by The Anatomy of Story- 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (mobi)
What wo might call the fallacy of the future is common in science fiction stories. Many writers think science fiction is about predicting what will happen in the future, what the world will actually be like. We saw this thinking at the end of 1983 when everyone was debating whether and in what ways George Orwell had been right about 1984.
The fallacy here is that stories set in the future are about the future. They're not. You set a story in the future to give the audience another pair of glasses, to abstract the present in order to understand it better. One key difference between science fiction and historical fiction is that stories set in the future highlight not so much values as the forces and choices that face us today and the consequences if we fail to choose wisely.
True time in a story is "natural" time. It has to do with the way the world develops and in turn furthers the development of the story. Some of the top techniques of natural time are seasons, holidays, the single day, and the time endpoint.
Seasons
The first technique of natural story time is the cycle of the seasons and the rituals that come with them. In this technique, you place the story, or a moment of the story, within a particular season. Each season, like each natural setting, conveys certain meanings to the audience about the hero or the world.
If you go further and show the change of the seasons, you give the audience a detailed and powerful expression of the growth or decay of the hero or the world.
If you cover all four seasons in your story, you tell the audience you are shifting from a linear story, which is about some kind of development, to a circular story, which is about how things ultimately remain the same. You can present this positively or negatively. A positive circular story usually emphasizes man's connection to the land. Human beings are animals, and happy to be so. The cycle of life, death, and rebirth is natural and worthy of celebration, and we can learn much by studying the secrets nature reveals at its gentle, steady pace. Thoreau's Walden uses the seasons in this way.
A negative circular story usually emphasizes that humans are bound by the forces of nature, just like other animals. This approach is tricky because it can quickly grow dull. Indeed, the great weakness of many nature documentaries is that the plot, which almost always matches the seasons, is predictable and hence boring. An animal might give birth in the spring, hunt and be hunted in the summer, mate in the fall, and face starvation in the winter. But sure enough, the animal returns in the spring to give birth again.
The classic method of connecting the seasons to the story line—done beautifully in Meet Me in St. Louis and Amarcord—uses a one-to-one connection of season to drama and follows this course:
■ Summer: The characters exist in a troubled, vulnerable state or in a world of freedom susceptible to attack.
■ Fall: The characters begin their decline.
■ Winter: The characters reach their lowest point.
■ Spring: The characters overcome their problem and rise.
You may want to use this classic connection or, to avoid cliche, purposely cut against it. For example, a character might decline in the spring and rise again in the winter. By changing the normal sequence, you not only short-circuit the audience's expectations but also assert that humans, though of the natural world, are not enslaved by its patterns.
Holidays and Rituals
Holidays, and the rituals that mark them, give you another technique for expressing meaning, pacing the story, and showing its development. A ritual is a philosophy that has been translated into a set of actions that are repeated at specific intervals. So any ritual you use is already a dramatic event, with strong visual elements, that you can insert in your drama. A holiday expands the scope of the ritual to a national scale and so allows you to express the political as well as the personal and social meaning of the ritual.
If you wish to use a ritual or holiday in your story, you must first examine the philosophy inherent in that ritual and decide in what way you agree or disagree with it. In your story, you may wish to support or attack all or part of that philosophy.
A Christmas Story
(screenplay by Jean Shepherd & Leigh Brown & Bob Clark., 1983)
The Great American Fourth of July and
Other Disasters
(novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd,
screenplay by Jean Shepherd1982) The humorist Jean Shepherd is a master at constructing a story around a particular holiday. He begins by combining a holiday with a storyteller reminiscing about his family. This sets up a Utopia of childhood for the audience, where each viewer nestles in the recognition of living happily within a family. The particular holiday creates a time passageway, rocketing the viewer back to his childhood. Shepherd does this by having the voice-over storyteller recount the funny things that happened every year on that holiday. For example, his little brother always wore a snowsuit that was too big for him. His dad always got a gift that would infuriate his mom. He always had to deal with the neighborhood bullies. And what about the time Flick got his tongue stuck on the flagpole?
Shepherd supports the philosophy of the holiday not in a straightforward or religious way but by pretending to make fun of it, by laughing at the silly things people do at this time every year. But those silly things also make him feel good, especially because they happen every year and because the people of his memory will never grow old. This is the power of the perennial story.
If you use this technique, it is important that you understand the relationship between the ritual, the holiday, and the season in which the holiday occurs. Then orchestrate all of these elements to express change, whether in the hero or in the world.
Hannah and Her Sisters
(by Woody Allen, 1986) You can see how to connect a holiday to your story and show character change in Hannah and Her Sisters. In this film, the holiday is Thanksgiving. A uniquely American celebration going back to colonial times, it embodies the formation of a community to give thanks for a bountiful harvest and the beginnings of a nation. But Woody Allen doesn't use Thanksgiving to structure the story and provide the underlying theme in the normal way. Instead of focusing on the philosophy of the holiday, Allen creates a story of simultaneous action that crosscuts among three sisters and their husbands or boyfriends. At the beginning of the story, there is no community, either among the characters or in the story structure itself. Allen creates community through the structure by interweaving three different love stories and by using the holiday of Thanksgiving three different times.
The structure works like this. The story begins at a Thanksgiving dinner that all the characters attend with the wrong partners. Then the story fractures into crosscuts among the six individuals. In the middle of the story, they all come together at Thanksgiving again, and this time most are with new, but still wrong, people. The story fractures again into its many simultaneous strands, with the characters struggling and apart. The story ends with each of the characters together at Thanksgiving a third time, but this time part of a real community, because each is now coupled with the right partner. Story and holiday become one. These characters don't talk about Thanksgiving; they live it.
The Single Day
The single day is another increment of time that has very specific effects when used in a story. The first effect is to create simultaneous story movement while maintaining narrative drive. Instead of showing a single character over a long development—the linear approach of most stories—you present a number of characters acting at the same time, right now, today. But the ticking of the hours keeps the story line moving forward and gives the story a sense of compression.
If you use a twelve-hour clock, setting the entire story in one day or one night, you create a funnel effect. The audience senses not only that each of the story strands will be settled at the end of the twelve hours but also that the urgency will increase as the deadline nears. American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Smiles of a Summer Night use this method.
If you
use a twenty-four-hour clock, you lessen the urgency and increase the sense of the circular. No matter what may have happened, we return to the beginning, with everything the same, and start all over again. Some writers use this circular sense to highlight change even more.
In this technique, you show that while most things do remain the same, the one or two tilings that have changed in the last twenty-four hours are that much more significant. This technique is the underlying foundation of stories as different as Ulysses and Groundhog Day. (The television show 24 reverses this technique, using the twenty-four-hour clock, stretched over an entire television season, to heighten suspense and pack the plot.)
Notice that this twenty-four-hour circular day has many of the same thematic effects as the four seasons. Not surprisingly, both techniques are often connected with comedy, which tends to be circular, emphasizes society as opposed to the individual, and ends in some kind of communion or marriage. Techniques of circular time are also associated with the myth form, which is based on circularity of space. In many classic myth stories, the hero starts at home, goes on a journey, and returns home to find what was already within him.
Eugene O'Neill uses the single-day technique in Long Day's Journey into Night. But unlike Ulysses, which covers almost twenty-four hours and evokes the positive qualities of circularity, Long Day's Journey into Night covers only about eighteen hours, from morning into night. This gives the story a declining line, from hope to despair, as the family becomes increasingly nasty and the mother moves toward drugged-out madness.
A second major effect of the single-day technique is to emphasize the everyday quality of the drama that is being played out. Instead of cutting out dead time and showing only the big dramatic moments, you show the little events and the boring details that make up the average person's life (as in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). Implied in this "day in the life" approach is that drama is just as valid, if not more so, for the little guy as for the king.
The Perfect Day
A variation on the single-day technique is the perfect day. The perfect day is a time version of the Utopian moment and as such is almost always used to structure a section of the story, rather than the story itself. Implied in the technique is that everything is in harmony, which limits how long you can use it, since too much time without conflict will kill your story.
The perfect-day technique usually connects a communal activity with a twelve-hour day or night. Communal activity is the crucial element in any Utopian moment. Attaching it to a natural increment of time, like dawn to dusk, intensifies the feeling of everything working well together because the harmony is grounded in a natural rhythm. The writers of Witness understood this very well when they connected the perfect day with the Amish community building a barn and the two leads falling in love.
Time Endpoint
A time endpoint, also known as a ticking clock, is a technique in which you tell the audience up front that the action must be completed by a specific time. It is most common in action stories (Speed), thrillers (Outbreak), caper stories (where the characters pull off some kind of heist, as in Ocean's Eleven), and suicide mission stories (The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen). A time endpoint gives you the benefit of intense narrative drive and great speed, although at the expense of texture and subtlety. It also creates an even faster funnel than the twelve-hour day, which is why it is often used when writers want to give an action story epic scope. The time endpoint lets you show literally hundreds of characters acting simultaneously and with great urgency, without stopping the narrative drive. In these kinds of stories—The Hunt for Red October is an example—the time endpoint is usually connected to a single place where all the actors and forces must converge.
A less common but very effective use of the time endpoint is in comedy journey stories. Any journey story is inherently fragmented and meandering. A comic journey makes the story even more fragmented because the forward narrative drive stops every time you do some comic business. Jokes and gags almost always take the story sideways; the story waits while a character is dropped or diminished in some way. By telling the audience up front that there is a specific time endpoint to the story, you give them a forward line they can hang on to through all the meandering. Instead of getting impatient to know what comes next, they relax and enjoy the comic moments along the way. We see this technique in comic journey stories like The Blues Brothers and Jacques Tati's Traffic.
Now that you've explored some techniques for making your story world develop over time, you have to connect the world with the hero's development at every step of the story. The overall arc—such as slavery to freedom—gives you the big picture of how the world of your story will change. But now you have to detail that development through story structure. Structure is what allows you to express your theme without sermonizing. It is also the way you show the audience a highly textured story world without losing narrative drive.
How do you do this? In a nutshell, you create a visual seven steps. Each of the seven key story structure steps tends to have a story world all its own. Each of these is a unique visual world within the overall story arena. Notice what a huge advantage this is: the story world has texture but also changes along with the change in the hero. To the seven structure steps you attach the other physical elements of the world, like natural settings, man-made spaces, technology, and time. This is how you create a total orchestration of story and world.
These are the structure steps that tend to have their own unique sub-world ("apparent defeat or temporary freedom" and "visit to death" are not among the seven key structure steps):
■ Weakness and need
■ Desire
■ Opponent
■ Apparent defeat or temporary freedom
■ Visit to death
■ Battle
■ Freedom or slavery
■ Weakness and Need At the beginning of the story, you show a subworld that is a physical manifestation of the hero's weakness or fear.
■ Desire This is a subworld in which the hero expresses his goal.
■ Opponent The opponent (or opponents) lives or works in a unique place that expresses his power and ability to attack the hero's great weakness. This world of the opponent should also be an extreme version of the hero's world of slavery.
■ Apparent Defeat or Temporary Freedom Apparent defeat is the moment when tlie hero wrongly believes he has lost to the opponent (we'll discuss it in more detail in Chapter 8 on plot). The world of the hero's apparent defeat is typically the narrowest space in the story up to that point. All of the forces defeating and enslaving the hero are literally pressing in on him.
In those rare stories where the hero ends enslaved or dead, he often experiences a moment of temporary freedom at the same point when most heroes experience apparent defeat. This usually occurs in some kind of Utopia that is the perfect place for the hero if he will only realize it in time.
■ Visit to Death In the visit to death (another step we'll discuss in Chapter 8), the hero travels to the underworld, or, in more modern stories, he has a sudden sense that he will die. He should encounter his mortality in a place that represents the elements of decline, aging, and death.
■ Battle The battle should occur in the most confined place of the entire story. The physical compression creates a kind of pressure-cooker effect, in which the final conflict builds to its hottest point and explodes.
■ Freedom or Slavery The world completes its detailed development by ending as a place of freedom or greater slavery and death. Again, the specific place should represent in physical terms the final maturation or decline of the character.
Here are some examples of how the visual seven steps work and how you attach the other four major elements—natural settings, man-made spaces, technology, and time—of the story world (indicated in italics).
Star Wars
(by George Lucas, 1977) Outer space is the overall world and arena.
■ Weakness and Need, De
sire? Desert wilderness. In this barren landscape, where somehow farming is done, Luke feels stuck. "I'll never get out of here," he complains. The event that triggers Luke's desire is a hologram, a miniature, of Princess Leia asking for help.
■ Opponent Death Star. Fantasy allows you to use abstract shapes as real objects. Mere the opponent's subworld, the Death Star, is a giant sphere. Inside, Darth Vader interrogates Princess Leia. Later the Death Star commanders learn that the emperor has disbanded the last remnants of the republic, and Darth Vader shows them the deadly power of the Force. ■ Apparent Defeat and Visit to Death Collapsing garbage dump with a monster under water. Combining "apparent defeat" and "visit to death," writer George Lucas places the characters in water, with a deadly creature underneath. And the room isn't just the narrowest space in the story up to that point; it is a collapsing room, which means it gives us a narrowing of space and time, ■ Battle Trench. Realistically, a dogfight would occur in open space where the pilots have room to maneuver. But Lucas understands that the best battle occurs in the tightest space possible. So he has the hero dive his plane into a long trench, with walls on both sides, and the endpoint of the hero's desire, the weak spot where the Death Star can be destroyed, at the far end of the trench. As if that's not enough, Luke's main opponent, Darth Vader, is chasing him. Luke takes his shot, and that small spot at the end of the trench is the convergent point of the entire film. An epic that covers the universe funnels down, visually and structurally, to a single point. ■ Freedom Hall of Heroes. The warriors' success is celebrated in a large hall where all the other warriors give their public approval.
The Wild Bunch
(story by Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner, screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah, 1969) This story uses a single-line journey through barren territory, and it gets progressively more barren. The story also places the characters in a society that is undergoing fundamental change, from village to city. New technology, in the form of cars and machine guns, has arrived, and the Bunch doesn't know how to adapt to this new world.
