Monthly Archives: July 2021

What is your story question?

The story question – how long can the Abbott family survive?

The first act of a story performs several tasks, including introducing the story question.

It also introduces readers and audiences to the world of the characters and their role in it. The act contains the inciting incident and the first turning point, and establishes mood and genre.

The central question the story must answer by the end of act three is something that the writer might easily neglect to emphasise in the dash to lay the tracks the story needs to ride on.

In Making a Good Script Great, Linda Seger advises that once the defining question is raised, usually within the first fifteen minutes of a film, and certainly before the first turning point of the story, everything that follows is in response to it.

“The central story question drives the story to its ultimate conclusion.”

A Quiet Place revolves around this central question: How long can the Abbott family survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind, monstrous aliens with a powerful sense of hearing? In Edge of Tomorrow, the question is: Can William Cage survive as part of the allied force fighting the Mimics? In E.T. it is: Will E.T. find a way to go back home?

In a story with an up ending the answer to the central question is usually, “yes”, and favours the hero. 

In a more ambiguous story, however, the answer is not clear-cut. In Donnie Darko, a non-linear film, Donnie is absent from home at the start of the story when a jet engine crashes into his bedroom, so he survives. But the incident is replayed at the end of the tale. This time Donnie stays at home and is killed.

Linking the answer to some deeper revelation that has been previously withheld is a powerful way to bring the outer and inner strands of a story together at the climax. This technique creates an exclamation mark within the final act.

Summary

The first act poses the central story question that is only answered at the climax of the third act.

Watch my new YouTube video on non-linear stories by clicking on this link.

Good Writing Advice?

Is Oscar Wild’s advice about writing to be taken a pinch of salt?

Writing advice is not that hard to find, in fact it’s everywhere. Some of it is very good, some of it not so much. The challenge is to sift through it until you separate the chaff from the wheat.

Princeton University’s Joyce Carol Oates, who teaches Creative Writing and is a multi-award winning novelist, does offer us some good general advice:

1. Write your heart out.
2. The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.
3. You are writing for your contemporaries – not for posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become posterity.
4. Keep in mind Oscar Wild: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
5. When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler’s advice.)
6. Unless you are experimenting with form – gnarled, snarled & obscure – stick to the accepted format.
7. Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless.
8. Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader – or any reader. He/she might exist – but is reading someone else.
9. Read, observe, listen intently! – as if your life depended upon it.
10. Write your heart out. (Again).

There you have it. Good advice to guide your writing. Take the time to ponder upon it.

Summary

Study the suggestions of accomplished writers to glean good writing advice from their thoughts, statements and works.

To catch my latest YouTube video click here.

The Power of the Secret

The power of the secret in Primal Fear
The power of the secret in Primal Fear

One way to get to know your characters is to have them reveal their secrets to you. Place yourself in each character’s shoes and try to have them talk through you—as if you were talking to a psychologist or a priest in a confessional. 

In the chapter on The Secret Lives of Characters (The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, Will Dunne) we are told that, “Characters with secrets have an objective (to conceal), a problem (the risk of exposure), and a motivation (enough at stake to require privacy).” That’s quite a truckload of treasure to help us enrich our stories.

Delve into your character and plot by having the character confess his or her secret, using the format offered below. What does the secret suggest about the character’s values? His or her psychological, sociological and physiological status? Next, write down ten actions the character might undertake to keep this secret hidden from the world.

Example: “I’ve got a secret about something I did in the past. I am Claudius in Ham­let. I killed Hamlet’s father, the king, so I could marry his wife and assume the throne of Denmark.” 

This admission cuts to the heart of the character. It is easy to imagine why Claudius would behave in this way, given the gravity of his secret. His secret not only reveals his lack of values — his desire for power that has made him a murderer — it also explains his present and future actions: He fears disgrace and retribution if he’s found out. Knowing that Hamlet suspects him of the murder of his father, he tries to exile him and plots his death. This is how secrets turn actions into plot. 

“Secrets are prodigious story generators.”

Example: In Primal Fear, defense attorney Martin Vail (Richard Gere) is representing altar boy Aaron Stamper (Edward Norton) who is charged with murder. Aaron, who purportedly suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), claims his alter-ego “Roy” is responsible. 

Aaron’s secret? “My name is Aaron Stamper and I don’t have DID! I am a sociopath and an exceptionally good actor.”

This secret is so central to the story that keeping it hidden drives the entire tale. The challenge is to keep the audience guessing.

Secrets, then, drive stories – use them to shape character and generate plot.

Summary

What is your character’s secret? Write down ten actions and their consequences that flow from it.

To catch my latest YouTube video click in this link!

Who is the pivotal character in your story?

The pivotal character via Lajos Egri
The pivotal character via Lajos Egri

Who is the pivotal character in your story? Lajos Egri defines this character as the one who forces the action.

The pivotal character may take the form of the antagonist, protagonist, love interest, sidekick, mentor, and so on.

This character generates energy from the get-go. He or she is the motivating force, the engine of conflict in a story, confident about the course of action to be undertaken. Othello’s Iago is such a character. His function is to drive the story to it’s ultimate conclusion.

Sometimes the character is relentless because circumstances have placed him in this position. An honest man who steals, for example, does so not for excitement or gain, but because his family might be starving, or he might need money for an operation for his child. But because he is an obsessively driven individual who focuses on his own goal, he can be reactionary and militant.

“The pivotal character forces the action, causing other characters to act.”

Pivotal characters are fixated on their goals and will drag others along with them.

Here are some characteristics and circumstances that make for effective pivotal characters: 

  1. Someone who wants to take revenge on the man who ran away with his wife.
  2. Someone willing to give his life for his country.
  3. Someone who loves a woman but must make money first to marry her.
  4. Someone greedy. His greed springs from poverty. He exploits others because of it.
  5. Someone who obsessively wants to achieve success in a specific job or profession and will stop at nothing to achieve it.

A pivotal character is useful because he grants the writer flexibility—pivotal characters are usually protagonists or antagonists, but not necessarily so. This means the writer can utilise other characters to enrich the story without having to do it through traditional roles.

Summary

The pivotal character can be the protagonist or antagonist, or she can be the love interest, ally or mentor, providing she forces others into action throughout the story.

Catch my latest YouTube video by clicking on this link!