What is Emotional Superstructure?
I may have finally hit on the perfect description for what we're doing here
One of my biggest struggles during these first few weeks of Lit in One Sentence has been finding the perfect vocabulary or metaphor to make it clear how our “one sentence” craft tool goes way beyond a simple description of story to reveal something fundamental and fascinating about any story’s emotional architecture.
But I seem to have finally found a description that makes sense to me and several other writer and editor friends I checked with: emotional superstructure.
Every story will have an emotional superstructure, whether or not the storyteller meant to put it there or ever thought about it this way.
What is Emotional Superstructure?
The superstructure is a property of the patterns our brains recognize as story. As soon as we know:
whose head we’re in (whose emotions our mirror neuron system is mirroring),
what they are doing, and
why it matters to them,
… we can start simulating how every single event in the story will make them feel, feeling a version of it in our own bodies as though it is all happening to us.
And that’s it, we’re lost in a story, immersed in someone else’s (real or fictional) experience while these three things continue to be developed and resolved.
It’s such an automatic, species-defining thing we humans do, one we start to engage with as small children as soon as we have language.
We don’t necessarily need to know what’s going on inside our heads to tell or read or listen to a story, any more than we need to know how our dishwashers work in order to use them.
And yet …
A defining feature of a story’s one sentence superstructure — that answers the three questions above — is that it’s hard to find any piece of the story that isn’t developing something mentioned in it. You can select any chapter, subplot, character, bit of dialogue, and so on — really any aspect of the story, large or small — and see how it points back to “true north” by connecting to one or more elements of the emotional superstructure sentence.
That Sounds Cool, Why Have I Never Heard of This Before?
I don’t know!!!
But I, too, have never heard anyone else talking about story structure in exactly this way. It also seems new to friends who’ve been in the writing world as authors, editors, teachers, and so on for a long time, whom I’ve asked.
If you’ve ever heard anyone talking about story structure in a similar way, please tell me! I would love to check them out!
Originally, I learned about the idea of capturing what makes a story unique, exciting, and different from every similar-sounding tale on the market in the context of loglines, one sentence pitching tools used in the movie and television industry.
Book-to-screen adaptation agent Lane Shefter Bishop — whose 2016 book Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence: Advice from the Front Lines of Hollywood I highly recommend — encourages writers to craft a logline early in their process, to help them make decisions as they write and make sure the whole story stays on track.
Through lots of trial and error — pitching to Hollywood executives with short attention spans who, in that era, got bored the moment they learned a property was based on a book — she hit on the character + journey + stakes formula as the most effective way to craft these.
Experimental evidence that this is a powerful way to land any story’s biggest emotional promise on any human being.
I’m taking this idea much farther to say that, whether or not a storyteller ever crafts a logline for their story, at any stage of the process, every story will have an emotional superstructure aligning its main character, journey, and stakes, because that is the pattern that our brains recognize and react to as “story.”
And pulling this into a single sentence for an entire work can be incredibly revealing about the emotional “whole” that every smaller piece of a story is adding up to, something the author themselves may or may not have been consciously aware of as they were writing! (But that will probably reveal a lot about their writerly obsessions.)
Learning to Find and Use Any Story’s Emotional Superstructure
If you’re interested in stories and storytelling in any way, learning how to do this for your own work — at whatever stage you decide to use it — will hopefully help to deepen your practice in surprising new ways.
I can think of SO MANY uses for these small but mighty sentences, across the process of writing and publishing a book (or any sort of story), but that is a whole other post.
Next week, I’ll take you through the basic steps I use to find and pull any story’s emotional superstructure into a single sentence of 30 words or less.
So, start thinking of emotionally engaging stories you’ve encountered recently and get ready to practice!
I’m considering making this a regular feature in the comments — maybe monthly? — so that we can all exercise our superstructure-finding skills together while sharing our best current story recommendations (including stories we’re working on ourselves) with each other.
Soon after, I’ll start doing conversations with published authors about what their own story’s emotional superstructures reveal about their work and themselves.
In the meantime, if you’re new here, have a look around at some examples of different stories, their one sentence emotional superstructures, and craft lessons we can learn by unpacking these, to get feel for what this all looks like in action. So far we’ve done American Fiction (movie, 2023), Yellowface (novel, 2023), the Medea (play, 431 BCE), and Little Red Riding Hood (fairy tale, 1812). And we’ll continue to do a lot more of these, for a wide range of stories across all genres, formats, time periods, etc.
Questions for You
First, what visual pops to mind when you hear the word “superstructure”?
I ask because the Lit in One Sentence “logo” — at the time of this post, a navy blue square with “Lit.” written inside — is currently a placeholder I’ve always meant to update!
But while the word “superstructure” connects cleanly enough to ideas of story structure that writers are familiar with already, while also capturing how everything else in the story will be developing some piece of this emotional “true north” — it’s really hard to visualize, at least for me! So if anything came to mind for you, please do share.
Otherwise, since I brought it up earlier: what’s everyone here reading and watching these days?
Next week, we can practice finding their — you’re definitely not tired of this word yet! — superstructures, but this week, let’s just hear what’s snagged your attention lately of all the stories floating out there.
As always, your comments will only be visible to other paying subscribers of Lit in One Sentence, not the rest of the internet.