STORY STRUCTURE 1: PROGRESSION - …...For example, you could tell the first half of your story from...

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STORY STRUCTURE 1: PROGRESSION

© Adam Westbrook & Marc Thomas


“Everything in your story must point in some direction that makes sense to your [audience]. Usually this means forward!”

— Bombay Flying Club

As we have seen throughout Story Design for Nonfiction, a story must go somewhere. It must have a destination that’s worth getting to, and the journey there must be as rewarding as possible. Even with this in mind, it’s hard to make sure this happens when you are deep in a project. You can easily get caught up on minutiae and be unable to see the wood for the trees.

This can cause you to lose either direction or drive.

“If you don’t take your audience by the hand and move them - either physically in time and space or emotionally - chances are they will leave you” says Poul at the Bombay Flying Club. “Drive (not pace) is a must even in the slowest story.”

Once we know where we are going, progression dictates that we get there in an increasingly more interesting and intense fashion...or at least, not a less interesting fashion! If we have done our story design properly, forward drive will be baked into our story when we use conflict properly: introducing and heightening conflict is the most fundamental form of progression and therefore story structure.

Progression as change Progression begins with change, which we’ve already talked about. In the best stories change happens either to a character (they go on a journey of change), to an issue (it becomes a bigger or more complication problem, or is solved) or perhaps to the audience (they become more informed, scared, provoked or challenged by your story). Bruce Block is a Hollywood cinematographer. I’ll be borrowing from his excellent book The Visual Story quite a lot in this lesson. If you are involved in video or photographic storytelling I recommend finding a copy.


“Progression begins as one thing and changes to something else. Music can make progression from slow to fast, for example. There are also visual

progressions. Progressions are fundamental to story or musical structure and they’re fundamental to visual structure.”

-Bruce Block

Progression affects narrative structure too, and the ordering of the events of our story. It’s a bit like a video game: things get more complicated and dangerous as the game progresses from level to level. The next fight is more violent than the last, the next baddie is more evil than the last one, and the risk is always higher. It must never recede.

To build stories that keep our audiences hooked, we need to be intentionally, systematically, and progressively raising the stakes.

A quick bit of science Do you remember the neuro agents Cortisol and ACTH from lesson 4? Cortisol is released in the brain as a way to deal with difficulty and its purpose is to focus our attention and prepare us for difficulty. Scientists know that ACTH, which regulate Cortisol release, is affected by stories and by making stories progressively more intense we can focus our audiences attention as the story builds.

But what makes something intense? How do we judge whether our story is progressively building towards something? Bruce Block recommends measuring the “intensity” of your narrative, and using this measurement to guide your decisions. To measure this, he places stories on a graph with the linear narrative on the X-axis and the level of intensity on the Y-axis. I created some example intensity graphs for Issue 3 of Inside the Story Magazine.

Let’s take a quick look at them.


Plotting Intensity - simple progression

This is the most simple way to think about intensity in a story. The story starts off not very intense and builds steadily towards the climax at the end. Many storytellers prefer to vary the intensity throughout a story though, particularly if it’s a bit longer. Robert McKee says - if you’ll excuse the metaphor - that it’s a bit like good sex, with its rhythmic waxing and wanes, building and releasing, all the while building in overall intensity towards a climax.

Plotting Intensity - more complex progression

Note that this isn’t a mathematical exercise and graph paper is not required. There is no way to “measure” intensity; instead, it’s about


making your own judgements on a rough scale. And what qualifies as intensity is up to you as a storyteller. Block describes it like this: “Story intensity refers to the degree of conflict in the story.” He’s a dramatist remember, so for him, dramatic conflict means intensity. The conflict between characters and situations gets increasingly more intense.

Can we translate for the nonfiction storyteller? As we’ve seen before, by simply widening our definition we can find a good use for it in making our factual stories stronger. Block in fact offers some clue to this in his book:

“Emotional reactions (to a story) are based on the intensity, or dynamic, of the audience’s emotional reaction when they read a book, listen to music or see a picture... Usually the more intense the visual stimulus, the more

intense the audience reaction.” - Bruce Block

If tangible conflict is not suitable to our stories, then I think the audience’s reaction is as a good (if not better) measure. I suggest it might be better because it puts us in the audience’s mind as we construct our stories wondering what they might be thinking at any given moment.

So, let’s agree (for now) that an audience’s emotional response to a story is the thing we want to progressively intensify throughout our stories. Increasing the audience’s emotional intensity in our story does not necessarily mean we need to bring our readers to the verge of tears at every climax. Intensity is relative: a wry smile, a satisfaction of having learned something new, or annoyance at another failed government policy all count, if they are the climax you want to create for your audience.

If you want your audience to act after seeing your story, you’re going to want have a higher emotional intensity; in other stories it’s not how dramatic and explosive it is that counts.

What matters is that you applied the technique with intention.


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Pick an emotion or reaction and decide that at the climax of your story you want the audience to feel this emotion most intensely. You can then employ narrative devices to progressively increase this.

Turning up the dial with your structure

OK, so we know we want our story to intensify as we build towards our climax. How do we make things more intense? As the storyteller, there are several tools at our disposal to make the audience feel the increasing intensity, through the fabric of the story.

Conflict As I mentioned before, some form of progression should already be built into your story design by defining conflict in the right way. You begin by introducing conflict, you heighten it and then you resolve it at the climax. When you heighten conflict in act two, by complicating things, adding new problems, you build intensity as the audience search for answers.

Knowledge Gaps Each time we open a knowledge gap we increase the intensity, the attention and engagement of our audience a bit more. And each time we close one, releasing new insight, intensity increases as well. So the frequency and rhythmn of your knowledge gaps can make the audience feel like a climax is coming.

In The Long Game, my video biography of Leonardo DaVinci, I use knowledge gaps strategically through my story to build progression. Every time I reveal an unexpected fact, I anticipate my audience’s response gets one step more intense. I then increase the pace at which these unexpected facts appear to build this higher up to the climatic moment.

In The Visual Story Bruce Block says there are three ways you can map the progression of a particular element in your story.


1) Constant: keep the intensity of a certain element the same throughout your story. This will not create any progression but might be the desired effect.

2) Build: build the intensity step by step until you reach the climax.

3) Flip-flop: you can raise intensity by alternating between different states of intensity of a particular element. The more rapidly you alternate, the more the intensity builds. For example, you could tell the first half of your story from one characters point of view, and then switch to another, contrasting point of view. Then, as you build to the climax, you flip flop between the two. Block calls this “Contrast and Affinity”.

With all of these, the frequency, rythmn and contrast of structural elements can be manipulated.

Turning up the dial with your medium

Once your narrative has progression baked into it you can use the devices inherent in your own medium to mirror, or even oppose, that progression.

You will no doubt be familiar with the ones that specifically relate your medium, and the key here is to subconsciously support the progression that is in the story itself.

Text: The length of words and sentences or the contrast between them can build intensity. Long paragraphs can slow a story down while scattergun dialogue can speed it up. Anecdote and action increase intensity, while background and exposition decrease it.

Video: A whole host of visual components are able to support the progression of your story, all of which are outlined in detail in The Visual Story. They include line, tone, shape, colour, movement and rhythm. Music can also


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be used, but only as a accent and not a main indicator of intensity.

Audio: Rhythm is a key component, as well as volume, the number of voices, sound effects and music. The contrast and similarities between all of these can be increased or decreased accordingly. It may be useful to keep a library of music which builds in emotion, rhythm or other intensity to support builds in the narrative.

The Memory Palace is a popular podcast about history. In the episode Secret Kitty presenter Nate DiMeo describes a (true) attempt by the CIA to stuff a live cat with microphones and transmitters and use it to spy on the Russians. With an unexpected climax in mind, DiMeo uses music and the pace of his own delivery to describe the operation in detail, thus building tension and intensity.

Photography: All the visual components not related to movement: tone, line, shape, colour can be used by still photographers. Juxtaposition within an image is powerful too. If you sequence photographs (for example in an audio slideshow, or interactive story) then the rhythm of the images can increase or decrease accordingly.

In The Whale Hunt, a unique interactive visual documentary, art- ist Jonathan Harris paces his images quite slowly at the start of the trip. As the whale hunt gets under way, the rhythm of the images increases, making us feel more intense, as we get closer to making a kill.


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STORY STRUCTURE 2: CLASSIC STORY SHAPES



“I think structure is one of the most important tools a writer has. Structure is all about making the story more rich.”

-Rebecca Skloot

Author of the award-winning science nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot describes structure’s importance for her.

Her book tells the story of an African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken from her body without her consent. They have since led to countless breakthroughs. Navigating a complex story, Skloot opted for a complicated three-part structure, telling several events, from different time periods, at the same time.

“What I thought all along was that if I couldn’t find a way to do a structure that jumped around in time like that and told all three narratives at the

same time, I’d lose a lot of the story, because the story of the cells and what happened to Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about

them at the same time that you’re learning about the science, the scientists and her family, what happened to them and where they are now. To me,

it was that I would have lost those things if I couldn’t have done the more complicated structure. But there was never a point where I thought, ‘I have to leave out this one really important part of the story because it doesn’t fit

in this structure.” - Rebecca Skloot

Structure supports the story. When you look at any of the following structures, remember they only work if they are employed to add meaning to the audience’s experience.

We’ll do them in chronological order. Play with these structures, adapt them, remix and transform them. And remember a type of structure is rarely the secret to a good story - it’s about finding (or creating) the structure best for you. The trick, as always, is to do it intentionally.


Aristotle It is Aristotle we have to thank for a lot of our understanding of story. “A whole is that which has a beginning a middle and an end,” is how he famously put it and the essential conflict structure he recognised still defines a story today.

In his Poetics he describes a very loose structure for tragedies based around the metaphor of tying and untying. First, we progressively complicate a story (desis), until we reach a story apex, or turning point (peripeteia). The story hangs on this climactic moment, and from here, the complications are untied (lusis).

You might notice a similarity between the turning point and the midpoint we have already discussed.

Freytag’s Dramatic Arc Story, like much culture, remained unchanged for a long time. Gustav Freytag, a German dramatist in the 19th Century took the time to break story down into five acts. He called them: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement.


Notice that the climax happens in the middle, not the later third of the story. The “rising action” piques our interest as things get more complicated and new gaps in our knowledge arise.

Hero’s Quest This is a hugely popular story shape, and is so evangelicalised, by “story gurus” it is beginning to become a bit of a cliché. No Hollywood film gets developed without this structure built in and longer documentaries and nonfiction books use it too.

It was highlighted by a famed anthropologist called Joseph Campbell. He studied mythology throughout the world and throughout history. His discovery was that almost every human culture - even though separated by time and geography - told the same universal story. He called it The Monomyth. It’s the ultimate universal story, and has been developed since into something called The Heroes Quest.

Some of the most popular films of all time from Star Wars to The Hunger Games follow this map. We follow a hero, on a singular quest, which takes them through progressively greater struggles until they return, changed and renewed.

Joseph Campbell found it prevalent in almost every culture on the planet throughout history so there is clearly something viscerally human about it. You can argue that it in some ways reflects our own lives: we are all the heroes of our own story, on our own quest to reach our own gold, whether that’s love, money, success or beating illness.


Bookending Bookending does not describe the story itself, merely how it begins and ends. Still, it is an effective device. Simply, you return to the beginning of the story at the end, in other words, the same event starts and ends the story, much like two bookends on a shelf.

It has a couple of interesting effects. One is to give the story a holistic and cyclical feeling. We go “full circle” and end up where we started, but changed by the story.

The second is to allow for comparison, and therefore it’s popular in character-based stories. We meet our character as they deal with a situation in one way. At the end of the story, they face the same situation, but handle it differently and we see how they have changed.

Vonnegut’s Man In Hole

In this entertaining lecture, several decades old, one of the great novelists of the last century Kurt Vonnegut presents a series of story shapes. He creates a graph with “time” as the X-axis and “fortune” as the Y-axis. The above example goes like this: man gets into hole, man gets out of it again. “We love this story!” he tells the audience. You’ll notice its similarity to Aristotle’s tying/untying structure, and in some ways is just a modern retelling.


The ultimate story structure

So there you have five structures for telling a story. They’ll all different and have been used in different ways but the real lesson here comes from seeing what they have in common.

They each introduce a conflict. Then they heighten it. And then - you guessed it - they resolve it.

Too much can be said about structure. It is important, and because it’s closer to the surface than the heart and the form of a story, it is more likely to get noticed. But structure does not make a story. You can go forward in time, you can go backwards, you can leaps all over like a kangeroo - as long as beneath that, conflict is always being introduced, heightened and resolved.

It is a very freeing realisation - because, provided you follow the constraints set by the conflict, the structure you choose for your story is only limited by your imagination.


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STORY STRUCTURE 3: creative story shapes



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In this PDF I’m going to show you some creative story structures that I have seen used by nonfiction storytellers across a range of mediums. You can find inspiration for story structure anywhere. My video essay Cause and Effect: the Unexpected Origins of Terrible Things from September 2014 uses a story structure I borrowed from a Wes Anderson film!

I hope these examples provide you with some inspiration.

Cyclical structure This structure is similar to bookending which I mention in PDF 15.2. It involves ending your story where you began. For example, if your photo- essay begins with the closure of a car factory and goes on to tell the story of a former employee, you can take the character back to the empty factory at the end of the story.

This has several purposes. One is to allow for comparison or contrast, particularly if you want to demonstrate change throughout your story. This is commonly used in some Hollywood genres, particularly maturation themes: we see a geeky guy fail to pick up a girl in a bar at the start of the film, before they undergo a radical personality transplant. In the final scene we see them in the same bar, trying to talk to the same girl this time with different results.

Western storytelling is also traditionally cyclical, something the classic story structures, like The Heroes Quest recognise. It’s a device which helps stories feel complete.

The audio slideshow portrait of John Hirst begins with the dramatic story of how he killed his landlady in 1977. The photographs are in black and white, to represent the past. In the final few mo- ments, John contemplates life in prison and how it “never leaves you” reflecting on the story, and bringing it to a close near where it began.


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Structure and point of view Different characters interpret the same event in different ways, a trope exploited by romantic comedies for decades. It’s not just men and women who see things differently. Almost every issue tackled by journalists is argued fiercely from different sides, especially politics, economics and social issues.

Playing with this allows us to creatively take our audiences on an unexpected journey. We can show them an event from one point of view, and allow them to make their mind up about it, before showing the same event from a new perspective. This forces the audience to recalibrate their opinions.

The RadioLab episode A Very Lucky Wind presents us with a story told from the point of view of two girls, who seems to have been part of a one-in-a-million coincidence. This sets up the investiga- tion for the rest of the episode, and at the climax, presenters Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich present the same story to an ex- pert on probability. His point of view unpicks the story piece by piece, and in doing so detonates the meaning of the story.

The Public Square begins from the point of view of hate preacher Terry Jones, before unexpectedly revealing we are watching it from another perspective altogether. This makes the story surpris- ing and memorable, and ultimately detonates its meaning.

Structure and time The CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother was never particularly funny, but it was a masterclass in narrative structure. The writers commonly played with time and point of view to create meaning. Each episode flashes back and forth in time as we see the same event through different perspectives, usually releasing meaning and pathos.

This also allows storytellers to feed in clues to plotlines that are yet to develop. When they do, the audience is thrown back in time to piece it


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all together. This is increasingly used in TV drama with the writers of Sherlock (BBC) and Breaking Bad (AMC) employing these devices.

Cause and Effect, a video essay about the origins of the First World War shines new light on an old conflict by telling the story backwards. We begin at the start of the war and step-by-step go further back in time. Each step picks up a new clue which brings us closer to detonating the Controlling Idea. More importantly, the structure reflects the Controlling Idea: it is a story about how terrible events can have innocent beginnings, and travelling backwards towards that innocent beginning inherently pushes that idea forward.

Time-based devices You don’t have to move in a constant direction through time, you can leap forwards and backwards as you like, to uncover new meaning.

Common devices include: foreshadowing (dropping clues to events yet to unfold), flash-forwards (where we see an event that is yet to happen), ‘how we got here’ or ‘in medias res’ (where we begin at the climax and the rest of the story explains how the characters got to that point), the flash- back (where we briefly visit events in the past to add meaning to events in the present).

In Hopeful, a short documentary following environmental cam- paigners in China, filmmaker Jonah Kessel moves us back and forward through time, starting in a polluted village, before whisking us back to tell the story of the people who brought us there. Also note the lovely symbolic use of Chess as a metaphor for campaign- ing.

In the New York Times article Here’s What Happens When you Cast Lindsay Lohan to be in your Movie writer Stephen Rodrick swaps his events around to foreshadow the climax later on, a scene where director Paul Schrader must strip naked in order to convince his reluctant star to do the same.


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Episode 1 of Kirby Ferguson’s acclaimed web series Everything Is A Remix employs the Unreliable Narrator device. He starts a story in the 1960s before realising his mistake and whisking us back 10 years before. This is a subtle way of revealing a new layer of infor- mation.

Multiplot structure Weaving together several plots into one narrative is a real storytelling challenge. Multicoloured index cards are essential for this task, as they allow you to visually see the balance between story lines and judge whether one is going on for too long.

Science writer Rebecca Skloot wove three narratives together in her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It was a job that took her two years! We’ll break her structure down in detail in the final week of the course.

Imitating structure We can also get creative with our structure, and create a new shape to imitate the nature of the story. John McPhee used this device often.

“A book on tennis can imitate the game’s back-and-forth, contrapuntal action; but it could also resemble a mountain climb with an ascent, climax

and descent arranged in pyramidal form. The choice is McPhee’s: either find an idea for order in the material, or impose one upon it.”

- William H Howarth

In Oranges, a study of the orange crops of Florida, McPhee structures his narrative to mimic the seasonal growth of Oranges themselves.

Malcolm Gladwell’s portrait The Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg mimics her chaotic, high speed and intense personality with a structure which flits from place to place very quickly. This is mir- rored in the fast-paced and piccato writing style too.


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Lullaby, a creative audio essay produced for In The Dark Radio takes this a step further, repeating a quote about lullabies over and over until it mimics a lullaby itself. The effect is to create something mesmerising - just like a lullaby!

Anti-Structure And some authors choose not to use a clear structure at all. This works well as long as it is intentional and done with purpose. It takes a mastery of the form to do this with confidence.

Alan Spearman’s epic documentary As I Am blends the poetry of a young man living in Deep South poverty with his own footage shot in the same neighbourhood. It meanders, sure, but is mesmerising all the same. A reminder of why these are principles and not rules.

You can find inspiration anywhere: books, TV shows, movies, video games, social media, and of course, the stories themselves. Keep your eyes open!

STORY STRUCTURE 1: PROGRESSION - …...For example, you could tell the first half of your story from...

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