Developing Story Ideas Page 12

  She wills him to choose her. The gods assist …

  She is imprisoned in a tower, but towers are meant to be breached, and sympathetic handmaidens exist to carry messages.

  Now she must oppose the will of her parents—the king and queen—to see him.

  No self-respecting princess is without a mirror, and here the heroine primps to make herself worthy. All interesting characters have flaws; hers is narcissism.

  When her lover appears, the queen summons him for royal review.

  Amanda’s story makes a slew of ironic juxtapositions: hunter/prey, secret message/English lesson, petitioner/freedom, upper house/ lower dungeon, mother/taxidermist, and mink/girl, mink/boy. Narrative art loves giving us puzzles to solve, tasks we perform mostly at an unconscious level and aided by contextual references—a fairy tale in this case. By integrating the traditional with the modern, Amanda’s tale confronts us with elements that make an ironic, eloquent commentary, and alerts us to an ominous subtext.

  Juxtaposing objects or elements makes us sense the meaning of each in relation to the other. The peace demonstrator putting a flower in a soldier’s rifle during a 1960s face-off constructed a brilliant juxtaposition, leading to a thousand sympathetic press stories. Juxtaposing objects, actions, images, sounds, or ideas is at the heart of poetic language because it stimulates the audience into searching for implied meanings.

  Juxtaposition in a written narrative is like that in film, formerly called montage, French for “assembly” or “showing.” Juxtaposition in film editing has been divided into four categories:

  Subtexts are the meanings beneath all surface events; they exist in intelligent fiction as they do in life. Scenes of tension often have ambiguous subtexts, ones at extreme variance with surface events.

  Structural—advances the stages and logic of a story or scene.

  Relational—creates contrast, parallels, or symbolism; for example, a baby crawling juxtaposed against a seal flopping across rocks.

  Conflictual—counterpoises opposing forces, such as intercutting shots of Palestinian youths hurling rocks with shots of an advancing Israeli tank.

  Elision—helps remove unnecessary time from a process. For example, a field of bright wildflowers in summer, then cut to the same field blanketed in snow, indicating the passage of time.

  Juxtaposing events or objects (Figure 14–1) invites the audience to draw conclusions. Stranded fishing boats propped up in a dried up lake bed, for instance, will speak volumes about the futility of a government dam project. Inventive pictorial composition and blocking (positioning or moving characters and objects in relation to each other) makes use of comparison and design to intensify our sensitivity to ideas.

  Figure 14–1 Juxtaposing objects draws our attention to ironies. Here a car parked next to a 2,500-year-old Lycian sarcophagus implies that each is the chosen transportation of its day.

  By all means use such techniques in your writing, but not in early drafts, or you’ll get tangled up creating attractive form when you should be developing the foundations. As you come to reread and redraft, clues will lie in wait to nudge you toward the next stages. Writing is an evolutionary process, never a one-shot test.

  Embellishment and the Oral Tradition

  A fascinating aspect of family stories is that with each retelling poetic allusions enter by increments. Embellishment is natural to storytelling; it is how stories grow, no matter whether their tellers are single or multiple. Many variations exist from different periods of Arthurian tales, each with their additions and changes as the result of new tellers and new times. Telling something, getting feedback, and improving the next telling are the lifeblood of the oral and theatrical traditions, and central to this book’s methods.

  Example 3 (Peter Riley)

  It is 1965 in New York City, the upper West Side on a rainy afternoon, night approaching. The sidewalk is busy with people making their ways home from work, stopping off for a drink, waiting for a bus. An attractive young woman in her early twenties waits at the corner for the light to change, doing her best to cover her hair from the rain with a newspaper.

  A fresh-faced man in his early thirties, hair neatly combed and wearing a simple suit, strolls up beside her, his umbrella aloft and shielding him from the drops. He watches the light change and then notices the girl beside him. He is obviously quite taken with her. The crowd on the corner surges across the intersection as the traffic comes to a halt, but he only stands there and watches her walk away. He suddenly snaps to reality and dashes across the corner after her.

  The man catches up with the young woman and politely asks her if she’d like to share his umbrella as far as she’s going. She is mildly surprised but grateful, and he seems unthreatening. They stroll down the sidewalk and chat about the weather, how the days are getting shorter—until finally the woman stops and announces that she’s reached her destination. It seems that she’s meeting her boyfriend here for an early dinner. He can be seen waiting at a table inside. The young man, disappointed, tells her it was nice meeting her and carries on his way. She watches him go, curious. Then she enters the restaurant and joins her boyfriend.

  As they are about to order, they are suddenly interrupted by the young man with the umbrella, who politely asks the young woman for a moment of her time. She steps into the lobby under the watchful eye of her flustered companion, more curious than ever. The young man presents her with a small bouquet of flowers and tells her he absolutely must see her again.

  Author’s notes on the story’s underlying meaning and importance:

  As romantic and impossible as it may seem, this is how my parents met.

  The story’s meaning or importance lies in the chance taken—the fact that a random meeting that could have been only that and nothing more ultimately resulted in a lifetime partnership and a family. Sickening as it may be in our cynical day and age, it is a paean to love at first sight.

  This story presents no real narrative or production problems.

  This story would seem on the surface to have little relation to my themes, but there is a connection to be found with the theme of the individual in the modern world. In this story two souls who are perhaps intended for one another seem to meet by “chance,” surrounded by the gloom of the city and its faceless, uninterested inhabitants. The most human of emotions finds its way in an environment that would seem to stamp it out.

  In the commotion of the city, a rain shower threatens the mild young woman’s beauty and composure, so the chivalrous young man offers the shelter of his umbrella. This she accepts because, in her coolness and curiosity, she judges him harmless. When he returns she becomes “more curious than before.” By presenting her with a “small bouquet of flowers,” he shows that he is stricken and “absolutely must see her again.” Who could resist? Improvising like some Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain, he proffers his heart. The boyfriend waiting at the table will get nowhere, for all he can offer is dinner.

  Character and action descriptions in a scene outline are strongest when you use the compressed, evocative language of poetry. Later, you will have to develop special imagery, action, and behavior to consolidate the values so effortlessly described in words. We know people best from what they do and say.

  Note how effectively Peter evokes his main character. He has “neatly combed hair,” “strolls,” is “fresh faced,” and wears a “simple suit.” Only a few aptly chosen details establish a most appealing image. Aim for the deft, poetic compression of this in any proposal, outline, or screenplay. Less is always more.

  However, when you expand to the full narrative, you will need to translate those key adjectives into active, behavioral equivalencies, ones we shall notice in that busiest of urban settings. Notice what seals the young man’s ascendancy: his gallantry in offering his umbrella against the unfriendly weather; thrusting flowers at her as a confession of his vulnerability. These are actions from the repertoire of courtly love. Notice also that the POV character at the begin
ning is Peter’s father, but that it migrates halfway through to his mother.

  Younger writers often like to flex muscle with dark and ugly subject matter, so it is refreshing to find this love story tale about Peter’s parents. Even grim stories need humor, hope, or flashes of beauty as leavening to the sterner stuff.

  Going Further

  Available at the website www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger are the following additional projects: Assignment 14–2: Family Story as Comic Strip and Assignment 14–3: The Untold Story. Books that might be helpful are:

  Carmack, Sharon Debartolo. The Genealogy Sourcebook. McGraw Hill, 2009 (A good starting guide to genealogy. Tells how to start interviewing and logging the details of your family. Start with the oldest members, one of whom may already be the unofficial family historian. Be warned, you have started down the trail of an addiction!).

  MacEntee, Thomas. Preserving Your Family’s Oral History and Stories. Amazon, 2013 (Lots of resources and tips. Ways to interview the older generation and preserve their tales).

  Stone, Elizabeth. Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. Times Books, 1988 (Wide-ranging survey of family stories that “define our sense of the unique nature of our families, and our own places in them” and provide “inspiration, warnings, and cherished values.” This compendium sorts family tales into groupings that define the world, the family, or the individual).

  15 A Myth, Legend, or Folktale Retold

  Myths, legends, and folktales are authorless tales whose intrinsic qualities and messages have made them endure. Indeed, they survive from antiquity because they remain adaptable and still potent for capturing the pressures and choices in contemporary life. They represent cultural assets that any writer can use.

  Traditional tales, such as legends, myths, and folktales are authorless, orally transmitted traditions. Legends are inauthentic history; that is, they use figures and events taken from the past and reshaped to serve contemporary purposes. Myths, which often involve the supernatural, represent the often insoluble principles governing the human condition. Folktales are usually cautionary narratives designed to pass on the knowledge and attitudes necessary to survival.

  On Legends, Myths, and Folktales

  A legend is history made inauthentic from repeated telling. That is, the tale may treat actual people and events from history, but they have been reshaped to answer the needs of each succeeding generation, indeed each successive storyteller. King Arthur probably existed, but over the centuries, countless troubadours embellished the different stories so that now, over a thousand years later when Arthurian legends have almost no historical verification, they still remain alive and pertinent. This is so because they comment on timeless human qualities such as love, loyalty, honor, faith, humility, and courage—and all the tests that make life an illuminating struggle. As an illustration of their relevance, Bert Olton’s Arthurian Legends on Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000) lists 250 productions that are either about Arthurian legends, or inspired by them.

  A myth is rather different. It is a tale, often involving the supernatural, dealing with inevitable and insoluble aspects of human experience. Myths illustrate such laws of the universe as, “we must usually take life as we find it.” The myth of Narcissus, who drowns while admiring his reflection in a pool, is an allegory for the perils of self-involvement. Rather than instructing us to respect bodies of water, or restrict our periods of self-admiration, the myth gleefully dramatizes what happens when someone’s vanity causes him to overlook danger. Myth, by nature fatalistic and much concerned with transgression or bad judgment, reminds us how the laws of the universe work. Greek mythology is no less than the history of a huge, aberrant, and dysfunctional family (Figure 15–1).

  Figure 15–1 Hecate in Greek mythology, the goddess of crossroads, was a triple being who ruled over the earth, sea, and sky.

  Fables and folktales are teaching stories whose job is to impart wisdom and survival skills. The best are capable of multitudinous interpretations, but superficially:

  Hansel and Gretel is about children surviving the wiles of a murderous stepmother.

  The Pied Piper of Hamelin warns of the seductions of charismatic leadership.

  Robin Hood is about the morality of bending laws on behalf of the underdog.

  Rapunzel deals with the longings of an imprisoned girl tempted by love to join her lover.

  Beauty and the Beast is about finding your true love when you’re no oil painting.

  Assignment 15–1: Adapt a Myth, Legend, or Folktale

  Find a myth, legend, or folktale that you can make work in a modern setting and that you find viscerally appealing. If your ethnic background is mixed (and whose isn’t?) you may like to research for a legend, folktale, or myth from among the remoter aspects of your background. For me this would mean foraging among Celtic and Hispanic tales before resorting to the familiar ones from my English upbringing.

  Step 1: Make up a presentation portfolio, which should include: A photocopy of the original tale

  A brief summary of its content

  Your new version, written in the usual outline form, which should include, A modern setting whose conventions are appropriate for a present-day story (that is, no magic potions, vanishing genies, or haunted shopping carts)

  Believable characters, believably motivated

  A plot easy to accept as credible today

  Step 2: Analyze briefly what your story is trying to convey about: The constants of human behavior

  The way things work in the world

  Interpreting Oral Tales

  Orally transmitted tales often carry more complex subtexts than the homily assigned them in children’s books. For example, the Italian “Doralice” by the 15th-century Giovanni Francesco Straparola is about a king whose dying wife tells him to marry again, but only to a woman whose finger fits her ring. Their daughter proving to have the only finger that fits it, the king wants to marry her.

  Dealing with father-daughter incest, the tale makes the princess’s husband punish the king for his lasciviousness. Other, similar stories make the daughter submit, since a father in the Middle Ages held ultimate authority in the family.

  As poetic allegories, stories often carry multiple meanings, and the wisdom embedded in their subtexts often makes them a challenging proposition for a modern adaptation.

  Adaptation Problems

  An attractive moral lesson may blind you to problems of adaptation. Many traditional tales hinge on the effects of a magic potion, obedience to some archaic custom, or submission to the will of a tyrannical parent. Transferred wholesale to the present day, your audience may be unable to suspend disbelief. In other situations you could employ the convenient properties of magical realism, but the assignment asks for a good story set in a world running under contemporary and familiar rules. So you may have to look hard for the modern embodiment of these situations. Say your tale calls for a self-destructively obedient daughter: Where can this be found? Try a fundamentalist immigrant father, formerly tortured as a political prisoner, now making extreme demands on his family. Should your myth call for a magic potion, you might solve it by making teenagers pop pills at a party, or having an anthropologist sample a shaman’s concoction as part of his research. Ingenuity can solve most problems.

  Examples

  Example 1: The Legend of Pretty Boy Floyd Retold (Michael Hanttula)

  A spring night. The wealthy man, P. B. Floyd, driving an expensive sports car, races through the back streets of a suburb to avoid the police car that patrols the main strips. Returning from the shipyard, where he has just completed refinishing the deck of his boat, his tattered jeans and stained shirt desecrate the fine leather seat that they rest on.

  Out of the darkness of an alleyway: a blur of spinning red and blue lights angers P. B., and his fist slams against the steering wheel as he pulls his “workday shoe”-covered foot from the accelerator. Pulling over, P. B. begins to prepare the doc
uments that the officer will look for. Reaching for his wallet, P. B. finds an empty pocket and an officer staring down his throat.

  He tries to explain, but the officer doesn’t trust someone dressed like he is. P. B. is asked to step out of the car—still trying to explain. The officer becomes infuriated with P. B. for attempting to lie his way out of this and calls for backup. P. B. explains that this isn’t necessary and the argument heats up. The officer rails at P. B. for insulting his intelligence and barks about his hatred for what criminals like him have done to the city. P. B. continues his attempt to justify himself, but the officer finally replies with a baton blow to the head. Finding himself on the ground and disoriented, P. B. struggles to stop the officer from beating him. The officer does not relent. As the baton meets his stomach, P. B. is able to grab hold, and he holds on for his life.

  The officer becomes even more enraged and threatens him with the consequences as he unleashes his service revolver. Without thought of his action, P. B. pulls forcefully on the baton and then strikes it back in the officer’s direction, trying to shake it free. The baton snaps back into the officer’s face. With a crack into his nose, the officer’s cartilage is forced into his brain, and his corpse collapses next to P. B. Sirens are approaching from a mile or so away as P. B. realizes what he has done.

  He flees, taking all the money he has with him, into the mountains. Witnesses have described P. B., and he is never able to return to a well-populated area. A slew of crimes following the officer’s murder, as well as a few that occurred before (all without suspects), are assumed to have been the work of the malicious P. B. Floyd, who “murdered an officer without thought when pulled over for a routine traffic violation.” Now he is the most feared and hated criminal in the state, held responsible for more crimes than this region has ever known.