Developing Story Ideas Read online

  More than a stock hero’s journey, this is a collective or even generational rite of passage into manhood. Michael reports reexperiencing this dream with each new group he has joined, as though his mind wants to calm his insecurities (or warn him?) by repeating the tale. Other elements in the dream, such as the veiled female guardian and the pool of severed limbs, suggest preoccupations that only he can decipher.

  Dream Sequence 3 (Cynthia Merwarth)

  Her arms are full of the day’s worth of shopping. As she walks up to the mall exit the guard unlocks the door and lets her out. Time must have flown by because the mall seemed full to her when she was in the stores. But now the parking lot is strangely deserted—all except for her car, which looks as though it is miles away (farther than she remembered having parked it).

  It is dark, and the car park lights illuminate the barrenness. As she walks to her car she hears the sound of growling. Turning, she sees a pack of wild dogs coming for her at a rapid pace. The car seems so far away, but she runs quickly. The growling sounds are closer, louder, more imminent. She runs forever, always hearing the sounds of the dogs behind her. She fumbles with her keys—that particular sound seems so loud and long. The car door flies open and she tries to get in, but as she is shutting the door a dog rips at her heel, making her scream in pain. She kicks it away and slams the door shut.

  Now the pack of dogs howls and encircles the car in a predatory rhythmic dance—as if they were going around a fire. Time stands still as she honks the horn again and again, trying to rouse some sign of life in the empty lot.

  She is now driving and the dogs are running behind her, never losing sight of her. She can see them in the rearview mirror. The road is dirt. It is deserted. She comes to a gas station and runs out of her car looking for help.

  As she runs up to the station attendant he swipes at her with his hand and tells her to “get out of here.” He gestures to hit her and stomps his feet at her. She backs off, not believing his refusal to listen to what she has just been through. She is trying to tell him as fast as possible and all he is doing is running from her and trying to hit her. As she runs past an aluminum wall of the building—following the attendant—she catches a glimpse of a wild dog near her. She freezes with terror. The dog is sitting and proceeds to tell her that the man will not help her … that the man cannot understand her.

  Why can she understand the dog? She thinks … it’s talking! She sees another dog in the reflection of the aluminum, where her reflection should be! She has become one of the dogs of the night.

  The author writes:

  The theme that seems to be developing here is “fear of the unknown,” and the realization that I am just like what scares me most. Suffering, death, and violence are all a part of the thematic content in this dream. Also, wanting answers to things that cannot be answered and the frustration and fear that goes along with that feeling.

  Although the journey here is quite short in duration, it too develops a three-act form:

  Act I

  The journey begins in the safe, normal, and sheltered world of the shopping mall.

  The gatekeeper closes the door behind her so she cannot return.

  She faces the changed world of the nighttime parking lot.

  Act II

  To get to the safe haven of her car she must evade the “wolf” pack, which wounds her (Achilles’?) heel and nearly gets her.

  When she finds a sanctuary, a helper rejects her needs as though she were a fleeing Jew in Nazi-dominated Europe.

  The dogs, now more plainly her demons, have caught up with her again. Dogs in Greek mythology are associated with Hecate and witchcraft.

  Act III

  Expecting to be devoured she finds that one dog talks to her and helps her. Though her own species rejects her, an enemy reveals himself a friend and mentor. Can she trust him?

  In reality’s mirror, she finds she has involuntarily joined the enemy by becoming one of them.

  The shapeshifter transforms from one form to another in order to confuse, lie, deceive, help, delay, or otherwise challenge the central character. In fairy tales, he can become a wolf and then return to human form. Ultimately, this is all part of the hero’s education.

  Among the archetypes here—gatekeeper, fleeing victim, pursuing demons, a false savior who renounces her—are three appearances by shapeshifters, protean figures that reveal themselves in different guises, morphing from one into another. The garage attendant is one, the talking dog is the second. She herself becomes the third when discovering in the mirror that she has changed into “one of the dogs of the night.”

  Changing from human into animal is one of the shapeshifter’s classic abilities, and Vogler1 believes shapeshifters are often catalysts for change. The garage attendant who should help her betrays his responsibilities and sends her out into the night. In another reversal, or plot point, the dog that came to devour her becomes her mentor—another archetype—advising her that the man cannot understand her. She understands she has become a dog on seeing herself in the garage’s polished wall alongside her fearsome canine guide. Because she belongs with the outcast creatures, the man tries to evict her.

  Analyze the dream, not the dreamer. The separation can be a fine line, but the dream is a tale, and the dreamer a person. Analyzing the dreamer is likely to be intrusive and objectionable, and make the author feel forced into self-exposure.

  I find the end, or coda, very ambiguous yet oddly moving. That she has a calm adviser is hopeful but it is disturbing that she has become what she most fears. To press any further would be to second-guess what the symbols mean to the writer, and we have pledged to examine the story, not psychoanalyze the writer.

  Note

  1Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 2nd ed. (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998).

  Going Further

  Available at the website www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger are the following additional projects: Assignment 16–2: Surreal Narrative, Assignment 16–3: Linking Dreams into One Narrative, and Assignment 16–4: Dream and Myth. Books that might be helpful:

  Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (The father of cinema surrealism, who made some of the most contentious and dreamlike films of the 20th century, writes candidly about his development—from boyhood in provincial Spain to his involvement in Paris with the great surrealist painters, writers, and filmmakers).

  Condron, Barbara. The Dreamer’s Dictionary. SOM Publications, 1995 (Help with interpreting dreams, their symbolism and metaphysical meanings in “multidimensional consciousness”).

  Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. Dell, 1968 (Jung posited the notion of a collective unconscious, and his work dovetails with the folklorist Joseph Campbell’s in distinguishing what is innate to mankind and thus culturally universal).

  Jung, Carl, Carl Gustav Jung, and Aniella Jaffe. Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. Knopf, 1989 (Jung’s autobiography taken down at the end of his life).

  Koch-Sheras, Phyllis and Amy Lemley. The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams, 2nd ed., McGraw Hill, 2000 (A cultural and physiological history of dreams and dreaming that instructs in recall techniques. Classifies dreams as message; healing; problem solving and creative; mystical, visionary, or “high”; completion; recurring; and lucid, in which the dreamer is aware of dreaming).

  17 Adapting a Short Story for the Screen

  The next resource to explore is the published short story, a literary cousin to the oral tale. Choose one you could adapt as a thirty-minute film.

  Assignment 17–1: Short Story Analysis

  Step 1: Make up a portfolio that includes: A photocopy of the story

  A cover sheet giving title, name of author, and place and year of publication

  Your adaptation of the story presented in scene outline

  Step 2: Describe briefly: What attracts you about the story

  Your interpretation of the story’s premise or ruling id
ea

  Its cinematic and dramatic strengths

  What you think its underlying meaning will be to an audience

  Step 3: Now describe: Who is the protagonist and who the antagonist (see sidebar)

  How the main character develops

  Through whose POV we see the story, and how you might go about changing or varying this

  Of course, you should never adapt anything in copyright for publication or public performance without first securing the proper permissions, but here we are simply exploring the problems. These can be treacherous for the unwary. This chapter’s goals are for you to:

  The protagonist is the original Greek name for the central character with whom we identify and whose fortunes we follow as he or she tries to get, do, or accomplish something. The antagonist stands in his or her way. Usually this is another character, but a group, force of nature, or some aspect of the main character’s own psyche may be antagonistic.

  Sample the delights of the short-story form

  Find one dealing with a world and themes to which you strongly resonate

  Find one visual and cinematic, or that can be made so

  Find one appropriate to thirty-minutes of screen time

  Assess the problems of adapting a literary form to one that is visual and behavioral

  Good fiction takes hold of the reader’s imagination, but beware, this happens through literary means for which no screen equivalent may exist! No literary story is utterly untranslatable to the screen, but most pose difficulties, some grave or even disabling. Many authors, for instance, take us inside the main character’s consciousness and tell the story from an interior, subjective point of view. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and other, more recent “stream of consciousness” writers like to explore their characters’ psychological processes and pressures from the inside. This poses massive difficulties if you try to adapt their work to the screen or stage. You could of course make your main character talk to herself, think aloud using voice-over, or let her debate her situation with a confidante, but generally these are clumsy solutions. Then again, a literary work’s authorial voice, and the attitudes it implies, can also evade adaptation. As an acid test, consider whether the narrative remains discernible if translated into silent movie form, dependent on images and action. A story that holds special meaning for you may stimulate you into inventing truly imaginative solutions, for the energy to innovate comes from inspiration. Or you may simply have to concede defeat and move on to other pastures.

  Here is a questionnaire for testing and preparing a story for adaptation. No assignment you undertake will probably use more than portions of what follows, which may seem exhaustively thorough. Especially if you are working alone and without guidance, tackle only what is meaningful at this time. The rest will fall into place as you gain experience.

  Evaluating a Story for Adaptation to the Screen

  All art emerges from the shaping pressure of limitations. These loom large when you transfer a story from one medium to another, and especially if you have pledged great fidelity to the original. Should you even try, given that each medium is so different? More important, surely, is to be true to the spirit of the story you choose, rather than to the specifics of its expression.

  “Faithful” adaptations from literature to film tend to miscarry because each medium has very different strengths and weaknesses. To avoid over-reverence toward the literary original, concentrate on what the screen can deliver well.

  In literature the author can give privileged access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings, but the screen becomes unbearably clumsy when it tries doing the same thing. The screen is closer to actuality, and the nearest we ever get to another person is from closely observing what they do and say. Using experience and empathy, we infer their internal state from their external actions. Cinema and theatre audiences do this from the behavioral evidence that the film or play offers. This said, restrictions inherent in theatrical or cinematic forms can spur you to find creative solutions. Thus film history contains all sorts of radical experiments at rendering consciousness, and these become all the more interesting when you’ve sampled the difficulties yourself.

  Keep in mind, as you look for a candidate story, that you are searching for material that will translate well into a scene-by-scene outline for the screen. You’ll recall from Chapter 13 that outlines:

  Are in brief, short-story form.

  Are written in the present-tense, and third person.

  Start a fresh paragraph for each new scene (that is, with each new location or stretch of time).

  Describe only what an audience would see and hear from the screen.

  Never include characters’ thoughts or technical information about the production.

  Summarize all conversations—Example: “Pablo tells Marguerite how angry he felt when he was put in the orphanage.”

  During your search, consider anthologies from some under-explored aspect of your own regional, cultural, or ethnic background. Treat whatever calls to you with skepticism until you have read it several times. Consider how well it would function as silent cinema, which, in the absence of sound, depends wholly on action.

  Scale in treatments for film refers to the amount of content, number of characters, and complexity of plot in relation to the chosen screen time. Scaling up or down may require not only compression or expansion, but altering content in order to preserve credibility.

  Discussion

  When considering adaptations, ask the following questions:

  Does the story seem to reflect the interests and values of its adaptor?

  Has the adaptation made deliberate and creative use of its new medium?

  Does the adaptation feel encumbered by its origin or liberated from it?

  Is the scale (see sidebar) suitable for its screen time (thirty minutes)? In a fifteen-minute story you can probably do justice only to one main character. Trying to handle more would make your story feel truncated and superficial.

  Is the central character’s problem singular, clear, and compelling?

  Is there a discernible pattern in the relationships between the characters?

  Is the crisis cinematic—that is, has it been made behavioral and evident—or is it internal and likely to evade full notice?

  Does the story deliver growth in one of its characters or a thematic development?

  Does the adaptation deliver the same level of meaning as the original? Is it less, more, or different?

  Examples

  The NYU students’ responses that follow are to an assignment that was originally more limited. It called only for a story summary, an interpretation of the author’s underlying purpose, and a description of perceived strengths and problems. The summaries and discussions are, however, concise and remain useful.

  Example 1: “An Encounter,” from Dubliners, by James Joyce (Peter Riley)

  Summary. The narrator of “An Encounter” is a young Irish boy bored with the monotony of school life and the Wild West games that he and his friends play in the evenings. Along with two classmates he decides to skip school and go on an adventure: a journey down to the port in Dublin, and a ferry crossing to a place called the “Pigeon House.” One of the boys, fearful of reprisals, does not turn up at the appointed time. But Mahony, a tough kid armed with a slingshot, meets the narrator and the two set off on their journey.

  The boys enjoy themselves down at the wharf, watching the ships, eating lunch with the sailors. They cross the river in the ferry and wander through Ringsend, buying biscuits in the local shops and chasing a stray cat through the street. Eventually they realize they are too tired to continue their journey and rest in a field before turning back.

  As the two sit there, a bizarre old man in ratty clothes passes them, then turns to come back their way. He sits down next to them and asks them about school and books, identifying the narrator as one who is a “bookworm” like himself, not one “for games” like Mahony. With a smile
that reveals the gaps in his yellowed teeth, the man interrogates them about the many “sweethearts” they each must surely have. He continues, speaking about how much he admires beautiful young girls. The narrator is wary of this strange figure, who springs away and then returns. Mahony darts off after the cat they were chasing, and the old man remains silent next to the narrator. Then he breaks into a frightening monologue about whipping insolent young boys, how boys who have sweethearts and keep secrets should be whipped without mercy. He tells the narrator he would “whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery.”

  The narrator, disturbed and afraid, leaps up and pretends to tie his shoe. Then he bids the man goodbye and climbs the slope of the field, fearful that the man will grab him by the ankles. He calls to Mahony across the field, and the other boy mercifully comes to his rescue.

  The Author’s Underlying Purpose. Joyce shows how anyone seeking adventure is confronted with the unsavory elements that such a world harbors. By flouting the conventions of home and school, the adventurer is faced with some terrifying truths, for the old man claims the narrator as belonging more in his world than to the one he left behind. The narrator cannot simply close his eyes to “darker things.”