Developing Story Ideas Page 7
Round and flat characters. The novelist E. M. Forster divided fictional characters into round characters (who are fully realized psychological portraits) and flat characters (who exist to serve a didactic purpose and lack depth).
Archetypes, according to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, are more than just types of person: each is really a figure representing our ancestral knowledge of human nature.
The literal meaning of “archetype” is “original type,” and oldest of all must be the hero, heroine, and monster—as in St. George, the princess, and the dragon getting ready to eat her. St George is the protagonist, and the dragon, the antagonist. Archetypes are more than types, for they often embody the moral forces forever in contention in human life. The dying hero, sleeping princess, scheming villain, lost children, wicked stepmother, and cruel taskmaster often represent cultural assumptions about courage, unprotected innocence, cunning, youthful beauty, impatience, sacrifice, and so on. These values, lodged in our collective identity, turn up so regularly in people’s dreams that Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious.”
Other significant roles include the mentor, guardian, and—more ambiguous and interesting—the shapeshifter, trickster, and shadow. The shapeshifter, for instance, generates suspense by being changeable or unreliable, thus putting the hero’s wariness and initiative to the test. The trickster can be a comic figure or someone malignant who tries to effect the hero’s undoing. The shadow epitomizes the demons and other dark, repressed forces that the hero (or heroine, of course) must confront, either in the external world or within themselves.
Archetypal figures or situations are extremely useful to your writing. When you discover one taking shape in one of your stories, read up on it and explore the ramifications it suggests for your work. No storyteller can avoid drawing on influences embedded in our cultural traditions—such as religion, myth, legend, folktale, nursery tale, art, history, psychology, and philosophy. Seeking greater knowledge inevitably brings more ideas and associations to help you extend and develop what your subconscious has initiated. We shall revisit this in “Yielding to Dramatic Conventions” (Chapter 24: Story-Editing Your Outline).
The point-of-view character is the one through whose eyes and heart we mainly see, and with whom we often identify. POV, also called narrative perspective, can move from character to character, depending on what the storyteller wants the audience to notice and feel.
Point of View (POV) or Narrative Perspective
In any story, it will be important to establish whose point of view (POV) we should mainly experience. In the cat and bird example earlier, three POVs are possible: the cat’s, the bird’s, and that of the onlooking storyteller. Whose tells the story most engagingly? We love to exchange identities and experience what being the “other” feels like. Whose viewpoint is most dramatic at different junctures of a story? Through artful presentation, the dramatist can lead us through multiple predicaments and multiple, conflicting feelings.
Biographical works often give us their subject’s view of him- or herself, and then for contrast juxtapose the perspectives of friends and family. A person’s perspective on him- or herself is well informed in some ways, but also full of significant blind spots that friends and acquaintances can often see clearly. A story channeled through a single-minded narrator often becomes that interesting character, the “unreliable narrator.” This can be alarming, poignant, or funny, since it highlights his or her limitations. Forrest Gump is a comedy about a mentally handicapped man whose dignified naiveté carries him far into the national spotlight (Figure 8–2).
Switching between multiple viewpoints is common in film because it shows effortlessly how one character affects another, and how we are all interconnected. Watch scenes of high dramatic tension in any of the famous James Dean films, for instance, to see how camera positioning and editing imply different psychological viewpoints.
Figure 8–2 Forrest Gump (1994), an ironic comedy about a handicapped man whose utterances people regard as divine wisdom (frame from the film).
The control over point of view is subtle, and rather difficult for the writer, since it often happens subconsciously with no reliable formula for creating it. The student samples in Chapters 13–21 show how nearly every writer elicits our identification with their characters, who are often flawed and all the more interesting because of it.
Assignment 8–2: Character and Destiny
Write a one-page character portrait of an interesting acquaintance (not a family member) and give three characteristic and revealing actions by this person.
Guess at this persons long-term agenda (that is, what he or she seems to be trying to get, do, or accomplish in life).
Speculate what experiences might have influenced these drives.
Predict where this persons agenda might take them in ten years time.
Assignment 8–3: Volition and Point of View
Think of a memorable event centering on a member of your family, whom you need not identify. Write briefly what you think that person was trying to get, do, or accomplish and consider this from these perspectives:
This person’s point of view during their immediate, moment-to-moment circumstances
Your point of view at the time
Your knowledge now of their whole life
Someone elses point of view whose interpretation was probably very different
Discussion
Immediate circumstances often trigger moment-to-moment reactions, but longer-term motivations have deep roots in a persons temperament and history. How much were the events linked to the larger business of your relatives life?
How different were your relatives idea of his or her agenda, your idea of it, and that of the storyteller? How much was what happened in your story the storytellers construct rather than something objectively true? Families are hotbeds of construing, and children often must fly the coop for a chance to become themselves.
Assignment 8–4: Acting on Volition
Without necessarily disclosing your subjects identity, make an oral presentation lasting three minutes or less about an acquaintances participation in a significant event that you witnessed, describing:
The event, including the action your friend took
What incited your friend to action, and what you think he or she was trying to get, do, or accomplish at the time
How this fits in with a larger picture you have formed of your acquaintance’s drives in life
9 Analyzing Drama
A scene, which may include several dramatic units, is a group of happenings that occur in one place or in one stretch of time. Begin your analysis by amassing information about the characters. What are their givens (that is, the reliable information about them embedded in the text)? Like detectives, we consider their appearance, age, gender, dress, role, and social circumstances (see Figure 8–1, “Checklist for Developing a Character”). We pay particular attention to evidence of their agendas as we generate a list of certainties, probabilities, and possibilities. Remember there are short-term drives (“I’m awfully tired and must sit down”) and there are pervasive, long-term drives that often go unnoticed by everyone, including the subject.
Don’t assume all agendas are psychological. Maslow’s hierarchy places physiological needs foremost—for food, shelter, and safety.1 Only after meeting “deficit needs” does a person begin to think about “being needs”—those for love, esteem, or respect. Last of all come the needs in relation to self-actualization, that is, to become wholly and authentically oneself and to fulfill one’s potential in the world. For a subsistence farmer whose kids are half-starved, notions of love, respect, or self-actualization remain remote or unimaginable while his family cries in hunger. To ask him whether he has fulfilled his human potential would be laughable.
Plot is the framework within which you organize a story. Plots are useful constructs of events that let you keep dramatic tension high and that can help frame moral or other questions. Any provoca
tive ideas you can develop about your characters’ deeper motives will help bring weight to what your stories have to say.
The plot of a narrative is the framework of circumstance within which the characters struggle to realize their objectives. Often while attempting this they must contest rules that are societal or universal.
Incidentally, a nation acting from “national character” behaves much like an individual. It too has a collective culture, environment, and history. Relating the small to the large, the microcosm to the macrocosm in your interpretations of life, is a sign of sophisticated thinking.
Assignment 9–1: Analyzing “The Fisherman’s Wife”
Here is an exercise in separating and defining scenes in a Grimm Brothers’ story. So you can decide its divisions, I have reproduced it without paragraph breaks.
Step 1: Either photocopy the story or download it from the website.
Step 2: Cut the scenes apart, creating a new paragraph for each. Give each a functional tag-line description. (Example: “Fisherman arrives home to find discontented wife in pretty cottage.”)
Step 3: Take your tag lines and draw a fluctuating dramatic arc for the story (using Intensity as the vertical axis, Time as the horizontal as in Figure 7–3 (cat and bird). Then describe each character’s strengths and weaknesses, and the dramatic problem each faces;
what produces narrative tension in the story; and
the story’s theme, and what evidence you used to decide it.
The Fisherman’s Wife
Once upon a time there was a fisherman who lived happily in a tumbledown cottage. One day he caught a talking flounder. To his surprise it said, “Don’t kill me, I am a prince. Put me back in the water.” When he told his wife, she asked him why he hadn’t asked for a wish. Surely he could have asked for a nice clean cottage to replace their miserable hovel? So the next day, he called up the flounder and reported what his wife wanted. The fish told him to go home. Sure enough, when he got home there was a pretty little cottage. His wife showed him what a nice place they now had, with a full pantry, ducks, vegetables, and fruit in the garden. The fisherman was sure they could now live very happily, but in a few days his wife found it too small, and sent him out to find the fish again. She wanted to live in a big stone castle, which the fisherman thought absurd. But he did as she asked, and with a heavy heart asked the fish for a castle. Sure enough, when he got home, there was a castle complete with battlements, towers, marble floors, servants, huge platters of food—everything. Quite soon, though, the fisherman’s wife was dissatisfied again. Why hadn’t he asked for her to become a queen instead of just a fisherman’s wife? When he returned to the sea it was dark and dangerous looking. But the flounder reappeared and again granted the unhappy fisherman his wife’s wish. Returning he found the castle bigger than ever, and his wife crowned as queen, sitting on a throne encrusted with diamonds and surrounded by ladies in waiting. But the fisherman’s wife was soon bored again. She wanted to be an emperor. When the fisherman protested she became angry, so back to the sea he went, this time finding it heaving and black. Even this wish was not enough, for the fisherman’s wife next wanted to be pope, and when she had the rich accoutrements of the Vatican the fisherman asked her if she was not at last happy. But she flew into a screaming rage and demanded that she become master of the universe so she could make the sun and moon set and rise. Back at the ocean, the seas were now raging and the sky black. The fisherman had to shriek out for the flounder. “Now what does she want?” asked the fish. And when the fisherman confessed what she had ordered, the flounder said, “She must go back to her old hovel—there you will find her.” The fisherman returned home—and they live there together to this very day.
Your graph should reveal fluctuations in the intensity of each scene, indicate the crises, and show how the dramatic units chain together into the larger dramatic arc representing the whole story.
The Dramatic Premise
Considering a work in its entirety means deciding the nature of its premise, which is the idea driving its plot. For “The Fisherman’s Wife” this is probably, “Some people are never satisfied, no matter what you give them.” For The Wizard of Oz, the premise might be, “By surviving a strange and frightening world, Dorothy gains friends and learns to value her home.”
A work’s premise is the ruling idea that drives its plot.
Few student writers can tell you their work’s premise, and nor can many writers of greater experience. If you can suggest one that is plausible, you will have done your good deed for the day. Finding the premise to your own work, hard though it may be, is hugely satisfying. Immediately you sense its rightness, and go on to see what is otherwise superfluous or detrimental.
A premise normally emerges from the writing process, and not vice versa as you might expect. Quite literally, we write in order to find out what we have to say.
Character-Driven versus Plot-Driven Drama
In a character-driven story, the needs of the characters generate the drama’s energy, tension, and narrative movement. Charles Dickens was a genius at drawing surreal characters, and Oliver Twist (written 1837–1839, Figure 9–1) is full of them. By focusing on the hostile circumstances of an orphaned boy in London, Dickens displaced his own bitter experiences from when his father was imprisoned for debt. Most biographical works feature carefully defined central characters, as you also find in domestic comedy, detective tales, teen comedies, buddy and coming-of-age stories, and many Westerns.
Figure 9–1 In a 1948 film adaptation of Dickens’s character-driven Oliver Twist, Oliver encounters a range of powerful personalities (frame from the film).
In plot-driven drama, the characters contend with the pressures of their circumstances, while in character-driven drama the storyline emerges from the peculiarities, choices, and drives of the characters.
A story with characters driven by strong external pressures is said to be plot-driven. Leo, visiting his upper-class friend in L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, falls into a situation beyond his understanding. The daughter of the house and a tenant farmer are having an illicit affair. The couple uses him as their messenger until they are discovered and the farmer kills himself. The adaptation by Harold Pinter made a memorable film. (Figure 9–2).
Action, horror, mystery, and disaster stories are generally plot-driven. Three skiers trying to escape an avalanche would experience such strong circumstances that they can only react, each in their own way, of course, to their situation. Such characters in plot-driven drama are more likely to be types than fully realized psychological portraits, but no matter whether you emphasize characters or plot, the two are symbiotic and will always influence each other.
Figure 9–2 A boy in The Go-Between (1971) who becomes an unwitting accomplice in a doomed love affair (frame from the film).
How would you classify “The Fisherman’s Wife”?
Genre
The world of a story, and the forces at work in it, help the reader or viewer decide what genre, or category, it belongs in. “Genre” is French for “type,” and refers to an artwork’s family or group. An action thriller or a buddy story may be concerned with what creates, tests, strengthens, or changes friendship, but each tale will have particular aspects that try to make it unique. Horror, black comedy, melodrama, and Bollywood musicals each have their own characteristic settings, conventions, symbols, and language. As consumers, we usually classify a story first by its genre conventions, but like all rules, they exist to be bent or broken, so storytellers often modify, combine, or subvert a genre for their own exuberant purposes.
A genre is a type or family of stories. Whatever your story signals will make the audience initially categorize it with others of its type.
Figure 9–3 A thriller like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) draws its tension and atmosphere from the film noir genre established three decades earlier (frame from the film).
As an author, you choose a particular genre because it summons
the world you want your characters to inhabit, or one useful for a particular story. In rite-of-passage stories like Oliver Twist and The Go-Between, or in a Cold War thriller like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965, Figure 9–3), the genre itself helps lay a groundwork of conditions the audience will quickly recognize.
Note
1Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), psychologist who studied human needs and arranged them in a hierarchy.
10 Understanding Story Structure
Each scene (in literature, theatre, fiction film, or documentary) should contribute a charge of dramatic impetus to the story’s momentum. This might be setup information, a gripping mood, complications for the central character to combat, a decisive confrontation between opponents, or the scene’s resolution. No scene deserves to exist unless it propels the story forward with something new.
Pedestrian storytelling bores its audience—perhaps with a surfeit of scene-setting information before any action begins. But today’s audiences expect a story with movement, so consider dropping us into the middle of the action and releasing items of expository information as they become necessary. A long and rather operatic 19th-century novel like Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge sustains the reader because of an unforgettably terrible act at its beginning. A young laborer, angry at finding no work at a hiring fair, gets drunk and auctions off the wife and child that weigh him down. Awakening from a drunken stupor next morning, Henchard is appalled to realize he sold them to a passing sailor. The novel now jumps eighteen years ahead: Henchard has long sworn off all drink, is now the town’s mayor, and his wife and daughter arrive in town destitute.