by The Anatomy of Story- 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (mobi)
Big
(by Gary Ross & Anne Spielberg 1988) A boy who suddenly wakes up to find he is a full-grown man promises to be a fun comedic fantasy. But what if you write a fantasy not set in some far-off, bizarre world but in a world an average kid would recognize? What if you send him to a real boy's Utopia, a toy company, and let him go out with a pretty, sexy woman? Anil what if the story isn't just about a boy get-ting big physically but one that shows the ideal blend of man and boy for living a happy adult life?
Step 3: Identify the Story Challenges and Problems
There are rules of construction that apply to all stories. But each story has its own unique set of rules, or challenges, as well. These are particular problems that are deeply embedded in the idea, and you cannot escape them. Nor do you want to. These problems are signposts for finding your true story. You must confront these problems head-on and solve them if you are to execute your story well. Most writers, if they identify the problems at all, do so after they've written the complete story. That's fat-too late.
The trick is to learn how to spot inherent problems right at the premise line. Of course, even the best writers can't spot all the problems this soon in the process. But as you master the key techniques of character, plot, theme, story world, symbol, and dialogue, you will be pleasantly surprised at how well you can dig out the difficulties in any idea. Here are just a few of the challenges and problems inherent to the following story ideas.
Star Wars
(by George Lucas, 1977) In any epic, but especially a space epic like Star Wars, you must introduce a wide range of characters quickly and then keep them interacting over vast space and time. You must make the futuristic story believable and recognizable in the present. And you must find a way to create character change in a hero who is morally good from the beginning.
Forrest Gump
(novel by Winston Groom, screenplay by Eric Roth, 1994) How do you turn forty years of historical moments into a cohesive, organic, personal story? Problems include creating a mentally challenged hero who is able to drive the plot, have believably deep insights, and experience character change while balancing whimsy with genuine sentiment.
Beloved
(by Toni Morrison, 1988) The main challenge for Toni Morrison is to write a tale of slavery in which the hero is not portrayed as a victim. An ambitious story like this has numerous problems that must be solved: keeping narrative drive in spite of constant jumps between past and present, making events in the distant past seem meaningful to an audience today, driving the plot with reactive characters, showing the effects of slavery on the minds of the people who lived it, and demonstrating how its effects continue to punish years after the slavery is over.
Jaws
(novel by Peter Bencbley, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, 1975) Writing a "realistic" horror story—in which characters fight one of man's natural predators—poses many problems: creating a fair fight with an opponent that has limited intelligence, setting up a situation where the shark can attack often, and ending the story with the hero going mano a mano with the shark.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(by Mark Twain, 1885) The main challenge facing the writer of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is huge: How do you show the moral—or more precisely, immoral—fabric of an entire nation in fictional terms? This brilliant story idea carries with it some major problems: using a boy to drive the action; maintaining story momentum and strong opposition in a traveling, episodic structure; and believably showing a simple and not entirely admirable boy gaining great moral insight.
The Great Gats by
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925) Fitzgerald's challenge is to show the American dream corrupted and reduced to a competition for fame and money. His problems are just as daunting. He must create narrative drive when the hero is someone else's helper, make the audience care about shallow people, and somehow turn a small love story into a metaphor for America.
Death of a Salesman
(by Arthur Miller; 194V) Tin- central challenge for Arthur Miller is to turn the life of a small man into a grand tragedy. Problems he must solve include mixing past and present events without confusing the audience, maintaining narrative drive, and providing hope in a desperate and violent conclusion.
Step 4: Find the Designing Principle
Given the problems and the promises inherent in your idea, you must now come up with an overall strategy for how you will tell your story. Your overall story strategy, stated in one line, is the designing principle of your story. The designing principle helps you extend the premise into deep structure.
KEY POINT: The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole.
It is the internal logic of the story, what makes the parts hang together
organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It is
what makes the story original.
In short, the designing principle is the seed of the story. And it is the single most important factor in making your story original and effective. Sometimes this principle is a symbol or a metaphor (known as the central symbol, the grand metaphor, or the root metaphor). But it is often larger than that. The designing principle tracks the fundamental process that will unfold over the course of the story.
The designing principle is difficult to see. And in truth, most stories don't have one. They are standard stories, told generically. That's the difference between a premise, which all stories have, and a designing principle—which only good stories have. The premise is concrete; it's what actually happens. The designing principle is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way. Stated in one line:
Designing principle = story process + original execution
Let's say you are a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the Mafia in America, as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists
have done. If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for The Godfather):
Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new "king."
What's important is that the designing principle is the "synthesizing idea," the "shaping cause"1 of the story; it's what internally makes the story a single unit and what makes it different from all other stories.
KEY POINT: Find the designing principle, and stick to it. Be diligent in discovering this principle, and never take your eye off it during the long writing process.
Let's take a look at Tootsie to see how the difference between the premise and the designing principle plays out in an actual story.
■ Premise When an actor can't get work, he disguises himself as a woman and gets a role in a TV series, only to fall in love with one of the female members of the cast.
■ Designing Principle Force a male chauvinist to live as a woman.
How do you find the designing principle in your premise? Don't make the mistake most writers make at this point. Instead of coming up with a unique designing principle, they pick a genre and impose it on the premise and then force the story to hit the beats (events) typical of that genre. The result is mechanical, generic, unoriginal fiction.
You find the designing principle by teasing it out of the simple one-line premise you have before you. Like a detective, you "induce" the form of the story from the premise.
This doesn't mean that there is only one designing principle per idea or that it's fixed or predetermined. There are many possible designing principles or forms that you can glean from your premise and by which you can develop your story. Each gives you different possibilities of what to say, and each brings inherent problems that you must solve. Again, let your technique help you out.
One way of coming up with a designing principle is to use a journey or similar traveling metaphor. Huck Finn's raft trip down the Mississippi River with Jim, Marlow's boat trip up the river into the "heart of darkness," Leopold Bloom's travels through Dublin in Ulysses, Alice
's fall down the rabbit hole into the upside-down world of Wonderland—each of these uses a traveling metaphor to organize the deeper process of the story.
Notice how the use of a journey in Heart of Darkness provides the designing principle for a very complex work of fiction:
A storyteller's trip upriver into the jungle is the line to three different locations simultaneously: to the truth about a mysterious and apparently immoral man; to the truth about the storyteller himself; and backward in civilization to the barbaric moral heart of darkness in all humans.
Sometimes a single symbol can serve as the designing principle, as with the red letter A in The Scarlet Letter, the island in The Tempest, the whale in Moby-Dick, or the mountain in The Magic Mountain. Or you can connect two grand symbols in a process, like the green nature and black slag of How Green Was My Valley. Other designing principles include units of time (day, night, four seasons), the unique use of a storyteller, or a special way the story unfolds.
Here are some designing principles in books, films, and plays, from the Bible all the way to the Harry Potter books, and how they differ from the premise line.
Moses, in the Book of Exodus ■ Premise When an Egyptian prince discovers that he is a Hebrew, he leads his people out of slavery.
■ Designing Principle A man who does not know who he is struggles to lead his people to freedom and receives the new moral laws that will define him and his people.
Ulysses
■ Premise Track a day in the life of a common man in Dublin.
■ Designing Principle In a modern odyssey through the city, over the
course of a single day, one man finds a father and the other man finds a son.
Four Weddings and a Funeral
■ Premise A man falls in love with a woman, but first one and then the other is engaged to someone else.
■ Designing Principle A group of friends experiences four Utopias (weddings) and a moment in hell (funeral) as they all look for their right partner in marriage.
Harry Potter Books
■ Premise A boy discovers he has magical powers and attends a school for magicians.
■ Designing Principle A magician prince learns to be a man and a king by attending a boarding school for sorcerers over the course of seven school years.
The Sting
■ Premise Two con artists swindle a rich man who killed one of their friends.
■ Designing Principle Tell the story of a sting in the form of a sting, and con both the opponent and the audience.
Long Day's Journey into Night
■ Premise A family deals with the mother's addiction.
■ Designing Principle As a family moves from day into night, its members are confronted with the sins and ghosts of their past.
Meet Me in St. Louis
■ Premise A young woman falls in love with the boy next door.
■ Designing Principle The growth of a family over the course of a year is shown by events in each of the four seasons.
Copenhagen
■ Premise Three people tell conflicting versions of a meeting that changed the outcome of World War II.
■ Designing Principle Use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle from physics to explore the ambiguous morality of the man who discovered it.
A Christmas Carol
■ Premise When three ghosts visit a stingy old man, he regains the spirit of Christmas.
■ Designing Principle Trace the rebirth of a man by forcing him to view his past, his present, and his future over the course of one Christmas Eve.
It's a Wonderful Life
■ Premise When a man prepares to commit suicide, an angel shows him what the world would be had he never been born.
■ Designing Principle Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived.
Citizen Kane
■ Premise Tell the life story of a rich newspaper baron.
■ Designing Principle Use a number of storytellers to show that a man's life can never be known.
Step 5: Determine Your Best Character in the Idea
Once you have a lock on the designing principle of your story, it's time to focus on your hero.
KEY POINT: Always tell a story about your best character.
"Best" doesn't mean "nicest." It means "the most fascinating, challenging, and complex," even if that character isn't particularly likable. The reason you want to tell a story about your best character is that this is where your interest, and the audience's interest, will inevitably go. You always want this character driving the action.
The way you determine the best character embedded in the idea is to ask yourself this crucial question: Who do I love? You can find the answer by asking yourself a few more questions: Do I want to see him act? Do I love the way he thinks? Do I care about the challenges he has to overcome?
If you can't find a character you love implied in the story idea, move on to another idea. If you find him but he is not currently the main character, change the premise right now so that he is.
If you are developing an idea that seems to have multiple main characters, you will have as many story lines as main characters, and so you must find the best character for each story line.
Step 6: Get a Sense of the Central Conflict
Once you have an idea of who will drive the story, you want to figure out what your story is about at the most essential level. That means determining the central conflict of the story. To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself "Who fights whom over what?" and answer the question in one succinct line.
The answer to that is what your story is really about, because all conflict in the story will essentially boil down to this one issue. The next two chapters will expand on this conflict in often complex ways. But you need to keep this one-line statement of conflict, along with the designing principle, in front of you at all times.
Step 7: Get a Sense of the Single Cause-and-Effect Pathway
Every good, organic story has a single cause-and-effect pathway: A leads to B, which leads to C, and so on all the way to Z. This is the spine of the story, and if you don't have a spine or you have too many spines, your story will fall apart (we'll talk about multiple-hero stories in a moment). Let's say you came up with this premise:
A man falls in love and fights his brother for control of a winery.
Notice that this is a split premise with two cause-and-effect trajectories. One of the great advantages of using these techniques to develop your premise is that it's much easier to spot problems and find solutions when you've written only one line. Once you write a full story or script, the story problems feel like they're set in concrete. But when you've written only one sentence, you can make a simple change and turn a split premise into a single line, such as this:
Through the love of a good woman, a man defeats his brother for control of a winery.
The trick to finding the single cause-and-effect pathway is to ask yourself "What is my hero's basic action?" Your hero will take many actions over the course of the story. But there should be one action that is most important, that unifies every other action the hero takes. That action is the cause-and-effect path.
For example, let's go back to the one-line premise for Star Wars:
When a princess falls into mortal danger, a young man uses his skills as a fighter to save her and defeat the evil forces of a galactic empire.
In forcing ourselves to describe Star Wars in a single line, we see that the one action that unites all the myriad actions of that film is "uses his skills as a fighter."
Or take the case of The Godfather, an epic book and an epic film. But again, if we work through the process, starting with reducing the story to a one-sentence premise, we can see the basic action clearly:
The youngest son of a Mafia family takes revenge on the men who shot his father and becomes the new Godfather.
Of all the actions Michael takes in that story, the one action t
hat connects them all, the basic action, is that he takes revenge.
KEY POINT: If you are developing a premise with many main characters, each story line must have a single cause-and-effect path. And all the story lines should come together to form a larger, all-encompassing spine.
For example, in The Canterbury Tales, each traveler tells a story with a single spine. But the stories are all part of a group—a microcosm of English society—that is traveling to Canterbury.
Step 8: Determine Your Hero's Possible Character Change
After the designing principle, the most important thing to glean from your premise line is the fundamental character change of your hero. This is what gives the audience the deepest satisfaction no matter what form the story takes, even when the character change is negative (as in The Godfather).
Character change is what your hero experiences by going through his struggle. At the simplest level, that change could be represented as a three-part equation (don't confuse this with three-act structure):
WxA = C
where W stands for weaknesses, both psychological and moral; A represents the struggle to accomplish the basic action in the middle of the story; and C stands for the changed person.
In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result. The simple logic of a story works like this: How does the act of struggling to do the basic action (A) lead the character to change from W to C? Notice that A, the basic action, is the fulcrum. A character with certain weaknesses, when being put through the wringer of a particular struggle, is forged and tempered into a changed being.
KEY POINT: The basic action should be the one action best able to force
the character to deal with his weaknesses and change.
This is the simple geometry of any story because it is the sequence of human growth. Human growth is very elusive, but it is real, and it is what you, the writer, must express above everything else (or else show why it doesn't occur).
The key to doing this is to start with the basic action and then go to the opposites of that action. This will tell yon who your hero is at the beginning of the story (his weaknesses) and who he is at the end (how he has changed). The steps work like this:
