Story Structure and Emotional Impact, by cofax

[cofax7]

I expect everyone in the Atlantis fandom has read auburnnothenna's Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion by now (Legion for short). If you haven't, I encourage you to do so: it's a tour de force of storytelling. Although I should warn you: it's not a happy story.

There are a lot of things to talk about in this story: plot, characterization, style, and so forth. I'm going to skip those and focus on the story structure: in particular, the order in which the plot unwinds, and what effect that has on the reader's experience of this particular story.



If you haven't read Legion recently, you may have forgotten that Auburn tells the story in the following order: 10 -- 1 -- 9 -- 2 -- 8 -- 3 -- 7 -- 4 -- 6 -- 5, where 10 is the scene with John and Rodney at Jeannie's barbecue and 5 is the final, climactic scene in the Atlantis gateroom. (I'm simplifying for purposes of discussion, as there are actually far more than 10 scenes in the story, but you get the idea.) It's a complex structure, both lines of narrative spiraling in from opposite directions to end at the moment which is, chronologically, in the center of the story.

Lots of people use flashbacks in narrative, and a lot of stories are told in interesting order, but I don't recall that I've ever seen a story structured in quite this way: one narrative line running forward and the other running backward, and both headed to the same place. (The closest parallel I can think of is Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow. I think the familiarity to The Sparrow is enlightening, but sadly, I don't have time to talk about it in the context of this post.) I've certainly never seen a piece of fanfiction pull off a structure like this quite so successfully.

There are two interwoven elements of storytelling here: suspense (or, the reveal of the actual plot) and the emotional tone, and how they work together. I'll talk about those, and then discuss how they operate to make the story a success.

The Structure of Suspense
If you look at the plot purely chronologically, it's a bit lopsided: all the action happens before John and Rodney return to Earth, and everything after that is just reaction. If Auburn had told this story chronologically, and included all the aftermath, the tension would have dissipated at the halfway mark, as soon as the reader knew John and Rodney survived. (Of course, at that point the reader might decide not to read any further, because they're too traumatized to continue!)

With this structure, after the first four scenes, the reader knows, if unconsciously, that the climax of the story is the dividing point between the Earth-present and the Atlantis-past. The explanation of what happened is not given until the very end, and the question of who survived and how is not answered until the end. This set up simultaneously manipulates the information available to the reader, and keeps them engaged despite their frustration.

Hiding what happened until the very end of the story is a technique that some might find manipulative, because we are in John's head in the Earth scenes, and yet we don't know what he knows. However it works so well here because the story is still moving forward, drawing the reader along, and promising a satisfying reveal, while simultaneously providing enough hints that the savvy reader can guess some of it before it's actual described. The alternating scenes, flipping back and forth between the disintegrating situation on Atlantis and the back-step to Cheyenne Mountain, keeps the reader engaged. The pacing moves smoothly from action to reaction and back again, giving the reader time to breathe and reinforcing that at least someone survived, before getting back into the thick of things in Atlantis.

From a purely technical standpoint, this is masterful storytelling.

The Emotional Narrative
The emotional throughline of the story, in comparison to the chronology, is very direct: the tone of the story starts ominous in the Earth scenes and suspenseful-but-hopeful in the Atlantis scenes, and heads unrelentingly downward to horror. In neither narrative line does the situation ever improve: it simply gets worse. The final scene in the Atlantis gateroom, where they forget the IDC and John is forced to shoot Teyla, in fact negates any hope or cheer found in the Earth-based scenes.

The images of John and Rodney driving down the Pacific coast in a Mustang, wind in their hair, are now retroactively colored with Teyla's blood; the soundtrack of that drive includes the thump of Beckett and Weir's bodies hitting the iris in Cheyenne Mountain. Despite the fact that the final point, chronologically, of the story is the barbecue in the LA sun, the fact is that there is no happy ending.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this story is kind of a downer.

Putting it Together
So, why did the story work?

It's likely that this outcome: the complete disaster of the Atlantis expedition, and the way in which everyone died, would not have made for a successful story unless it was structured in the way that this one was. The two things that I see making this story so successful are the structure, as described above, and the fact that the story is fanfiction.

Going in, the reader knows these characters, and cares about them. Without that investment, I suspect that the content of the story would turn them away. There isn't enough in the story to make me care about John, Rodney, Elizabeth, Teyla, and Zelenka in the story if that's my only experience of them. Most of them are just names. It's my understanding of who they are and what they mean , both independently and to each other, that makes the scenes in the city so powerful. This is not a flaw in the story, to my mind: it's an element inherent in fanfiction that allows the author to reach for emotional resonance that would otherwise take a lot more time and effort to achieve.

To expand on that point: the reader starts the story knowing John and Rodney survived. That is key to the reader's involvement -- the reader doesn't know what else happened, but they know John and Rodney survived. This is built-in reassurance from the author: See, things aren't so bad -- look at John and Rodney at a barbecue! Look at them squabble about sharing food! Sure, there are ominous undertones to the scene, but the reader starts the story from a place of comfort. (Particularly if the reader is a slash fan: her OTP is safe, yay!) They're alive and together. It's only as the story progresses that the reader slowly begins to realize that holy cow, John and Rodney are the only ones who survived! And by that point the reader is too sucked in by the plot to pull away.

Also, and possibly more importantly, because this is fanfiction, the reader can invest themselves fully in a story that is so incredibly harrowing and painful, and then go on. This is fanfiction, and therefore the reader knows that Elizabeth, Zelenka, and Teyla aren't dead. That Atlantis survives, that John and Rodney didn't go through all that, that O'Neill didn't witness the horror of those thumps against the iris.

The reader can close the story and find another one, a happy fluffy story about penguins or Aliens-Made-Us-Have-Sex. Whereas if this were original fiction, or the canon, and this were the outcome, it would require both more upfront work to engage the reader in the characters, but the bleak and horrifying outcome would be less emotionally fulfilling to the potential readership. It would, in fact, alienate the audience, or many of them. That's one of the freeing things about fanfiction.

But to bring it back around to the major point of this essay. I'm structure's bitch, and I'm enthralled by the way that Legion works on several levels to suck the reader into a story that she doesn't want to see happen. We don't want to see them forget the IDC, and starve to death in the chair room, and destroy the Daedalus. But the story is so well designed that we can't help staying with it until the very end, jaws hanging open, as the pieces fall into place and we see the inevitable disaster. In less skilled hands, this story might not have worked: it's too dark, too grim. It wouldn't have had a broad appeal, because the narrative would have been lopsided and the emotional content is so difficult to read. But structured this way, it works fabulously.


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Note: Yes, I told Auburn I was writing this essay. And yes, I've shared it with her. And no, she had no input into the content.

Comments

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing for me was that I did not read that first scene as happening on earth; I read it as happening on Atlantis, with a confusion of reality/fantasy, and that there was no guarentee that the two would survive. I didn't think that Jeannie and the picnic was real when I first read through the story, so that made it a different experience for me.