Jenga Stories

I read a really great post on Twitter (HERE) which is so full of great advice that I plan to repost in many different ways over the course of the next few weeks. This first one is on Jenga Stories. 

What’s a Jenga Story? Took me a second too, but it’s basically where you start with the end in mind. Nathan, in that link, brings up a couple of stories that use this form, Pulp Fiction, Saving Private Ryan, are his examples. 

Think about Jenga. You have a huge tower that is already complete and you slowly try and pull out different pieces from the whole. But, basically, you see the final product first. Saving Private Ryan, you see the old guy looking at the gravestones in the first scene. As an audience member you want to know who he is, why he’s there. In Pulp Fiction, you see Vincent and Jules and the case and you want to know what’s happened to them. 

There are some other great examples of this: (a) Memento is a great one that works backward from back to end, (b) Fight Club, (c) 12 Monkeys, (d) The Usual Suspects. 

I tried this to a degree in my novel Vapor Trail (see HERE). The first scene has two characters involved in a bomging. I’m hoping that the reader is intrigued enough that they want to find out how that occurred. 

What are the potential drawbacks to the Jenga Story style? 

I think it can become a bit formulaic. A little obvious. That’s what was so neat about Memento, they took the standard Jenga storyline and turned it a bit on it’s head. The viewer was only given small focus points of the overall Jenga structure. So that was a fresh take. Still, I think the concern here is that it can become ho hum by the mere fact that everyone does it and it’s fairly obvious.