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An interesting question I haven’t looked at in great detail yet is the curve of the horror story.

My guess is that many of them still vary the up and down beats as the tension arising from the threat facing the protagonists is built up and then released. Alien certainly works this way, giving Ripley a series of small victories as the creature chews through the rest of the crew and finally comes to her.

The underrated recent horror flick The Ruins plays it another way. Once the first world hubris of its pretty young protagonists leads to their entrapment in a site of ancient menace, they never catch a break. There are momentary respites, but no victories. If you were to map out its beat structure, you’d see downward arrows mixed with lateral ones. I admired its commitment to the slow, grinding destruction of its main cast, but wonder if the refusal to provide contrasting upbeats has withheld from it the popularity it deserves.

Not having mapped The Ruins I reckon that any given section of it, once the characters get to the pyramid, looks something like this:

A false beard always looks more real on screen than a true one, just as a film set made of wood and cardboard is always more ‘authentic’ than a natural one.
—painter and novelist Giorgio De Chirico, Hebdomeros

Narratives exert a hold on us by exciting our hopes and fears. They accomplish their effects by arranging its moments, or beats, in a series of setups and resolutions. By becoming aware of these patterns in other narratives, we can sharpen the impact of the group-made, spontaneous storylines that arise in our roleplaying sessions.

The two most essential story elements, as seen in our Hamlet breakdown, are suspense and dramatic beats. Both of them engage our emotions by inviting us to fear bad outcomes for the characters we identify with, and to feel a vicarious sense of victory when they achieve good results. Suspense beats revolve around physical jeopardy and the pursuit of external goals. Dramatic beats place our heroes in emotional conflict; their goals are internal. Genre narratives tend to be procedural, built largely or exclusively on suspense beats. Character dramas rely, eponymously enough, on dramatic beats.

Both types of narratives are supported by informational beats. These set up the beats that evoke our hopes and fears, by providing us with the context to care about the central characters’ goals and understand how they’re pursuing them.

Just as the two primary beat types appear in a narrative rhythm of up and down moments, of victories and defeats, the three informational beats create their own patterns of conceals, teases, and reveals.

A question beat introduces a mystery we want to see solved. House’s patient of the week displays an inexplicable new symptom. The Batman wonders where the Joker is hiding. Miss Marple notices that the young heiress appears to be hiding something. As information-seeking creatures, unanswered questions make us uneasy. This frustration serves as an emotional down beat.

A reveal provides information, orienting us and reducing our sense of confusion. Thirteen discovers that the patient was living in a dry cleaning plant. Batman finds distinctive soil samples at the site of the Joker’s latest murder spree. Miss Marple finds a letter hinting at a blackmail plot.

Reveals often register as up beats, but if the news they bring is bad for our sympathetic characters, our satisfaction at knowing may be tempered or overwhelmed by our concern for them.

Reveals are most satisfying when they answer questions we’ve already been prompted to pose. Think of this as a set-up / punchline structure; another example is the greater elation we feel during a suspense or dramatic up beat if it was preceded by a previous defeat.

When not preceded by a previous question, reveals can feel like tedious exposition. Dollops of information we know will be important later, but which we haven’t been emotionally keyed into, quickly tax our attention. These bare reveals can be made more engaging by folding them into dramatic scenes.

The third information beat is the pipe beat. The term comes from a screenwriting metaphor, which compares the act of concealing information which becomes important later to installing plumbing beneath the floorboards of a house. It surreptitiously plants information which at the time seems tangential, or to relate to some other point. Later its true relevance will be surprisingly revealed.

Next week: information beats and roleplaying.

I’m teaming up with the fine folks at Gameplaywright to produce Hamlet’s Hit Points, a book of practical story analysis aimed at gamers. Timed for a Gen Con release, the book crystallizes the beat analysis system developed during my Hamlet series last year. It presents a version of the Hamlet story map, revised to reflect the insights gained while putting it together over the course of late ‘08 and most of ‘09. It further expands the analysis to two more classic narratives — Casablanca, and the film version of Dr. No. These serve to bracket Hamlet, which mixes of procedural and dramatic plotting. Casablanca is a drama that nods toward the procedural in a sub-plot, while Dr. No is as pure a procedural as you’re likely to get.

(As you may recall from the Hamlet series, procedural plots follow the protagonist in search of external, practical goals, while drama concerns itself with the pursuit of inner, emotional goals.)

I figured out the real point of the Hamlet analysis only by doing it. At first I thought I was interested in the possible turning points faced by the protagonist(s) and to what extent they either generated suspense or were quickly resolved, without extended opposition. As I went through it, I found out what I was actually doing: looking at the basic building blocks of narrative, to see the internal rhythms of engaging storytelling at work.

I used to think that we all as gamers had an intuitive sense of story rhythm, gained simply from consuming metric oodles of narrative entertainment. Over my years in game design I’ve come to revise that view. The object of the book is to help its readers to break down narratives on their own, to see the moving parts at work and see why they were put together that way. This in turn helps us to internalize a sense of narrative rhythm and use it when making story decisions in-game, whether as a GM or player.