Meta: narrative structure and raising the stakes in the Guardian drama

[china_shop]

I've been listening to a lot of writing and narrative meta lately (mostly Writing Excuses podcast), and one of the things they discussed is what the middles of stories can do in terms of narratives. (Note: they generally focus on plotty stories.) So this is kind of a hybrid of their theory and what I came up with.

Among many other things, middles can:

• raise the stakes and make the stakes ever more personal, to show why it's the protagonist who has to be the one to take action


• have other, less costly strategies fail, to show why the protagonist has to take their final (costly) decisive action


• show why the protagonist is reluctant to take that action, ie, the reasons they don't just go out and resolve the problem straight away.

It's all about building tension so the climax feels climactic and earned.

All roads lead to the Guardian drama, for me, and thinking about Guardian through the lens above made my brain light up. The show does all three of those things so well, using those strategies to ratchet up tension in a way I find super satisfying. And since one of the exercises they talk about in the podcast is looking at existing works and reverse-engineering outlines, I thought I'd analyse Shen Wei's choices leading up to and during the finale, in those terms, for A and B.

( Rambling, and a tragic absence of screencaps )