Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative
Page 4
And that feels like a pretty good segue into the next chapter, hm?
1 I fell asleep last night watching a Patrick Swayze movie marathon—as one is wont to do in these troubled times, for what greater balm for the soul is there than Ghost followed by Dirty Dancing followed by Roadhouse?—and obviously I made one of those notes where you’re half-asleep and … well. We’ve all been there!
2 Just don’t elect the diaper president, please—we’ve had enough of that already.
Chapter Two
SOYLENT STORY: IT’S MADE OUT OF PEOPLE
I like to play video games.
I especially like to play video games where I am allowed to craft and create my very own character. When I was a writer and designer for pen-and-paper role-playing games,1 my goal was to give the player as much control over his experience as possible. I wrote the games the way I wanted to play them: I wanted that control and relished it, and so I wanted the players of my games to have access to that same kind of experience.
When I get to create characters in a video game, I like to have the power to design how they look, what traits they have, where they come from. Even if all of that does not magically “auto-assemble” into a formal backstory, a backstory still manages to emerge in my head. Maybe it’s just the storyteller in me, but I can’t help but think, “My character is Elfblood McElvoy! He had a hard life, which explains his propensity for punching people and then picking their pockets. Also, he takes great delight in lying as a survival mechanism and he wears fancy purple pants2 because I said so, that’s why.”
Then, even as I play, I might advance the character’s story: “As Elfblood matures and grows more comfortable in planting roots, he decides it’s time to buy a large, roomy house with a comfortable bed, because as a child he was forced to sleep inside a wicker basket. Also he was raised by angry bears, which is why he hates bears and kills a great many of them to keep their skins as rugs.”
Or whatever. Point is, none of this is programmatically true in the game. The video game does not reinforce this backstory or even allow it to be codified. It’s all in my head.
But that’s okay.
What’s interesting to me about this phenomenon is that I’m essentially creating backstory and stakes and conflict for the character that don’t exist and that, at least in the context of the game itself, don’t really matter. The game provides for me a narrative; just the same, I’m injecting my own narrative into it. Initially I wondered: Is it just me? Is it just because I’m a writer and a storyteller that I naturally drift toward invoking excess narrative? Am I that easily bored? Where are my pants?3
Ah, but then we had B-Dub, the Tiny Human.
I like to watch our Tiny Human play, and here’s the thing you’ll see when you watch kids play: They create characters and give those characters conflict. They don’t do this because they are told. They do this because, to them, it’s interesting. (And maybe, just maybe, because it helps them work through problems and discover solutions, as well as adjust to the reality that life is full of conflict. Which is perhaps one of the things that story gives us, too, even as adults.) B-Dub doesn’t just have two action figures stand there and successfully make breakfast: They are besieged by conflict. Dragons! Robots! Dragobots! The Dragobots overcooked the eggs and now war comes to the Kitchen Kingdom! The toys talk and bicker. They fight and make friends. He infuses them with personality, and then puts them through the wringer. A story unfolds, chaotic and unrestrained. It’s not the best story, no. It’s not a story you’d want to put on paper—well, maybe, if you wanted to highlight the delightful absurdity of it. But it’s got the hallmarks of story and character you want. The action figures—the characters—encounter conflict and sometimes change as a result, even if that change is that they simply got dead. The action figures affect one another. They have stories that begin and complete, though admittedly sometimes that completion is nothing more than AND THEN EVERYTHING EXPLODES as toys are flung about.4
To distill the point I’m making, the first thing my son does with his action figures is this: He gives them a problem.
So that’s the first thing we need to talk about.
CHARACTERS ARE THEIR PROBLEMS
Writers are often exhorted to endure these somewhat cuckoopants “character creation exercises” to help them get to the heart of the characters they’re creating—we write imaginary job interviews, or we fictionalize the character’s Twitter feed, or we instead explore a hundred different inane questions about them. (What’s her favorite hair color? How long are her toes? If she were a piece of Ikea furniture, what piece of Ikea furniture would she be? A Billy Bookcase? A Klippan loveseat? Perhaps a Snorjn-pög Lingonberry-Flavored desk lamp?) It’s not that it’s bad to consider these things. It’s just—are they really the best ways to get to the most vital aspects of the character? Does it really breathe meaningful life into them in a practical and critical way? Maybe! Maybe you find them useful. But for my mileage, I want as fast an understanding of what makes the character interesting on the page as possible, and that means encouraging you to consider the characters through the context of the story you hope to tell with them.
For me, the most efficient and compelling way to do that is to identify, right out of the gate, the character’s problem.
And this is how the audience will see the character. The character is her problems. We remember her conflicts because that is who she is and why we are witnessing this particular segment of her life. Remember that thing I said (in the interlude on page 9!) about how a story is defined by the break in its status quo? So, too, is a character defined by her problems—and her problems represent exactly that breach of status quo I’m talking about.
Thinking about a character’s primary problem isn’t just a good way to figure out the character—it’s the best way to conceive of that character’s place in the story and the focus of the narrative.
Let’s take John McClane, from Die Hard.5
It’s tempting to think that John McClane’s problem is Hans Gruber and his band of merry not-quite-terrorists. Thing is, that problem defines the plot, but it doesn’t define John McClane. Meaning, it isn’t the problem that puts him in the story.
No, John McClane’s problem is that he’s separated from his wife, Holly. Right? That’s his big issue. That’s why he comes out to the West Coast, leaving New York City and his job as a cop there. It’s why he joins a party full of people utterly unlike him. It’s what gives him the motivation to survive, persist, and triumph. He has a family to win back.
Here you’ll say, “Chuck, that sounds suspiciously like you’ve identified his motivation.” And you’re damn right. That is, in fact, his motivation. So why highlight it as his problem?
Motivation is often framed in a wifty, noncommittal way. A motivation might be, Fred wants to be rich. Or, Siobhan wants to do better in school. Or, perhaps, Chuck wants to stop pooping fire out of his butt.6
But those motivations are a little … soft. They’re passive, not active. By framing them as problems, though, we put them front and center. We make them present. Problems are to be conquered within the story; motivations run the risk of continuing on forever, without solution, without end.
Buffy Summers has a problem: It’s not vampires, but rather, it’s that she wants to be a normal teen, and being the vampire slayer prevents this. That problem not only defines her character, it provides context for many of the episodes throughout Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If her problem were vampires, the only thing she’d be doing is running around sticking Mr. Pointy7 into the chests of the undead. Which might be fun for about three episodes, and then we’d get bored. But that core problem of wanting to live a normal life and just be a teenager instead of a vampire-slaying freak show with an unshakable destiny—that’s something that provides story fodder for years. Further, it’s a problem we totally grok. We’ve all felt like freaks at times—or like society has expectations of us that we just can’t escape.
Luke Skyw
alker has something of the opposite problem: He’s desperate to escape his normal life for a life of heroism.8
Luke Skywalker would do anything to be Luke Skywalker, Vampire Slayer, instead of Luke Skywalker, Womp Rat Bullseye-er. He’s eager to escape the ugly, boring sand planet.9 Tied into Luke’s utter lack of adventure is that he’s stuck with his stick-in-the-mud aunt and uncle—not his father, who apparently was an ace pilot and awesome dude back in the Clone Wars. Inevitably, Luke’s no-good, dirt-farmer life is swept up in the cloak of an old chaotic Jedi named Obi-Wan, and, well, the saga unfolds from there. Further, Luke’s initial “problem” disappears under the danger of the solution—as it turns out, sometimes the fix is worse than the problem. In story terms, Luke’s problem changes and evolves as the Star Wars saga goes on. He solves one problem and replaces it with another, which keeps the story fresh and vital.
THE STORY IS THE SOLUTION
A character has a problem:
My husband is trying to kill me.
My child has been abducted.
I am lost in the wilderness.
Someone took the last jelly donut out of the box, and that was my jelly donut, goddamnit.
The character likely also has a solution:
I will kill my husband before he kills me.
I will take the law into my own hands to get my child back.
I will follow the river south in the hopes of escaping the wilderness and finding my way once more.
I will hunt my nemesis across all the earth and all the stars until my foe is dead … or has at least returned to me the jelly donut he stole.
The character is the problem. And the solution is the story.
What I mean is this:
Between the character’s problem and the character’s solution to that problem lies the story. That is the character’s quest. Implicit in the quest is a story. Ever watch the show Dexter, or read the book by Jeff Lindsay that it’s based on? You have a character who is a serial killer, but the fact that Dexter can’t stop being a serial killer is his problem. His father, Harry, gives Dexter a “code” that serves as Harry’s solution to Dexter’s problem—that code allows Dexter to kill, but only to kill bad people. Dexter’s own solution to the problem of being a serial killer goes one step further, however:
He becomes a forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department.
Dexter hides in plain sight. This affords him the opportunity to clean up his own murder scenes and steer attention away from him, and it grants him the chance to find new victims. But! It also causes Dexter a complication: By hiding in plain sight, he’s also in scarily close proximity to the law, even as he breaks it. He is playing with fire, operating out of a department whose detectives are ultimately highly skilled at rooting out the truth.
All this translates to one larger idea:
The character creates the plot.
We have this idea of plot as a big, explosive thing. A galaxy in strife! A world in danger! Hidden treasure! Secret weapon! All of those things are very large, very plotty, yes.
They’re also entirely external. They are inorganic.
And yet, we often approach stories this way—and it’s like trying to install a skeleton into the body after the child is born. It’s not a part of the story. When storytellers have an exterior framework into which they then plug the characters, the characters operate as secondary, as afterthoughts. And the audience has no one to ground them in the story.
Characters are everything.
Characters drive the narrative.
Story is Soylent Green.10 It’s made out of people.
Plot is not some external thing. It is born directly of the people on the page.
Put differently, if story is architecture, then characters are the architects. Sometimes they’re willing architects, other times quite unwitting. But they’re architects just the same. Meaning, they build the story structure as they go, acting and talking and changing the narrative.
Everything can unfold naturally from that interstitial terrain where a character navigates the problems that she faces. That journey, that quest, has a core conflict baked right into it: The character wants a thing and must work to gain the thing. By drawing this as a problem in need of solving, you have “auto-magically” invoked conflict. Moreover, it’s a personal conflict. Remember what I said about us seeing our stories inside the stories of the characters? They are how we relate. They are our vehicle to empathy.
Look at it this way: The core storyworld dynamic of the Empire versus the Rebellion in Star Wars is the big galactic conflict. But it is meaningless without considering the roles of the characters both inside it and against it. That struggle between Evil Space Regime and the Plucky Band of Iconoclasts is the status quo. It’s happening. It’s ongoing. We begin the saga with that as the baseline for the events that are unfolding.
In terms of Star Wars, that baseline is then interrupted by the paths of our core characters, Leia, Luke, Han, and the like. It is the actions of these characters, in pursuit of solutions to their problems, that not only give us an entry point to the larger conflict, but also serve as the mechanism by which we discover and confront the greater galaxy. We don’t get the story if Luke doesn’t choose to pursue adventure off of Tatooine, if Leia doesn’t work to pursue freedom for the galaxy, if Han doesn’t work to be the debt-ridden scoundrel that he is. Without them, the Star Wars saga is just a boring-ass chess game. With them, it’s something greater. With them, it’s a story.
Ah, but, but, but—
A problem and a solution are not enough.
The quest itself is an uncomplicated tale. “I want the thing! Now I go get the thing. I have the thing! THE END.”
Ugh. Dull.
Your job, as the storyteller, is to be as horrible as you can be. You are the Dungeon Master. You are the callous god. Your job is to place a labyrinth between the character and her solution. You must interrupt her quest at every turn with:
Complications.
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: IT’S COMPLICATED
To recap: John McClane’s problem is that his family is recently broken up. His solution is that he’s going to fly his ass out to the West Coast and mingle with a party of coastal elites to try to rebuild the bridge to his wife.
Now, implicit in that is the central dramatic story. (Drama is the conflict between people. It auto-generates conflict and the story—admittedly, it tends to generate a more human one with far fewer, um, machine guns than we see in Die Hard.) McClane is a fish out of water in this context. He doesn’t belong to this world; this world belongs to his wife. There’s a power imbalance, and he’s uncomfortable—and we see it in the opening act of the film when he has to ball up his toes and relax after a long flight.
But then the movie delivers its first real complication to that central drama:
Hans Gruber and his merry gang of not-quite-terrorists.
That complication is itself somewhat complicated: It’s not just that terrorists show up, it’s that John is separated from the party without much to help him. The guy doesn’t even have a pair of socks on, since he was doing that thing with his toes on the carpet. Now, his discomfort at being with these people and in this corporate world suddenly pales in comparison to being separated from the group while trapped in a skyscraper as it’s being locked down and taken over by violent thieves.
And that is only the first complication.
Every complication is a bend in the maze of the labyrinth that the writers put between McClane and the end of his quest. Every move the terrorists make against him is a complication. When the cops and the FBI show up and think he’s part of Gruber’s gang? Complication. When the media shows up to his house and involves his children—thus making Gruber realize that Holly is, in fact, John’s wife? Not only is that a complication, but it raises the stakes of the relationship central to the drama (more on raising stakes on page 45). Each complication might lead him to a crisis point: a moment in the story where it seems t
hat all is lost or that the way forward is impossible.
Every complication demands a response from the character it affects. In Die Hard, some of McClane’s responses are proactive, with the character offering his own complications to the story. Example: When he throws a dead body out the window to get the attention of the patrolman below, he’s the one complicating the story—both making it better for himself by recruiting an ally and worse in that he’s just attracted a whole lot of attention to himself.
Ah, but these are not the only kind of complications.
INTERNAL COMPLICATIONS / LIMITATIONS
Complications aren’t all surface. They’re not all DOOM ROBOTS and ORC ATTACK and OH GOD, THE DOG JUST FARTED.11 Besides, characters are not two-dimensional pieces of paper. They have their own architecture—and they have weaknesses in their design. Flaws in the code. Glitches in the Matrix. Exhaust ports on the Death Star.
Internal complications—or what I call “limitations,” because they place limits on a character—add new bends and roundabouts and dead-ends to the maze. A limitation would be defined as a trait internal to the character that limits his ability to directly and correctly solve his own problem.
Buffy Summers—who, remember, wants to be a normal high school student (problem)—faces complications in pursuit of that problem in the form of, ohhh, just some vampires and demons and other assorted nastiness emerging from the Hell mouth that her entire town sits on. But she has her own limitations, too. For one, she’s not very academic—it’s not that she’s not smart, but she doesn’t really want to learn stuff, necessarily. She’s resistant to it, and this makes dealing with her other complication—vampires and demons and Hell-mouth nasties—much harder. It also complicates her relationship with Giles, her Watcher.12