Last week, we established that the “emotional superstructure” of any story answers the questions of:
whose head we’ll be in,
what they are doing, and
why it matters to them
Once we find these three elements and pull them into the most unique, dramatic, and powerful one sentence alignment we can, we have that story’s emotional “true north.” We can pick out any smaller element of the story and see how it’s developing some aspect(s) of the superstructure sentence. We have a “whole” that enables us to see how all the parts are adding up.
If you’re new here, you can see this in action for American Fiction (movie, 2023), Yellowface (novel, 2023), the Medea (play, 431 BCE), and Little Red Riding Hood (fairy tale, 1812).
In this post, I’ll walk you through my process for finding any story’s emotional “true north” and crafting these superstructure sentences. My rule for them is 30 words or fewer.
Try it on any story you engage with — as a reader, a viewer, a writer, a teacher, a workshopper, an editor, anything — and you’ll gain an unprecedented level of insight into that story’s emotional architecture and what it’s really about.
The answers might surprise you, even for stories you thought you knew well!
While it can take a lot of work to perfect a superstructure sentence, finding even “rough draft” answers to these questions can reveal a lot. That’s what I will invite you to do in the comments of this post, for any story you’ve recently engaged with.
1. Whose Head are We In?
This whole approach works because, when we read about a person in a story doing something, our brains experience the same activity patterns as if we were doing that thing ourselves in real life.
That’s why we always approach a story looking for a primary consciousness to inhabit, a main character whose emotions we will mirror via our mirror neuron system.
Often, the storyteller gives us little choice and makes it clear who the main character is. They will appear pretty quickly on the page and their emotions will be the most fully realized throughout.
Even if we spend time in the heads of other characters later on, once the storyteller has grounded us in the protagonist’s head, we’ll continue measuring the impact of other characters’ actions on them, as we saw with the time we spent in the wolf’s and huntsman’s heads in Little Red Riding Hood.
If you have an ensemble cast, or a situation where the character who’s narrating might not be the character whose emotions and actions really drive most of the story, ask yourself who has the most dramatic emotional experience, the most at stake? Who is going through the most intense thing? It is in mirroring that character that readers will have the most powerful emotional experience the story can offer, so base the emotional superstructure sentence on that character.
In a Game of Thrones type situation or a reality TV show like Love on the Spectrum, which I mentioned last week, where we really are spending equitable time mirroring many people on similarly intense journeys, we could write a separate sentence for each and/or one that captures any overarching and relevant aspects of everyone’s identities, journeys, and goals.
With only 30 words maximum of real estate available in a superstructure sentence, how do we then describe this person whose head we’re in?
There will be many aspects to their identity, and it may help to start with a brain dump just listing them all out. I am fond of using Scapple mind mapping software for this, brought to you by the same people who make the Scrivener software I know is popular with many writers (including myself).
Not every aspect of their identity will be explored equally in the story, so hone in on the most important things about them relative to this journey. Which aspects of their identity cause the most drama in this story?
Also, what are the most unique things about them, the things that set them apart from everyone else? In the story world, and maybe even compared to everyone else in the real world. It might be a unique situation they’ve found themselves in, or a unique desire.
Once you have a few “rough draft” phrases and ideas for this, it’s time to move on to …
2. What are They Doing?
What is the overall flavor of this character’s journey, from the beginning to the end of the story?
This can be tricky to capture in a short phrase — remember, the whole superstructure sentence should be 30 words at most, and generally the shorter the better — so here are a few things I usually look for.
What do they want? Is there one main desire that motivates most of the actions they take in the story? You could say that what they’re doing is trying to achieve that.
If it’s not obvious what they want, think about the highest highs and lowest lows the character experiences throughout the story. The highs are likely to come from when they’re getting what they want most, the lows from when they experience the biggest blows to their deepest desires. If you can identify the common desire that runs through the highs and lows, that’s an important part of the story’s emotional superstructure and should somehow be captured in the sentence.
Also ask yourself, what is the most important thing this character does? Any character will, of course, be doing lots of things over the course of the story. Little Red Riding Hood is taking cake and wine to her grandmother, but that doesn’t earn a spot in the superstructure sentence — A girl eager to please the grandmother whose red cap gift she always wears must defeat the wolf she lets deceive and devour them both — because that’s not the biggest, highest stakes thing she’s doing. The most important thing she’s doing is defeating the wolf, so the superstructure sentence focuses on that. The cake and wine are part of this journey, and covered by Red’s overall eagerness to please grandmother.
Finally, what is the biggest choice the character will have to make? Many stories are structured around a “moment of truth” — a major choice the character will face that all the smaller choices they’ve made along the way have helped prepare them for. Whatever they choose will come at a cost, and also have some benefits, and by the time we reach this moment near the end of the story, the character will fully understand what these are because of everything that happened before.
If your story features a choice like this, capture it in the superstructure sentence. A good example is American Fiction, whose superstructure is: A literary author must decide whether to perform the crude Black stereotypes that will make him an acclaimed bestseller and finance his mother’s dementia care. He can choose not to perform the stereotypes, but then his mom won’t get the best dementia care. The whole story is exploring everything that goes into that choice and how the main character makes it in many ways large and small.
This is a good moment to mention that every superstructure sentence I’ve ever written includes the word “must” because it’s such a strong connector between the character and their journey. Whether internally or externally compelled, what is the biggest and most important thing this character must do in this story?
3. Why Does it Matter to Them?
Ultimately, what’s at stake in this story?
What happens if they fail at their quest? For me, it helps to picture the character in different multiverses. Can you visualize the multiverse in which they succeed and the multiverse in which they fail? What, in really concrete terms, is the difference between the two?
We all want many of the same things in life — to not die, to be loved, etc — so if your stakes feel too generic, push as hard as you can on what gives them a unique flavor for this character, in this story.
If your character’s journey is about making a big choice, the superstructure sentence should make it clear what they stand to gain or lose either way.
4. What is the Most Powerful Alignment of These Elements?
The rest of the process is starting to write different versions of the sentence, playing with various phrasings, shuffling things around to try and emphasize the most uniqueness and drama this story has to offer.
One thing I keep an eye out for is causality. Do the character, journey, and stakes feel powerfully connected enough?
For example, one of my rough draft sentences for Little Red Riding Hood was: A girl eager to please the grandmother whose red cap gift she always wears must defeat the wolf who deceives and devours them both.
This is almost fine, very close to the version I ended up with. But it also felt a little flat, a little random. It could apply to a variation in which the wolf shows up to deceive and devour grandmother, then moves on to Little Red and she defeats him just so she and grandmother can live.
There’s a stronger, more emotionally powerful causal link between Little Red and the biggest thing she needs to do here. It’s her fault that the wolf has any chance to deceive and devour grandmother. She gives him all the information he needs and takes off to pick flowers, giving him all the time he needs too. Grandmother is the person who loves her most in the world, whom she’s most eager to please (powerful stakes) and instead she does this and it’s on her to set it right in the end.
The superstructure sentence should capture this, the most powerful alignment of the story’s main character, journey, and stakes. It should push the causal connections between them to — as we say in yoga — their fullest expression.
This part is more art than science, but you should feel it when everything about a story’s emotional superstructure clicks into place.
How Do I Know When I’m Done?
Not every “one sentence” description of a story will work as an emotional superstructure sentence. Not every star in the night sky is the pole star, not every direction “true north.”
The coolest property of a working superstructure sentence is that you’d be hard pressed to find anything in the story that isn’t developing some piece of it. Every chapter, every subplot, pretty much down to the sentence level. One you find the “umbrella” character, journey, and stakes, everything else falls under it. Everything else is developing this most powerful sense of whose head we’re in, what they’re doing, and why it matters to them. And all three things are being constantly pushed along in every smaller “unit of story.”
You can imagine “scanning” the text with your superstructure sentence. If there are big sections of the story that don’t have any obvious connection back to your sentence, you might want to revisit these and ask what’s going on with character, journey, and stakes here. Then rework your sentence to cover these parts too. When you’re done, everything should point back to “true north.”
Because emotional superstructure tracks how our brains and bodies produce feelings out of stories — once we know whose head we’re in, what they’re doing, and why it matters to them, we can start simulating how every other event in the story will make them feel — a working one usually gives me a “pop” of the strongest emotion the story itself gave me.
Which I think is truly one of the wildest and most fascinating things about it!!!
It’s like a finely wrought miniature of the story. It has the same emotional vibes. You don’t just know the ingredients going in, you can taste how the final recipe has come out once it’s been cooked.
Ready to Practice?
What’s an emotionally engaging story you’ve encountered in the past month or so?
This could be something you read or watched, something you’re working on (if you’re ready to share), even something a friend told you across the dinner table.
What is this story’s superstructure? Whose head are we in, what are they doing, why does it matter to them?
Getting these into a polished sentence is finicky work, but just roughing out descriptions of these basic ingredients can still be a really illuminating first step in understanding a story’s superstructure! So, tell us what it is for your latest stories.
My answer to this question is below.
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