Developing Story Ideas Read online

  The resolution to a dramatic situation is whatever action concludes and resolves the situation’s conflict.

  On Working Collaboratively

  Working in a group runs counter to the romantic myth that art can only come from the individual. Collectively critiquing, solving problems, and developing working principles is fun and important because it’s exploring common values, so important in an audience medium. Until the Middle Ages or later, all theatre was made by a team without designated leadership. Even today, more comedy is written by teams than by individuals.

  You’ll be amazed at how much wisdom, balance, and good sense exists in a group, particularly after you have all become comfortable with each other. Developing ideas through discussion may be slow, but when each person contributes, everyone gains practice and learns from each other. Unlike lectures and lessons, you forget nothing you helped to invent.

  Cards You’ll Need to Play CLOSAT

  Figure 5–1 Cards for Playing CLOSAT.

  Note

  1To name just a few: Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, John Candy, Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Jim Belushi, and Mike Myers.

  6 Working from Life

  First-rate writers, actors, comedians, painters, and photographers all develop acute observational skills, and so should a writer. From your sharpest observation of whatever strikes you as odd, funny, or strange come patterns and then narratives. To see how easily life-observations can turn into stories, we’re going to make further use of the improvising game CLOSAT. It is a great warm-up exercise at the beginning of a class, and an excellent refresher when minds grow tired. Its title, as you will recall, comes from its observation categories: Characters, Locations, Objects, Situations, Acts, and Themes. From random combinations you can cook up many an imaginative scene or story. The game’s value is that you:

  Learn to trust your intuition

  Get used to producing fast sketches, as valuable to writers as to graphic artists

  See how stories suggest their own form and development

  By working in a group or class, you discover how each person’s mind works and what pleasure collaboration brings.

  Assignment 6–1: The Writer’s Journal and Preparing for CLOSAT

  Step 1: Keep your writer’s journal close and note any promising characters, locations, objects, situations, acts, and themes.

  Step 2: Select material from your journal writer’s journal and make six CLOSAT playing cards, two each for Characters, Locations, and Objects. Reduce your observations to telling detail.

  Step 3: Code each card at the top with your initials, a tag line, and its CLOSAT type (see sample cards, end of Chapter 5).

  Assignment 6–2: Play CLOSAT with Two Characters, One Location, and One Object

  If you are working alone:

  Make piles of cards, one each for Characters, Locations, and Objects. Shuffle them and lay them face down.

  Take two Characters and one Location and Object from the piles.

  Play CLOSAT, taking only ten minutes before presenting the result to a listener or listeners.

  If you are part of a group/class:

  Designate a group secretary for each round so the position rotates.

  Exchange piles face down so each group works blind with another groups cards.

  Someone draws two cards from the Character pile and one each from the Location and Object piles.

  The group plays CLOSAT from the cards it has drawn, putting heads together for ten minutes only before the group secretaries present each groups work. When the group generates surplus or contradictory material, the secretary improvises the best telling.

  It will be a delight to learn what people managed to do with a roll of worn-out orange carpeting, a shy young woman gospel singer, and a postal truck driver with his leg in a castand it must all happen on a mountain footpath in the early morning mist!

  A character who develops is one who learns enough from the storys circumstances to alter their actions in future. A story can be equally instructive and satisfying, however, when a character fails to adapt and change.

  Development

  In the stories you have been telling, did any of the characters developthat is, did anyone learn something and change?

  Even in the earliest recorded tales, storytellers seemed aware that audiences wanted the main character to learn and grow. In the terminology of drama, this is called the characters development. Audiences still look for it, because the human need for hope is a constant. Probably that hunger lies behind our prodigious appetite for stories in the first place. Even so, the element of hope can be very modest, and just a small, symbolic action after a long and grueling situation is enough to suggest that change is underway. A story about a rebellious daughter might end with her washing her own dishes for the first time or going out in wet weather wearing more practical shoes. Such actions, even though taken in strife and heartbreak, can be richly satisfying because we understand that she will eventually prosper and her spirit will remain unbroken.

  Figure 6–1 An hourglass can transcend its original function and connote the brevity of human existence (drawing by Thomas Hardy).

  Denotation and connotation. An hourglass is an ancient form of clock, but in the right circumstances it transcends its humble denotation by poetically connoting mortality.

  By artfully building contexts, the author can invest prosaic objects, events, or characters with poetic meanings that transcend their everyday appearances. Objects and acts are particularly useful since they can be made to connote meaning far beyond what they are or what they denote (Figure 6–1).

  The human memory, also called recall, will effortlessly winnow the best story elements and discard all else from its mass of story materials. Trust your memory to help you edit.

  Discussion

  So long as these story issues get discussed, their order isnt important:

  We generally recall best what most engages us. Which group’s story stands out in memory? You may want to concentrate on analyzing this story alone.

  Of the characters, which did you feel you know best, and why? (A little highly selective information can mean more than a catalogue of bland detail.)

  Which story seemed the strongest, and why?

  Which story had the most satisfying development, and what was its nature? (Don’t be too critical of the rapidly improvised fragments you produced today, but you probably saw that characters who stay in an unchanging situation are not dramatically satisfying. They are credible but not interesting.)

  What made a character more compelling? (Usually it’s because that character was active, had an agenda of some kind, and was trying to get, do, or accomplish something.)

  How functional was the location? (Novice writers often let human interactions take place without regard to their settings. But the mood and meaning of a setting can powerfully affect us; it can suggest or limit action in useful ways, and make us feel more connected to the protagonist’s situation.)

  A point-of-view (POV) character in a scene or story is one whose experiences, feelings, or attitudes mainly shape our perceptions.

  Point of View (POV)

  An important aspect of storytelling that will often concern us is point of view. In most narrative forms there is a character or characters through whose experiences we mainly perceive the events. Often this is the person with most potential to change and develop. For dramatic effect or storytelling convenience, POV can shift between characters. Some of the most interesting become unreliable narrators, because we have to take into account the nature of their subjectivity.

  In your early drafts, you may not know who should be the POV character that shapes our perceptions. Even after you solve this, you may still choose to route the audience’s perceptions through minor characters with differing subjective perceptions.

  Settings and dramatic detail help define characters and augment their predicaments. Render them in
brief, colorful, pithy description but do not let them slow story momentum.

  Active characters are always trying to get, do, or accomplish things. Their more profound goals are often unknown to them or even concealed. Passive characters are people to whom things happen. Both types have agendas, of course, and use different strategies to effect them.

  Active voice: when you write in the active voice, your characters have agency, and your story acquires authority.

  Active and Passive

  Characters who are trying to get, do, or accomplish things struggle to act on their surroundings. We, however, are often taught to see ourselves as acted upon, and thus write scientifically in the passive voice. The phrase I have just used, “are often taught,” is passive and implies that children, being on the receiving end, are victims. Official language bristles with passive-voice constructions because the writers want to remove themselves from “agency”—that is, from holding responsibility. Some languages assist by saying literally, “The cup dropped and broke itself.”

  Habitually we see ourselves trying to please others, falling into line with forces beyond our control, and using language that unconsciously embraces our helplessness. Although I have known this all my life, I still catch lapses in my writing—or rather, Microsoft Word does it for me by underlining my lapses in wiggly green lines. The worst humiliation is to discover your proactive heroine thinking, “Because I am being laughed at, I can see how badly I am treated.” Growling at yourself, you substitute, “Seeing how they laugh at me, I think I’ll tackle them.” The revision is short, supple, and leads into action.

  The Nascent Power of Imagery

  Your CLOSAT observations and images will be useful when you come to tackle fiction assignments. With your news clippings, they will help you tackle news and documentary projects, and by joining, juxtaposing, extending, and interrogating them, you will have multiple pathways to fictional tales. The images you choose may lodge in our memories and imagination, as one did for the novelist John Fowles, who began his bestseller from the mystery of remembered moment. Living at Lyme Regis by the English Channel, he saw a young woman staring out to sea toward France. This iconic figure led to his enormously popular The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) in which she became the rebellious Victorian governess Sarah Woodruff (Figure 6–2). Deserted after an affair with a French lieutenant, she becomes a fatal magnet to the conventional, already engaged scientist Charles, whose decent rationality is no match for his romantic self.

  Figure 6–2 A novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, came from an image seen by the author, and from the novel came the feature film of the same name (frame from the film).

  W. G. Sebald’s highly elliptical, autobiographically flavored novels of ideas, such as The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), reproduce the photographs, architectural drawings, train schedules, and bus tickets that have proliferated during the author’s own journeys of inquiry, and that have turned into talismanic objects.

  Assignment 6–3: Instant CLOSAT Using Pictures

  Once everyone becomes somewhat comfortable with improvising, ask them to bring two (properly coded) images for each of the CLOSAT categories. Stories now originate in groups or by individuals—according to whatever rules the class or group adopts. You may use these suggestions:

  Version 1: On the spot, the leader makes a CLOSAT card selection (say three characters, two locations, three objects, and a theme), and asks a group to come up with a two-scene story in three minutes.

  Version 2: Put up a similar set of CLOSAT cards, then spin a pencil like a roulette wheel to see whom it picks to tell the next story. This makes everyone invent something for every set of cards.

  Going Further

  Try Assignment 6–4: CLOSAT with Three Characters, Two Objects, an Act, and a Theme (see www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger). If you enjoyed improvising from randomly generated elements, try the games in the books below.

  Biro, Yvette and Marie-Geneviève Ripeau. To Dress a Nude: Exercises in Imagination. Kendall Hunt, 1998 (A structured approach to developing stories from found artifacts, such as a photograph, painting, or piece of music, and an alternative approach to screenwriting in its own right).

  Rabiger, Michael. Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, 5th ed., Focal Press, 2013, pp. 261–282 (After tossing a coin, you may be asked to write a three-character, four-minute comedy scene called “Embarrassing Moment,” set late at night, with a main character the same age and gender as yourself, the main conflict being internal to one of the other characters, and the scene’s crisis to be placed near the beginning).

  Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theater. Northwestern University Press, first published 1963 (This classic and influential text, reprinted many times, is intended for improvisational work with children, but its methods work with people of all ages. Its philosophy lies behind Second City, Chicago’s famous school of “improv” comedy, which over the decades has produced actors, comedians, and directors of stellar repute).

  Part III

  Craft and Concepts of Drama

  Your job as a storyteller is to entertain people by making them feel and think in unfamiliar ways. For this, you will need imagination, astute observation of those around you, and evocative language to seduce people into seeing the worlds you create.

  This part of the book is a brief primer in populating, assessing, overhauling, and fine-tuning any story—your own or someone else’s. It shows you how to develop analytic skills and how to offer your sensations and opinions to other people about their work.

  Whenever you act as critic, you will need to change hats and venture your feelings, reactions, and ideas from the perspective of a reader or audience member. You will see me doing this in my critiques of the assignment samples in Chapters 13–21.

  First, though, we must establish some working principles. These may be unfamiliar, so I suggest you first read these chapters through, just to see what’s there. Then, try applying anything attractive to something you or someone else has written.

  A word of warning about the composition stage: whenever you turn to composing new material, you must lock away all conscious analysis and theory, because the proud intellect will rush in and hobble your imagination. Only after you finish a first messy draft is it safe to put on your story-editing hat and take up the story editor’s tools.

  7 Characters, Their Problems and Conflicts

  Ask your friends who is special in their lives, and they will probably tell you about someone kind, patient, loyal, or funny. But if that person were to become functional in a narrative, you would need more than typifying adjectives, because those would trap him or her in the kind of single, functional pose you see in illustrations.

  Figure 7–1, from a 19th-century American travelogue, typifies each of its four characters from the perspective of the artist: there are the two loyal, dutiful captors; their shifty Indian prisoner; and Major Downing, who “surveyed [Spotted Horse] for a while in meditative serenity” before proposing to roast him alive.1 Notice how the storyteller’s prejudices are implicit in what he thinks true and typical.

  Figure 7–1 How each person is made typical in “The Capture of Spotted Horse.”

  In drama you cannot define characters as “typical” in this way, that is, frozen as a concept. They must be doing things, not just being. The difference between doing and being is something no trained actor can afford to overlook. One is kinetic and natural to acting, the other makes development impossible.

  A character’s problem is the major difficulty that he or she must solve, and that determines his or her all-important agenda of activities.

  On receiving their parts, actors comb the script for clues, asking “what drives my character?” and “What is my character trying to accomplish?” Each player searches for his or her character’s dramatic problem. This means finding the source of that character’s unfinished business, the energy driving that character’s will or volition, and what creates the trajecto
ry we call the character’s agenda.

  Even a humble spider can have a problem and an agenda:

  Itsy Bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout

  Down came the rain and washed the spider out.

  Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,

  So Itsy Bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.

  By its nature a spider must climb, but Itsy Bitsy’s misfortune is to choose a drain as a pathway, and to have his intention or agenda trounced by a deluge. Figure 7–2 shows his efforts in a graph using Time as its horizontal coordinate and Will as the vertical.

  Conflict, a key component in drama, is the result of a character’s blocked will. Be on guard—define someone’s conflict too easily, there is usually a better and more embracing definition lurking out of sight.

  Figure 7–2 The spider’s will to succeed graphed over time, with peaks and troughs reflecting the will he puts into fulfilling his agenda.

  You can expose the dynamics in any scene by translating its dominant pressures through time in a graph that undulates, like the changing pitch of notes on a stave in a piece of music.

  In drama as in life, a character’s push to achieve something invariably involves conflict. Itsy Bitsy wants to go upward, but the rushing water pushes him down. What to do? As he ponders this, the weather changes so that he can complete his mission after all. The moral? Things change, and patience sometimes brings change. The nursery rhyme’s theme, or residual meaning, is that anyone can overcome adversity with patience and persistence.