In order to master the plan, we need to revisit the theory, to take another look at it from a couple of other perspectives, then define the story elements more precisely. Normally, the stricter a definition, the more limiting and restrictive it is. In this case, it's the opposite. The more specific the definition, the more clearly you understand each element, the more choices you'll have, and the easier it'll be to get to the energy and drama of your characters and your story. Understanding the tools and how they work is the key to using them successfully.
In the last chapter, we examined identification—what it is and what part it plays in stories and in life. Identification is the goal not only of every story but of every life. It's our deepest social need. It's at the heart of all meaningful social interaction. It's what makes life worthwhile. It's what we're all after. We don't think of it that way. We don't say, "I'm going out tonight to find someone to identify with," but that's what we're doing.
But why? Why do we need it? Remember, in stories we ask why of everything to push it to the deepest level, to find the root cause, to get to the very bottom of it. It being the character. That's what stories do—get to the bottom, reach the limit, of the characters. We get to the limit of Ahab and Gatsby and Scarlett and Romeo and Hamlet. No one ever accused any of them (or the authors) of not going all the way. No one ever accused Romeo of not loving and pursuing Juliet with all his heart or Hamlet of not agonizing enough over his problems or Ahab of not going all-out to get Moby-Dick. If you want your characters and your stories to go all the way, you, the author, must do the same. You must push them as far as you can at every chance. One way of going all the way is to ask why, why, and why of everything.
So, why do we need to identify? What does it do for us? A good way to see what something does is to see what happens when we take it away. It's always easiest to see things in the extreme. Stories are about the extremes, always. Even if it's about an old lady fussing at her dog to be more polite and considerate of her, it needs to be extreme in terms of who she and her dog are.
So, an extreme case of taking away identification can be reached by asking: what's the worst punishment we can legally give someone in
prison, short of execution? Got the answer? Of course. You know instantly. We all do. Solitary confinement. We don't have to have been there to know. Imagining is enough.
But why? What's so bad about it? Why is it painful? It's painful because you're alone, because you have no contact with others. OK, but what's bad about that? What happens when we have no contact with others? Well, we get nutty. Stir-crazy. We flip out. We lose our emotional balance. If we're not connected to others, we lose our connection to ourselves.
Psychologists have done isolation studies in which they put people in special tanks—each person in a separate tank. Their hands were padded so that the sense of touch was cut off and they floated in a special heavy liquid so they were as weightless as possible. They were cut off from everything except their own minds What happened to them? In short order, everyone, even those with the strongest character, began hallucinating. They deteriorated. They lost touch with reality—with themselves. They couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, where they began and where they ended.
So, if you're not in touch with others, you're not in touch with yourself. The purpose of stories, of identification, is to put us (and keep us) in touch with ourselves. Identification is what must happen before you can like someone, form a friendship, or fall in love. It's what holds the world together. Civilization could not survive without it. Lofty stuff? Well , it's still theory, so you don't have to swallow it all to write a strong story—as long as you understand the importance of identification.
Connecting with others is connecting with ourselves. The purpose of stories is to make this connection—to create identification. Identification is how we experience characters, how we feel what they feel, how we become them and, in doing so, experience more of ourselves. But we cannot identify unless the character is revealed. Revealing character is a
new phrase. It's what leads to identification. REVEALING CHARACTER IS YOUR ONGOING PURPOSE AT ALL TIMES. You make all story choices based on this rule. When faced with a choice, ask yourself: Which way reveals more character? If it reveals more character, do it.
As I said, this is still theory. Identification and revealing character are the effects of a story. They're the results of a successful story. They're what stories do, but not how they do it. How they do it is the cause. Writers work with causes, not effects. Creating identification is the goal of every story. Showing you how to create identification is the continual goal of this course.
So, how do you reveal character? Well, the character can only be revealed if he acts. Action is character. The most wonderful character in the world will not get to us unless he does something. The character will not act unless he has to, unless he's challenged. Like the rest of us, he's not going to get up and push himself to the limit for no reason. He has to be urged, prodded, challenged. That challenge is CONFLICT, which brings us back to the story elements and the basic story form, which is:
CONFLICT, ACTION, RESOLUTION
CONFLICT is the first, the number-one critical ingredient, but it's important not for what it is, but for what it does. What conflict does is force the character to ACT—whether he likes it or not, and he will not like it, he cannot. Ahab, Scarlett, Hamlet, Lear, Gatsby did not like what was happening to them or what they had to do. They were trying to enjoy themselves, but they were frustrated at every turn. The character cannot enjoy himself. You, the author, cannot let him, because if he's enjoying himself, the reader is not. So, conflict is what we use to make the character act, to use himself, to reveal himself. Revealing character is what must happen before identification can occur.
THE NUMBER-ONE INGREDIENT AND SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT IT
Conflict is the first, most important, and trickiest ingredient by far. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is a social reason. The first time I was told by a writing teacher that nothing happens without conflict, I went home and wrote a story, working conflict in at every turn, making everything difficult for the characters in every possible way. How do you think I felt after making all that trouble? I was worn-out. Working the conflict was stressful beyond the usual struggle of writing. That story was applauded in the workshop, but it had been a real strain to write.
Why was it such a strain and why will it be until you get used to it? Ask yourself how you get along in society, how you survive when you're out in the world. By making as much trouble as possible every chance you get? No, you survive by avoiding conflict, by playing it safe, by being careful, by doing the exact opposite of what you need to do to write exciting stories.
Writing compelling stories goes against the grain of all our socialized, civilized training. Creating fiction is an antisocial act. You, the author, are the one who must make all the trouble. And you must be merciless if you are going to incite your characters to the kind of action that is revealing and dramatic. This will be difficult when the time comes to pressure, to assault, to attack your character, a character that you have put your heart into creating and are attached to. But you must, because the more pressure you put on your character, the more he must use himself, reveal himself, so that we are able to experience him.
If you take the easy way out, which you will be prone to do, consciously or unconsciously, because of your civilized nature and your affection for your character, if you take that easy way, your character will not act in a compelling way, your story will sag, and the reader will leave. So you must be cruel to your characters. It's the only way.
Remember, the whale didn't kill Ahab. Melville did. The betrayed husband didn't kill Gatsby. Fitzgerald did. In Gone with the Wind, the tragic death of Rhett and Scarlett's little daughter falling from the horse wasn't ultimately from the fall. The author, Margaret Mitchell, had to kill her by making her fall from the horse. Why do that? Why cause such pain to Rhet
t and Scarlett? Pushing them to their limits was the best way to reach them on the deepest level and to reach us also—to reveal character, to create identification. So, you, the author, are the ultimate cause of all the trouble in the story and all the pain suffered by the characters.
We're capturing life on the page, but we do it in a way that could only be seen as perverse if we were doing it to real people. The more real your characters become to you, the more you must fight the urge to make life easy for them. To create compelling stories, you must develop and exercise SADISTIC LICENSE. As I said earlier, fiction is not polite society—even when you're writing about polite society. Happy lives make lousy novels. Because trouble is dramatic, fiction is the downside, the gory details, the worst-case scenario—always. The thing you must be ever wary of is your tendency to hold back, to go easy, to let up at the very moment when you should bear down. It's a great paradox that this antisocial process produces this most social and personal creation.
OK, shying away from using conflict is one problem. The other problem is not understanding what conflict is and what it isn't. We all know what conflict is, right? Your wife calls you an insensitive slob. You get cut off on the expressway on the way to work. Your boss tells you that your work is below par. Your mother disinherits you.
Well, guess what, not one of those is conflict, our kind of conflict— dramatic conflict. Oh, those examples are troubling, disturbing, upsetting, but not one of them is what's needed to set a story in motion. They're false conflict. Trying to create a story from false conflict is like dragging a dead horse around a racetrack: you might get to the finish line, but you'll never win the race.
What we think of as conflict in everyday experience—disagreements, arguments, insults, shouting matches, even fistfights—are not our kind of conflict—not dramatic conflict. They can be turned into dramatic conflict—anything and everything can, once you know how—but dramatic conflict is a different creature entirely. Dramatic conflict is made up of several elements. Get one wrong, and no matter how brilliantly you write, your story falls flat.
All right, so what exactly is dramatic conflict? In the last chapter, I defined it as want + obstacle. That's good, but not precise enough to keep you focused the way you need to be. We need to pin it down so there is no doubt you have a dramatic want and a dramatic obstacle, which are both needed to create dramatic conflict.
Want: How do you know if you have a dramatic want—enough of a want to incite the character to propel the story forward to a dramatic finish? For a want to be dramatic the character must feel that satisfying it is a matter of life and death. That doesn't mean that it is a matter of life and death, but the character must feel that strongly, must believe that deeply that things must change, that he or she can't stand to go on with life as it is. A wife who has been browbeaten for years and taken it quietly, for example, could feel that her husband's abuse this particular morning was so vicious and demeaning that she can't take it any longer, that she can't live with herself if she puts up with another moment of it. He must stop treating her with such contempt, he must change, or she will leave him. She must be determined, driven, desperate to make things change. She will settle for nothing less. (Now, that doesn't mean that she won't be forced to compromise, but only after waging an all-out battle, after using everything she has to prevail.) There's urgency, a sense of crisis. If she can live with things the way they are, if she has a choice, you have a false want, which will make for a false conflict. The want must be overpowering and pushing the character to the limit. She has come to a point where she can't stand it any longer. Her neighbor might feel differently. "Twenty minutes of abuse a day, for all you've got. I'd trade places with you any day." But our wife can stand it no longer. If she did nothing, she could not live with herself. She would have no self-respect. This would eat her up from the inside.
Now, of course, there are gentle, subtle stories that may not go the limit to this degree. But even the best of these follow this form. At a minimum, they have a sense of urgency, an encounter/confrontation, and a resolution. But don't get distracted by that now. Your job is to learn to create drama. Once you can do that, you can do anything.
Obstacle: Following immediately on the heels of the want must come the obstacle. But how can you tell if you have enough of an obstacle, a dramatic obstacle? Well, first, the obstacle must be as determined, driven, and desperate to block or deny the want as the want is driven to overcome the obstacle. If they are not of equal determination, you have an uneven match and a false conflict—one that will be resolved quickly. The best way to measure the want-obstacle relationship is to consider what would happen if the character ignored the obstacle. If you have a dramatic obstacle and the character ignores it, if he does not act, he will be seriously harmed or destroyed—emotionally, physically, socially, financially ruined. If the character can do nothing and still suffer no injury, you have a false conflict or no conflict—no drama, no story.
Obstacle First: Now, a person's want often doesn't get fired up until it's thwarted. The obstacle often appears first, as in Hamlet (the ghost of
Hamlet's father appears out of nowhere) or in my Larry scene (my wife kisses Larry). The want is there. It's understood, but it's dormant. We assume Hamlet wasn't longing to have the problem of avenging his father's death dumped in his lap. So, he doesn't give it a thought until it is. We assume that I don't want my wife cheating on me by kissing Larry, but it doesn't cross my mind until it happens. Often it's easier to dump a big problem on the character to get things moving than to try to work up a want first. Or you can create an obstacle, then start your story before the obstacle appears and build up the want that the obstacle will threaten or deny. Whether it's want-obstacle or obstacle-want, they need to appear as close together as possible.
Action: Activity is not action, not dramatic action. A character can be doing all kinds of things (ranting, raving, thrashing around) that are not to the point, not an attempt to make something happen. For action to be dramatic, it must be either a direct attack upon the problem or a defense against it. Trying to convince someone to loan you money so you can pay off a gambling debt is a direct attack upon the problem. Hiding behind the door with a baseball bat to club the juice man who's coming to break your legs at eight o'clock is a defense against the problem—a problem that's coming to you. In both cases the character must assert himself in a major way.
Thinking: Thinking can be action. Thinking that involves wrestling with the problem and planning an attack or a defense is action. The mind is a dramatic place. The written story is the only story form that can do the mind well, that can portray it to its fullest. All great stories involve the workings of the mind and the internal conflict, the character's struggle with himself. The mind is the deepest, most intimate connection that we can make. But all writers do not go into the mind to the same degree—mainly because it's the most difficult part of the
craft next to using conflict. Portraying a character's thoughts is difficult and complicated enough that it needs a chapter of its own, which will come later.
WANT, OBSTACLE, ACTION Your first line of defense. The never-fail tools.
The holy trinity of story.
Want, obstacle, action are the one, two, three of dramatic movement. If you get those three elements in place and working properly, your story will have the dramatic energy to propel it to a strong ending. The first questions to be asked when reworking a story or a scene are: 1. Who wants what? 2. What's the obstacle? 3. What's the character doing (action) to overcome it? If you don't check these elements first, if you fuss around with other concerns, you'll waste a lot of time and energy trying to fix things that can never make up for a weakness in these elements. If the want, obstacle, action aren't absolutely clear, if you can't find them on the page, that is what you must work on first— always. Nothing begins, nothing moves dramatically, until they are working. Never let yourself be distracted from working these elements first. They are what determine all else i
n your story.
Resolution: The ending. Many writers say they have trouble with endings, but the ending is rarely the problem. The major cause of difficult endings is: There is no real beginning. The fact that you have a lot of words and pages doesn't mean that your story has begun in the dramatic sense. Technically, until you have a dramatic conflict (want + obstacle) and a character acting to overcome the obstacle, your story has not begun. If those elements don't emerge until page 60, your story doesn't start until page 60. Some stories never begin.
The rule is: the end is in the beginning. This means that if you have two forces of equal strength struggling to conquer each other, you have a beginning. The story will end when one prevails after an all-out struggle. For example, it's easy to see what the end of my Larry scene and the eventual end of the story would be. The end, the resolution of the conflict, is merely a victory or a defeat. Romeo and Juliet are defeated. Hamlet is defeated. Ahab is defeated. Scarlett loses and wins. Now, reality is not so cut-and-dried, so the ending doesn't have to go all one way. There can be mixed victories, compromises, accepting less, just as it might happen in real life, but again, only after an all-out struggle. It can never be easy. But there can be moments when it can appear easy, which brings us to an important point.
THE USES OF HAPPINESS
Even though it can't be easy, it can appear to be easy. What would you feel if, in a 300-page novel, everything got good, the trouble seemed to be over, and the characters were home free on page 150. The characters are rejoicing, "This is great. Our worries are over. Life is wonderful." But you know damn well that trouble is going to strike soon; otherwise, it's over.
Early in The Great Gatsby, several pages are spent showing us Gatsby's grand mansion and describing how it glows through the night with his fabulous parties in and around his place and his pool. It's OK, but we don't need that much of it, if that's all there is to it. But, in fiction, happiness is a setup. We open with the wonderful, glowing Gatsby mansion. We close with the mansion darkened and Gatsby floating facedown in his swimming pool. If things are going to get better, they can't do so until the end. That brings us to another important point.
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