Developing Story Ideas Read online

  Here’s a situation of internal conflict from real life. When she was in her twenties, a friend whom I’ll call Tatiana began to suspect from a remark dropped by a family friend that she was adopted. This very much bothered her, but she could not bring herself to confront her mother. Her problem was to become unsure of her origins. Who am I? Who were my parents? Who’s telling the truth?

  Thirty more years of turbulent life passed before she screwed up the courage to question her mother, now very fragile and in her nineties. Indeed, Tatiana was adopted as a small child, and now she got the details of her biological parents. Thus her agenda changed as she began another highly emotional journey of discovery.

  Conflict—internal and external—happens in many ways, and is related to the human need to find meaning by pushing against adversity. You push to get your tax returns completed, to get your aunt’s funeral arranged, or to raise a smile on your glum mailman’s face. We humans are always pushing to do, to find out, to complete, to restore, to get, to accomplish. Notice how these are all “doing” words, that is, verbs. But doing means forever encountering obstacles. You have a math exam coming up, yet you put off studying. Is it that you hate math? Or are you convinced you’ll fail? What is the overriding problem underlying your conflict?

  A person’s volition (her will to get, do, or accomplish) arises from temperament, life circumstances, and the imperative sent out by those marks incised by experience, which we have called unfinished business. They shape how we see and act, so that the many small deeds of daily life are really the subsidiary parts of a much larger, long-lasting drive. Dramaturgy calls this a character’s agenda. Tatiana’s was to know her identity, and to somehow complete herself. And perhaps she did—as much as any person can do.

  Unfinished business is the agenda of tasks that our psyche wants us to engage in and complete. Unless you force it into consciousness, it works subliminally in the background.

  Profiling Someone’s Agenda

  Seeing your own agenda is as difficult and unsettling as seeing yourself in profile. Luckily it is rather easier to see other people’s agendas. You start by making a patient, nonjudgmental observation of their actions, especially those that seem charged, heightened, or contradictory. Keep an open mind, and (privately) construct a hypothetical explanation to embrace the causes and effects you have so far seen. Be open to everything, not just what you hope or expect to find. This is especially important if you are a journalist, documentary-maker, or other professional observer of humankind. Your subject might, for instance, show:

  A disdain for intellectuals and intellectual work. (Envy and suspicion of those better educated?)

  A driving need to publicly protest certain kinds of injustice. (Experience of unjust treatment, or anger over the abuse of a loved one?)

  A great need for mentors. (Compensating for someone important in early life who was absent?)

  The meanings to these important issues remain bubbling below the surface and are seldom articulated or even recognized by their owners. These underlying truths we call subtexts. A couple may be arguing over whose turn it is to take out the garbage, but the likely subtext is, “This marriage is in trouble because he expects her to do all the menial work.”

  A subtext is an embracing, unstated truth existing below the surface of events.

  To make your fictional characters true to life, consider making them preoccupied and unaware of the larger dimension and likely subtexts. Your audience will enjoy guessing at the other four-fifths of the iceberg below the surface. Why? Maybe it comes from being tribal creatures for millions of years. Our well-being depended on fitting into the group, so we remain hardwired to second-guess others, compelled to pursue what makes them tick.

  Once you start searching, hints and clues arise along the way. I sometimes wondered what drove a friend of mine, a heavy-drinking Leftist who lived on a London barge. He led an activist’s life and was passionately critical of power structures. One day he confided that when he was a twelve-year-old altar boy his priest had shocked him by kissing him. Rightly or wrongly—I never found out—I saw a vital connection between the urgency and bitterness of his political life, the failure of his short marriage, and his disdain for all authority figures. One day he vanished, and his body was found days later in the river. I have often wondered whether a person’s whole destiny really can turn upon a single, dreadful moment.

  Each of us moves under an agenda fueled by striking experiences. More often these are multiple rather than single ones. We are all marked, all shaped to particular purposes and drives in life. How we go about accomplishing the objectives in our agenda helps determine what others make of us, particularly those baffled souls in our family. So much remains hidden, and so the dramatist’s job is to shine light on what may really be going on.

  Some people, you might argue, are so passive that they have no agenda. Don’t be fooled: Benjamin in The Graduate has an agenda all right—to resist being sucked into the suffocating lifestyle of his parents’ generation. Likewise, the bohemians in Rick Linklater’s Slacker have agendas—hence their lives of resistance and dissimulation. They know what they don’t want, and pursue highly active strategies of avoidance.

  To make your characters appealing and credible, give them issues to work on, things they want to get, do, or accomplish. Usually they won’t be conscious of their underlying issues, or know what subconscious pressures drive them. People tend to concentrate fiercely on what preoccupies them, and do not see the larger picture of interaction. Your characters won’t know what they are really doing, or why—but you, their creator must.

  Let’s pause to visualize two in interacting, unaware agendas in a simplified world (Figure 7–3). Here, a cat stalks a sparrow, and the graph superimposes their two agendas.

  We can identify with both the cat’s hunting instinct and the bird’s vulnerability, so we watch in a state of suspense, or dramatic tension. Were it comedy, and the cat and bird named Sylvester and Tweety, that tension would still exist, but as comedy. Dramatic tension—in comedy, tragedy, folktale, or legend alike—causes a vital stream of questioning inside us. Will Sylvester catch Tweety, or will the cheeky little bird outwit him again? Will Benjamin, suspended underwater in the swimming pool, quietly drown himself? What matters is that internally we question the unfolding drama and even argue with it.

  Story material often makes us identify with one or more of the characters. It is attractively human to invest our emotions in the fate of others—even to feel we “are” the central character. This is why we love stories from such an early age.

  Figure 7–3 Intensity graph for a cat stalking a sparrow. The dotted line indicates the intensity of the sparrow’s consciousness, and the solid line, the cat’s.

  Thus storytellers must keep us, their audience, stimulated, intrigued, and questioning. That stimulates our imaginations, makes us exercise our judgment and experience of life, so that we become open to larger issues—the exploitation of the weak by the strong, say, or how some people seem to face unfair adversity throughout their life.

  Dramaturgy

  We can use dramaturgical terms to analyze and discuss drama. The cat and bird scene would break down into something like this:

  Action

  Dramatic Category

  1

  Cat goes on the alert as a flock of sparrows arrives in a tree.

  Inciting moment. The cat’s instincts are aroused and we know something is going to happen. What will the cat do? His problem is that he must restrain his terrible urge to pounce.

  2

  A single sparrow descends nearby.

  Complication #1. A development in the hunt intensifies our expectations. How will the cat react to this added temptation? The obstacles to the cat’s plan are the distance he must leap and the target sparrow’s general wariness.

  3

  The cat lashes his tail and crouches.

  Complication #2. The cat’s murderous concentration increases our sense of th
e sparrow’s danger. Has the bird seen the cat? Can the cat leap the distance?

  4

  Sparrow pecks unconcerned.

  Complication #3. Yikes, the sparrow hasn’t seen the danger. Are these his last moments? Oh no!

  5

  Cat gathers himself for a leap.

  Crisis imminent. The tension is rising because the kill seems inevitable.

  6

  Sparrow senses danger.

  Reversal. High dramatic tension as the bird realizes the cat’s intentions. Who will succeed, cat or bird?

  7

  Cat leaps as sparrow takes off.

  Crisis completed. The cat is not quick enough and the sparrow has escaped. What will the cat do now?

  8

  Cat fails, licks his shoulder, and returns to bird-watching.

  Resolution. Cat returns to stalking prey. He is well fed, and can afford to wait and watch.

  The concepts in bold print come from the poets and dramatists of ancient Greece, but two centuries back they became a useful little graphic known as Freytag’s pyramid (Figure 7–4). Geometrical rather than undulating, and using climax rather than crisis, Freytag’s pyramid makes the central concept into a paradigm—that of a buildup and release of conflicting forces. The scene’s rising action starts with the inciting moment and exposition, goes through escalating complications, leads to the dramatic crisis, or climax, and ends with the falling action or resolution. From Freytag we see that the crisis is pivotal, a hinge for the entire scene. The rising action before it, and the falling action after, makes drama proceed by cycles rather like breathing.

  To assess a scene, first define its crisis, climax, or turning point. Before it is the buildup of opposing forces leading to confrontation; after it, begins the outcome or scene resolution. The crisis is thus the pivotal point at which fortunes change.

  Whether your scene concerns starting an old car, lugging a sofa bed up a staircase, or a couple making love in an attic, you can break its stages into dramatic units whose rising and falling intensities translate into an overall dramatic arc. Momentum for this begins from the inciting moment during the scene’s all-important setup. Whatever information the audience needs to understand the characters and their situation is called exposition. As a rule, give no more than necessary and wait to add more later, once the scene has gathered momentum.

  Figure 7–4 Freytag’s pyramid.

  Complications during the rising action act as obstacles that test the central character’s strength, resolve, inventiveness, and other qualities. During this phase, he or she commonly encounters mentors and helpers, and (equally important) hinderers too. Outwitting the latter often permits the central character to grow in confidence and ability. While we watch, we decide what is at stake for the central character. Why is she crossing the road at such a dangerous moment? Is she avoiding an awkward social encounter? How much will it matter to her if she fails? What is “at stake” here?

  Raising the stakes is an expression borrowed from gambling. Applied to drama, it refers to the complications that impede a character from realizing his or her goal, and make failure costly. Raise the stakes, and you raise dramatic tension too.

  We assess “the stakes” by looking at the person’s goals and seeing what obstacles currently stand in their way. When the stakes go up, the obstacles become greater, and success gets more difficult. This makes failure more costly, and so dramatic tension rises.

  Joseph Campbell2 discovered this trajectory to be an archetype lying embedded in folktales the world over, and named it “the hero’s journey.” In his thesis, the hero often completes his journey by returning to normal life, changed and educated by the mission. Ulysses, for example, eventually returns to Penelope and routs the interloping suitors.

  The crisis, then, is the all-important focal point for which the scene exists. Practice spotting them in the drama you watch, and ask yourself how they are positioned and why. In most, the crisis is near the end, but occasionally it comes early, leaving the majority of the scene to expand on the consequences. Imagine someone who has borrowed a friend’s house breaking a precious goblet at the beginning of a scene. With his hand bleeding, he must look for a bandage and then summon the courage to phone the bad news. What is this scene’s intention? To show how he broke the goblet? No. It is probably to explore the main character’s extreme and painful sense of obligation to the lender.

  Stories involve multiple events and multiple dramatic units. The resolution of one leads into the setup and inciting moment for the next. Thus, as the narrative goes forward, each dramatic unit is an inhalation and exhalation in the story’s breathing pattern.

  The storyteller’s art seeks to involve us with interesting people dealing with the pressures and stresses of their individual agendas. Their goals may be modest, noble, hopeless, or screamingly funny, but we love to exercise our judgment on their behalf and have our emotions stretched. Stories, in fact, allow us to rehearse extreme thoughts, actions, emotions, and situations in safety, and to ready ourselves for similar catastrophes.

  Which brings us to the issue of credibility in fiction. How freely can you use coincidence and the far-fetched when you know they happen in life? Once, for example, I had a long wait at Newark while changing planes. To kill time I wandered the corridors without my glasses, preferring the featureless blur. “Michael Rabiger!” said a woman’s amazed voice, and hastily restoring my glasses, I found in front of me, standing hands on hips, a friend not seen in several years.

  Story credibility: whether your story is realism, surrealism, comedy, or tragedy, your audience wants to accept the events as credible, never contrived or out of character.

  Could I bring two people together this way in a fiction piece? Probably not, since coincidences look contrived. Thus, an important part of balancing a story is to ensure your audience can believe every action and event. But realism pursued slavishly leads to banality, so your job is to find the balance that convinces us of all incidents’ likelihood. The onus changes depending on the type or genre of the story. Depending on the special qualities you give the world of your characters, they may be able to fly or predict the future. Developing characters is the subject of the next chapter.

  Notes

  1William M. Thayer, Marvels of the New West (Norwich, CT: Henry Hill, 1888), p. 238.

  2Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an American writer and lecturer widely known for his original work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His extensive lectures are on YouTube.

  8 Developing Characters of Your Own

  Dramatists see a person’s character, conflicts, and destiny as interrelated. Some conflicts arise from outward circumstances, others from the circumstances generated by his or her inherent nature. Thus spiders climb, and cats stalk birds, but the master of the Pequod hunts the great white whale out of obsession with revenge. His backstory (prior history) is that Moby Dick took his leg and destroyed his ship, and now Captain Ahab (limping on a prosthesis made of, yes, whalebone) is ready to risk his own life and those of his crew to get revenge.

  A backstory is a character’s formative circumstances prior to the story’s present. Backstory details are called givens, and each helps to establish the character’s history and outlook.

  How do we judge character? In everyday life we glance at someone new and employ our life experience to intuitively guess their type, likely nature, motivations, personality, and so on. What really drives them may only emerge slowly over a long association, and even then, can you really say you know those closest to you—your parents, say? Mine died decades ago, yet I continue to make little discoveries about them. Those who matter to you have incredible depth and complexity, and take a lifetime to understand.

  Develop characters by establishing their background, temperament, behavior, and agendas.

  You have many aspects at your disposal when creating characters for drama, as you see from the checklist for developing a character in Figure 8–1.
/>   Figure 8–1 Checklist for developing a character.

  Assignment 8–1: Developing Two Characters

  Step 1: Using the Character Development Checklist, make skeletal notes for a two-minute oral presentation for Character A and Character B (four minutes total). One should be a family member well-known to you, but alter any details that would reveal their identity and relationship to you. The other should be an invented character whom you try to make equally credible. Tell nobody which is which, because your audience is going to choose. This is a real test of skills.

  Step 2: After your two presentations, your audience votes on which was the fictional character, which the real. How many did you convince?

  Discussion

  What aspects of character left the deepest impression?

  What details made people see the character with their inner eye?

  Which details seemed to promise most development for the invented character?

  Round Characters, Flat Characters, and Archetypes

  In literary realism, major characters are usually “round,” that is, multidimensional, conflicted, and psychologically complex. Minor characters, having only a limited part to play in the consciousness of the main character, are often flat; that is, they serve the moment but we learn little about them. Because traditional stories preceded the rise of psychological insight, they are almost wholly peopled with flat types. Contemporary moral tales pitting good against evil also commonly have two-dimensional or “flat” characters, each representing a dominant quality (courage, endurance, greed, etc.). They may also represent a type of person (inexperienced youth, wise elder, lost traveler, determined old lady, and so on).