Story Read online

  Suppose you were to wake up one morning with the inspiration to write this Story Climax: “Hero and villain pursue each other on foot for three days and three nights across the Mojave Desert. On the brink of dehydration, exhaustion, and delirium, a hundred miles from the nearest water, they fight it out and one kills the other.” It’s thrilling … until you look back at your protagonist and remember that he’s a seventy-five-year-old retired accountant, hobbled on crutches and allergic to dust. He’d turn your tragic climax into a joke. What’s worse, your agent tells you Walter Matthau wants to play him as soon as you get the ending sorted out. What do you do?

  Find the page where the protagonist is introduced, on it locate the phrase of description that reads “Jake (75)”, then delete 7, insert 3. In other words, rework characterization. Deep character remains unchanged because whether Jake is thirty-five or seventy-five, he still has the will and tenacity to go to the limit in the Mojave. But you must make him credible.

  In 1924 Erich von Stroheim made GREED. Its climax plays out over three days and three nights, hero and villain, across the Mojave Desert. Von Stroheim shot this sequence in the Mojave in high summer with temperatures rising to over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. He almost killed his cast and crew, but he got what he wanted: a white-on-white landscape of vast salt wastes extending to the horizon. Under the scorching sun, hero and villain, skin cracked and parched like the desert floor, grapple. In the struggle the villain grabs a rock and smashes in the skull of the hero. But as the hero dies, in his last moment of consciousness, he manages to reach up and handcuff himself to his killer. In the final image the villain collapses in the dust chained to the corpse he just killed.

  GREED’s brilliant ending is created out of ultimate choices that profoundly delineate its characters. Any aspect of characterization that undermines the credibility of such an action must be sacrificed. Plot, as Aristotle noted, is more important than characterization, but story structure and true character are one phenomenon seen from two points of view. The choices that characters make from behind their outer masks simultaneously shape their inner natures and propel the story. From Oedipus Rex to Falstaff, from Anna Karenina to Lord Jim, from Zorba the Greek to Thelma and Louise, this is the character/structure dynamic of consummate storytelling.

  6

  STRUCTURE AND MEANING

  AESTHETIC EMOTION

  Aristotle approached the question of story and meaning in this way: Why is it, he asked, when we see a dead body in the street we have one reaction, but when we read of death in Homer, or see it in the theatre, we have another? Because in life idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds.

  In life, if you see a dead body in the street, you’re struck by a rush of adrenaline: “My God, he’s dead!” Perhaps you drive away in fear. Later, in the coolness of time, you may reflect on the meaning of this stranger’s demise, on your own mortality, on life in the shadow of death. This contemplation may change you within so that the next time you are confronted with death, you have a new, perhaps more compassionate reaction. Or, reversing the pattern, you may, in youth, think deeply but not wisely about love, embracing an idealistic vision that trips you into a poignant but very painful romance. This may harden the heart, creating a cynic who in later years finds bitter what the young still think sweet.

  Your intellectual life prepares you for emotional experiences that then urge you toward fresh perceptions that in turn remix the chemistry of new encounters. The two realms influence each other, but first one, then the other. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you’re having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.

  The source of all art is the human psyche’s primal, prelinguistic need for the resolution of stress and discord through beauty and harmony, for the use of creativity to revive a life deadened by routine, for a link to reality through our instinctive, sensory feel for the truth. Like music and dance, painting and sculpture, poetry and song, story is first, last, and always the experience of aesthetic emotion—the simultaneous encounter of thought and feeling.

  When an idea wraps itself around an emotional charge, it becomes all the more powerful, all the more profound, all the more memorable. You might forget the day you saw a dead body in the street, but the death of Hamlet haunts you forever. Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. In short, a story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience. In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.

  In this sense, story is, at heart, nonintellectual. It does not express ideas in the dry, intellectual arguments of an essay. But this is not to say story is anti-intellectual. We pray that the writer has ideas of import and insight. Rather, the exchange between artist and audience expresses idea directly through the senses and perceptions, intuition and emotion. It requires no mediator, no critic to rationalize the transaction, to replace the ineffable and the sentient with explanation and abstraction. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

  A well-told story neither expresses the clockwork reasonings of a thesis nor vents raging inchoate emotions. It triumphs in the marriage of the rational with the irrational. For a work that’s either essentially emotional or essentially intellectual cannot have the validity of one that calls upon our subtler faculties of sympathy, empathy, premonition, discernment … our innate sensitivity to the truth.

  PREMISE

  Two ideas bracket the creative process: Premise, the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story, and Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax. A Premise, however, unlike a Controlling Idea, is rarely a closed statement. More likely, it’s an open-ended question: What would happen if … ? What would happen if a shark swam into a beach resort and devoured a vacationer? JAWS. What would happen if a wife walked out on her husband and child? KRAMER VS. KRAMER. Stanislavski called this the “Magic if …,” the daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything seems possible.

  But “What would happen if …” is only one kind of Premise. Writers find inspiration wherever they turn—in a friend’s light-hearted confession of a dark desire, the jibe of a legless beggar, a nightmare or daydream, a newspaper fact, a child’s fantasy. Even the craft itself may inspire. Purely technical exercises, such as linking a smooth transition from one scene to the next or editing dialogue to avoid repetition, may trigger a burst of imagination. Anything may premise the writing, even, for example, a glance out a window.

  In 1965 Ingmar Bergman contracted labyrinthitis, a viral infection of the inner ear that keeps its victims in a ceaselessly swirling vertigo, even while sleeping. For weeks Bergman was bedridden, his head in a brace, trying to keep vertigo at bay by staring at a spot his doctor had painted on the ceiling, but with each glance away the room spun like a whirligig. Concentrating on the spot, he began to imagine two faces intermingled. Days later, as he recovered, he glanced through a window and saw a nurse and a patient sitting comparing hands. Those images, the nurse/patient relationship and merging faces, were the genesis for Bergman’s masterpiece PERSONA.

  Flashes of inspiration or intuition that seem so random and spontaneous are in fact serendipitous. For what may inspire one writer will be ignored by another. The Premise awakens what waits within, the visions or convictions nascent in the writer.
The sum total of his experience has prepared him for this moment and he reacts to it as only he would. Now the work begins. Along the way he interprets, chooses, and makes judgments. If, to some people, a writer’s final statement about life appears dogmatic and opinionated, so be it. Bland and pacifying writers are a bore. We want unfettered souls with the courage to take a point of view, artists whose insights startle and excite.

  Finally, it’s important to realize that whatever inspires the writing need not stay in the writing. A Premise is not precious. As long as it contributes to the growth of story, keep it, but should the telling take a left turn, abandon the original inspiration to follow the evolving story. The problem is not to start writing, but to keep writing and renewing inspiration. We rarely know where we’re going; writing is discovery.

  STRUCTURE AS RHETORIC

  Make no mistake: While a story’s inspiration may be a dream and its final effect aesthetic emotion, a work moves from an open premise to a fulfilling climax only when the writer is possessed by serious thought. For an artist must have not only ideas to express, but ideas to prove. Expressing an idea, in the sense of exposing it, is never enough. The audience must not just understand; it must believe. You want the world to leave your story convinced that yours is a truthful metaphor for life. And the means by which you bring the audience to your point of view resides in the very design you give your telling. As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship.

  STORYTELLING is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action. A story’s event structure is the means by which you first express, then prove your idea … without explanation.

  Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing—they dramatize. Audiences are rarely interested, and certainly never convinced, when forced to listen to the discussion of ideas. Dialogue, the natural talk of characters pursuing desire, is not a platform for the filmmaker’s philosophy. Explanations of authorial ideas, whether in dialogue or narration, seriously diminish a film’s quality. A great story authenticates its ideas solely within the dynamics of its events; failure to express a view of life through the pure, honest consequences of human choice and action is a creative defeat no amount of clever language can salvage.

  To illustrate, consider that prolific genre, Crime. What idea is expressed by virtually all detective fiction? “Crime doesn’t pay.” How do we come to understand that? Hopefully without one character musing to another, “There! What’d I tell ya? Crime doesn’t pay. Nope, it looked like they’d get away with it, but the wheels of justice turned unrelentingly …” No, we see the idea acted out in front of us: A crime is committed; for a while the criminal goes free; eventually he’s apprehended and punished. In the act of punishment—imprisoning him for life or shooting him dead on the street—an emotionally charged idea runs through the audience. And if we could put words to this idea, they wouldn’t be as polite as “Crime does not pay.” Rather: “They got the bastard!” An electrifying triumph of justice and social revenge.

  The kind and quality of aesthetic emotion is relative. The Psycho-Thriller strives for very strong effects; other forms, like the Disillusionment plot or the Love Story, want the softer emotions of perhaps sadness or compassion. But regardless of genre, the principle is universal: the story’s meaning, whether comic or tragic, must be dramatized in an emotionally expressive Story Climax without the aid of explanatory dialogue.

  CONTROLLING IDEA

  Theme has become a rather vague term in the writer’s vocabulary. “Poverty,” “war,” and “love,” for example, are not themes; they relate to setting or genre. A true theme is not a word but a sentence—one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning. I prefer the phrase Controlling Idea, for like theme, it names a story’s root or central idea, but it also implies function: The Controlling Idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices. It’s yet another Creative Discipline to guide your aesthetic choices toward what is appropriate or inappropriate in your story, toward what is expressive of your Controlling Idea and may be kept versus what is irrelevant to it and must be cut.

  The Controlling Idea of a completed story must be expressible in a single sentence. After the Premise is first imagined and the work is evolving, explore everything and anything that comes to mind. Ultimately, however, the film must be molded around one idea. This is not to say that a story can be reduced to a rubric. Far more is captured within the web of a story that can ever be stated in words—subtleties, subtexts, conceits, double meanings, richness of all kinds. A story becomes a kind of living philosophy that the audience members grasp as a whole, in a flash, without conscious thought—a perception married to their life experiences. But the irony is this:

  The more beautifully you shape your work around one clear idea, the more meanings audiences will discover in your film as they take your idea and follow its implications into every aspect of their lives. Conversely, the more ideas you try to pack into a story, the more they implode upon themselves, until the film collapses into a rubble of tangential notions, saying nothing.

  A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

  The Controlling Idea has two components: Value plus Cause. It identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state. The sentence composed from these two elements, Value plus Cause, expresses the core meaning of the story.

  Value means the primary value in its positive or negative charge that comes into the world or life of your character as a result of the final action of the story. For example: An up-ending Crime Story (IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT) returns an unjust world (negative) to justice (positive), suggesting a phrase such as “Justice is restored …” In a down-ending Political Thriller (MISSING), the military dictatorship commands the story’s world at climax, prompting a negative phrase such as “Tyranny prevails …” A positive-ending Education Plot (GROUNDHOG DAY) arcs the protagonist from a cynical, self-serving man to someone who’s genuinely selfless and loving, leading to “Happiness fills our lives …” A negative-ending Love Story (DANGEROUS LIAISONS) turns passion into self-loathing, evoking “Hatred destroys …”

  Cause refers to the primary reason that the life or world of the protagonist has turned to its positive or negative value. Working back from the ending to the beginning, we trace the chief cause deep within the character, society, or environment that has brought this value into existence. A complex story may contain many forces for change, but generally one cause dominates the others. Therefore, in a Crime Story, neither “Crime doesn’t pay …” (justice triumphs …) nor “Crime pays …” (injustice triumphs …) could stand as a full Controlling Idea because each gives us only half a meaning—the ending value. A story of substance also expresses why its world or protagonist has ended on its specific value.

  If, for example, you were writing for Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, your full Controlling Idea of Value plus Cause would be: “Justice triumphs because the protagonist is more violent than the criminals.” Dirty Harry manages some minor detective work here and there, but his violence is the dominant cause for change. This insight then guides you to what’s appropriate and inappropriate. It tells you it would be inappropriate to write a scene in which Dirty Harry comes upon the murder victim, discovers a ski cap left behind by the fleeing killer, takes out a magnifying glass, examines it, and concludes, “Hmm … this man’s approximately thirty-five years of age; he has reddish hair; and he comes from the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania—notice the anthracitic dust.” This is Sherlock Holmes, not Dirty Harry.

  If, however, you were writing for Peter Falk’s Columbo, your Controlling Idea would be: “Justice is restored because the protagonist
is more clever than the criminal.” The ski cap forensics might be appropriate for Columbo because the dominant cause for change in the Columbo series is Sherlock Holmesian deduction. It would be inappropriate, however, for Columbo to reach under his wrinkled raincoat, come up with a.44 Magnum, and start blowing people away.

  To complete the previous examples: IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT—justice is restored because a perceptive black outsider sees the truth of white perversion. GROUNDHOG DAY—happiness fills our lives when we learn to love unconditionally. MISSING—tyranny prevails because it’s supported by a corrupt CIA. DANGEROUS LIAISONS—hatred destroys us when we fear the opposite sex. The Controlling Idea is the purest form of a story’s meaning, the how and why of change, the vision of life the audience members carry away into their lives.

  Meaning and the Creative Process

  How do you find your story’s Controlling Idea? The creative process may begin anywhere. You might be prompted by a Premise, a “What would happen if…,” or a bit of character, or an image. You might start in the middle, the beginning, near the end. As your fictional world and characters grow, events interlink and the story builds. Then comes that crucial moment when you take the leap and create the Story Climax. This climax of the last act is a final action that excites and moves you, that feels complete and satisfying. The Controlling Idea is now at hand.