Monthly Archives: May 2022

What goes into memorable one-liners?

Forrest Gump is full of memorable one-liners.

STORY consultant Linda Seger reminds us that memorable, dialogue, including memorable one-liners, is an indispensable part of any enduring story.

Memorable dialogue has rhythm, context and veracity. It conveys character through subtext and promotes plot through subtlety, ingenuity and compression.

Sometimes a line of dialogue rises to the status of theme and serves to sum up the premise of the story. At its best, it becomes a meme, an item in our menu of commonly used expressions.

In my classes on storytelling, I urge my students to come up with several supercharged lines in their story that not only capture some important aspect of a character, but that also sum up or, at least, highlight important features of the tale.

“Memorable one-liners become memes, spreading throughout society and immortalising their source narratives.”

Such snippets of dialogue increase their power through repetition, not only within the story itself, (the line is repeated by the same or other characters), but also extradigetically, through the viewers and readers who quote it in their everyday lives.

Who can forget these immortal lines?

1. “Go ahead, make my day.”
2. “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”
3. “Life is like a box of chocolates.”
4. “I’ll be back.”
5. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
6. “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
7. “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

Memorable lines of dialogue echo, sing, resonate, surprise and excite. Like great music, they keeps replaying itself over and over in our minds.

How many of the lines mentioned above can you place? Check below for the answers.

Summary

Memorable dialogue, including memorable one-liners, performs many functions in a story. At its best, it becomes a meme that spreads throughout society, immortalising its source.

1. Dirty Harry
2. The Wizard of Oz
3. Forrest Gump
4. Terminator
5. Apocalypse Now
6. Who Killed Roger Rabbit
7. The Godfather

Catch my latest video—From Plot to Character here!

How to write a strong dramatic premise.

Dramatic premise: Don’t mess with nature—it bites!

A strong dramatic premise is fundamental to most successful stories.

Here are four tips to help you come up with a winning premise:

1. Make the premise as extraordinary and unique as you can:

Rehashing old ideas from past novels and films results in unoriginal and predictable stories. The premise of Jurassic Park was unique at the time, and the box-office receipts prove it.

In my own best selling Scarab series, the original premise is: What would happen to the world if a mysterious formula, buried inside in a secret chamber beneath the Sphinx of Giza, proves to be the final link in constructing a quantum computer that can change the laws of physics?

2. Ensure that the premise statement is clear and contains a strong set-up and pay-off:

Here’s an example: The daughter of a callous hospital director is abducted by an ex-surgeon whose child has failed to qualify for a liver transplant and has died as a consequence (set-up).

This is intriguing, but not enough to motivate the story. Here’s the pay-off:

The fired surgeon kidnaps the director’s own daughter and removes her liver. The director has to find a replacement for his child’s organ, within two days, or she’ll die.

“Together with good characterisation, emotive storytelling, good pacing, and a sense of verisimilitude, the story premise offers a method for successful storytelling.”

3. The concept must raise dramatic questions:

In this example, such questions are indeed raised: Will the hospital director manage to find a liver for transplantation and save his child? Will the kidnapper allow the child to die? Will the hospital director become a more compassionate and caring man, or will this experience fail to change him?

4. The premise evokes the entire story in its essential form:

Steven Spielberg defines high concept as a pithy sentence or paragraph that allows one to hold the entire story in the palm of one’s hand. A strong story premise does the same sort of thing. That’s not to say that it is predictable and devoid of twists and surprises, only that we know enough about the sort of story we’re about to experience, to hold our interest.

Summary

The dramatic premise is a short description of the story that acts as a blueprint for the entire tale. A strong premise is one that is unique, contains a strong set-up and a pay-off, and generates dramatic questions.

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The fabula and the syuzhet in stories.

Extracting the fabula from the syuzhet is essential if one is to make sense of Memento.

The fabula and syuzhet are important narrative concepts, yet few writers know exactly what they mean.

The syuzhet is the story that unfolds on the page or screen. It contains all the gaps in information, obfuscations, and complications that help make the story gripping to readers and audiences.

The fabula, by contrast, is the sequence of events readers and audiences reconstruct in their minds while the story unfolds in order to make sense of it.

Think of the fabula as the all-revealing, areal perspective of a story. It affords full discloser, offers no surprises and grants no unsolved puzzles. It is replete.

The syuzhet, on the other hand, represents the subjective, ground-level discombobulation of the fabula. It is intended to generate a kaleidoscope of puzzlement and intrigue to keep us engrossed. Arguably, the syuzhet contains the artistic fingerprints of its creators. It is the level where most of the art and craft happens.

Memento, for example, has an extremely convoluted syuzhet. The hero, who suffers from short term memory loss, has to constantly try to understand events that make no sense to him, since he has forgotten the intentions and motives that have preceded them. The creators of the film offer a story that unfolds from present to past. this approach captures the disorientating subjective experience of the hero.

“The fabula reorders a discombobulated syuzhet in the mind of the reader or audience in order to make sense of the overall story.”

Most films, even conventional ones, routinely hide information from us. This is in order to build suspense or interest. In Manchester by the Sea the protagonist is unable to form relationships. He seems content to remain in an abusive, low-paying job is explained through a series of flashbacks later in the film.

Other more ontologically complex films reveal information at a more formal level. The result is the existential surprises of the sort we see in films such as Donnie Darko, Vanilla Sky, Jacob’s ladder, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and many others. Such puzzle films present the audience with two or more levels of existential reality. This makes it harder to construct a fabula from a stubbornly uncommunicative syuzhet.

In my own novel, The Level, the syuzhet withholds crucial information from the readers, challenging them to build a coherent fabula before they can understand the meaning of the story.

The benefit of fabula construction for writers lies at the initial stage of story-creation. In planning a complex tale it is best to build a clear fabula before attempting to shift, hide, and surprise through an artful syuzhet. Failure to do so will leave writers as confused as the readers and audiences they are attempting to woo.

Summary

Establish a cogent fabula before attempting to write a convoluted and artful syuzhet.

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Plot from character

The longer I think about stories, both as a writer and as a teacher, the more convinced I become that it all hinges on character.

It wasn’t always the case. When I was first starting out, I tended to emphasise the outer journey – the series of tangible events that exist at the level of plot. Back then I focused on the originality of the idea, the high concept, the attempt to grab one’s attention through a new and unique premise.

Certainly, these are important tools for developing a story. The success of my first novel, Scarab, is proof of that.

But as I went along, my focus shifted to character. I began to conceive of a story from the inside out. I obsessed over the following questions. Does the character lack self-awareness at the beginning of the story? Moral and ethical values? What is her wound, couched in a secret? What must she learn/heal before she can accomplish her goal? Is there is tension between her want and her need? In short, how what is her character arc?

“Plot from character is an insurance policy against shallow and inauthentic character action.”

I began to see that the outer journey, the plot, needs, somehow, to be molded from the materials of the inner journey. And that the events occurring at the level of plot need to be synchronised to the flows that occur along the character arc.

I recognised that understanding the character arc, therefore, is the true precursor of the story. It is reason the hero reacts to events or initiates action in the way that she does.

This realisation has made it easier to write action and plot as manifestation of character. It’s an insurance policy against writing shallow, inauthentic characters.

In The Nostalgia of Time Travel, I write about a man obsessed with fixing a dreadful mistake that resulted in the death of his wife many years previously. Every action, every thought he experiences stems from this obsession. Whatever else the story is about, it is also a tale about a driven man relentlessly attempting to do the impossible. A man who refuses to give up. In many respects his outer life is nothing more than a reflection of his inner life.

One of the greatest examples in literature of how character shapes the story is found in William Golding’s great novel, The Spire. The novel describes the Dean of the Cathedral’s, (Jocelin’s) determination to build a spire on top of a structure that may not support the additional weight. The effort to convince the master builder to built it is a study in the consequences of mistaking pride and stubbornness for faith and strength.

Summary

Plot from character is a methodology that many of the world‘s greatest writers have perfected.

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How to set up the story’s surprise.

A well-crafted, well-timed surprise in your story quickens the blood and makes your story gripping and memorable. — Shutter Island contains a surprise of such magnitude that it changes the genre of the story.

What is the role of ‘the surprise’ in a story? And how is it set up?

A surprise can prevent complacency and predictability and boredom. Additionally, a well-timed surprise, stemming from an important revelation about a past event or character, can help make sense of the entire story. Placed near the end of a film or novel, it can leave a lasting impression.

Who can forget the explanatory power of ‘She’s my sister AND my daughter’, when Evelyn reveals the family’s unspeakable secret to Gittes near the end of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown? The revelation not only sheds light on the seemingly puzzling behavior of several characters, but it helps explain the murder at the center of the story.

“A well-crafted surprise is an antidote to boredom and predictability of a story.”

In Shutter Island, the surprise is more of an existential revelation than an unexpected twist. The film is a closed multiform narrative. Please check out my video on non-linear stories for more information on such narratives.

The film opens with Deputy Teddy Daniels, and his partner, Chuck Aule, arriving on the island to investigate a psychiatric facility where a patient has mysteriously disappeared. At first, Shutter Island appears to be a classical detective story. But things are not what they seem. The grand, existential surprise in the film not only turns the plot around, it changes the type of narrative it is—from detective story to psychological thriller. We accept the change because it has been carefully prepared for by the film-makers. The audience has been given a sense that the world is not what it seems, so when the grand surprise does come, it does not feel forced or far-fetched.

Summary

A well-crafted, well-timed surprise counters complacency and boredom by injecting narrative adrenaline into a story.

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