journey

Beginnings: Setting a Story into Motion

Posted by

1

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.

Why we need tragedy

Posted by

5

Having recently absorbed a whole season of Netflix-original Bloodline, that’s 13 hours of television viewing in the space of a few weeks, I have been impressed upon by, not only the marvel of on-demand long-form drama, but also the importance of the genre of tragedy.

Bloodline is thriller-drama based around several generations of the Rayburn family. It focuses on the return of black-sheep Danny, to the Rayburn home in Florida Keys on the occasion of the 45th wedding anniversary of his parents. Several decades of lies and family secrets are slowly uncovered, leading to greater and greater treachery and ultimately, tragedy.

bloodline 2

Percy Shelley in his essay, “A Defense of Poetry” famously stated,

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Tragedy is an interesting example of such legislation, as the catharsis it offers is often a reaffirmation of just desserts for hubris. Protagonists of tragedy rarely emerge unscathed, and if they do their lessons are sorely learned.

A theme of Bear Skin is how the hard stuff of life such as conflict, tension, pain, sorrow, and misunderstandings can be redeemed through story. Story tellers combine these raw elements with a character journey and use the readers inherent sense of justice to create a crescendo of crisis.

Resolution then occurs through catharsis or emotional release, often through the payoff required by justice. If our protagonist is not, as it were, caught by conventional justice or punished for their crimes, they often suffer worse through pain, guilt, trauma or an ever increasing slide into self compromise.

Why tragedy then? Why do we or anyone want stories about people suffering? Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights old all knew the power of tragic narrative.

tragedy

Tragedy presents us with a protagonist full of foibles, flaws, human faults, and vices. The audience is invited to both empathise with the protagonist, but also to judge with the objectivity of a third party observer.

By creating a degree of separation, the story-teller can lead the audience through the experience of cleansing punishment experienced by the protagonist or the key players, and to process internal behaviour change, without deep self-mortification.

Tragedy is in many cases, salvation, for it is another who suffers for our sins. We observe the evils, the justified motives, the small steps which lead to a crime – and while we can empathise with their journey, and we suffer with them, we are reborn to live anew.

Anna Karenina

Waking as from a dream, we return to life, granted a second chance, the chance to live a better, wiser, more integrated life.

Bear Skin goes to New Zealand

Posted by

0

Hello all from the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Jennifer from Bear Skin,  this week week has been fortunate enough to have had some time travelling around the South Island of New Zealand with her best mate Tamlyn. As a Tokein fan, this trip is exciting beyond words.

Mountains, snow, white water rivers, gorges, mysterious forrests, wide plains – New Zealand has it all.

I fully recommend any lover of literature and story to travel to the scenes of stories they love and re-imagine it all again.

Why archaeologists?

Posted by

0

In Science fiction and fantasy there is an abundance of scientific professionals such as archaeologists, journalists, detetectives and doctors who end up on quests in strange realms, seeking talismans of great power or significance, and encountering strange and mythical creatures and tests. My childhood favourite was Tin Tin, who always managed to run into some mystery and follow it through to its mysterious end.

tintin

The more I read, and the more I read “about reading”, the more I discover something called the “hero journey”. This ‘hero journey’ accounts for common features between stories, such as:

  1. An ordinary person, selected for a quest. Sometimes unwillingly, due to birth right or a prophecy.
  2. The leaving of home or the realm of the familar.
  3. Encounter with mythical creatures, tests and trials.
  4. Characters who come along at the right time as “helpers” to aid the hero.
  5. Hero battles creatures and overcomes trials and tests through courage and wit, often this requires great self sacrifice.
  6. Return home of hero to the realm of the familar  but forever changed inside.

In the case of the archaeologist/ scientist, it seems that the curiousity of the individual and their passion for knowledge leads them into a hero quest, often a treasure hunt. Their scientific nature gives them a firm footing in our current familiar world, making them believable as they journey through mythical realms. They stand as though the bridge for us between two worlds, the real world and the mythical dream world which we cannot reach ourselves.

They become our avatar into dreams.

TOMB-RAIDER-1

The tougher, the more sceptical and scientific they are, they more we can trust them and allow them to guide us into the dream world, knowing that they will be able to discern the tests that await and bring us home.