by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
Again, you are dealing with an emotional quality in your storytelling. Your hero makes a decision. The important thing to remember about this decision is that when he makes it, he gains something and he gives something up. It isn't much of a decision if someone says, "Hey, here's a million dollars. You can take it or leave it." But if someone comes along and says, "Congratulations, now you can get your million dollars. But there's one catch: If you take it, you'll never see your daughter again. And if you want to keep on seeing your daughter, you'll never get another chance to get the million dollars you've just earned." Now this is an important decision your hero must make. It involves high emotional intensity from the reader, as well as moral and ethical considerations—the most compelling of story elements.
... And in Making That Decision He Satisfied a Need...
Let's call this the hole. It is the emotional "engine" that has been driving the hero to do stuff the whole of his life, and certainly for the duration of the story, though he may not even be aware of what that hole is.
... That Had Been Created by Something in His Past.
This is the importance of the backstory. The backstory simply means his past, whatever happened in his past relevant to the story you're telling. The need, or hole, is some event that involved your hero before the story began. Or perhaps it's some item that haunts him, as in Citizen Kane, with the enigmatic reference to the boyhood sled Rosebud. In some way the hero is still incomplete. He's been injured, or he's had a part of him taken away. Perhaps he's lost his faith or rejected love. Perhaps he's a loner, someone who's not good at sharing himself with others, and he comes into this story carrying this thing with him, needing this hole filled. And in the process of the story, the hole is filled as he comes to his realization.
THE MODEL FOR YOUR STORY
Obviously what I've just discussed is a generic structure for storytelling and is really more of a guideline to help you determine a forward movement. It is a paradigm, or model, of dramatic structure. Certainly, your story should differ in various ways; we're not trying to encourage writers to write formulaic fiction. Remember, what we're talking about is structure, in the same way that there are specific requirements for building a house so that it stands firmly in all weather and is not in danger of falling down. As long as the building's structure (or in your case, the story's structure) holds firm, all is well. If it doesn't stand firm—and you have to rely on your instincts for this—you need to go back to the model and analyze why your story isn't working properly, using the model as a guideline.
Let's look at a couple of examples and see how this paradigm applies. We'll use a mixture of films and books, because many people are more familiar with movie versions of stories than books and because film structure is easier to analyze.
Consider The Firm, by John Grisham. At its heart, this is a retelling of the classic Faust story. Its emotional power derives from the struggle the hero undergoes with the substantial moral and ethical dilemmas he has to solve. The hero is a man who sells his soul to the Devil for the "good life," which is the thing he thinks he wants most, and then realizes what a terrible price he has paid for it and tries to get his soul back.
Inciting Incident
The hero, an ambitious, poor kid from across the tracks and just out of law school, gets his dream job with a prestigious Memphis law firm. Then he realizes he's made a terrible mistake. The firm is a front for a Mafia family.
Goal
The young lawyer must determine how to leave his job without getting himself or his wife killed in the process, and remain a lawyer and an individual with his honor and integrity intact.
Strategy
He sees a way out of his dilemma: a cunning path that will allow him to maintain his ethics—lawyer/client confidentiality—and continue his life as he wants to, that is be a lawyer without being disbarred, retain his life without having to go into a federal witness protection program and look over his shoulder for a Mafia hit man the rest of his life, and nail the bad guys in the firm. He does this by collecting evidence of fraud, overcharged bills sent through the mail—a federal offence. This allows him to separate his law firm bosses from their Mafia clients, handing the lawyers over to the FBI who can charge them with federal crimes, while keeping intact his lawyer/client relationship with the Mafia bosses. Thus he retains his ability to continue practicing as a lawyer without the fear that the Mob will send someone to kill him one day.
Opposition
The firm, particularly its security chief, has killed others who tried to leave and will kill or blackmail the hero to force him to stay.
Stakes
The attorney must keep his life in a literal sense and get it back in a metaphorical one.
Bleakest Moment
His wife leaves him and he sees no way out of a double bind: The Mafia has all but stolen his soul and enslaved him in a guilded cage, while the FBI wants him to trash his ethics and future as a brilliant young lawyer and will perhaps even send him to jail along with the other lawyers targeted in the firm if he refuses to cooperate.
Revelation
Money, power, and all the trappings of the Yuppie materialistic world he thought he always wanted are nothing compared to the love of his wife, his ability to do what he loves best, that is, practice law in a meaningful way to help people, and maintain his honor and his ethics.
Decision
The hero decides to give up all the material success he's achieved in favor of a simple, more honest and fulfilling life.
Emotional or Psychological Hole
As a kid he was poor and seemingly powerless, growing up in a trailer park with an older brother in jail for manslaughter.
Filling the Hole
He learns what is important in life and what is glittering illusion, becoming a more mature and complete person in the process.
Here are some other movies and examples of plotting elements:
• Witness: A young Amish boy witnesses a brutal murder, and a police officer (Harrison Ford) has to travel to Amish Pennsylvania to protect the child from the bad guys who have tracked him down.
The inciting incident is the murder in the train station the boy witnesses. Without the murder, there is no story.
• 48 Hrs: A cop and a convict have forty-eight hours to find and arrest a psychotic thief who has murdered his way off a chain gang and gone north looking for the stolen money he hid.
The prize here, as in many cops and robbers movies, is the capture of the villain.
• Tootsie: A talented but unemployed actor pretends to be a woman in order to land a plum role on a daytime soap opera. The only drawback: He (Dustin Hoffman) has to keep secret the fact that he's a man as long as he is starring in the soap.
The Dustin Hoffman character can't get a job as an actor. So his strategy is to disguise himself as a woman and achieve his goal that way.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind: A man is obsessed with a mountain he has never seen, and in his search to find it discovers he is one of several who have been chosen by extraterrestrials to represent the human race.
Everyone in the movie thinks this man (Richard Dreyfuss) is crazy and tries to prevent him from getting to the mountain to witness the arrival of the alien spaceship. Later the conflict gets even greater, because he reaches his goal of finding the mountain, only to discover the U.S. government and the military are conspiring to prevent him from taking the last step to reaching that goal. His prize? He is chosen by the aliens to go up in their spaceship.
• The Great Escape: Several hundred Allied prisoners of war in Germany in 1944 plot to escape their captors. The stakes are freedom or death and torture if they're recaptured by the Nazis.
• The Fugitive: Interestingly, the bleakest moment happens even before the opening credits of the film are finished. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) has been wrongly condemned to death for the murder of his wife. The scene of his bleakest moment shows him sitting on a bus on the way to prison, shivering with fear
, his life as he has known it, gone forever through no fault of his own.
• The Wizard of Oz: A little girl and her dog are swept up from Depression-era Kansas by a tornado and deposited in a fantasy land called Oz, where she has to secure the legendary wizard's help to get home again.
All stories have lessons, and the most famous is probably from this film. It's true, it's obvious, and verging on moronic, but at the end of the film, Dorothy says something to the effect of: "I learned that when I go looking for my heart's desire, I don't have to go farther than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never lost it in the first place."
Now, to be honest, Gary and I used to discuss this particular example all the time, and neither of us could figure out exactly what it meant. Nevertheless, it's a clear example of a character coming out and announcing the lesson of the story in the most bald-faced way.
• Lethal Weapon: Undercover cop Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), a borderline psychopath, is teamed with family-man cop Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in order to nail a drug ring. In the process, Riggs has to rescue Murtaugh's teenage daughter from the clutches of the bad guys.
Mel Gibson begins the story as a tragic, driven character, whose actions verge on the suicidal. In the backstory, his wife has died and he reaches the stage where he actually puts a gun to his head and is only moments away from killing himself. He's lost his family. That's his need. As you watch the movie, you see the relationship between Gibson's Riggs and his partner develop to the point where Murtaugh and his family essentially adopt Riggs into the family. By the end of the film, the two have caught the bad guys and eat Christmas dinner together. Riggs has filled that hole and found himself a family.
• The Tempest: At the end of Shakespeare's play, the wizard Prospero has wreaked revenge on his enemies, regained his stolen kingdom, and found a husband for his daughter, Miranda. But to regain his lost life and riches, he must forever give up magic and supernatural powers. That is the decision he makes, the price for successfully achieving his goals.
The great French film director Jean Renoir (son of the famous painter) once said: "Learning is being able to see the relationship between things."
It is, in my opinion, a profound statement that bears a lot of thinking about, particularly in regard to storytelling. An understanding of dramatic structure is important, not because it is a pattern you should follow slavishly, but because it is a tool that helps you construct your story and build relationships in an emotionally powerful and satisfying way. It is a starting point for creativity, not an end in itself.
As an exercise, list an inventory of your skills as a writer— and as a storyteller. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What do you do well? Create characters? Write strong atmospheric description or snappy dialogue? What would you like to strengthen? What are your weak points? Cliched plotting? Scenes that seem to have no real life or zing?
Be honest. This is for nobody else's eyes but your own. Try to identify what is driving you to be a writer of stories, what you expect to get out of the experience. What compels you against all odds to do this thing called "writing" for a living?
EXERCISES
1. Next time you watch a movie, study it carefully for the plot points we've discussed. Examine it for structure, for why things happen the way they do. Nothing (hardly ever, anyway) is by chance in a finished screenplay. The Fugitive is a wonderful example of strong dramatic structure.
2. Once you've done that, reread the last book you read. This time, read it with a pencil in hand and mark the plot points. After you've done this with about fifty books and films, you'll be writing plots like a pro.
3. Come up with five "What if. . ."or "Suppose ..." ideas each week. Then pick one each month and start asking—and answering—the question "Why" about this idea. Then write a complete synopsis, detailing the beginning, middle, and end of your story.
Chapter Five
Characters
This is, perhaps, the most important chapter in this book. Plot is what characters do next, and characters are the hub of all narrative work. So almost all narrative structural problems can be fixed with solutions that involve rethinking and reworking characters and characterization.
When in trouble, in other words, rethink and rework your characters until the problem is solved, and your book will start to feel as though it's writing itself. This, of course, is a lot easier said than done. But it is, at least, a plan of action and a way of attacking narrative problems when they inevitably arise.
THE STORY IS WHO IT HAPPENS TO
Here's a basic thing to remember: The story is not what happens; the story is who it happens to.
We read narrative fiction and nonfiction to visit new worlds and become involved in the lives of interesting people. Fiction, in particular, these days is also concerned with extremes— emotional traumas, watershed moments in a character's life, moral and ethical dilemmas, and so forth.
In nearly all cases, problems with plotting and general problems that writers characterize (excuse the pun!) as a book "not working" stem from a need to rethink qualities they have—or have not—given their characters.
Consider the example of a woman amateur sleuth who is in too restrictive a marriage to investigate a crime effectively.
"But I've created terrific conflict with her domineering husband," I hear you say.
Unfortunately, it doesn't help in the creation of your story if the conflict you've created, however powerful, causes your primary character to be either reactive or passive. This is particularly true if she is the heroine of a mystery in which she is expected to actively ferret out clues and expose the guilty. If she is merely reacting to things the bad guys do to her all the time, or she stumbles across clues or a solution by luck or coincidence, your story will be weak and emotionally bland.
Suppose you plot a story wherein the amateur sleuth sees a crime, takes a picture of it and then exhibits the picture. The villain sees the picture and comes after your heroine fearing she is about to expose him.
The problem here is that your heroine has done nothing to cause the villain to be brought to justice. It could be argued that she has exhibited a picture, but in reality, he has initiated all the running here, not her.
However, if she takes definite and increasingly life-endangering steps in order to flush him out of his secure place, she is a positive character.
If everything revolves around your story's antagonist panicking enough to go after her, you have a structural flaw in the story that is best solved by rethinking the qualities of the heroine. Give her more spunk, even if she is frightened while doing whatever it is she does, and more decisiveness, and you have someone with whom readers want to spend some time, and about whom they begin to care. She has to act despite her domineering husband, not because of his whims and wishes.
PLOT IS WHAT CHARACTERS DO NEXT
Character is plot (which is another way of saying plot is what characters do next). This means that your story is the interaction of a character's specific personality with a set of— usually—external circumstances. What makes your story interesting is that the events of the story unfold in a way that is unique to that particular character and who she is, and the solution is usually drawn from the unique qualities the character possesses or develops as the story moves to its climax. If the same things happened to a different character, those events, just as in real life, would happen in a different way. That means that when a story isn't working for some reason, say the pacing is off or the viewpoint doesn't work, the structural storytelling problems can be reduced to thinking further, or reconsidering your preconceptions of who these characters are and how they relate to each other. For example: Can you combine two characters into one? Should this character have crossed the path of that character in the backstory?
The key to storytelling is conceptualizing what you want to say and then getting an outline or synopsis of that concept on paper. Not an easy task by any means. In fact, developing an init
ial synopsis of the story may be the hardest job the novelist, in particular, has to do.
KNOW YOUR CHARACTERS
Take a moment to reread and think about that last paragraph. That simple concept is the key to fixing structural problems in your manuscript.
When in doubt—or in trouble, technically—rethink not only what your characters do, but also who they are. The most powerful stories, dramatically and emotionally, are those that explore circumstances that develop and exploit a character's obsession: What exactly will she do to achieve the goal of this obsession? Just how far will she go?
It took me many years to realize that the essence of what I was doing for students and authors, in terms of fixing structural problems with storytelling, could be reduced for the most part to solving problems relating to character and character relationships.
If you replace your main character with another, the new character would act in a different way to the same set of problems, and the story would unfold differently. If the story unfolds differently, you have to rethink events and outcomes, and that means passive, dull characters can become active, involving people we care about and so forth.
OUTSIDE CHARACTER, INSIDE CHARACTER
Think of characterization in two ways:
1. There is outer characterization, that is, everything readers can observe about a character: how she speaks, how she dresses, what she wears for one type of meeting and what she wears for another, body language, and so forth.
2. And there is deep character, that is, the emotional and psychological parts of the character that are revealed under the pressure of the story. Readers wouldn't—and shouldn't— know about this inner life unless the events of the story bring it out.
Here are two examples: A rich man finds a wallet. The rich man looks inside, notes a few credit cards and one thousand dollars in cash, searches for some sign of who the wallet belongs to, shrugs, and returns it, intact, to its owner. He did the expected thing, and readers share his pleasure in allowing his sense of honor and honesty to come to the fore.
