Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, let's talk about the difference between story

and how you tell the story.

So the story is what happens.

So the plot.

And the structure is how you tell the story.

So let us take a simple illustration.

Little Red Riding Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood.

Simple version.

You begin at the beginning.

You go on with the events in sequence,

and you end at the end.

Little Red Riding Hood was a little girl whose mother

had made her a red cloak and a hood,

so everybody called her Little Red Riding Hood.

And one day, her mother said to her,

your grandmother is very ill, and I've

made this wonderful basket with bread and a bottle of wine

in it, and you must carry it to her through the forest.

But don't stray off the path because there

But don't stray off the path because there

are wolves in the forest.

So Little Red Riding Hood sets out along the path,

but then she sees some beautiful flowers off to the side

and thinks what a good idea it would

be if I were to pick a bouquet for my grandmother.

And she steps off the path and begins gathering the flowers.

And out from behind a tree stepped

a rather hairy looking gentleman who said, "What are you

a rather hairy looking gentleman who said, "What are you

doing little girl?"

And she said, "I am gathering some flowers

for my grandmother who lives on the other side of the forest."

You know the rest.

Let's start the story a different way.

It was dark inside the wolf.

The grandmother, who had been gobbled whole,

couldn't say a word because it was quite stifling and full

of old chicken parts and plastic bags

that the wolf had eaten by mistake.

that the wolf had eaten by mistake.

And she had to listen in silence as the wolf put

on her nightgown and nightcap and climbed into her bed

and started doing a terrible imitation of her.

What a bad imitation the grandmother said.

But, luckily, along came you know the rest.

We can start it another way.

We can tell the story from the point of view of the wolf,

or we might tell the story as a flashback.

or we might tell the story as a flashback.

Every time the grandmother remembered

what an awful time she had had inside the wolf, et cetera.

Or we might begin as a detective story might begin.

There, on the floor, lay either one corpse, that of the wolf,

or two, because, in some versions,

the grandmother doesn't come out of it so well.

What had caused this double murder?

Those are some ways of telling the story.

Those are some ways of telling the story.

Sometimes, people use time jumps.

Little was Little Red Riding Hood to know that in two weeks

time, she would be looking back on one of the most

definitive events of her life.

So where you start, what order you tell the events in,

that's variable.

The plot underneath it, however, it's the same story.

Or you can also have the "Rashomon" approach

Or you can also have the "Rashomon" approach

which is there is a story there somewhere,

but we hear three different versions of it.

"Rashomon" is the film by Kurosawa

in which the same story is told involving

a murdered man, a robber, and the murdered man's wife.

And each one has a different version

of how that murder came about.

The murdered man appears through a medium

The murdered man appears through a medium

that goes into a trance.

And each of the stories is different,

so the viewer is left wondering which one is the real story.

There's also a device in which you give the reader

two possible endings.

And that was used by Charlotte Bronte

in her novel called "Villette."

On the one hand, maybe it ended this way.

But on the other hand, dear reader,

But on the other hand, dear reader,

if you're feeling more hopeful, you

might prefer this other version.

There are many different kinds of ways

of telling stories that have been used for generations,

but I would never dare to say that there

was nothing new under the sun.

Because as soon as you say that, then there is.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Understanding how the structure is going to work

can take a while.

In that respect, it's a bit like knitting.

In that respect, it's a bit like knitting.

You can pull it all apart and start again if things have not

been working out.

And as one of the great things about being a writer,

you can always just pull it apart.

You're not stuck out on the stage like an opera singer who

just sung a bad note.

You can't take that back.

Everybody heard it.

But with a writing, it's under your control

until you decide to show it to somebody else.

until you decide to show it to somebody else.

So the two novels I really got quite far into

and had to then set aside--

in the first one, there were too many characters.

There were eight characters.

I knew everything about these people.

I knew what they had for breakfast.

I knew what kind of socks they wore.

And all of that, and I had covered 200 pages,

and nothing had happened.

There wasn't any story.

There wasn't any story.

Into the drawer.

The second one, I had too many time levels

and too many locations.

And it was the same problem.

I knew a lot about these time levels and these locations.

I got quite far into it.

I was up to about page 150.

And nothing had happened.

So if nothing is happening by page 10, you're in trouble.

So if nothing is happening by page 10, you're in trouble.

Because you don't know what the story is.

How do you strike the balance between something that's

too complicated and doesn't work and something

that's just complicated enough and does work?

Practice.

And yet, you can't tell anybody how

to do that because it is hands in the mud.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

For a full compendium of ways to tell stories,

you could do worse than read the thousand and one

nights and one night, usually known as the "Arabian Nights."

They were originally a number of uncollected stories

that had been circulating around the ancient world

for a long time.

Some genius put them together in a frame story,

which is another way of telling stories.

You have a frame story, and within that frame,

you can tell many different stories.

The frame story of the thousand and one nights and one night

The frame story of the thousand and one nights and one night

is that there was a sultan whose wife had

been caught cheating on him.

And so disillusioned and angry was he

that he decided to marry one woman a day.

And then the next morning, cut off her head.

Scheherazade decided to put a stop to this

and volunteered herself to be the next bride.

and volunteered herself to be the next bride.

But she did ask one favor, which was

that her younger sister should sleep under the bed,

because she was in the habit of telling her a story

every night.

And that was granted.

So she begins telling the story, but it is not finished

by the time dawn arrives.

And the Sultan is so eager to hear the end of the story

that he lets her live another day.

She does the same thing.

She finishes that story and begins another one.

She finishes that story and begins another one.

And this goes on for a thousand and one nights.

And on the final night, he realizes

that he's been a bad person.

He reforms and decides not to cut the heads off girls

anymore.

So that's the frame story.

But within it, we got all of these other stories

some of which have yet other stories embedded within them.

The frame story is the story of Scheherazade and the Sultan.

But the stories within that frame are the stories that

But the stories within that frame are the stories that

Scheherazade is telling him in order to-- and she tells them

in a certain order--

in order to bring him to a different frame of mind.

But also, of course, to save her own life

because each of those stories has to be interesting enough so

that he wants to hear the end of it.

And like Charles Dickens, she ends each installment

with a cliffhanger.

What's going to happen?

What's going to happen?

Tune in next week.

That's exactly what soap operas do today.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In "The Blind Assassin," we have the main character

who's kind of a mean old lady.

She could have been meaner, but she's not

a kindly, nice polite person.

She's quite prickly and annoyed.

She's quite prickly and annoyed.

So she's the narrator in both the present and the past.

But then, we have another layer, which

is a novel called "The Blind Assassin."

And within the novel called "The Blind Assassin,"

there's a story called "The Blind Assassin," which

is being told by one of the characters within the novel

to another character within the novel.

So there's another layer which is composed

of newspaper and magazine articles that

are a counterpoint to the actual story.

They're the public version of the events that

They're the public version of the events that

are going on behind the scenes.

And the stories told by each one of these kinds of narration,

they're all different, but they're related.

So that is the structure.

There are four levels of narration.

It's not just a story within a story.

It's a story within a story within a story within a story.

So it's fancy footwork, granted.

And some people follow the clues and others don't.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you're just starting out, forget everything

I said about all of these different structures

and just do a simple telling of your story

to see if you can master that part.

My first novels were pretty simple in their structure.

My first novels were pretty simple in their structure.

So "The Edible Woman," which is my first published novel

begins at the beginning and goes on until it reaches the end.

And the only change is a part in the middle

that's in the third person.

But the events are told in order.

So I would say learn to do that.

It's like any other skill.

You can't suddenly play a Beethoven sonata

You can't suddenly play a Beethoven sonata

until you first learn to play "Twinkle, Twinkle,

Little Star."

So practicing the skills, if you can get a simple thing to work,

then you can start with the variations.

But I think with any skill, with any craft,

it is hands-on learn by doing and it's also seeing

what other people have done.

what other people have done.

So what are their skills at?

How did they do it?

But also, what are my skills at, and what am I

up to doing right now, today?