Developing Story Ideas Read online

  P. B. lives in solitude and almost never makes contact with others, let alone commits any crimes. He does, however, donate what money he can to charities he formerly supported when he lived within the good grace of the town. Each time he sends only an unmarked packet filled with bills.

  The author writes:

  I guess this story speaks of mistaken identity. P. B. is never allowed to return because of the identity the town has given him, so he must leave everything behind and become a hermit—or face conviction and be incarcerated. P. B. is fairly innocent, but witnesses would say that it was he who had attacked the officer. In a police-controlled society, the might of the officer’s duty makes what is right: it gives the officer the right to act violently, but not the citizen the right to protect him/herself. Once someone is condemned by the state, the people of that state will also condemn that person, feeling as if that person’s actions against the state have been made against them personally as well.

  When initially condemned, a person is likely to be accused as an all-around evil person—whether through accusations of other actual crimes (as in the legend of Pretty Boy Floyd) or in having a criminal mind (so that criminal actions equate with an evil mentality). As far as my themes are concerned, I seem to deal with stories of misunderstood characters, or the (re)actions that come from misunderstandings. This seems to be a case of wrongful guilt placed upon P. B. that has sentenced him to a lifetime of solitude.

  Backstory is information about the past that the audience gleans as the story proceeds. It concerns events and situations that led the story’s characters into their present situations and attitudes. Editorializing is the sin of making backstory and authorial attitudes emerge blatantly, from “planted” dialogue, such as: “Ah, there you are, Alan. And you’ve just been to visit your father, who bought a share in the mine in 1962.”

  Every story that you or anyone produces will ask for further development. How to make this happen? In this story, the foreground events need some backstory (see the sidebar) to establish local police behavior and the type of people who live in the town. Without this, we will assume Floyd is spoiled and resentful by nature, when really he is the victim of prejudice and ill-treatment.

  After the killing, the narrative probably must branch into two stories, told in parallel segments: one follows Floyd in his developing solitude, the other shows town life with other crimes being committed that the townspeople conveniently ascribe to him in his absence. That he always gave anonymously to charities will need establishing early, if the anonymous gifts continued from his hideout are to carry their rightful value by the movie’s end.

  This story falls under the rubric of “give a dog a bad name,” for it illustrates how class or racial stereotyping shackles a person to a self-fulfilling reputation. Because Floyd is good looking and wealthy, the officer’s class antagonism is at fault. Floyd must perpetually be on guard, particularly since pride and irritability are his Achilles’ heel. Perhaps he is like Rodney King, the Los Angeles African American who failed to stop for a police car and who was beaten unmercifully for it. Like King, Floyd refuses to play the subordinate and pays dearly for his independence. Killing his tormentor leads inexorably to exile and to blame for all locally unsolved crimes.

  We might say, “Serves him right,” except that in his solitude he still seeks to relieve the suffering of others. Unlike his precursor Robin Hood, his actions go unseen, and the very fact that he does good from obscurity helps redeem him.

  Example 2 (Tatsuya Guillermo Ohno)

  Southern Japan, a small village. Joshi is a well-known architect and a religious person. He has built numerous churches, all of them in a very traditional style, with a round straight tree placed to support the ceiling at the center of each church. It symbolizes the strength and unity of each believer. A week after he has finished his latest church, the priest tells Joshi that the central tree has a hole and is infected.

  Leaving the tree in that condition would weaken the tree and the church would fall down. Also the other wood in the church could become infected and become weaker and weaker until it too fell apart. Knowing the dangers, Joshi starts a search party who walk into the middle of the forest.

  It is very hot and humid, but the party keeps searching for a tree. They sleep in the forest and the search starts early in the morning. Days go by and they still can’t find a tree. Every single one they find is infected and full of holes. Everyone is exhausted but still they keep looking. One night after a week of looking, the search is canceled. First thing in the morning everyone packs to go home, but Joshi doesn’t give up and goes on searching for the right tree. The forest is very dark. The moon is the only thing he can see. He can hardly see the trees at all.

  Just before dawn he decides to go back but as he returns he bumps into a big, big tree. He is amazed by the size of it, at how perfectly round and straight it is. The sun comes up and he sees that there are no holes in it and that it isn’t infected. The search party returns to cut the tree down, and with the help of all the villagers the tree is dragged to the village.

  The author writes:

  The story is about unity. The tree represents unity and is in this case the main support. Although the search was exhausting, the entire party worked hard looking for the tree. Hope encouraged Joshi to go on looking one more time for the tree, so the story is also about hope, which is the last thing we have to lose.

  This fairly straightforward story, barely modernized enough to fulfill the assignment, is about faith and persistence. Its hero Joshi, famed for his art and religiousness, is too comfortable with success and has become careless.

  Tatsumo’s draft could be accused of having an over-evident (“on the nose”) moral. Actually, some vital elements are missing, but they are not hard to find.

  Interrogating a story. To test a plot, search it for implausibilities and omissions. This is done well by a sympathetic group, who become the story’s first audience. If the author is to learn all that’s possible, he or she must listen carefully to the responses and not leap to defend or explain.

  You develop an idea by interrogating it—that is, by asking all the hard, valid questions that a skeptical audience might pose, and using all your ingenuity to find answers. For instance:

  Q:

  How does the priest come to report the tree’s failure to Joshi?

  A:

  Maybe with pain and disbelief, suggesting that the new church is literally rotten at the core and Joshi must rectify the disaster.

  Q:

  How does Joshi react?

  A:

  Perhaps with anger or disbelief until convinced that his work is indeed faulty. It is always useful to make a character’s path more difficult, to throw more trouble and tension in his way. This is called “raising the stakes,” a gambler’s expression signifying you have more at stake to win or lose.

  Raising the stakes. Find ways to intensify a character’s obstacles, and you make his character “play for higher stakes.” This drives him to a higher level of striving.

  Q:

  How does Joshi atone for his mistake?

  A:

  After seeing that he has failed, he must accept that it happened through pride and over-confidence. This allows him to earn a moral epiphany later.

  Q:

  How does he tell the villagers?

  A:

  The priest could offer to tell them on Joshi’s behalf, but it would be more powerful if Joshi told them himself. This would start him on the healing path of humility. Certainly it would raise the stakes to make him do so.

  Q:

  How does he get the villagers to follow him into the forest?

  A:

  Perhaps they first make him search alone. When he fails, he must return in humility to ask for their support.

  Q:

  Where is God when Joshi, who thinks he has paid his dues as a worshiper, needs him?

  A:

  God will not let Joshi continue: he must first con
front his faults and prove his moral worth. People only become heroes after severe tests.

  Genres and Their Subversion

  By applying the moral conventions that go with Tatsuya’s chosen genre of moral journey tale, some developmental possibilities take shape. Recognizing a genre calls up a range of expectations, such as the timing and sequencing of slapstick comedy, the drawn-out tension of the thriller, or the low-key night setups and melancholy of film noir. A genre helps you establish the story’s world, but it places limits on what you can do. We don’t, for instance, expect to see a purple cartoon cat strolling through Galilee in a biblical scene. Though we gravitate toward favorite genres, we still hope your treatment will contain something fresh and unexpected. Film critics wearied by the repetition of cinematic formulae are excellent at genre spotting, and the industry trade paper Variety has made ironic pigeonholing into an art form.

  A genre (French for type or class) refers to a category of artwork. Romantic comedy, documentary, and film noir are screen genres; blues, hard rock, symphonies, and jazz are genres of music. All genres involve audience expectations that have developed during their history.

  Audiences often like treatments that successfully combine or subvert old genres, or that veer off unexpectedly in another direction. This modifies the genre by purposefully subverting it.

  Example 3: Sisyphus Cries Dixie: A Modern Story (Michelle Arnove)

  On a deserted street just off the center of town in New Orleans, lies a beat up, half-burned-down building. Echoes from the Mardi Gras celebration going on a few blocks away shake the tattered stairs and walls of 13 Stone Hill Street. Three men occupy a room on the tired fourth floor. Two of them stand stiffly next to either side of the door. A large, well-manicured man named Æsopus sits center floor in a large chair behind a wooden table. Sisyphus, a muscular man in his early twenties enters the room and sits on the end of the table with great confidence.

  Æsopus, a formidable father figure to the “crawfish cavalry”—a local money laundering group—explains his family plight to Sisyphus. His daughter Ægina has eloped with Jupiter, a man known as a bad-news gambler about town. Sisyphus, a freelance journalist, is married to Harouka, the daughter of an extremely wealthy Arabian prince. Since Sisyphus belongs to the country club and socializes with many in these circles, Æsopus thinks that Sisyphus might have information on his daughter’s whereabouts. He thinks she was taken against her will and offers to compensate Sisyphus in exchange for the facts. Æsopus does not want to go to the local police due to his long-standing judicial differences of opinion over criminal operations. Lacking no wealth, Sisyphus prefers to be given a bottle of vintage wine from Æsopus’s infamous wine cellar. Æsopus agrees to this but warns Sisyphus of pitfalls in the situation.

  Since entrusting Sisyphus with his fears for his daughter, Sisyphus “must come through or else.” “Or else what?” responds Sisyphus. Æsopus will send his main man after him—Pluto, who runs Æsopus’s bottle-capping company. A factory down in the lower end of town, the company is a sorry excuse for an encapsulated sweat shop. As it turns out, Pluto’s top man, whom they call Death, has been in the hospital due to a golf cart accident with Sisyphus. They had been playing a round of golf, and Death was ahead in his game but fell from the golf cart on the way to the next hole. Word had it that Sisyphus, angry that he might lose, pushed Death from the cart as they were cruising at top speed across the putting green. Death ended up with a broken arm, broken leg, and fractured vertebrae. Pluto is not happy about this incident.

  Æsopus makes an agreement with Sisyphus that if he does not capture Jupiter and Ægina and bring them back to good ole’ New Orleans, Sisyphus will have to go to work for Æsopus under Pluto. The deal is on … until time runs out. Sisyphus tells his wife of the arrangement he made with Æsopus. He asks her to contact her father to help him out. Disgusted with Sisyphus’s continuous trouble-making schemes, the wife runs away with Pluto’s cousin, Erilias.

  Sisyphus fails and has no choice but to go to work for Æsopus under Pluto’s command. After a week at the factory in the posh back offices, Sisyphus cons Pluto into letting him off for a few days to find his wife and Erilias. He heads for the country club first, and finds himself engaged in a round of golf three hours later. His friends, happy to see him, drag him out first to dinner and later to a dance club. One of his friends, Olympus, offers him a job as caretaker on his private island and offers keys to the estate and all its treasures. Sisyphus, without hesitation, snatches the opportunity.

  Three years later, as he lounges on the empty beach, a yacht bearing Æsopus and Pluto arrives nearby. At gunpoint, they take Sisyphus back to the States.

  The factory, now more run-down than ever, continues to manufacture bottles and caps. Sisyphus is demoted from his previous posh position under Pluto to low man on the bottle-capping assembly line. Here the bottles never stop lining up and the bins of caps runneth over.

  Every evening, Sisyphus is taken to a dorm-style room and is watched over by Pluto’s security guards. This is his destiny … to be forevermore a bottle capper.

  The author writes:

  As I could never come close to the original magical Myth of Sisyphus, understanding Camus’s reflective comment on how human beings are the masters of their own fate is somewhat complex. However, I will give it a try.

  The original myth points to a number of notions about humankind and destiny. First, I would say that Camus is trying to point out that we are responsible for our own actions and bring about our own destiny through indirect self-deprecating actions. In other words, sometimes we take for granted what we have and then must test the truth of its existence, losing in the process. Sisyphus had all that he needed, but was tempted with more. When he tested his possessions, he lost all that he enjoyed. Given an opportunity for redemption, he once again tested his ownership of his goods and ended up far worse off.

  The other defining point of the myth is the notion of repetition and counter-progression as a living hell. Maybe my own beliefs in variety, growth, and progression as the primary needs for happiness in life leave me with the feeling that destitution and “hell,” as we’d have it, is doing the same thing, day in and day out, with no satisfactory outcome. To spend one’s life doing meaningless, menial, laborious activities and never seeing any change or growth, either in oneself or the objects of one’s focus, equates to nothingness, especially when one’s life is ruled by another person and choices are not elements in the equation.

  The setting—Mafiosi in a run-down New Orleans backwater—is replete with atmospheric possibility. It is a world in which women and younger males are property, and the godfather deals out assignments that may garner promotion or punishment.

  I wish the author had used modern names, as the ancient ones get in the way of accepting the story as modern. However, we do have a good beginning, and in Sisyphus wearily capping bottles for eternity, a memorable ending too. Instead of the mythical figure repeatedly rolling his rock uphill, Michelle’s hero is condemned to everlasting factory labor as punishment for his over-confidence and inattention.

  Since this will be his fate, it would be interesting to place him, when he begins as a carefree young journalist, in the sight of something that foreshadows his destiny, such as a fly struggling in a spider web. Sisyphus is the hero, so we expect him to win, but myths like to turn our expectation on its head. Making him fail focuses our attention on the faults and omissions that clinch his destiny.

  Foreshadowing—literally the shadow that falls ahead of us when we walk away from the sun—is a narrative device that lets the audience (and sometimes the character, if perceptive) glimpse a portent of what will happen in the future.

  The outline has a couple of non sequiturs. Why does Sisyphus fail to find Ægina? How does Æsopus’s wife become pivotal to Sisyphus’s failure? In the original myth, Zeus has Æsopus’s daughter plucked away by an eagle. Sisyphus happens to see the abduction and snitches on Zeus, who exacts revenge by consigni
ng Sisyphus to eternal punishment. For the next draft, the chain of causality would need mending.

  Discussion

  The adaptations—of an American legend, a Japanese folktale, and a Greek myth—deal with characters whose innate qualities shape their fates. Floyd, though outlawed, holds on to his humanity but not much else; Joshi triumphs after truly signifying humility; while Sisyphus messes up and finds himself trapped in dehumanizing toil. The notion that we make our own path through life is a very old one, expressed by Heraclitus as “character is destiny.” Do your tales connect character and fate in this way?

  Michael Roemer, whose Telling Stories is cited at the end of this chapter, believes that a story’s plot represents the laws of the universe at work, and that the characters who most often catch our imagination are those who challenge those laws in order to fulfill their desires and ambitions. Civilization depends on people who act for good, so we care deeply about what makes people tick, what actions they take to earn good or bad fortune, and what determines the justice they receive. Two of our characters merely survive, because they make bad judgments, overestimate their abilities, or otherwise fail to adapt to reality. One (Joshi) sees reality but refuses to accept that God can really want him defeated, and obstinately continues his search. God’s message—to the villagers and to us—is that he rewards faith and persistence.