewrite the whole thing from another character’s point of view. I rewrite it again from the original point of view.

Years pass. I feel pure horror to think I might ever have showed the manuscript to anyone. What if I die and someone finds the file? I would erase it from my hard drive, but I’ve spent two thousand hours on it. By now I’m a different person, one who enjoys authors I scorned then and vice versa. Maybe the draft is worth another look, but the only way to face reading it again is to slash and burn as I go.

To my surprise, a plot starts on page 270. One sentence out of ten actually evokes the physical world instead of someone’s trite thoughts. I keep those sentences. When I’m done, I step back to see what kind of husk is left. It’s roughly the length of a short story.

That’s similar to what happened with “The Ninety-Fifth Percentile,” the seventh story in Fox Tooth Heart. I wrote a so-called novel about a closeted kid from San Antonio who drank to dampen the shame he felt about being gay. He didn’t have friends. He got high and rode the bus in loops around town. A gay couple down the street took an interest in him. They’re the ones who sold him the drugs. He kept riding buses until in a 7-Eleven parking lot he encountered a sketchily drawn tragic bad-boy figure of the sort I was always infatuated with myself. They hung out; still, nothing much happened until he turned sixteen and got his license, which was when he switched from riding buses to racing around on highways in his dad’s sports car. Here the story picked up speed, at least until a hazy and highly melodramatic disaster caused him to flee to Montana. 

Any of that sounds potentially dramatic enough when I present it in a quick summary, but my manuscript was 500 pages long. The couple down the road seemed cartoonish to me, like the boy’s mother and father and the boy from the 7-Eleven, so I got rid of all of them. I cut the long looping bus rides. I cut almost every word prior to page 250. I cut Montana. I realized a single car ride after the boy’s sixteenth birthday did a fine job of expressing something I’d spent eighty pages trying to get across when he was a passenger. I changed his name and moved him to Houston and gave him a new family and rebuilt the thing from the ground up, retaining little beyond the mood.

That meant retaining a sense of how I intended for the story to make people feel. I wanted to convey the kid’s bottomless yearning. And I wanted readers to feel the dread accumulating in him as costs accrued from the lies he told. Whatever wasn’t working toward those goals, I cut. Suddenly I had a useful formula, oddly easy to follow. Before long I had 4,000 words instead of 200,000. I added some new material to tie things together, and then I had a story I liked—which is not to tout my revision methods. This has been a cautionary tale.