You’ve seen these words many times thus far in this book: the Six Core Competencies. They refer to what I like to think of as a tool chest—facets of knowledge and skill, separate but interdependent within the whole of the storytelling process—comprised of four story development elements and two execution skills. Each has a subordinated list of criteria and alternative forms and benchmarks for determining how well they will work within a story. Together they are the antithesis of make-it-up-as-you-go-and just-throw-it-into-the-wind-and-see-what-happens storytelling.
The four elements of the Six Core Competencies are actually aspects and qualities that are essential for a story’s effectiveness. If you skip one or if one is weak, you may have just rendered your story unpublishable. These elements are:
The remaining two of the Six Core Competencies are specific tasks and skills of execution, the actions through which you implement the previous four elements:
Some writers are surprised to find they need to do only two things—versus six things they need to know—in order to write a book: Write scenes, and create them using sentences. Everything you do while looking at a screen with your fingers on a keyboard falls under the category of one of those two things.
An anesthesiologist has to do only one thing well: Put the patient under without killing him. But she has to know about five hundred things to do it successfully. It is the same with a writer: There are four arenas you need to know about … and only two skill sets you need to master in context to that knowledge.
Oversimplification? Hardly. Within those six buckets are literally hundreds of things you need to be aware of and be able to implement. Organizing them, however, allows you to inventory your knowledge, rather than just spilling words onto a page randomly, instinctively, imitatively, or from some misguided belief system.
Let me be clear here—the Six Core Competencies are not the same elements as the six essences of story physics, which are the focus of this book. To think they are the same is like thinking an airplane is the same thing as gravity or that surfing is the same thing as the ocean tides. Or that a stick of dynamite is the same thing as an explosion.
The Six Core Competencies are made up of tools or activities that require tools, while story physics are essences, forces, catalysts for an outcome. They are the objects of the tools. Story physics make the tools useful, and make them work in the first place.
The fact that both models are measured and described with six separate component realms is coincidental, though potentially confusing. They refer to completely different things. Yet—like airplanes and gravity—they are connected at the hip, in that the six basic essences of story physics—compelling premise, dramatic tension, pacing, hero empathy, vicarious experience, and narrative strategy—are the underlying forces that make the Six Core Competencies necessary and effective. The more powerful the forces, the better the tools work.
Viewed in context to the whole of the story development and execution process, when the integration of the Six Core Competencies and story physics is understood, they become a complete—and completely empowering—survey of what a writer needs to understand and execute within a story. The writer now has six things she needs to put into a story … and six reasons (forces) why she should. Story physics are six variables you can manipulate by applying the Six Core Competencies. Even if someone uses different terminology to describe them—which is the case more often than not—all twelve will be present in an effectively told story.
This is what’s known in the academic world as a model. It’s a window into clarity. If you’re looking to truly understand what needs to be done—what ground you need to cover—to write an effective story, then both of these six-part models will serve you. Otherwise, you better hope that what spills out of your head when you sit down and write will cover all those bases naturally.
This “phenomenon” occurs all the time in the real world, even for best-selling authors who, in their interviews, seduce the uninitiated into believing that writing without utilizing the tools and forces of storytelling is a tried and true practice that will work for everyone. Good luck with that. For every writer who succeeds by simply stumbling upon proper balance and structure, or through instinct or a learning curve (the pain of many failures), there are crowds of writers who were rejected because of flaws that feed on this very approach.
It’s theoretically possible to successfully complete an appendectomy or an amputation without really knowing what you’re doing, and we hear about it when it happens. But the odds are better that in such situations somebody’s going to die instead. Medical school is a better avenue to take to doing appendectomies and such, because the procedures are exceedingly complex. The same is the case for writing an effective novel or screenplay. The Six Core Competencies and story physics models are the medical school of storytelling.
The objective of this chapter is to introduce the Six Core Competencies to you—perhaps again, if you’ve read Story Engineering and/or my website—independent of the context within which they have been referred to in this book. It’s sort of like studying the nature and chemistry of spices before discussing them in context to cooking a killer meal. Or, switching analogies here, it’s good to know the building blocks, the ingredients—units of weight-bearing structure and force-applying aesthetic potential—before we set out to erect a building.
The core competencies were the subject of my first writing book, Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing (2011, Writer’s Digest Books). They represent a vast collection of the things writers need to know, boiled down into six categories, or buckets of information. Six wasn’t the target, but it just turned out that way after studying this stuff for more than thirty years. I concluded that just about anything out there in the writing void can be placed inside one of these buckets, and each bucket is unique enough to warrant its own category.
A concept is not a theme. A concept is not structure. Structure is not conceptual, until the writer makes it so. Character is not theme until it marries concept. A scene is separate from and subordinated to the macroconcept. Words are just drops of water in a large lake of story. Each of these is worthy and necessary, but each is separate and requires integration with the others.
It’s like the skills required of a quarterback: throwing strength, footwork in the pocket, field vision, speed, ability to take a hit … each is a separate talent. They are all requisite core competencies.
And yet, all of these—speed, toughness, field vision—can be possessed by an eighth grader. A player can be positioned at quarterback at any level: grade school, high school, small college, D-1, and professional. The difference between good and great at any level is the underlying physics of each of those core competencies. Strength, speed, sensibility, decision-making, creativity, courage, and something indefinably special … these are the football physics that define the future of the player.
So it is with our stories. We must master the core competencies to play at the professional level, and the better our understanding of the story physics that make each of those core competencies work, the sooner we’ll see our books in the window of a bookstore.
In order to achieve effective story development, all the Six Core Competencies need to be effectively rendered within a story. This means an author is best served by understanding each of them as both stand-alone elements and skills, as well as pieces of an integrated whole.
We do this by understanding and applying the strongest forces of story physics to our stories, in just the right places, in just the right way, with just the right touch. All of which splats a cream pie into the face of anyone who claims that either of these models results in formulaic storytelling. The number of potential outcomes that result from infinite degrees of application within each element of the models is … infinite.
You need to nail all six competencies to get into the publishing game and deliver a story that readers will feel and remember. And even then, success isn’t guaranteed, because agents, editors, and readers decide the definition of “nail.” We are left to simply do the best we can, and our efforts are always empowered through awareness and knowledge.
Not every skilled athlete makes it in his sport. In that world, being gifted has a lot to do with it. While many major league athletes do everything well, most do one or two things very well, better than their almost-made-it peers. Ask your club golf or tennis pro about this … on paper he has the same level of excellence as the touring pros relative to form, consistency, and power. And yet, he’s giving lessons for forty bucks an hour instead of being interviewed by John McEnroe. The reason behind this corresponds to getting published: You need something special, something extraordinary (as well as a bit of good fortune), to break in and have a book rise to the level of a bestseller. And, lucky for us, it doesn’t require a genetic gift. It does require, however, the application of literary physics in a way similar to an athlete’s genetic gifts of power and speed. We can get there if we obtain knowledge and awareness, and evolve a nuanced touch and sensibility.
Notice that all the core competencies are dependent on one or more of the essences of story physics and that they can all be rendered as a matter of degree. In The Hunger Games, for example, the competition concocted by the Capitol city could have been a bake-off. But that’s not nearly as gripping (compelling premise, dramatic tension, hero empathy, vicarious experience) as the death match we see in the novels. Not by a long shot. We get to choose our level of story physics through the application of the core competencies. And Suzanne Collins chose well (see Chapter 24 for an analysis of the story physics in her novel).
Memorize this if you really want to master it: The core competencies are the what, the underlying story physics that make them work are the why, and the writer’s skill at execution and integration is the how. In an effective story, there is always a dance, or give and take, between the core competencies and the underlying story physics.
Maybe you’re like a lot of writers out there, still searching for the how or for a better grip on the what and the why. Maybe you feel that too much of the teaching related to telling stories comes off like a big white cloud, a body of thought that morphs and moves and separates and then gathers itself again, constantly defying any sort of box a well-intended teacher might want to stuff it into. You’ll hear sage advice, and all of it will be true and valid: You have to make the reader root for your hero … you must include emotional stakes and resonance … you need to have a theme and subtext … the denouement needs to be contextually aligned with the narrative exposition … the character arc needs to spark a sense of empathy … and so on.
Say what? All of these cloudy concepts are usually missing both a how and a why component. Story physics, on the other hand, is the how and the why. It is the match you put to your fuse. It is the fuel you pour onto the pile you intend to ignite. When you focus too much on the pile, without regard to the fuel, you’ll end up with a pile of dry wood.
But how the hell do you go about doing any of it? It’s like telling an artist how to paint without talking about the brush. Where do you start, and what do you start with? And after you do finally start, what comes next? How do you know what to write? In what order do you write it in? How do you even approach conjuring those esoteric literary clouds?
The Six Core Competencies model endeavors to answer these questions, and in doing so provides a set of standards and criteria for achieving the aforementioned vaporous aesthetics.
It does this through criteria-driven, content-specific modeling of a successful story. Yes, regardless of form or content, all successful stories—novels and screenplays—share certain elements, internal dynamics, and standards. It’s not a formula, per se, but an accepted structure.
I’ll say it again: Omit any of the Six Core Competencies, and your story will suffer for it. Take a swing at one and miss (through mediocre ideas or poor execution) and your manuscript will reek of “newbieism.” Most writers begin their journeys with a sense of these issues of craftsmanship, but lack a box to put them in, or, if you prefer, a fence to put around them. They just set off down the storytelling trail and wing it, armed only with the motivation that comes with believing they can write a story every bit as good as the one they just finished reading, or (if it’s a movie) watching.
You’ve heard a lot of people in your life say, “I’d like to write a novel someday.” Or a screenplay, perhaps. Or some variation thereof. And if you’re already a writer yourself (definition of a writer: someone who actually writes) you may have thought at the time, Good luck with that, it’s a lot harder than it looks. And while I willingly say that I created the Six Core Competencies model to make the utterly complex clearer and more accessible, please don’t think that I’m saying it’s remotely easy. No, my view is quite the opposite. The bar is higher than you know. But once you get inside the Six Core Competencies model, you’ll see that it carves a road map through the creative jungle toward writing a publishable manuscript, a process that’s about as clear and left-brained as a highly right-brained endeavor can be. And it’s a journey rendered safer and more efficient—and more fun—through an understanding of the story physics that make it all work.
Never forget that solid writing, like any professional skill or craft, looks easy when in the hands of a true pro. Much like software code lurking behind the most simple and beautiful web page, successful writers have an entire infrastructure in place, invisible to the untrained eye, that empowers the program to run.
The core competencies first appear in Chapter 8, after many references and contextual nods. Here they are, listed and defined for you:
Story structure is the Big Enchilada of the Six Core Competencies. Most writers bring some semblance of learning curve and intuitive sense to the other five, but structure is both terrifying and liberating. It becomes a guideline, a contextual road map, that shows you what to write (contextually, in terms of the missions of the scenes) and where to put it.
For many, mastering structure seems, well, impossible. But here’s the career-changing epiphany that challenges you to either do this properly, from this model, or remain a vagabond wandering across the vast landscape of story possibilities: Structure is everywhere. When you realize this, you’ll see it in virtually every book you’ve ever read and movie you’ve even seen. (This includes, with a stretch, the classics. But I submit to you that you’re not writing a classic but a book that seeks an audience in this day and age, which, like it or not, responds to this set of principles, not the ones that Shakespeare and Cervantes and even St. Paul had to deal with.) Not because it’s a rule—rules suck—but because, like gravity, it’s the paradigm within which the underlying story physics work best.
Like an airplane wing, there are many designs. But they all, despite their size, have basically the same shape, because of the physics involved.
Same with our stories.
Go to www.writersdigest.com/story-structure-graphic to see the basics of story structure in graphic form. Stare at it for … the rest of your career. This is it, the Holy Grail of injecting powerful story physics into your story. Even if an agent or editor doesn't subscribe to this, they're likely to reject a story that doesn't align with it.
Compromised story physics will be the reason they reject you. And structure will likely be the culprit.
Depart from these proportions and target beats at your own peril, but it’ll be like skydiving with a bedroom sheet if you do.
And if you doubt it, I encourage you to test it.
Deconstruct any book or movie against this model. You’ll experience a curtain parting … the long-lost truth that nobody has told you in all those workshops … at least not in as simplified a form. They actually have told you, but without a complete contextual Big Picture grasp of it, those truths float free, unconnected to a bigger whole.
What follows is perhaps the most empowering part of this book. It’s where you’ll see the power of story physics at work in two recent bestsellers: The Help and The Hunger Games.
These chapters present a significant opportunity for learning, as points of story architecture and story physics are reviewed both generically and in context to these stories. The more angles we take as we look at these things, the clearer your understanding will be.
If you haven’t read the books, I encourage you to do so. Or, if you want to get up to speed quickly, as a review in preparation for these deconstructions, I recommend you watch the DVDs, as they’ll suffice for purposes of this analysis (and I do point out where and how the films differ from the books). In fact, you may want to actually see the DVDs again after reading this … because once you see story architecture and story physics at work, you can’t un-see them. You’ll find yourself analyzing every book and movie you enjoy from now on, just like any professional who is also a consumer in her field.