Scale and dimension (giant trucks cut to caterpillar crossing same highway).
You can also use scene cards to help you ponder the different associations created by cutting from one scene to another. The exquisite short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Robert Enrico, France, 1962) often contrasts frame designs or subject movements, and with these comparisons alone it easily sustains our interest. A longer piece usually needs a larger, enclosing design. The nouvelle vague (new wave) French novelists of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor, made bold experiments in literary structure and texture, and the cinema has been equally inventive. Nicholas Roeg’s mystery, Don’t Look Now (1973, Figure 24–2) is a veritable dictionary of narrative and structural devices. It capitalizes on the way people under great psychological pressure hardly notice time or hunger while they struggle to comprehend the true order of events.
Figure 24–2 Don’t Look Now, Nicholas Roeg’s masterful storytelling set in the labyrinth of Venice (frame from the film).
Letting a Main Character’s Psychic Condition Dictate the Narrative Order
Imagine a man realizing that his keys and wallet have disappeared from his briefcase. He does not chronologically recall the events since he last saw them. In a panic, his mind rushes to whatever is most important, and his body blindly carries out what his mind dictates. First, he bangs all his pockets looking for the missing items. Then he scours his memory for any moment when someone could have got into his briefcase. Provisionally he recalls three likely occasions, then reconstructs each occasion sketchily, in search of a quick and obvious answer. There being none, he scours each occasion in detail, making and correcting memory errors, recalling “might-have-been” moments and trying comparisons between possibilities. Triumphantly he then recalls someone sitting nearby who turned away with a strange expression. Could he be the culprit?
Emotion affects how we travel imaginatively through time, space, and memory. It can block out much of the familiar world and create disorientation, or it can orient us along internally driven priorities. It can extend time (boredom from waiting for a nonexistent bus) or compress it (suddenly a wallet gone, man running for doorway, hero yells “Stop thief!”—someone tackles the thief but he breaks free …).
When subjectivity is so dominant, the sequence and rhythm of events become windows into the POV character’s state of mind. In an action thriller like Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive (1993, Figure 24–3), the torrent of action and reaction alone tells most of what we need to know about Dr. Richard Kimble’s priorities, feelings, and vulnerabilities.
Figure 24–3 In a plot-driven story like The Fugitive, we understand the central character from the way he handles his predicaments (frame from the film).
Point of View and Stream of Consciousness
Despite the apparent objectivity of the camera, a screen story is really a stream of human consciousness, so that POV and apparent time are inextricably entwined. POV can originate in one character but migrate to another. In the storytelling itself, it can move around as we follow the mind (or collective of minds) that inhabit the film’s vision of its world, and we can begin to think of this as the unseen storyteller’s stream of consciousness. For every film implies a storyteller.
No story need be cast in the tedious chronological mold of mainstream realism. Structure and flow can instead arise from mood and context, association with similar stories, or from the logic of its characters, their psychology, or mood. Because film is a reproduction of consciousness, each character may be thinking and acting from differing inner or outer compulsions. The inner and outer may be in harmony, or they may be in conflict. The ultimate arbiter is the unseen storyteller whose hand creates the story itself. Try considering that:
The needs of the subject often suggest an appropriate form and structure: A period piece depending on a complicated historical setup may require you to launch some commanding action, then backtrack in time to establish characters, events, era, and backstory before the action proper can go forward.
A film about an archeologist might go chronologically backward, digging a metaphorical trench downward through layers of time, and coming to rest at some significant point of origin.
A surreal story about a psychopathic firefighter secretly setting buildings ablaze might employ nightmarish shifts between place, character, and mood.
A story about identical twins separated at birth might tell parallel stories to show serendipitously similar events before they meet for the first time.
Film language can juxtapose extremes: As a baffled psychiatrist trying to understand a soldier suffering post-traumatic hallucinations, the narrative could alternate between different points of view. The doctor is in the present, while the patient relives chaotic terrors and events that may be imaginary or misremembered.
Genre influences a story’s structure: A story set in India might borrow from Indian dramatic repertoire by structuring its story as a succession of moods.
A story about women persecuted as witches in the 17th century might use scenes arranged as a series of tableaux that imitated paintings of the period.
Whatever option you take, your audience should find the story’s structure and language rooted in its characters, narrative style, topic, genre, or message.
However your story begins, it implies a “contract.” It is wise to imply straight away what the story will deal with, and how it will proceed. An effective contract (also called the hook) draws the audience into the piece, and persuades them to suspend disbelief.
Troubleshooting
Here are more ways to flush out problems and find solutions. You can apply them initially to an outline, then again when you reach the full draft stage, when it is common to feel you can no longer see the wood for the trees.
Getting the Story Started
Let the audience know quickly what the piece is about. Your screen tale is fatally handicapped if minutes roll past with no hint of its focus. It’s like sitting hungry in a restaurant that has failed to give you a menu. See how others set the scene for their work by running the first minutes of several feature films. How did the successful ones claim your attention, and how quickly? Do the same with novels. Anna Karenina begins, “All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.” Interesting families, says Tolstoy contentiously, are animated by their conflicts. Even if you disagree, you read on.
Hide exposition. Realizing the author is briefing us can be like catching the puppeteer at work, so camouflage your exposition by establishing it visually. Details of the era, place, backstory, relationships, characters, and their agendas should all ideally unfold during action.
Keep exposition minimal, and space it out. When your audience must absorb new situations or meet new characters, hold back all information extraneous to the immediate situation till later, or risk making your audience gag on an overload. Hold each item until we really need it.
Double-check for important expository information. It is fatally easy for the writer, so familiar with the basics, to omit something vital. Train yourself to read with a newcomer’s lack of foreknowledge—a prime discipline all on its own.
Character Issues
Involve us with your main characters soon. Don’t waste time introducing us slowly to the rugged landscape, working up an atmosphere, and so on. A slow pace was fine for readers with excess time on their hands in the 19th century, and can still work with a captive audience in the theatre, concert hall, or cinema. But usually your audience will turn to other things unless you boldly claim their attention. Grab us with action that commits the characters to a compelling situation. This is the “contract” you strike with your audience. Start with momentum—something Shakespeare, with a whole company to feed, knew very well. Often his plays start in a tumult of action that leaves you gasping to catch up.
Keep the story moving as new characters come on the scene. In jazz the rhythm section seldom stops wh
en a new soloist enters. So don’t stop the action to let us meet a new character. Keep up your story’s momentum
Inhabit each character. In separate readings, try identifying for the length of the piece with only one character’s reality at a time. As you explore his or her subjective needs, feelings, and perceptions, improvise his or her interior monologue. This can lift flat characters from being inanimate foils and ensure that round characters act from a developing agenda.
Don’t invent a new character to solve a plot problem. If she is indispensable, make her a functioning part of the story well before you make her perform that vital plot function.
Make sure the characters have enough opposing and conflicting qualities. Because conflict is at the heart of all drama, make sure your characters differ in temperament, social background, habits, likes, dislikes, and agendas. This will generate the kind of friction that drama needs. Interesting characters tend to have internal conflicts as well as external ones, and this indicates their unfinished business in life. As part of our quest in life, many of us hitch up with our opposites.
Know what your characters are trying to get or do. Having decided a character’s dominant motivation, remember to make that character keep evolving, however minimally. During any rewrite, keep asking, “What is this character trying to get or do now?” Finding new answers will keep your characters fresh, questing, and dynamic.
Develop your characters. Don’t settle for a formula; write character biographies for your characters so each is unique. View documentary films about so-called ordinary people to see exactly how and where you got information about each person’s life.
Point of View
Whose story is it? Check whose POV you are suggesting, and consider whose should prevail. Prove your choice by experimentally privileging other possible POVs. If you still cannot decide, you probably haven’t yet decided who or what the piece is really about.
Sustaining Dramatic Tension
“Make them laugh, make them cry, but make them wait.” Storytelling, like striptease, must keep the audience in anticipation. Disrobe too fast or too slow, and your act fails. As the story proceeds, ensure your audience has questions to answer, dilemmas to judge, and contradictions to weigh. Keep it wondering so it stays in that wonderful state of anticipation in which minds and imaginations are hard at work.
Raise the stakes, but keep them credible. You can often intensify whatever is stopping a character from accomplishing their goals. Make them work harder, suffer more, and play for higher stakes. Drama about untroubled middle-class people leading calm, materially assured lives is flat unless you can raise the stakes by injecting the sensational. Make real life your teacher: What really creates tension in ordinary people’s lives?
Vary how you act on your audience, but maintain the intensity of demand. Novice fiction is often monotonous because scenes are too similar in type, rhythm, or content. Variety and contrast keep us fresh. Avoid making inconsistently high or low demands, sometimes overworking the audience by compressing or truncating a complex situation, and sometimes boring it with indulgent late-night discussions or artful montages about the coming of spring. Scan your piece with the “intensity meter” in hand and assess each scene’s demands on the audience. Give them ratings between 1 and 10. Now draw a graph plotting how all the sequences play. Your curve should “breathe” between high and low intensities, and crescendo at a logical place in the overall design. If it doesn’t, rearrange scenes and rewrite until it does.
See that climaxes are well-placed. A barometric chart for your entire story will show where the high points lie in each scene and whether they are high enough. How well are these incidental climaxes distributed? Are they bunched? Do they come too early in the story, leaving you with too much falling action? Try redistributing them by transposing scene cards. One crisis should stand out as the turning point for the whole story. Once you know this, see whether you are using the right point-of-view character, starting the story too early or too late, or taking too long to establish the characters’ problems.
Under any new conditions, rewrite your working hypothesis. This is fascinating if unsettling work.
Excess Baggage
Kill your darlings. Any scene, no matter how dear to the writer, is excess baggage if the piece works without it. The same is true for characters. Less is always more. Remove: Dialogue whose meaning you can render through action
Characters or scenes not strictly necessary
Anything without a clearly defined dramatic function
Check for multiple endings. How your story takes leave of its audience is what the audience most remembers. Smoke Signals (1998, Figure 24–4), Chris Eyre’s funny and endearing film about life on an Indian reservation, has three endings. This common fault spikes a story’s most potent weapon—its parting shot. Multiple endings happen when storytellers try to convey too many messages. Look rigorously at your piece, identify its thematic backbone, and ditch whatever isn’t the single, most effective conclusion. Remake your working hypothesis to identify its theme and what ending is most appropriate.
Figure 24–4 Smoke Signals, an endearing tale of reservation life marred by multiple endings.
Stay True to Your Intentions
Keep rethinking your working hypothesis. With each new draft, the story’s premise subtly shifts. Updating the hypothesis often seems uphill and unnecessary, but doing it confronts you with your latest intentions. Often these have become inconsistent. You must stay abreast of what you are doing, and, let it be said loud and clear, most people do not.
Put your work away for a few days before rereading it. The writer’s occupational hazard is partial blindness from the glare of over-familiarity. Get enough distance so that, at the very least, you can see what any newcomer effortlessly sees in your work.
Seek audience reaction and feedback. It’s an audience medium, so make your audience your masters by listening to them. Ask open questions and, without arguing or explaining, listen carefully to the answers.
Yielding to Dramatic Conventions
If you feel outside forces taking over your tale, you are right. The dramatic conventions are asserting themselves—the forces from human experience of narrative that affect your work much as the moon affects the oceans. So before you expand an outline, let’s quickly consider how tradition can exert such invasive authority.
Every writer, knowingly or otherwise, operates from the bloodlines of their art form. These conventions survive and prosper because they are useful at facilitating narrative purposes. Any writer, actor, dancer, songwriter, or comedian who enthralls us is making skillful use of both old and new. Genres and structural forms are parts of this cultural connections kit, and you can often get ideas and help by comparing your work to one similar in another art form. Dramatic conventions affect a work’s
Length. We expect different things of different-length works.
Language. We expect interesting discourse in heightened language. Metaphor, symbol, simile, analogy, and rhythms are all part of the dialogue between audience and artist, just as they are in song.
Genre. We expect particular families of work to handle particular topics in particular ways. An identifiable genre accelerates our entry into the story and helps us to focus on its salient points.
Medium. We bring different expectations to poetry, songs, short stories, animation films, documentary, experimental films, avant garde theatre, television, modern dance, and so on. The medium is also the message.
Plot. The contest between individual will and the rules of the universe provides the dramatic tension. Often its creator tries to engage with the current doubts, beliefs, and interests of the audience.
Style. Stylistic choices concern mood, rhythms, point of view, density of language, poetical allusions, and individual voice. The latter is more inherent than chosen.
Morality and ethics. Most artworks exploit the critical dichotomies in the human mind such as our perennial concern about good and evil. Ri
ght versus wrong is less interesting than right versus right.
As you expand your outline, you are shaping your audience to anticipate particular things. You may not give it entirely what it expects, for subverting expectations is an oft-used way of springing surprise or maintaining dramatic tension. You can keep things lively by splicing genres and types of discourse together as a way to push or subvert expectations. The conventions, though old, are always in change and always in negotiation. Like spoken language, they must evolve if they are to remain potent and useful.
High Art and Low Art
Attracting a wide audience can pose a quandary. By reaching overmuch toward what the audience knows, the teller may patronize us, lose contact with tale’s source in the authentic, and compromise his or her own “voice.” Conversely, the teller who focuses inwardly on personal concerns may fail to show anything we recognize or care about. In between these extremes lies a noble expectation—that stories of depth and universality arise from individual experience, concern, and conscience. By touching our hearts, storytellers diminish the existential void between us.
Cultural snobs divide art into high and low, but there is no inherent conflict between “good” and “popular.” Shakespeare, the ultimate poet and dramatist, was a bestseller in his time and has been ever since. By working with the culture you know intimately, you can infuse even a slapstick comedy with the underlying seriousness that treats the human condition in a responsible and entertaining way.
Developing Story Ideas Page 23