Beginnings: Setting a Story into Motion

Posted by 4rchbishop

In July, I shared a video essay by screenwriter Michael Arndt on insanely great story endings. The 90 min presentation is a brilliant excavation of how narrative works, and how crisis and catharsis interweave to create ‘insanely great’ story endings.

The Oscar winning screenwriter of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and ‘Toy Story 3’ has also created a shorter lecture on story beginnings.

Here are the key steps Arndt identifies set up a good story beginning:

Step 1: Show Your Hero Doing What They Love Most

The first step to setting up a story is to identify the protagonist or hero’s ‘grand passion’. This is their defining trait, the centre of their universe. As you introduce the character the universe they live in, you show your hero doing the thing they love to do the most.

Step 2: Add a Flaw

The character’s grand passion however, contains a flaw. Usually it’s the dark side of their natural love, a good thing that’s taken too far, a fear or a weakness. What is key however, is that the hero’s flaw is tied to their deepest love and desires.

Step 3: Add a Storm

In the early stages of the story, usually around page 10 of a screenplay, you want to establish ‘storm clouds’ on the horizon of the main character’s world. Your character is walking down the road of life, on a nice bright sunny day, and then BABOOM! ~ something comes and totally blows their joyous life apart and irrevocably changes the path they are on.

Step 4: Add Insult to Injury

This bolt from the blue not only interferes with your character’s life but skewers them through their grand passion to their deepest flaw. This wound, changes their whole sense of what their future is going to be. To increase the stakes at this early point in the story, add insult to injury, making the whole world seem a little bit beyond unfair.

Step 5: Make Your Character Pick the Unhealthy Choice

All of this serves to set up the character journey of your protagonist for the rest of the story. Your hero’s grand passion has been taken away, the world is revealed to be unfair and he or she comes to a fork in the road, and they have to make a choice on how to deal with their new reality.

There is a high road to take, a healthy responsible choice, or a low road to take. As the audience, we are barracking for the hero to do the unhealthy, irresponsible thing, because we feel his or her pain.

Bring It Home

To put everything right, your character must make a journey that is the rest of the story. By the end of this journey, hopefully, not only will they get back what they lost, but they will have healed the flaw they had which was tied to this deep passion and desire.

The key point of Arndt’s analysis is that the essence of your story, comes out of your character’s deepest desire and darkest fears. The thing they love gets stolen away from them, and the world is revealed to be unfair. Their journey to reclaim their lost passion, heals their deepest fears, their wound and flaw and re-establishes equilibrium and peace.

And this is what makes insanely good story beginnings.

Endings: the good, the bad and the insanely great!

Posted by 4rchbishop

In this short video, screenwriter Michael Arndt, outlines the ingredients of what he believes make a great film ending. Oscar winner for best original screenplay, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ [2006] and best adapted screenplay ‘Toy Story 3’ [2010], Arndt also worked on the script for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ [2015] and is a true veteran of the craft.

He emphasises several times throughout the presentation that he does NOT intend to state that story telling is formulaic. His analysis merely is an attempt to understand how great stories work by taking the viewer to the point of emotional catharsis.

Arndt points out that many scripts fail to deliver on their endings. While the girl gets the boy, or the hero wins the prize, much of the emotional catharsis of story resolutions are sorely lacking. With much reflection, he has identified three important ingredients for a great story, which when resolved create a great ending: a personal stake, an external stake and a philosophical stake.

To illustrate what he calls, ‘insanely great’ endings, Arndt uses ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ [1977], ‘The Graduate’ [1967] and his own ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ [2006], each which within only 2 short minutes, bring resounding emotional climax and catharsis for the viewers.

Watch the full video presentation via the link below:

Endings: The Good, the Bad, and the Insanely Great from Pandemonium on Vimeo.

Poetics

Posted by 4rchbishop

Around 335 BC Aristotle wrote, Poetics (Περὶ ποιητικῆς) the earliest known work of the theory of drama. So comprehensive is it, that it is still used by literary theorists, writers, educators and directors of theatre of film. Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters [2002, Michael Tierno] is a modern application and case in point.

Interestingly, the whole work was lost to the Western world for a long time until the Middle Ages when part of the original was discovered, through an Arabic translation of the scholar Averroes.

In the work, Aristotle defines “poetry”, a term which in Greek literally means “making” and includes treatises about drama, comedy, tragedy, satire, lyric and epic poetry.

He outlines various rules for the construction of drama, which still form the bedrock of story telling and narrative theory. These include [among others]:

Character [ethos] is the moral or ethical character in tragic play and supports the plot. Their personal motivations somehow connect parts of the cause-and-effect chain of actions producing pity and fear.
The tragic accident or crisis, is what happens to the hero because of a mistake he or she makes (hamartia). That is because the audience is more likely to be “moved” by a character driven accident than by a random occurrance. A hero may have made the mistake knowingly (in Medea) or unknowingly (Oedipus).
Discovery must occur within the plot and the poet should incorporate complication and dénouement or resolution within the story. The poet must express thought through the characters’ words and actions, while paying close attention to diction and how a character’s spoken words express a specific idea.

Catharsis, or tragic pleasure, is the experience of fear and pity produced in the spectator. According to Aristotle, tragedy arouses the emotions of pity and fear in order to release the audience and purge away their excess. Aristotle also talks about “pleasure” one gets from contemplating the pity and fear that are aroused through the play.
Aristotle defined levels of narration and audience knowledge of what is happening in the plot. His tripartite division of characters, means some are in a superior position (βελτίονας) to the audience, and know more than the audience. Most narrators know the full story and so are superior to the audience. Other characters are in an inferior position to the audience (χείρονας) for example a character could be lost yet we audience members know that around the corner lies the murderer waiting for them. Finally, some characters are at the same level (τοιούτους) as the audience, and as they discover truths, so does the audience.

Interestingly, Aristotle points out that the origins of tragedy stem from the dithyramb or Dionysic rites and the origins of comedy, stem from phallic processions. These pagan rituals continued throughout the classic period until they were discontinued under Christian Emperors such as Constantine. Unfortunately, drama and theatre itself along with the works of classical authors such as Aristotle were consequently lost throughout the dark or medieval ages.

However, Aristotle’s theory of Poetics, underpins the logic and structure of all epic narratives, including the ancient Jewish and Christian scriptures.

To Aristotle, tragedy is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe; it creates a cause-and-effect chain that clearly reveals what may happen at any time or place. Within the order, the characters act knowingly and unknowingly act, facing crises often by their own mistake [harmartia]. Interestingly harmartia is the same Greek word used by biblical writers for sin . Artistotle’s tragic characters experience catharsis, or the purging of emotions, through the denouement or resolution of their wound [harmatia]. This occurs through satisfying of the logic of the universe within which it is set. This satisfaction creates pleasure within the audience through the purging of emotions.

Krisis

Posted by 4rchbishop

The Greek word crisis /krisis/ means human or divine judgement, a decision, a sentence.

As part of narrative, the “crisis” is usually the turning point of the story, at which the tension reaches maximum point, the hero or characters are put through intense trial, until the “catharsis” , the purification, cleansing or resolution is found.

The ancient world believed, something the eastern world still appreciates, that this world is built upon justice.

Ancient beliefs such as Hinduism teach that our suffering is merited for past misdemeanors. Buddhism teaches that ego and attachment cause suffering and that is in fact, detachment which brings “catharsis” or cleansing and release.

In this way, story and narrative are built within an ancient understanding of the world and the consequences of justice, and injustice faced by the characters. For this reason, ancient stories, myths and legends, retold in comic books, science fiction and fantasy hold such power in our modern world. These stories provide a meta-narrative in a post-modern era which has done away with such notions.

The popularity of medieval and ancient world narratives such as Vikings, Game of Thrones, Rome and other such sagas, though decried as violent, misogynistic, immoral, and licentious, simply illuminate the taste for a world ruled by justice, though harsh, somehow real and biting. These ancient worlds are populated by blood thirsty gods, vengeful warriors, power hungry despots, fates and powers.

It is within these worlds, because of their violence and darkness, that the voyeur can feel the bite of justice as characters meet their end. These worlds are Shakespearean and biblical in the darkness they portray. The world is wicked without much redemption.

In our contemporary context, we speak of issues of “justice” such as issues of child slavery, human trafficking, the exploitation of women, racism and more. However, an ancient understanding of “justice” would indicate that suffering is the normal state of humanity by merit of our hubris and corruption.

To frame these issues as matter of “injustice” implies a high view of human value from which we have slipped, and justice would require the righting of wrongdoings.

But how is this possible in a world corrupted through and through?

Merely showing mercy does not deal with the “just” nature of the universe. We cannot “love” the universe into wholeness.

This is where narrative helps. Epic narratives depict the “hero” as the one who experiences the crisis, the judgement, in place of the innocent victims. The hero achieves the “catharsis” or the cleansing, the expurgation and righting of wrong.

Those who would fight against “injustice” must understand their role, like the hero of narrative, is to undertake the trial in place of the innocent one, to suffer the death and judgement issued to them by a cosmos geared by “justice” and in doing so re-balance the world.

Philippians 2:5-8 explains the Christian truth:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

The Lungs of the Earth

Posted by 4rchbishop

Trees, or better, forests, are known as the lungs of the earth.

Not only do their leaves produce oxygen, but their trunks and branches are made of carbon extracted from the air. Until burned, this noxious carbon is stored as wood fibres and strong timber.

How fascinating that we living mammals breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide, not only by exhaling, but by burning fuel for cooking, heating and transportation! What a marvellous relationship!

Estimates show that one person in a developed country needs to plant 150 trees every year, the trees of which must each live for 25+ years to offset their lifetime carbon emissions.

What interests me is that the stuff of narrative is tension, crisis and conflict. It is from this crisis, the characters or heroes gain their agency, their mission, their adventure, journey, and eventual self discovery. From crisis comes catharsis – and in this story gives us satisfaction.

The crisis and tension alone is noxious and stressful, but woven into story it becomes the strong wood fibres and timber architecture of a tale.

British 19th century author G. K. Chesterton wrote:

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

I propose then that stories are the lungs of the soul, as trees are the lungs of the earth.

Their food is the noxious tensions and crises of life. They architect their strong trunks and boughs from the stuff of bogeys, fears and fights. And they give out life giving atmosphere of catharsis, resolution, and redemption.

I wonder how many stories each person needs to tell or share to offset our heart and soul’s noxious fumes.

Many I imagine !

Who is the baddy?

Posted by 4rchbishop

We all know that story does not work without a crisis; the protagonist requires a challenge to overcome, the dragon to slay, the mountain to conquer, the darkness to subdue. Every hero requires a nemesis and every protagonist, an antagonist. This is the stuff of good stories – drama, tension, a fight.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines villain as:

“a cruelly malicious person;….a scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot”.

Important evil agency in the plot.…………Interesting!

As a child watching Mary Poppins I remember the bad guys clearly – they worked in the bank. Cold, miserly, money hungry, they would steal men’s time away from their children, away from joy, fun and family. In contrast, Mary sought to bring the children’s dreams alive and to mend relationships between parents and their offspring.

The sensitive viewer may grow to believe that banks and institutions are evil, that the arts and pursuits of family, simple hearty work [such as chimney sweeping] and creativity are true, good and right. But is this a fair representation of reality?

Well not really, but it’s just a kids story, right?

In a cowboy or Western movie – the baddy is an Indian or Mexican. In a spy or war movie, the baddy is a German or Eastern European or Muslim. Are the baddies foreign nationals? Are the baddies the capitalists [Mary Poppins] or the government [Divergent/ Hunger Games]? Are the baddies the drug dealers and criminals amongst us ? Who are the bad guys, really?

The very word villain comes from the Middle-English word for “base or low born rustic” or medieval latin “farmhand”. In medieval times, it accounted for one who did not behave in manner befitting a Knight – one of lowly, dishonourable behaviour. In contemporary parlance, the word is cognate to the french word for “ugly.” The term “sinister” comes from the latin root for “left.”

So in narrative terms – cruetly and malice, wickedness and crime are related to social class, political persuasion and physical appearance? Maybe not in such simplistic terms but if we continue to digest simple stories and their simple morals, perhaps we produce a society of people with narrow minded stereotypical views of who out there needs to be punished for social ills.

How do we redress this?

Of late, years Hollywood has played a lot with story conventions around stereotypical bad buys, and we have more tales telling the back stories of villains such as Wreck It Ralph, Despicable Me, Maleficent, Shrek, Monsters Inc and so forth. Children learn that the bad guy [or girl] has a story too.

However since classical days, the greatest of literary works are the most complex in their approach to the nature and origin of evil.

Greek and Roman plays and poems presented complex tales of conflicted heros with murky motivations. Shakespeares characters are deeply wrought characters full of jealousy, hubris, power lust, and vengeance. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and the Russian writers are famed for the manner in which they can cast characters both empathetic and corrupted at once. The genuis of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter is that while evil lay without in the form of Voldemort, it existed in very real form within Hogwarts too, among the full blooded wizards, the Slytherin families and even within Harry himself and his desire for power.

Most tales of inner struggles are tragedies. Simple stories of good versus bad can end happily when good guy defeats bad guy, but what does one do when the good guy IS the bad guy? How does this story possibly end happily?

John Lennon’s song has become the anthem of peace marches since the ’60s

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

For us to realise that there is no baddy “out there” – not another nation, not another religion, not an ugly person or a different person – this requires a terrbile self knowing and self realisation that is absent from Lennon’s anthem – the baddy is within.

This sounds like religious dogma you might protest…. Religion has created all manner of guilt complexes to make us out the be the culprit of all wrong doings. Religion exists to torture us in the knowledge that we are “baaaaaad” deeply and irrevocably bad. However, it does seem that within this realisation comes the truest form of self- knowing.

No wonder our human psychology is complex – we construct stories in which the fault belongs to others. These narratives save us from descending into madness. Acceptance of culpability would crush us. But lack of acceptance creates in us a delusion, a splintering from true self-knowing. So what is the answer?

I personally find the solution in Hebrew literature. Ancient and deeply perceptive, Hebrew narrative is nuanced enough to make the protagonist both empathetic [we can identify with them] but also the villain. When you pass by the normal foils – giants, lions, enemy kingdoms – you find the true problem. The human heart is the problem. While there is evil and conflict and tension from without – ultimately it’s the complex, betraying and deceitful human heart at the bottom of it all.

This narrative however, does not descend into despair. It does so by introducing a new note into the story – the note of grace. When the crushing knowledge of human culpability is first raised, so is the notion of a sacrifice, a scape-goat. First, literally it was a goat or lamb, ceremonially slain at feast times and symbolically expunging evil. However, such symbols cannot redress the evil in the human heart, can they?

And so transpires the greatest myth of all, the myth become history [as CS Lewis puts it], God become man, to die a death that only man can die, and redress an evil that only God can redress. This scape-goat moves from beyond symbol into something so groundshattering that philsophers and theologians are still confused by the depth and weight of it all. This event in history, permits true self knowledge. Humanity can know self to be corrupt without despair, for the punishment has fallen upon the scape-goat, the innocent. This gracious act in turns becomes the wellspring of transformed action, as with a new lease of life, humanity can simultaneously know self and rejoice.

How would this transform politics, international relations, human relations – the fundamental understanding that the problem lies within? And this knowledge does not result in despair, nor in delusion, but in glorious self knowing and true “peace on earth.”

Journalism as Narrative

Posted by 4rchbishop

One cannot spend long listening to mainstream media without realising that a “narrative” is being laid out. By narrative, I mean a conversation, a view point, a focus upon a certain perspective [character] with a certain struggle [crisis] and seeking a certain resolutions [catharsis].

This is well acknowledged by commentators. Factoids are thrown about such as “more people are killed by obesity than by shark attacks” or “more people die walking down the street than in plane crashes” or most significantly, “more people die daily from prevantable diseases and hunger than in terrorist attacks.” Yet the media has a narrative to tell and mostly this narrative is driven by what the audience, the readers, are interested in reading or viewing. Unashamedly appealing to the feelings and fears of the viewers, media will focus on the shark attacks, the plane crashes and the terrorist attacks. The viewer must supplement their world knowledge through self study.

This is a curiousity to note, especially because many of us state, “I’d rather read the news than fiction, I think the real world is interesting enough” or ” I want fact not fiction”. Journalists are bound to various codes of conduct not to perjure or malign people or companies unduly or not to insert opinion into their pieces, retaining an impartial reporterly perspective. However, the bias evident in what is reported and how it is reported is remarkable and one that the user generates.

Brandon Stanton, photographer of the wildly successful blog “Humans of New York” gave this brilliant TEDx talk in 2013. He highlights how the media selects their content and how this content does not reflect the greater reality of life. His blog seeks to counter that and tell a different narrative.

Fiction is simply another form of narrative. Let us read with discernment.

Breaking Bad’ and modern day tragedy

Posted by 4rchbishop

Breaking Bad is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time. By the time the series finale aired, the series was among the most-watched cable shows on American television. The show received numerous awards, including sixteen Primetime Emmy Awards, eight Satelite Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Peabody Awards and a People’s Choice Award. In 2013, Breaking Bad entered the Guiness World Records as the highest rated show of all time.

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad

The show which lasted five seasons, between 2008 and 2013 is described by series creator Vince Gilligan as one in which the protagonist becomes the antagonist. It tells of the metamorphosis of middle class high school teacher, Walter White who missed big chances to be an award winning chemist and finds himself turning 50, working two jobs to support a pregnant wife, a disabled son and a diagnosis of inoperable cancer. Brother-in-law Hank is a drug enforcement administration [DEA] officer and laughs with Walter about the money in meth amphetamines, and before the first episode is out, Walter is attempting to cook premium crystal meth from the back of an RV in the desert of New Mexico.

His subsequent journey into the criminal underworld, reveals to him a grit and determination and a “bad ass” fighting spirit long hidden in his middle class comfort. Initiatlly motivated by the high fees for cancer treatment and to provide for his family, Walter maximises his chemistry prowess to cook the best crystal meth in Alberquerque, becoming both successful and more and more compromised, descending deeper into the criminal world throughout the series, and becoming less and less a sympathetic antihero.

An article in the New Stateman recently, refers to David P Pierson opening essay in , Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Contexts, Politics, Style and Reception of the Television Series. Pierson’s essay, examines how the show has such a terrible and enduring resonance.

Breaking Bad is, he argues, a demonstration of the true consequences of neoliberal ideology: the idea that “the market should be the organising agent for nearly all social, political, economic and personal decisions”. Under neoliberal criminology, the criminal is not a product of psychological disorder, but “a rational-economic actor who contemplates and calculates the risks and the rewards of his actions”. And there is Walter White in a nutshell.

– http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/capitalist-nightmare-heart-breaking-bad

The phenomenal popularity of the show is curious in the contemporary climate. For it’s darkness, the moral narrative is complex. A good man, turns to crime to support hims family. He takes on the criminal world to make dirty money clean. His disenchantment with cosy middle class life and the hand of cards dealt him, forces him to take matters into his own hands and to become somewhat of a renegade. However, his personal dissolution and increasing moral compromise winds downward without much sign of redemption.

The show combines some familar narrative elements we are comfortable with – the disenchanted male leaving the domestic sphere to head out into the dessert to do combat vigliante style, in the Western cowboy tradition. War tales are full of good characters faced with grey moral choices in unspeakable circumstances, drawing on both good and bad motivations to achieve their ends. However, the show was popular throughout the tail end of the GFC and housing bubble collapse in the USA. When life and society let him down, Walter turns bad. Irredeemably so.

Audiences world wide watch with curiosity the dissolution of a man “breaking bad”, going off the moral deepend under terrible stress, so they don’t have to. It’s catharsis.

Breaking Bad was distinctive because we always knew where its road would end. We knew that right from the start, in the way that the first audiences of Shakespeare’s tragedies knew what lay in store for Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. But these days we like to think that the hero, even if he is an anti-hero, makes it through….. In 21st-century culture it is difficult to consider the fact of mortality, as the surgeon (and this year’s Reith lecturer) Atul Gawande reflects in his recent book Being Mortal. If Walter’s cancer weren’t terminal, there would be no story. There is no escape.

– http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/capitalist-nightmare-heart-breaking-bad

The modern day tragedy of epic proportions has gone down in history now as the most popular series of all time – far above comedy, romance, sci-fi, thriller and reality TV. This fact is illustrative of the power of narrative, to with a darkly humorous style, to map out the depth of human suffering, to journey through terrible moral choices, to give catharsis by telling a nuanced tale of a society and culture and one man’s journey to take things into his own hands.

I say, let tragedy as a genre, live on!

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Bear Skin Digital

The Art of Narrative

catharsis

Beginnings: Setting a Story into Motion

Step 1: Show Your Hero Doing What They Love Most

Step 2: Add a Flaw

Step 3: Add a Storm

Step 4: Add Insult to Injury

Step 5: Make Your Character Pick the Unhealthy Choice

Bring It Home

Endings: the good, the bad and the insanely great!

Poetics

Krisis

The Lungs of the Earth

Who is the baddy?

Journalism as Narrative

Breaking Bad’ and modern day tragedy