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■ Seasons Is one or more of the seasons important to the story? If so, try to come up with a unique way to connect the seasons to the dramatic line.
■ Holiday or Ritual If the philosophy of a holiday or ritual is central to your story, decide in what way you agree or disagree with that philosophy. Then connect the holiday or ritual at the appropriate story points.
■ Visual Seven Steps Detail the visual subworlds that you will attach to the main structure steps in your story. Look especially at these structure steps:
1. weakness or need
2. desire
3. opponent
4. apparent defeat or temporary freedom
5. visit to death
6. battle
7. freedom or slavery
Figure out how to connect the major natural settings and man-made spaces to the subworlds you use. Concentrate on the following three subworlds:
1. Weakness subworld: If your hero starts the story enslaved, explain how the initial subworld is an expression or accentuation of the hero's great weakness.
2. Opponent subworld: Describe how the opponent's world
expresses his power and ability to attack the hero's great weakness.
3. Battle subworld: Try to come up with a place of battle that is the most confined space of the entire story.
As practice, let's break down the story world of one of the most popular stories ever written.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
(novel by J. K. Rowling, screenplay by Steven Kloves, 2001)
■ Story World in One Line A school for wizards in a giant magical medieval castle.
■ Overall Arena All of the Harry Potter stories combine myth, fairy tale, and the schoolboy-coming-of-age story (as in Goodbye; Mr. Chips; Tom Brown's School Days; and Dead Poets Society). So Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone uses the fantasy structure of beginning in the mundane world and then moving to the main arena, which is the fantasy world. That world and arena is the Hogwarts School, set in a castle surrounded by lush nature. The story plays out over the course of the school year in a large but defined place with seemingly infinite subworlds.
■ Value Oppositions and Visual Oppositions The story has a number of value oppositions on which the visual oppositions are based. 1. Harry and the wizards of Hogwarts versus Muggles: The first opposition is between wizards and Muggles. Muggles, who are average, nonmagical people, value possessions, money, comfort, sensual pleasure, and themselves above all. The wizards of Hogwarts School value loyalty, courage, self-sacrifice, and learning.
Visually, Muggles live in average suburban houses on average suburban streets, where everything is homogenized to look the same, where there is no magic and no community, and nature has been so tamed that it's almost gone.
The Hogwarts' world is a magical kingdom unto itself, a huge castle surrounded by wild nature, a school that teaches not only magic but also the values on which the school was founded.
2. Harry versus Lord Voldemort: The main opposition is between good wizard Harry and evil wizard Voldemort". Where Harry values friendship, courage, achievement, and fairness, Voldemort believes only in power and will do anything, including committing murder, to get it. Harry's visual world is the "shining city on the hill," the community of scholars at Hogwarts. Voldemort's world is the Dark Forest that surrounds the school and the dark underworld below the school where his power is strongest.
3. Harry versus Draco Malfoy. The third major opposition is student to student. Young Draco Malfoy is aristocratic and disdainful of the poor. He values status and winning at all costs. Draco is set in visual opposition to Harry, Ron, and Hermione by being placed in a competing house, Slytherin, with its own flags and colors.
■ Land, People, and Technology The story is set in the present, but it is really a throwback to an earlier societal stage with a very different combination of land, people, and technology than the audience expects. This is a modern-day prep school set in a medieval world ol castles, lakes, and forests. The technology is another hybrid: magic with a high-tech sheen, where the latest witch's broom is the Nimbus 2000 and the techniques of magic are taught with all the depth and rigor of a modern-day university.
■ Systems The Harry Potter stories fuse two systems: the prep school and the world of magic. This fusion is the gold of the story idea (and worth billions of dollars). Writer J. K. Rowling has taken great pains to detail the rules and workings of this hybrid system. The headmaster and head wizard is Professor Dumbledore. Teachers such as Professor McGonagall and Professor Snape teach courses in potions, defense against the dark arts, and herbology. Students are divided into four houses: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. The wizard world even has its own sport, Quidditch, with as precise a set of rules as any sport in the "real" world.
As a first-year student who is only eleven, Harry is at the bottom of the hierarchy in this world. His great potential suggests he will rise to the top over the course of the seven stories and seven years. But for now he represents the audience, and they learn how this magical system works at the same time he does.
■ Natural Settings Hogwarts castle is built beside a mountain lake and is surrounded by the Dark Forest.
■ Weather Weather is used to some dramatic effect but in a fairly predictable way. It is raining heavily when Hagrid arrives at the hut where Harry's foster family has hidden. There is lightning on Halloween when the troll attacks the school. And it is snowing at Christmas.
■ Man-made Spaces Rowling makes full use of the techniques of man-made spaces in storytelling. She sets up the magic world by first showing the mundane. For his first eleven years, Harry lives enslaved in a bland suburban house on a bland suburban street. After learning he is a wizard, Harry in effect goes back in time when he and Hagrid go shopping on the nineteenth-century Dickensian street of Diagon Alley. The street is still recognizably English, but its quaint shops and swirl of community make it an exciting halfway house on the journey to the magical medieval kingdom of Hogwarts School. Along with Ollivander's Wand Shop is Gringott's Bank, whose goblin clerks and cavernous vaults suggest a Dickensian Hall of the Mountain King. Harry then takes a nineteenth-century locomotive, the Hogwarts Express, deep into the fairy-tale world of Hogwarts.
The castle of Hogwarts School is the ultimate warm house, with infinite nooks and crannies, filled with a community of students and teachers. The center of the warm house is the great dining hall, the cathedral-like space hung with banners that hark back to King Arthur and the days of chivalry. This is where the community comes together as a whole and where all can give praise when one of their members has done well.
Within this warm house is a labyrinth of diversity. The Escher-like stairways shift position and lead to often unpredictable locations. Students must use a secret password to get to their rooms.
This warm house also has its terrifying places. There is the forbidden area on the third floor, dusty and empty, with a room and a trapdoor guarded by a huge three-headed dog. This trapdoor is really the passageway to the cellarlike Underworld of the school. Down there is a room with giant chess pieces, and the battle of the mind played out there is a life-and-death struggle.
■ Miniatures The sport of Quidditch is a miniature of this magical world and Harry's place in it. Just as Hogwarts is a hybrid of the boarding school and the world of magic, Quidditch combines rugby, cricket, and soccer with flying broomsticks, witchcraft, and the jousting contests of the knights of old England. Through Quidditch, the two archrival houses in the school, Gryffindor and Slytherin, can engage in mock witch battle and show off the more spectacular action elements of their craft.
As befits his reputation as a wizard of great potential, Harry wins the coveted role as his team's Seeker, and he is the youngest to fill the position in a century. Of course, the concept of the Seeker has larger connotations from myth and philosophy, and it describes Harry's overall quest, not just in Sorcerer's Stone but in the entire Harry Potter series.
■ Becoming Big or Small This technique is not used much in Sorcerer's Stone, but the three friends in effect become small when they must battle the giant troll in the bathroom; the three-headed dog is enormous, and Hagrid is a gentle giant.
■ Passageways Rowling uses three passageways in the story. The first is the brick wall Hagrid "opens" by spinning the bricks like a Rubik's Cube. With this gateway, Harry moves from the mundane world of his Muggle upbringing to the wizard street of Diagon Alley. The second passageway is platform 9% at the train station, where Harry follows the Weasley boys right through the brick archway to board the Hogwarts Express. The final passageway is the trapdoor to the Underworld of Hogwarts, guarded by the three-headed dog.
■ Technology The technology is among the most inventive of all the elements of Sorcerer's Stone and is fundamental to the huge popularity of the Harry Potter series. This is magic tech, and it has the dual appeal of the power of modern high technology allied with the charm of animals and magic. For example, owls deliver the mail by dropping it in the hands of the recipient. Wands, the ultimate tool of the wizard's power, are sold in a special wand store, and each wand chooses its owner. The favorite method of personal transportation is the broomstick, and the latest model, the Nimbus 2000, has specs as
quantified as a computer's. The sorting hat reads the mind and heart of its wearer and determines what house fits him best.
Rowling even creates tools that signify false change and false value. The wish mirror takes one of the classic tools of storytelling— indeed, a symbol for storytelling itself—and shows the viewer what he most desperately dreams of becoming. The image he sees is a double of the self, but it shows a false desire on which the viewer can waste his entire life. The invisibility cloak, a tool from ancient philosophy, allows the wearer to exercise his deepest desires without paying a cost. It allows him to take greater risks, but the danger if he fails is huge. The Sorcerer's Stone can turn metal into gold and make an elixir so that the drinker never dies. But that is false growth, a change that has not been earned by hard work.
■ Hero's Change and World Change By the end of the story, Harry has overcome the ghost of his parents' death and learned of the power of love. But the timeless Hogwarts School, set within a lush natural world, does not change.
■ Seasons Rowling connects the circularity of the school year-including the seasons—with the deeply natural setting of Hogwarts School. This creates a subtle tie between the maturation of the students, especially Harry, and the wisdom and rhythms of nature.
■ Holiday or Ritual Sorcerer's Stone includes Halloween and Christmas as punctuation points in the rhythm of the school year, but the author doesn't comment on the underlying philosophy of either.
Now let's examine the visual seven steps and the story elements associated with them (indicated in italics).
■ Harry's Problem, Ghost Suburban house, room under the stairs. As in many myth stories (such as the stories of Moses and Oedipus and many tales by Dickens), Harry appears first as a baby, a foundling to be raised by others. The wizards hint at his ghost (the event from Harry's past that will haunt him) and the fame that will precede him, which is why they are placing him with a Muggle family they know to be horrible. Indeed, Harry spends his first eleven years stuffed into a cagelike room under the stairs. His greedy and selfish aunt, uncle,
and cousin boss him around and keep him ignorant of who he really is.
■ Weakness and Need Snake exhibit at the zoo, the great hall at Hogwarts School. Harry doesn't know his origins or his great potential as a wizard. He and the audience get a sense of what he doesn't know when he visits the snake exhibit at the zoo. In this place, wild nature is completely tamed and imprisoned. Harry is shocked at his ability to talk to the snake and free him while also imprisoning his nasty cousin in the snake's cage.
Later, in the great dining hall of Hogwarts, both Harry's potential and his need are underscored in front of the entire school when the sorting hat says he has courage, a fine mind, talent, and a thirst to prove himself. Yet in his first classes, Harry's lack of self-mastery and training as a wizard are painfully clear.
■ Desire, Ghost Hut, great hall, trapdoor. Because it is the first in a seven-book series, Sorcerer's Stone must set up a number of desire lines.
1. Overall desire for the series: to go to Hogwarts School and learn to become a great wizard.
Harry gains the first part of this desire when Hagrid comes to the hut where Harry's foster family has hidden him away. Hagrid informs Harry that he is a wizard, born to wizards who were murdered, and that he has been accepted into Hogwarts School. Learning to become a great wizard will require all seven books.
2. Desire line that tracks this book: to win the school cup.
This goal is set when Harry and the other first-year students gather in the great hall, learn the rules of the school, and are placed in one of four houses by the sorting hat. Notice that this collects all the episodes of a myth, played out over the course of an amorphous school year, and places them on a single, quantifiable track. The desire line begins in the hall where all the students are gathered, and it ends in the same hall where all cheer when Harry and his friends win the victory for their house.
3. Desire line for the second half of this story: to solve the mystery of the Sorcerer's Stone under the trapdoor.
The desire to win the school cup gives shape to the school year. But a lot of episodic business must be accomplished,
especially in this opening story of the series. Rowling must introduce numerous characters, explain the rules of magic, and provide many details of the world, including the Quidditch match. So a second, more focused desire becomes necessary.
When Harry, Ron, and Hermione accidentally end up on the restricted third floor and find the trapdoor guarded by the three-headed dog, they gain the desire that funnels this world-heavy story to a fine point. Sorcerer's Stone becomes a detective story, a form that has one of the cleanest and strongest spines in all of storytelling.
■ Opponents Suburban house, classes, stadium, bathroom. Harry faces his first opponents, Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Cousin Dudley in his own house. Like Cinderella, he must do all the chores, and he is forced to live in a tiny room under the stairs. Harry's ongoing opponent among the students is Draco Malfoy, with whom he must contend in many of his classes. As a member of Gryffindor house, Harry battles Draco's house, Slytherin, in the Quidditch match in the stadium. Harry and his friends fight the giant troll in the girls' bathroom.
■ Opponent, Apparent Defeat Dark Forest. Lord Voldemort is Harry's long-term, behind-the-scenes, most powerful opponent. Rowling, in this first of seven Potter books, faces a difficult story problem. Since she must sustain this opposition for seven books, and because Harry is only eleven years old in the first book, she must start Voldemort in a highly weakened state. Here in Sorcerer's Stone, Voldemort can barely keep himself alive and must work through the mind and body of Professor Quirrell.
Still, Voldemort and his subworlds are dangerous. The Dark Forest is filled with deadly plants and animals, and Harry and the other students can easily get lost there. Harry enters the terrifying Dark Forest at night, and there he comes upon the vampirelike Lord Voldemort drinking the blood of a unicorn. Even in his weakened state, Voldemort is powerful enough to kill. Only the last-second intervention of a centaur saves Harry's life.
■ Opponent, Battle Underworld of Hogwarts (trapdoor, Devil's Snare, enclosed room). Harry, Ron, and Hermione go to the restricted third
floor to find the Sorcerer's Stone. Hut when they get past the three-headed dog (like Cerberus guarding Hades), fall through the trapdoor, and drop below the strangling roots of the Devil's Snare, they are in the Underworld of Hogwarts, Voldemort's other subworld. There they must win the violent battle of the abstract but deadly wizard's chess match.
Harry's battle with Voldemort takes place in an enclosed room—a tight space. The room itself is at the bottom of a long flig
ht of stairs, which gives the effect of being at the point of a vortex.
Harry faces Voldemort and Professor Quirrell alone there, and when he tries to escape, Quirrell rings the room with fire. Voldemort attacks Harry's great weakness—his desperate wish to be with the parents he never knew—by promising to bring them back if Harry gives him the stone, ■ Self-Revelation Room of fire, infirmary. Under extreme attack from Voldemort and Professor Quirrell, Harry takes a stand as a wizard for good. Recovering in the infirmary, he learns from Professor Dumbledore that his body is literally infused with and protected by love. Somehow his skin burned the evil Quirrell to death because of the love Harry's mother showed for him when she sacrificed her life so that he might live, ■ New Equilibrium Train station. With the school year over, the students are about to go through the passageway back to the mundane world. But Harry is now armed with a picture book that Hagrid gives him that shows him in the loving arms of the parents he never knew.
A LOT WRITERS think of symbols as those pesky lit-
tle things that were only important in lit class. Big mistake. If instead you think of symbols as jewels sewn into the story tapestry that have great emotional effect, you'll have some idea of the power of this set of story techniques.
Symbol is a technique of the small. It is the word or object that stands for something else—person, place, action, or thing—and is repeated many times over the course of the story. Just as character, theme, and plot are big puzzles to fool and please the audience, symbol is the small puzzle that works its magic deep below the surface. Symbols are crucial to your success as a storyteller because they give you a hidden language that emotionally sways the audience.
HOW SYMBOLS WORK
A symbol is an image with special power that has value to the audience. Just as matter is highly concentrated energy, a symbol is highly concentrated meaning. In fact, it is the most focused condenser-expander of any storytelling technique. A simple guide to using symbol might be "Refer