Category Archives: Story Structure

The likeable protagonist in films and novels

The likeable protagonist: Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The likeable protagonist: Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In his book, Writing Screenplays that Sell, Michael Hague, stresses the need to create a likeable protagonist if our stories are to succeed.

Likeable protagonists make for more popular films and novels. Unlikable heroes make for unpopular ones.

“A likeable protagonist is exceptional, interesting, eccentric. He stands out from the crowd. He is the sort of person we would like to know long after the story has ended.”

Here are four simple but effective ways to write a likeable protagonist in a screenplay or novel:

  • Make your protagonist someone who represents something bigger than himself. Indiana Jones is likeable and heroic not only because he is able to do things no one else can—his actions showcase his passions and skills—but because he fights to preserve the values that define and enrich society. This increases his aura.
  • Make the protagonist funny and entertaining, as in Deadpool.
  • Make her a kind, good person, as are the heroes in Norma Ray, or Crimes of the Heart.
  • Write a protagonist who is tough, or good at what he does, as in Gladiator.

Using one or more of these traits, indeed, preferably all four of them, will make your protagonist more likeable and engaging. This is vital in helping your audience or readers to form a relationship with the character—one that will endure throughout the story and beyond.

Most importantly, establish these positive traits as soon as possible—especially if you are dealing with a complex, flawed characters. Once an audience gets to like the character it will more easily tolerate his or her flaws.

Summary

Craft likeable and engaging protagonists for your screenplays and novels by having them display likeable traits early, before exposing their flaws. This will grant us time to get to like them.

Check out my latest video on writing compelling characters!

The grand surprise in stories—how to set it up!

Shutter Island contains a story-altering surprise.
Shutter Island contains a story-altering grand surprise.

What is a grand surprise and how do we set one up?

If story structure could be represented on a sheet of paper it would look like a zig-zagging line mediated by two or three radical turns. The zig-zagging lines and turns represent surprises of varying strength.

Telegraphing your punch eliminates the surprise, making your story predictable and boring. In his book, Film Scriptwriting, Dwight. V Swain reminds us that stories should be unpredictable but logical, in other words, contain development that is plausible but unforeseen.

One way to achieve this is to set up an anticipated line of action then spin off in a different direction.

But the surprise can’t feel inauthentic or forced.

Shutter Island opens with Deputy Edward (Teddy) Daniels, and his partner, Chuck Aule, arriving on the island to investigate a psychiatric facility where a patient has mysteriously disappeared. But things are not what they seem. The surprise in the story turns the narrative on its head but is effective because it has been carefully prepared for by the film-makers.

“A grand surprise changes the path of the story fundamentally, forcing it in a direction that we didn’t see coming. Use it to keep your stories fresh and exciting.”

Suppose you’ve written a story where your hero encounters numerous obstacles in order to sneak into the room where his girlfriend is supposedly waiting for him. He struggles up the drainpipe outside the house and finally reaches her open window. The room is in darkness. He climbs inside, and, panting with passion and fatigue, he tiptoes to the figure lying on the bed. The bedside light goes on to reveal that the figure is not his girlfriend but her mother.

This sort of surprise might not necessarily rise to the level of a turning point, or be as story-altering as the one in Shutter Island, but it does constitute a deviation from the story’s path. Providing that the set-up is right, twists will help keep your stories unpredictable.

Summary

To keep your stories fresh and unpredictable spin your readers and audiences away from expectation through a grand surprise.

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The evolution of story

Inception is an example of a closed multiform narrative that points to the evolution of story.
Inception is an example of a closed multiform narrative that points to the evolution of story.

In life as in culture evolution is inevitable.

In his book The Screenwriter’s Workbook screenwriting guru Syd Field wrote this about the screenplay: […] I think we’re in the middle of a screenwriting revolution, a time where screenwriters are pushing the form in new directions.” 

My PhD thesis, Multiform and Multistrand Narrative Structures in Hollywood Cinema, traces the impact of digital media on the story-telling form. I suggest that since stories are structured to reflect our experiences their form is likely to change when our experience of the world changes. 

The increasing non-linearity of life, reflected in the web environment in which we spend so much time, must influence our understanding of action – even of time and space. 

Context, and our interpretation of it, which rests on our understanding of how time and space structures experience, has to shift under such pervasive and persistent pressure.

“As we evolve so must the stories we tell. Nothing reflects this evolution as much as the change in structure—from linear into non-linear story telling.”

This may explain the popularity of films such as The English Patient, Cold Mountain, 2046, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Donnie Darko, Inception, and many others.

These films muddle our understanding of linearity, of cause and effect. They rearrange past, present and future, making the status of what is real problematic. The idea is to reflect, at the level of structure, the bewildering complexity and multiplicity of contemporary life.

The danger in tinkering with the traditional form defined by Aristotle as a narrative that has a beginning, middle and end, however, is that the emotional impact on the reader is lessened. Stories that fail to evoke strong emotions through character action and consequence fall flat. Inception works as a film because it innovates form while placing the characters in life-threatening situations within the story.

Authors and screenwriters who choose to use evolving, non-linear forms, then, ought to ensure that their characters continue to evoke powerful emotion such as passion, sadness, joy, disdain—the strength of traditional story-telling. 

An evolving form and structure, then, should never dazzle us at the cost of lessening the emotional impact of our characters. Not if we want our audiences and readers to care about them.

Summary

The evolution of story form should not get in the way of characters who engage readers and audiences through emotion.

Catch my latest YouTube video on writing techniques here!

Understanding Layered Conflict in Stories

Fight Club contains many examples of layered conflict.
Fight Club contains many examples of layered conflict.

Conflict, especially layered conflict, is the driving force behind every story. It supports narrative cause and effect and provides fuel for the tale. Conflict arises from forces that oppose each other and operates on multiple levels. Here are three types of conflict: external, internal, and mixed.

External conflict is typically represented through protagonist/antagonist interaction, but it can also take the form of environmental opposition such as a threat presented by a volcano, or a cyclone. 

Internal conflict pits the protagonist against himself, in effect, turning him into the story’s antagonist — as in Fight Club where the conflict is between the character’s wishes, goals and desires, and between defining traits). 

Mixed conflict is the most common form. Here the protagonist is confronted by a mixture of inner and outer obstacles. 

One of my favourite films, The Matrix, is a great example of how conflict plays out across the layers. At an internal level, the protagonist, Neo experiences conflict between his belief that his current existence is real, and his growing conviction that the world as he knows it is an illusion. It is only when he comes to accept that he is The One that he is able to resolve his inner conflict and defeat the antagonist, agent Smith, and the machines, which have enslaved humanity. Neo’s struggle to attain the story goal, then, is pitted against a multilayered conflict.

Summary

Layered conflict is the fuel that powers your story. The layers can be described as external, internal, and mixed.

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How symbolic ascension makes your story universal

A story replete with symbolic ascension!

What is symbolic ascension?

Every great story is both particular and universal. Being rooted in a local context paradoxically allows the story to reach beyond its social and cultural boundaries. In his book, Story, Robert Mckee refers to the process by which a story becomes universal as symbolic ascension. 

Like the images in our dreams, symbols permeate our unconscious mind. They deepen our experience of a story in ways that are not at once apparent. 

If rendered crudely, we immediately recognise these images as mechanical devices, destroying their effect. Slipped in skillfully and surreptitiously, however, they move us profoundly. 

Symbolic ascension works in this way: At a first encounter the setting, events and specific actions of characters represent only themselves – they are denotative or literal in meaning. But as the story progresses they acquire greater significance. They acquire connotative or figurative meaning. By the end of the story these very same settings, incidents and actions come to stand for universal ideas.

“Symbolic ascension is the process in which actions, events, settings and objects are transformed into universal symbols through repetition and association.”

In The Deer Hunter, the protagonist, Michael (Robert De Niro) progresses from a beer-drinking factory worker to a worrier—the hunter of the film’s title. A man who kills. 

But the film shows that if you keep killing you eventually will turn the gun on yourself—as does Nick (Christopher Walken). 

Nick’s death precipitates a crisis in Michael. Armed, and in camouflage, he ascends to a mountain top where he spots a magnificent elk emerging from the surrounding mist. The setting resonates with significance harking back to Moses receiving the transformative knowledge of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

The action (the ascension), and the setting (the mountain), are symbolically significant. But they are also literal events. It is this spontaneous duality that gives the story its enduring power.

Summary

Symbolic ascension is the process by which seemingly ordinary and specific settings, actions and events acquire universal meaning.

Catch my latest YouTube video on managing dramatic beats through scene sequencing by clicking on this link!

The Power of Dilemma in Stories

The power of dilemma is in full display in Dona Flor and her Two Husbands.

Wherein lies the power of dilemma in stories? What makes for the best dramatic conflict? The two questions are related.


In his seminal book, Story, Robert McKee reminds us that the choice between good and evil or between right and wrong is not a choice at all. It might generate conflict at the level of the plot between the protagonist and his world, but this conflict is two dimensional.

Conflict Through Dilemma

McKee illustrates the point by asserting that Attila the Hun would never be conflicted about invading, murdering, plundering. It is, after all, why he led his armies across two continents. He has no choice but to act in the way he does. It is only in the eyes of his victims that he is seen as evil.

In order to generate conflict within the character, as well as between him and those who oppose him – to make the conflict three dimensional – the character must experience a dilemma.

In the supernatural romance, Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, Dona faces a choice between a new husband who’s warm, secure, faithful but dull, and her old one who’s exciting, sexy, but dead – although he appears to her in the flesh and as insatiable as ever. She is caught between choosing a boringly safe life versus a mad, macabre, but emotionally exciting one.

“The power of dilemma is most evident at the turning points of a story.”

In my bestselling first novel, Scarab, the protagonist, Jack Wheeler, has to choose between two conflicting scenarios. In a world that has been reset to eliminate the death of the woman he loves, he can declare his love for her once more, but risk the possibility, no matter how remote, of recycling the events that led to her death. Or he can keep his feelings for her a secret and eliminate the risk. His uncertainty makes his choice a hard one, since there is no evidence to suggest that telling her he loves her would endanger her life at all. That is the nature of a dilemma – no clear choice.

Placing your protagonist in a dilemma, then, is a powerful technique that not only drives the plot forward, but makes the character’s actions unpredictable and engrossing.

Summary

The power of dilemma escalates the tensions within your protagonist and the other characters, making the story more gripping.

To watch my latest YouTube video on High Concept click on this link.

Causally Connected Scenes

The Fugitive contains many causally connected scenes.

A scene does not exist in isolation, rather, it is part of a set of causally connected scenes that make up the story. 

In Making a Good Script Great Linda Seger stresses that it is far more effective to think of a scene as being a member of a scene sequence—scenes that are so tightly connected to one another that they create single narrative blocks within the story. 

These sequences might be chase scenes in a city that get progressively shorter until they end in a car crash or getaway; they may build up to the final explosion in The Guns of Navarone; they might culminate in two lovers reuniting as in When Harry met Sally.

“Causally connected scenes are an antidote to a slackening of interest due to a meandering narrative.”

In The Fugitive the first sequence of scenes might be called murder and the sentencing. It forms a tight causal unit that spans eleven minutes. The next sequence could be called the escape, leading to the train wreck. The sequence following that could be labeled after him and include the scenes of Deputy Sam Gerard starting the chase, culminating in Kimble arriving in Chicago. 

The point is that all these scenes are linked by cause and effect, or, at least, action and consequence, that allows no room for loose or weakly connected events.

In my novel, The Level, the protagonist finds himself bound to a sturdy chair in a pitch-black room. To make matters worse he is suffering from amnesia and has no clue how he got there. 

Later, a mysterious woman carrying a lantern appears from the darkness, unties him and gives him a series of clues to follow in order to escape. 

The story is a connect-the-pieces puzzle, fraught with dangerous pit-falls that threaten the protagonist’s every step. Indeed, the entire story is driven by causally connected scene sequences, each of which reveals a part of the puzzle. This serves to maintain the readers’ interest.

Summary

Organise your story into causally connected scenes in order to drive the action and avoid a slackening in your narrative.


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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.

Audience participation – how to get it

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Audience participation in The Fugitive
Audience participation in The Fugitive

Sometimes writers try to solicit audience participation by injecting more action into their stories. They erroneously add a fight scene here or a chase scene there in the belief that it will capture the audience through sheer pace alone. They fail to realise that action works best only if it is built upon the foundation of rising stakes, anticipation, suspense.

Firstly, the audience has to care about the character whose life is placed in peril. This means the character has to be finely crafted to evoke sympathy. Crafting sympathetic characters in a feature film or novel is crucial if we are to care about the story at all. I have written about this topic extensively on this site.

At the level of plot, the story benefits through setbacks that delay the hero’s achieving the story goal. Like the drawing back of an arrow, a setback allows the shaft to travel all the faster when released. The setbacks take several forms – barriers and reversals being the most common.

Think about the number of barriers that Sam Gerard encounters in trying to find Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. Each ramps up the tension by allowing Kimble to stay one step ahead and increases our involvement in the story. 

“Audience participation is essential if your story is to succeed. Work at learning the craft until it is mastered.”

How about the reversal in Edge of Tomorrow when Major William Cage meets with General Brigham who is in charge of operations?

The General wants Cage to film the Allied assault against the enemy for purposes of morale. Cage wants no part of it. When Cage tries to blackmail Brigham to force him to reconsider his decision, he ends up being stripped of his rank and sent to the front as a lowly private instead. It is a reversal that sets up the entire story.

In my science fiction novel, Scarab, the protagonist, Jack Wheeler, is confronted with a devastating choice in trying to rescue the woman he loves. He can save her from certain death, but only if he stays away from her forever. It is a reversal in expectation that increases our involvement in the story.

Placing your hero in a situation of undeserved misfortune, then tightening the screws, is one technique that is bound to help increase audience participation in your stories

Summary

A sympathetic hero, in a feature film or novel, who encounters obstacles and reversals in trying to achieve his goal, increases audience participation in the story.

Catch my latest YouTube video on how to write story hooks by clicking on this link.

The Moral Premise – how to harness it.

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The power of the moral premise
The power of the moral premise.

What is the moral premise? How does it differ from a dramatic premise? And why do you need it anyway? 

In his book, The Moral Premise, Stanley D. Williams points out that most commercially successful stories are forged upon the anvil of a moral premise—a clear message to audiences and readers about the reward or punishment associated with embarking on a path of virtue as opposed to a path of vice.

Stories that embody a universal truth about the human condition ring true, and, providing that other components are present—good characterisation, dialogue, as well as an intriguing plot—people are likely to reward such stories with good book or ticket sales.

The moral premise is a sentence that captures the meta-story of the tale—what the story is really about on the inside, whereas the dramatic premise captures what it is about on the outside.

Macbeth is an ambitious Thane who is triggered by a prediction that he will become king. Encouraged by his wife, he murders the rightful king and usurps his throne. This is the dramatic premise of the story.

But what the story is really about is its value-defining premise—how unchecked ambition leads to the murder of a king, and what consequences flow from such an act.

“The moral premise is the true pilot of the story, guiding all actions and events that comprise the tale.”

The moral premise has two parts. Together they encapsulate the totality of the moral landscape with virtue and vice on opposite poles. Simply stated: Virtue leads to a good outcome, but vice leads to a bad outcome. Macbeth is the much loved Thane of Glamis, respected by the king, and the wider community of friends and kingsmen. His initial state of virtue leads to love and praise within his rightful social place.

But his murder of the king activates the second part of the moral premise, his hidden vice—unchecked ambition leads to murder and mayhem.

Defining the premise in this way allows you to construct a tale in which the protagonist’s inner Journey from virtue to vice or from vice to virtue plays out as an outer journey for all to see.

Summary

The moral premise describes the protagonist’s movement from vice to virtue or virtue to vice, while the dramatic premise describes its physical enactment.

Click on the link to watch my latest YouTube video on how to Use Dramatic Irony in Stories