Orient your audience: Critiquing Tim Grahl’s ‘No Doubt’ (Part 2)
Summary: Being clear means your audience experiences your story in the way you intend. We look at how Tim Grahl grounds us in a scene.
I must have been seven or, perhaps, eight years old. We were shopping in a department store, and my parents were looking at clothes on a rack. At the end of the rack, against the wall, stood one of those three-panel, wrap around mirrors. I’d never seen one before. Like a moth first discovering the irresistibility of fluorescent lights at night, I became entranced.
I stepped up into the booth, taken by the novelty of viewing myself from multiple angles. I probably made faces and silly poses. This went on for a few minutes.
Eventually, the excitement wore off. I turned around, expecting to see my family.
But there was nobody there.
I remember vividly the feeling in my body. Panic. Where had everyone gone?
I rushed to search. The racks were taller than I was. They created a bewildering maze. I looked down nearby aisles but couldn’t see anyone. Tears came. How would I find my parents? What was going to happen to me?
Very few of us enjoy the feeling of being lost. True, there are the odd adrenaline junkies who love throwing themselves into unfamiliar situations and figuring things out on the fly. But most of us, most of the time, feel much more comfortable in situations in which we have some level of control. We like to know where things are, what to expect, where we are going.
A lot of my work in software design was helping orient people in the midst of what could otherwise be quite bewildering contexts. Software interfaces can be literally anything, but not everything is recognizable or easy to understand. It took hard work – and a lot of testing – to ensure that people could use our products the way we intended.
In storytelling, it’s no different. The possibilities for constructing your scenes and characters and story worlds are boundless. But you need to keep your audience grounded, understanding where they are and what’s happening and where they are going.
That doesn’t mean you tell them everything, of course. Mystery and revelation are part of the fun! But (with a few exceptions) you never want your audience to feel lost.
Recap
This is the second note in a series analyzing Tim Grahl’s short story, “No Doubt”.
In the first note, we established our agenda for this project. We’re analyzing Tim’s story in terms of five fundamentals of storytelling: clarity, believability, engagingness, affect, and meaningfulness.
In this note, we’ll begin to dive into the weeds on clarity. What does Tim’s story do well and poorly when it comes to making it easy to understand what’s happening and why?
- Intro
- Clear ← Where we are currently
- Believable
- Engaging
- Affecting
- Meaningful
What is clarity?
In storytelling discussions around clarity, there’s always a temptation to talk about George Orwell and Hemmingway-esque writing and plain versus stained glass windows. Personally, I’m partial to a straightforward writing style with occasional indulgence in flair. But stylistic clarity is not what we’re talking about today. The clarity we’re after has only to do with this: the successful delivery of intent.
To be clear means your audience receives your story in the way you wanted.
If you intend for your flowery prose to call attention to itself and it does, that’s clear. If you intend for your words to “get out of the way” and merely convey your awesome plot, and they do, that’s clear.
This definition suggests a useful and surprising possibility: It’s perfectly valid to use confusion for effect. Your audience members don’t always need to know what’s going on. You may choose to make parts of your story intentionally difficult to understand.
But if you do that, there’s a catch: your audience members must know that confusion is what you want them to feel in that moment. It must be clear to them both 1) that it’s on purpose and 2) that it’s worth it, that you will sufficiently reward them for enduring the discomfort.
Overall assessment of “No Doubt”
So now, 600 words into this note, we finally get to the point. Using our definition, how does Tim Grahl’s “No Doubt” measure up?
There’s a lot Tim does well.
- Tim gives us a good general sense for the who the key players are, what’s at stake, and what happens from moment to moment.
- On the micro level, Tim’s grammar and sentence structure is clear. That’s one place where newer writers sometimes struggle, and believe it or not, it can ruin what might otherwise be a good story.
- On the macro level, “No Doubt’s” overall structure is mostly clear as well. Tim introduces his main character Ethan and establishes a clear goal and conflict, he escalates the conflict to a doozy of a disaster, and then he unpacks the implications of that disaster’s effect on Ethan’s world.
So far, so good.
But not everything is perfect. (Unfortunately, no story is, dear reader.) There were a handful of places where I hit bumps, and it will be instructive to look at them.
So, for what follows, we’ll spend our time focused on the medium-resolution craft of the story. How does “No Doubt” work on the level of scenes and sub arcs?
In this note, we’ll look at one positive example of how Tim structures a scene for clarity. Later, we’ll talk about a couple of instances in which he could have made changes to improve clarity.
With luck, this exercise will give you some tools to think about clarity in your own stories.
What works well: a sense of progress
Tim’s protagonist, Ethan, is in middle school. He has a crush on Meg, a classmate. Meg invites Ethan to come see her perform at her church in the evening on Christmas Eve. But there’s a problem: Ethan must work that evening at his parents’ grocery store. It will be an especially busy time because other stores are closed, so Ethan’s parents aren’t likely to allow him the time off. Ethan faces a dilemma.
The Christmas Eve day sequence is all about ratcheting up the tension on Ethan’s dilemma as the hours count down.
Structurally, this section of the story maps to the “Fun and Games” phase of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat sheet or Act II A for those who use a four-segment plot. In a longer story, this section would have several ups and downs; but because it’s a short story, it’s just a straight escalation. It flows out from the inciting incident and builds toward the story’s central disaster.
What Tim does especially well here is put us solidly in Ethan’s perspective. It’s instructive to see how he uses a three-unit architecture to achieve this.
Establishing shot
First, Tim opens with a tight focus on a specific, concrete moment. Ethan is interacting with a customer. He wants to go to Meg’s performance but can’t, and Tim plays with Ethan’s conflicted desires in subtext.
Ethan handed the white-haired Mrs. Cleaver back her six dollars and thirty-two cents in change, and helped her load two cans of cranberry sauce and a pint of cookies and cream into her paper bag.
“Is Santa bringing you anything good this year?” she asked, hefting up the bag into her arms.
Ethan glanced at the five-deep line of carts and people waiting behind Mrs. Cleaver, then to the far wall where his mom had hung a wreath around the large clock. The fake pine needles partially obscured the black hands of the clock, but he could still make out that the concert was starting in less than thirty minutes.
“No ma’am,” he answered.
Mrs. Cleaver cocked her head to the side questioningly, but Ethan reached for the plastic divider on the conveyor belt, slid it back onto the metal rail, and hefted his hundredth sweating, frozen turkey across the scanner.
I can feel Ethan’s self-pity seeping through the prose. But the important thing to note from a clarity perspective is that this solidly grounds me. Even though we’re starting with tight focus, from a plot perspective, this functions like an establishing wide shot in a movie. It orients us to the context in which everything is about to play out. It’s Christmas Eve. This is the “big day” for the story. And things are not going Ethan’s way.
Reminder of the stakes
Next, Tim reminds us of Ethan’s desire and the stakes by having Ethan stop and steal a glance at Meg’s invitation. The mechanics of this are a bit implausible since there are a bunch of customers waiting in line. (We’ll discuss believability later in this series.) But for now, we’ll just go with it. In terms of clarity, it achieves what it needs to.
Ethan bent down next to the register, unzipped the front pouch and retrieved Meg’s envelope. He ran his fingers over the letters and stared for the dozenth time in the last week at the Santa Claus holding the heart.
Zooming out
Finally, Tim pulls back to a longer, broader, more “tell-y” section. The first two units put flesh on things, so now Tim can go big-picture and he won’t lose us.
[Over the course of the day, Ethan had] rang up a never-ending stream of customers. Any hope of it calming down enough to convince his parents to let him slip away was gone. If anything, it had gotten busier the last hour between people stopping on their way home from their final shift or frantically realizing they had forgotten something when they started prepping for the next day’s dinner.
[. . .]
Now, as the clock ticked off the remaining minutes before he would stand Meg up at the church, he sighed and handed a receipt to the puffy coated man in front of him, then turned to the next batch of items.
This is exceptionally well-constructed. We’re clearly oriented to the scene. We know what’s happening and why it matters. We’re locked in as the conflict escalates.
Well done, Tim.
Use this in your stories
In your own storytelling, this kind of “opening shot” technique is something you can play around with.
- Orient your audience members at the start of a scene or sequence by giving them some concrete, in-perspective example of the stakes.
- Then, as events play out, your audience will already have that benchmark against which to evaluate everything that happens. The reference point makes the escalation clear.
. . . Oh, and what happened to me with the mirrors in the department store?
The conclusion to that little episode was rather anticlimactic. My parents were just on the other side of a clothing rack. They heard my distress and found me. I calmed down. All was well.
Although, I never again stepped up to one of those three-panel mirrors without first checking my context.
In the next note, we’ll start to unpack a couple of places where “No Doubt” gets confusing and look at some potential ways to make it more clear.
Onward!
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