On May 28, 2019, I went nervously into my studio, got on a call with my writing and editing mentor Shawn Coyne, hit record, and began the first episode of the Masterwork Experiment. It’s been two months since the experiment ended, and there’s still no completed draft.
What’s going on?
A brief history
Shawn designed the Masterwork Experiment to discover whether an experienced fiction writer (me) could use a new technique of his (analyzing the beat structure of a masterwork), to create an original piece of fiction with a different setting and style.
The masterwork was Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. My setting was to be Regency England, the area of my expertise.
Shawn and I examined Proulx’s tragic 11,500-word love story for “beats,” which Shawn defines as units of change. For example, protagonist Ennis del Mar wakes up remembering a dream, then he gets out of bed and starts his day. Whether that’s two units of change (from asleep to awake, and from in bed to out of bed), or just one (starts a new day) depends on how closely you’re reading and how you experience the story.
Operating at the most analytical level, I saw it as two beats. I continued to identify more, smaller beats than Shawn did throughout the text. But he signed off on my final list of 83 micro-beats, and that’s the story structure I agreed to work with.
On August 8, 2019, we recorded the last of the ten episode arc. Shawn read sections of my Brokeback-Mountain inspired draft for the world to hear, approved the direction I was taking, and called the Masterwork Experiment a success.
The big brass ring for me is publication: if my finished draft meets all the conditions of the experiment, Shawn’s Story Grid Editions imprint will publish my story as a standalone short novella in December, 2020.
Well, the long silence on this project should tell you something. It’s mid-October as I write this, and that partial draft is no further along today than it was at the end of the podcast.
Early hurdles
When Shawn proposed the project to me, I thought of two minor upper-class characters from my novel Restraint (Martin and Albert, if you’re curious), whose story of forbidden love would be fun to explore.
Shawn shot that down: the two lovers in Brokeback Mountain are poor working-class men. Therefore I, too, had to write about two people living on the socioeconomic fringe. I began to imagine two servant-class characters, Matthew and Josiah.
Somehow, Shawn said, I would have to get these two servants out into the wilderness, because that’s how Ennis and Jack in Brokeback Mountain gain the freedom to fall in love.
I spent a week struggling to find a historically accurate way to get two early 19th century English servants alone together in the great outdoors. Wilderness per se is in short supply in England, but I came up with a barely-plausible cross-country journey.
Getting stuck
As the Masterwork Experiment progressed in weekly one-hour conversations with Shawn, the constraints seemed to get tighter and tighter. Not only was I responsible for writing a “Waking up” beat and a “starting his day” beat, and so on for 83 beats, but I began to feel that I was expected to replicate the meaning of the story itself.
Here’s the problem. Shawn seemed to read Brokeback Mountain as an eye-opener, a prejudice-buster for people of his father’s generation who needed persuading that gay people are…well, people. That’s not a meaning that I find in the masterwork—especially not in 2019—and it’s not one I’m interested in writing about.
In the name of not “burying my gays,” I argued publicly in the first couple of episodes for keeping both lovers alive. But Shawn was adamant: one character dies in a hate crime in the masterwork, and I have to kill one of my characters, too.
I ended up agreeing to that but I didn’t like it. (Narrator: She still doesn’t.)
So, as soon as the stint of recording and posting episodes was over, I got stuck.
It’s taken me two months, advice from several friends and some new acquaintances (hello Jeff and Will of The Big Gay Fiction Podcast), and a couple of life changes big enough to rob the Masterwork Experiment of its primacy in my thoughts, but I am finally realizing my big mistake:
I read the rules wrong
The story beats I identified in Brokeback Mountain include “Making a shrine to the dead lover” but don’t specify how or why the lover died. They include “Weather alters plans and ends the job” but don’t specify “snowstorm” or “out in the wilderness.” They include “A getting to know you conversation” but don’t specify where the conversation takes place.
I got way too deep in the weeds of the masterwork. I was trying to replicate details that I didn’t have to replicate.
Shawn also talked so much about the two lovers’ character traits that I thought I had to give my two lovers the same traits. What would be the point of that? That story’s already been written—by a far more accomplished prose stylist than I’ll ever be.
What’s more, that semi-plausible cross-country journey I dummied up challenged historical accuracy to the point that the research was driving me nuts.
I painted myself into a corner trying to meet all those levels of constraint and expectation. I started to hate my story. My stall has lasted for more than two months.
What am I going to do?
Break the rules.
My job, at its plainest, was to understand a masterwork at the beat level, and replicate those beats in a different setting. The purpose of the experiment was not to create a story that Shawn Coyne admires as much as he admires Brokeback Mountain, or one that strikes the same intellectual and emotional chords in him. However much I admire him (a lot), he’s not actually the target audience for anything I might write.
So yes, I’ll keep my servant-class men, and yes it’ll still be a story of forbidden love that never gets a chance to flourish. One of the lovers will survive the other. But there will be no wilderness, no great outdoors, no tent, no campfires. No twenty-year time span. Probably no hate crime. Other than needing to keep their jobs in order to survive, they aren’t going to have the same traits as Jack and Ennis. Their love isn’t going to have the same meaning as Jack and Ennis’s love—certainly not precisely the meaning Shawn found in Brokeback Mountain. Anyone who needs convincing that queer people are real people is not who I’m writing for.
I’m going to write my own story. It might fail the Experiment, but at least now I have a shot at actually writing it.
I listened to the whole podcast of the experiment and from a distance came to the same conclusion you have: you will have to take it now and make it yours. It was a fascinating project, but its benefit was to me, not in hearing you wrangle a way to make your work mirror the original, but how that information could inspire other choices you might not have considered. Any masterwork analysis fascinates those of us story nerds, but as writers, we must create stories that resonate with our own intentions and WORK. Sometimes, I believe that process exposes structure, characters, scenes, that could only have come from the mind, the whole person, of its creator and cannot be followed by another. Yep, the elements of story gridding will be there, but maybe only fully realized in a unique way for each story and teller. So you tell yours! So glad you did this experiment for all of us!
Hi Tami. Thanks for the good words. In the last three weeks, I’ve made some significant progress on the story (finally!) and am feeling much better about it. You are so right: I needed to find my way to my own unique take on the general beat structure.
Thanks, too, for subscribing to my list.