A Story is a Promise
&
The Spirit of Storytelling
Bill Johnson
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Bill Johnson on Smashwords
A Story is a Promise and The Spirit of Storytelling
Copyright © 2001 A Story is a Promise by Bill Johnson
Copyright © 2011 The Spirit of Storytelling by Bill Johnson
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling.
Copyright © 2001 and 2011 by Bill Johnson.
All rights reserved.
Published by Blue Haven Publishing
Willamette Writers House 2108 Buck St West Linn, OR 97068
Book Design: Bill Johnson Cover: Nancy Hill
Fourth Edition. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-9673932-0-5
Johnson, Bill
The Spirit of Storytelling/ by
Bill Johnson — 4th ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-96783932-0-5
1. How-to 2. Story Writing
I. Title
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Elizabeth Lyon, a true friend
and
Monty Metawa, who understands much
Introduction
This book is designed to guide writers toward a new understanding of the process of creating and writing dramatic stories.
Section One explores…
How a story functions like a promise How to fulfill a story’s promise to its audience
Section Two explores how a story’s elements are designed,
including…
Techniques to create a story premise Developing dynamic characters Creating a plot Understanding what’s at stake in your story The role of ideas in stories The role of conflict in storytelling
Section Three offers essays that explore how to outline a story,
including…
Examples of story lines and plot lines Story Director™, a unique process of outlining a story
Section Four explores principles of storytelling through reviews of popular novels, screenplays, and plays.
Third Edition
Deep Characterization
This addition explores the difference between characters created to act out a story for an audience and characters created to act out a writer’s internal dramas. A story written for an audience is a promise to take that audience on a story journey; a story written for the writer’s own needs is a promise to transport him or her to the fulfillment of personal needs. For example, some writers create stories out of a need to be acknowledged. Writers who are emotionally numb can create stories to experience deep feeling.
This new work is meant to help writers who have been ‘stuck’ at a certain level of storytelling without understanding why.
Fourth Edition
The Spirit of Storytelling
This new addition explores how writers can give their story characters fully realized, internal lives that do not revolve around the authors needs and dramas. The goal here is to help authors bring their character to life.
Foreword
Twenty-eight years making short films had convinced me I was well prepared to write a screenplay or a novel. I’d written, produced, and directed almost a hundred films for theatrical release, television, corporate presentations, documentaries, and education, receiving forty-four awards and a grant from the American Film Institute. Yet, as I struggled to write my first novel, I soon floundered and found myself lost in a maze without a map. What I hadn’t grasped was how great the leap from a short film to a novel or feature length script.
I began to read everything I could find on writing novels and screen-plays, nearly eighty books altogether. Each focused on pieces of the larger picture, not the whole. All were filtered through the author’s own unique perspective, each different enough from the others to create confusion. They wrote as though the essential principals of dramatic writing were too vast for anyone to cover in a single book. However, a handful did come close enough to convince me it was possible. I also had this nagging feeling there was a higher level to storytelling that none of them were discussing, and I sensed that if I didn’t understand that, I wasn’t going anywhere.
One night in March, 1995, while searching the Writer’s Forum on AOL, I came across a series of postings that got my attention. They began, “I would like to open a discussion into story movement, what it is, and how to create it.” I read them all, then read them again. Nothing I’d come across before had so clearly cut to the very essence of how to tell a story. Here was someone who understood that higher level for which I aspired and who knew how to teach it.
Though I’d never met him, I offered my help as an editor. Perhaps I could be a sounding board for his ideas, someone to raise questions. I was pleasantly surprised when he responded to my email by accepting my offer. It was the start of a lasting friendship that began my own journey into the heart of storytelling. It would change my writing life forever.
I’d read many a story but never fully understood what was behind “paint on the walls.” It was clear that stories worked, but why did the writer choose a particular plot, or set of characters, or locale, or the individual words on the page for that matter? The beauty of what Bill does is contained in the series of steps he led me through, each building on the previous one, until I could see those principals in action in a story I was writing. He even taught me how to go about
choosing the right dramatic words—no small feat. For the first time, things began to make sense and my writing began to steadily improve.
As time went by, Bill’s personalized style of teaching was an inspiration. I was struck by the fact that this book was written in the same conversational style, one on one, as though Bill were talking to me, anticipating my questions, even raising issues that stimulated my thinking about the story I was writing, or one that I planned to write. It was clear that from his years of teaching experience that he could anticipate the kinds of questions I might ask, and even anticipate why I asked them. I came to realize that Bill has a unique understanding of what a writer needs to know to become a storyteller and all of that is reflected in this book.
Now, whenever I’m in the midst of writing a story and am uncertain about where it’s going or how to get there, this is the book I return to time and again for answers and inspiration.
Lawrence Booth Founder, Half Moon Bay Film School
Acknowledgments
This book owes a debt to…
Lawrence Booth, founder of the Half Moon Bay Film School. His editorial assistance, probing questions, and friendship helped bring this book into being.
Tom Shaw, of Tom Shaw Productions, a filmmaker who generously helped others. Tom gave me a place to stay in his studio for a year to sup-port the creation of the essays in this book. He was a true friend.
David Morgan, who introduced me to story analysis. David is a friend and mentor, and the country’s finest story analyst.
Bill Snowden, whose friendship and support helped give me direction.
Elizabeth Lyon, a wonderful friend who introduced the ideas in this book to many people and has been a long-time sounding board.
SECTION ONE
A STORY IS A PROMISE
SECTION ONE:
A Story Is a Promise
Table of Contents
Chapter One, Understanding the Human Need for Stories
Chapter Two, A Story Is a Promise
Chapter Three, Naming Your Promise
Chapter Four, Sustaining a Story’s Promise
Chapter Five, How to Make a Down Payment on Your Promise
Chapter Six, Writing Dramatic Moments
Chapter Seven, Suggesting a Dramatic Truth
SECTION TWO:
Designing the Elements of Your Stories
Chapter Eight, Premise—Understanding Your Story Foundation
Chapter Nine, Techniques of Creating a Story Premise
Chapter Ten, Characters, Story, and Premise
Chapter Eleven, What Is a Plot?
Chapter Twelve, Creating a Dramatic Plot
Chapter Thirteen, What’s at Stake in Your Story?
Chapter Fourteen, What Is Conflict?
Chapter Fifteen, Escalating Your Story’s Conflict
Chapter Sixteen, The Relationship Between Stories and Ideas
Chapter Seventeen, Thrust and Counter-thrust
Chapter Eighteen, Writing Dramatic Dialogue
SECTION THREE:
Outlining Your Story
Chapter Nineteen, Story Line and Plot Line
Chapter Twenty, Using Story Director (TM) to Outline Your Story
Chapter Twenty-One, Writing Down a Story’s Spine
Chapter Twenty-Two, Common Mistakes of Story Structure
SECTION FOUR:
Reviews of Popular Stories
Using the Reviews
Chapter Twenty-Three, Premise and Mystery
Chapter Twenty-Four, Stories and the Transcendent Experience
Chapter Twenty-Five, The Power and Passion of Love & Hate
Chapter Twenty-Six , The Art of Creating Drama
Chapter Twenty-Seven, Setting A Story Into Motion
Chapter Twenty-Eight, The Artist as Storyteller
THIRD EDITION:
DEEP CHARACTERIZATION
Chapter Twenty-Nine, Deep Characterization
Chapter Thirty, Character Types
Chapter Thirty-One, Transformation
Chapter Thirty-Two, Science and Characterization
Chapter Thirty-Three, Writing About a Stuck Main Character
Chapter Thirty-Four, Beginning a Novel with a Wounded Main Character
Chapter Thirty-Five, Writing About a Wounded Psyche
FOURTH EDITION:
THE SPIRIT OF STORYTELLING
Chapter Thirty-Six, The Spirit of Storytelling
Chapter Thirty-Seven, Meditation and Creativity
Chapter Thirty-Eight, Listening to Your Characters
Chapter Thirty-Nine, What Lies Beneath
Chapter Forty, Understanding Emotional Triggers
Chapter Forty-One, Telling a Story in the Spirit of Storytelling
Conclusion
APPENDIX
Resources
End Notes
Contact Information
Section One
A Story Is a Promise
Chapter One, Understanding the Human Need for Stories
Since prehistoric times, when our ancestors gathered around fires in caves, storytellers have been aware of how arranging events in a story-like fashion engages and satisfies audiences. This chapter explores how a well-told story satisfies an audience.
In the Beginning Is the Story
Coming into this world, we have needs for food and shelter. When those immediate needs are met, others come to the surface.
One is a need for acknowledgement. Yet, from the time we are born, how we are acknowledged shapes our expectations of what we can expect from life. From our families, we might take in the idea that we have worth. Or that we don’t. That we’re destined to be a success in life. That we’re destined to fail.
While we’re digesting these ideas, we’re also interpreting our experiences in life and developing our own sense of who we are. A sense of the meaning and purpose. A sense of how we fit in and what we deserve from life. A sense of how we matter to ourselves and to others.
While we integrate our sense of who we are, our cultures suggest something about our place in the world, even as stereotypes. For example, if we’re American, we love freedom. If we’re French, we’re romantic. If we’re Italian, we’re hot-blooded. If we’re German, we’re cold and unemotional. If we’re blonde, we have more fun and are more desirable. We might enjoy having a particular kind of “mattering” bestowed on us by our culture. Or, we might enjoy rebelling against an external definition of who we are.
All of these cultural definitions are stories. To the degree with which we accept them or are forced to deal with others who believe them, these stories have an impact on our lives and our sense of place in the world. Take away a person’s sense of place in the world and you’ll have an unhappy person.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t revolve around ensuring that we feel we matter. That we fit in. That our lives have a meaning and purpose that is desirable to us. Even worse, life is often unpredictable. Events happen, but to no clear purpose. We get things from life—relationships, jobs, recognition—but not always what we want. Or, what we want goes to someone else. How do we deal with this?
Because people are inventive and creative, we make do. One way we make do is to tell ourselves stories that fulfill our needs. For example, regardless of the outward appearances and realities of our lives, we are heroic. We have honor. We are brave. Or we’re fearful—but we have good reason to be. And God loves us. Or hates us and has cursed us, if that’s our story need.
Because life can operate to remind us we aren’t heroic or courageous, or whatever need we desire to have validated, stories provide the shortest path for accomplishing this.
If we feel life is unjust, we can experience in stories a place where justice prevails. A place where redemption can be dramatically won, if our lives lack hope of redemption (or worse, if our redemption is out of our control). A place in which we can imagine ourselves courageously exploring new worlds, even if we’re too shy to say “hello” to our neighbors. Where our senses can be enlivened through thrilling experiences, albeit from a safe distance. Where true love conquers all. Where difficult issues can be examined in ways we find stimulating. Where mysteries are resolved. Where good defeats evil. Where evil defeats good, and we get to set a book down or leave a movie theatre having survived the experience.
That’s why issues such as courage, redemption, renewal, love, and honor are most often at the heart of stories. A well-told story is an arrangement of words and images that re-creates lifelike characters, issues, ideas, and events in a way that promises dramatic fulfillment of human needs, and then delivers on that promise.
A story, then, is a promise.
A story that clearly communicates its promise draws in an audience. When stories fail to suggest their promise readers struggle to feel engaged because people gravitate toward stories that promise to meet their particular needs.
A well-designed story, then, is a vehicle that transports its audience to a resolution of human needs that is satisfying and fulfilling. When we find a particular story journey to be dramatically potent and pleasing, we desire to re-experience the same story journey again and again. A successful story journey promises to move us through desirable states of feelings, perceptions, or thoughts in a way that is more “true” than life (or life as we wish it to be).
Knowing what needs a story promises to fulfill for its audience creates the beginning of a foundation for understanding the craft of storytelling. Learning that craft is at the very heart of the art of storytelling.
Which raises the question: how do you set out a story’s promise?
That’s answered in the next chapter.
Chapter Questions
What needs do stories fulfill in your life?
How are the stories you tell yourself about who you are different from your experiences in life?
What needs do the stories you create promise to fulfill for others?
What kind of stories about who you are as a person have been assigned to you by your cultural background? Your income level? Your level of education? Your family background?
Do the stories you most enjoy validate your choices in life? Or, do they help you to believe that under different circumstances, you would be a different person?
Chapter Two, A Story Is a Promise
Perceiving that a story is a promise is a cornerstone of the foundation for understanding the art of storytelling. This chapter takes a closer look at how a story functions as a promise.
A writer sets out a story’s promise by offering details of lifelike characters, issues, events, and circumstances, then editing and arranging those details to move an audience toward a desirable experience of resolution. For example, when a story created around the issue of courage fulfills its promise, the audience experiences a fulfilling state of courage. The audience experiences the truth of the story’s promise.
Popular stories are often designed to revolve around a promise of some human need that is acted out to dramatic fulfillment. The film Rocky, written by Sylvester Stallone (who also stars as Rocky), promises to be a story about self-respect. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, promises to be about Dorothy’s dramatic journey to a new sense of who she is and her need to belong. Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, promises to be a story about tragic love. The Harry Potter novels revolve around the issue of Harry fitting in. In The Lovely Bones, a family deals with grief.
This focus on shaping the events and details of a story to a particular purpose makes a well-told story fundamentally unlike the vagaries of real life. The “true” facts of life generally don’t arrange themselves to promise a story-like resolution and fulfillment. If they did, a factual account of the suicides of two teenagers distraught that their parents kept them apart would create the effect of the story Romeo and Juliet. The two versions are clearly not the same in mood, tone, or dramatic purpose. The fact that two teens committed suicide simply offers information. It’s an account of an event. The truth of a story like Romeo and Juliet leads us to deeply feel the nature of powerful love.
Often, a story’s promise is set through the introduction of characters designed to act to resolution some clearly established issue of human need. As the characters act to fulfill a story’s promise, a story’s audience comes to feel that the characters ring true and are “lifelike.” Characters in well-told stories should, more correctly, be called story-like, because it is through their actions revolving around a discernible dramatic purpose that a story’s audience chooses to identify with the characters. By internalizing a story’s journey to fulfillment of a particular promise via the actions of its characters, an audience experiences a dramatic journey toward the fulfillment of a story’s particular promise, an audience can resolve powerful unresolved feelings and beliefs.
By editing away all the details not “true” to this journey, a storyteller creates a story that becomes all the more “real” to an audience. Characters in stories about courage often perform impossible feats, not because it’s humanly possible, but because the audience demands that the actions of the story be story-like. That’s why characters not created around a clearly defined dramatic purpose can appear to be lifeless, cardboard cutouts. It doesn’t matter how carefully they are described or how true the details of their description. A carefully described character who acts to no discernible dramatic purpose can appear to be a lie, which leads an audience to turn away, just as we in real life turn away from those who lie to us about their promises.
A story, then, is not created by assembling details that are realistic or true to life; it is created by assembling details that have a dramatic purpose that resonates with an audience, details that are story-like in their design and intent and that evoke the world of a story in a dramatically engaging way.
The same logic applies to what details of a story’s environment the storyteller should set out, based on an understanding of a character’s role in fulfilling a story’s promise. Only those details that revolve around setting out a story’s promise in a way that makes a story’s world ring true should be included. Others have no purpose.
When writers create characters, events, and descriptive details that dramatically act out to fulfillment a story’s promise, such writing is innately satisfying. The romantic can read novels that fulfill a need for romance. The lover of action, the need for heroic quests. The lover of literary fiction, stories that explore the human condition.
That’s why there’s a story for every need, even needs we didn’t know we had until a storyteller draws us in to experience a particular story’s world. As long as people desire to have their curiosity satisfied, their questions about life and existence explained and answered, their issues of human need validated, there will be a desire for stories.
That’s why a story must promise something to its audience. For the writer to promise nothing is to violate the unwritten contract of a storyteller with his or her audience: that the story transport its audience to a satisfying, fulfilling resolution.
How a storyteller suggests a story’s promise is set out in the following chapter.
Chapter Questions
What does your story promise its audience?
How do you introduce your story’s promise?
What events fulfill your story’s promise?
What is the promise of your life story?
How does that impact the kinds of stories you enjoy?
What details evoke the drama of your story’s promise?
Chapter Three, Naming Your Promise
A story’s opening scenes are vital. If they don’t suggest a story’s promise, that story risks either not fully engaging or losing its audience. How does one set out a story’s promise? It’s done by a process I call naming.
For example, Rocky is a story about self-respect. When the storyteller arranges for Rocky to be called a “bum” and thrown out of the gym where he trains, the story acts out Rocky’s self-respect being actively undermined. That cues in the audience that the story is about self-respect. It names the story’s promise.
By raising the issue as a question—can Rocky gain self-respect?—the story begins in an active voice. When an audience hears questions arising out of issues of human need, it naturally feels engaged over a story’s course and outcome. The opening scenes of Rocky—or any well-told story—revolve around more than the introduction of a story’s characters or plot, or an account of a character’s life and situation. They operate around naming a story’s promise in a dramatic way, i.e., in a way an audience is made to care how a story will turn out. When a story’s promise is clearly named, the narrative tension over a story’s course and outcome can be transferred from a story’s characters to its audience. When this narrative tension is internalized by a story’s audience, that audience is compelled to experience how a story resolves the issues of its characters and its events for the relief of that tension.
One can see this process in the film The Usual Suspects, written by Christopher McQuarrie. The character Verbal refers to the men in a lineup—the usual suspects—as being men who would not be broken. That names the issue at the heart of the story: the power of will. It also presents the issue as a dramatic question. Could these men be broken? The dramatic answer is yes—by someone with a more powerful will. Getting to the answer of who that is draws viewers to the end of the film.
The events that begin The Usual Suspects also operate to suggest the story’s promise. One man interrupts another man’s attempt to set a fire that will destroy a ship. When the second man, Keyser, is through with Keaton, the man who was trying to set the fire, he takes Keaton’s life. These events name the story—by introducing two men engaged in a contest of wills—while raising questions, what happened on this ship and who are these men? In answering these questions, the story’s audience is drawn into the story’s world and the resolution of its promise.
To better understand this process of naming, imagine someone showing you a childhood photograph. The physical frame around the photograph encloses the world of the photograph in much the same way a storyteller sets the dimensions of a story in the frame of a novel, play, or film. Now you’re told that one of the children in the school photo just inherited a million dollars and wants to donate the money to charity, but needs help making decisions. That suggests a particular plot. It only suggests a plot because it implies some events might happen, but that in itself is not a story. It is not a story because there is no promise to resolve some issue of human need. Writing about the inheritance would just be an account of a particular situation.
Now you’re told another child in the photo is the secret son of Osama bin Laden. That suggests another plot. A far-fetched one, but it serves my purpose of making a point. This character only suggests a plot because there’s no indication of any kind of story revolving around that character or any sequence of actions, just a question of what will happen next.
Your friend tells you that he or she found true love with someone in the photo. That names the story. We know it’s going to be a story about true love. Such a story could conceivably have Osama’s son and the new millionaire as characters, as long as they have clearly identified dramatic purposes and then act to resolve issues arising from the story’s promise.
What often leads storytellers down the path of failing to name their stories is their focus on presenting what is visual and apparent, using details to describe the characters, actions, and environments. Unless the storyteller names the dramatic purpose that underlies these events and suggests a need for resolution of the deeper issue at play in them, all that other work is dramatically inert; it is an account that simply makes statements about static things. It’s true that some accounts, a history of a civil war battle, for example, will satisfy a particular audience. An account of that battle is not the same as a story about the characters involved, and how the experience affects or changes them.
For example, to say that “John is five foot eight, one hundred thirty-eight pounds, blond, blue-eyed” might be true, but it fails to name a story issue around John. To say, however, that “John thought he knew what loneliness was, until he met Mary,” names a story that John will act out, one about loneliness.
The above example is obvious, but that’s better than being obscure to the point of suggesting no dramatic purpose at all. Once writers learn how to clearly suggest a dramatic purpose, they can then learn how to make it more suggestive and less obvious.
Often writers understand their story’s promise but they overlay it with so many static descriptions of characters and events they obscure it. In a story’s opening scenes, any character action, scene description, plot event, or character dialogue not arising from a story’s promise and suggesting a need for its dramatic advance toward resolution, risks having no clear meaning. When a storyteller communicates his or her story’s promise and dramatic purpose, he or she can naturally reveal the motivations of their characters as they react to resolving the story’s issues and events. A story’s details then serve a purpose.
To offer details that serve no purpose is comparable to trying to study facts for a test without knowing the subject of the test. It’s a situation that quickly becomes frustrating for a reader.
The quicker the storyteller communicates the role of characters and a story’s events in fulfilling a story’s promise, the more quickly an audience will desire to enter a story’s world to experience its promise played out to resolution and fulfillment.
To be able to set a story’s promise in an active voice, the storyteller needs to make a distinction between a story, its plot, characters, environment, and ideas.
A story’s core dramatic issue might revolve around courage, for example. In a story about courage, the story’s plot is the actions that make the story about courage dramatic. The characters in a story about courage will have issues of courage to resolve. The story’s environment would be the places in which the story unfolds that would also potentially act as obstacles to a story’s characters. For example, in a story set on a mountain, the mountain itself could test the courage of the story’s characters. In this story set on a mountain, the storyteller might explore ideas about courage, such as whether it’s better to fight a losing battle with courage or to avoid the battle and stay alive.
Each of these story elements needs to be named—whether directly, indirectly, as a metaphor, etc.—in a way that makes its dramatic purpose clear, without being obscure, or too obvious. If failing to resonate with the story’s audience.
In Prince of Tides, the details that describe where Tom Wingo grew up evoke what made that place an anchorage for his life and a wound. The details have a context.
In Avatar, a wounded marine dreams of flying, then wakes to the reality of having crippled legs and the thought, you always to have to wake up. But this story takes place in an environment where that is not always true, and the question of whether he can continue to be awake in a world where he can fly becomes a compelling question.
I once had an exchange with someone who didn’t understand that a film called The Bourne Identity had anything to do with the issue of identity. She saw herself as a purely intuitive writer, but her writing reflected her lack of understanding.
When a storyteller understands that opening scenes revolve around setting out a story’s promise, he or she has a guide to how to write such scenes.
To help you understand this process, consider again Prince of Tides and imagine a horizontal line with a scale that runs from 0 (zero), 5 (five) to 10 (ten). To write, ‘My name is Tom Wingo’ is obscure, a zero. It suggests nothing about Tom as a character or his journey in the story. To write, ‘My name is Tom Wingo and I want to tell you about my dysfunctional family and how I survived my childhood’ is obvious, a five. To avoid being obvious, many writers move toward being obscure.
Writing ‘My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call,’ is dramatically suggestive about a wounded character seeking healing.
When you create a significant character for your story, I suggest you start with being obvious about what a character wants, then be more suggestive. It’s important that an introduction of a character suggest something about their journey and purpose in a story. The risk otherwise is to just assemble details that have no context or deeper meaning.
The next chapter of the book offers examples of how to set out a story’s promise.
Chapter Questions
What kind of events or actions or dialogue names your story’s promise in its opening scenes?
What did you do to create drama around the introduction of your story’s promise?
How do the actions of your main characters revolve around resolving your story’s promise?
How do the events of your story highlight your story’s promise?
Chapter Four, Sustaining a Story’s Promise
You now understand what needs your story promises to fulfill for your intended audience. You understand how to name your story’s promise in a clear, discernible way. This chapter offers an overview of how a storyteller sustains a story’s promise over the course of a story.
The process of sustaining a story’s promise begins with understanding the meaning of drama.
Drama is the anticipation of an outcome
for an unresolved dramatic issue, character
concern, story event, or idea.
You create an anticipation of a story’s promise by suggesting that something around an issue such as courage, redemption, or renewal needs resolution. If you haven’t set out that an issue, event, character goal, idea, etc, is in need of resolution, there can be no drama over an outcome around it. This holds true whether the issue is the outcome of a story’s promise, the complications of a story’s plot, the outcome of character actions, or the outcome of the issues and ideas a story raises. By interweaving the introduction of characters with issues to resolve that arise from a story’s promise, a storyteller creates an anticipation of such characters moving the story toward the fulfillment of its promise.
For example, placing a character whose issue is gaining self-respect in an environment that denies him self-respect is the introduction to Rocky. What makes the story dramatic is that the only way Rocky comes to feel he can gain self respect is to box Apollo Creed and remain standing at the end of the fight. I call that—Rocky’s need to prove that he’s a somebody—a dramatic truth. When characters both embody an issue of human need and are compelled to resolve that issue for internal or external reasons, they have a dramatic truth to resolve. Characters who don’t embody a dramatic truth are dramatically inert; they have nothing to resolve, no reason to act to shape events. They just react to them.
An audience wants to feel a story’s dramatic purpose is generating, scene by scene, experiences of resolution and fulfillment more potent and true than real life. More true because the edited arrangement of a story’s elements is designed specifically to dramatically transport the audience toward a resolution of a story’s promise. This is what makes stories so magical in their ability to transport audiences.
To understand this process, consider Romeo and Juliet. It is a story about great love. Romeo’s heartfelt, poetic longing for Rosalind introduces the issue of love. From the core dramatic issue of the story, the storyteller creates a story line composed of the events, dialogue, and actions that name what the story is about as it moves from its introduction to its fulfillment.
It is this quality of a story moving along its story line that makes a story satisfying to an audience. To not name and highlight a story’s advance along its story line is to risk that a story fails to offer a compelling, dramatic journey. Worse, this lack of a story line suggests the storyteller is confusing an account of events with how to tell an engaging story.
That’s why the members of an audience who are confused about a story’s dramatic purpose generally aren’t emotionally or thoughtfully engaged by the actions of its characters or plot. In effect, the storyteller races his or her characters and plot events about to create the effect of a story moving toward a dramatic destination. But, in reality, the audience realizes they aren’t going anywhere, and boredom sets in, or a story becomes work because all the details have to be memorized until something arrives that gives the details a context. A good story is visceral in its ability to transport an audience. People feel moved or they don’t. They feel caught up in a story or not. They feel like a story is worth the effort they are extending to follow the action or not.
The most common mistake of inexperienced writers is not clearly establishing and sustaining their story’s advance along its story line. This is ruthlessly damning. It creates a story that is a collection of meaningless details that suggest no promise or dramatic purpose, just as a collection of railroad cars sitting isolated on sections of broken or disconnected tracks fails to suggest the possibility of a journey toward a destination. Offering more detailed descriptions of the railroad cars doesn’t change that they sit motionless on disconnected tracks.
Just as a typical railroad train travels on two rails that compose a track, for a story to advance toward its resolution and fulfillment of its promise there needs to be a second rail to accompany the story line. That second rail is the plot line. When a story’s characters act to overcome obstacles generated by a story’s plot, their actions compose a story’s plot line.
In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the story is about great love. Its plot is about what makes this love great. This story advances from its introduction along both a story line and a plot line. Together, they create the mechanism that allows for the story’s audience to experience a discernible dramatic progression toward a story’s resolution and fulfillment. Storytellers, in fact, create the plot obstacles their characters must overcome for the very purpose of making a story’s progression along its story line dramatic. The catch is that those plot obstacles must arise from a story’s dramatic purpose and promise in the same way the issues that compose and name its story line arise.
The issues characters bring to stories to resolve must also impact a story’s events in a way that can be assigned meaning. How characters respond to a story’s plot events enable an audience to judge how far a story has advanced along its story line. The closer Romeo and Juliet come to proving their love, the closer the story is to its fulfillment, even if that fulfillment revolves around their deaths.
Many writers struggle with the issue of creating a story line that parallels their plot line because a story line only exists to the degree that the storyteller evokes it through the response of a story’s characters to a story’s events, or the reaction of an audience to these events. Many struggling writers assume that characters + conflict + plot + resolution = story. Only, however, when a writer’s story and plot elements interweave to create the effect of a dramatic progression toward fulfillment and resolution of issues of human need, or offer potent illuminations and revelations about life, does a story fully engage the attention of an audience. Without that arrangement, character actions and plot events become merely a sequence of events that suggest no dramatic significance.
Some writers so seamlessly weave together their plot and story lines that they appear joined. This could be compared to a magnetic train that runs on a single rail. The inexperienced writer trying to duplicate this process, however, must be careful that he or she is not simply overlaying personal feelings about a story’s promise onto plot events. If a storyteller’s plot events fail to inspire or evoke feelings of fulfillment for an audience, such a story has failed to transport its audience. That’s why stories that are merely sequences of action—this happened, then that happened—can fail to emotionally or thoughtfully engage an audience. Such stories lack a discernible story line composed of events with resolutions that evoke desirable perceptions, feelings, or epiphanies for an audience.
Some plot events can be designed to be so creative, shocking, nerve wracking, titillating, exciting, intriguing, oddly humorous, or imbued with a grand sense of spectacle that they engage and reward the attention of an audience on those merits alone. When the events on a plot line become divorced from a story and its promise, they become lifelike and inconsequential. They have a beginning, middle, and end, but no frame of reference as to what it is that they’re a dramatic beginning, middle, and end of.
The craft required to create multiple plot threads or time lines that evoke a story advancing along a single story line leads to the difficulties some inexperienced storytellers encounter when they try to create complex stories. If there’s no unity of purpose at the heart of a story and its events, there’s no common story line or plot line along which a story as an entity advances. The different story threads split apart into disconnected fragments of plot lines that don’t move in a common direction. The audience senses that the different story elements aren’t creating the purposeful, organized effect of a well-designed story.
Often, struggling storytellers compound this mistake by introducing more plot threads and characters to maintain some hold on the audience. Unfortunately, it only proves that the authors are unaware of why their stories aren’t engaging. Well-told film stories with multiple time lines include The Limey, Toto le Hero, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The English Patient, and Inception.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls opens with a frame, also called a book end. A Park Avenue socialite is being driven through New York in a taxi when she sees her mother dumpster diving on the sidewalk. How this socialite was raised by a dumpster-diving mother requires going back in time. It creates quite a compelling plot question. The end of the memoir ends in the present, answering the question raised in that opening scene or frame for the novel about how this woman survived being raised by a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father.
In Good Grief, by Lolly Winston, a young woman is overcome with grief after the death of her husband. Many of her daily experiences trigger intense memories of her life with her husband, both good and bad. Dealing with her grief involves dealing with her past and present.
In Steigg Larrson’s The Girl with the Green Tattoo, a young woman with special talents must deal with a court-appointed overseer who sexually abuses her. During the course of the novel, this abused girl takes a step toward feeling love for a man. This is a small but heart-felt step for her.
Keep in mind that a simple story line for Romeo and Juliet could read: The beginning of the story line introduces a story about great love. The middle of the story line sets out the complications around this great love proving itself. The end of this story line is the fulfillment offered by this great love proving itself. There is a beginning, middle, and end.
A simple plot line for Romeo and Juliet: The beginning of the plot line sets out events that introduce a story about great love. The middle of the plot line consists of events that escalate the drama around the outcome of whether this great love can prove itself. The end of this plot line is the resolution of the story that proves that great love can overcome all obstacles, even death. Again, a beginning, middle, and end.
If understanding the distinction between a story line and plot line is still difficult, think of a story as heat and a plot as flame. Heat is the tangible presence of flame, while flame is a concrete manifestation of heat. A story that generates no quality of heat also struggles to generate a visible manifestation of flame. It risks being a flame that generates no sensation of heat for its audience. An audience that comes to a story for the emotional, sensory, and intellectual heat it generates will turn away from a cold and lifeless story/flame.
If you understand the difference between an account of an event and a story inspired by events, you’re on the right path.
The ability to set out and sustain a story’s promise in a way that dramatically transports an audience is an important part of a foundation for understanding how to write dramatic stories.
In the next chapter, I’ll explore how one demonstrates the ability to fulfill a story’s promise.
Chapter Questions
Can you describe a story line for your story in simple terms and in three sentences?
Can you describe your plot line using three sentences?
Was your first attempt to write a story line and plot line obvious and clumsy? Good! If it’s visible to you, it should be visible to your audience.
Chapter Five, How to Make a Down Payment on Your Promise
If a story is a promise, how does the storyteller demonstrate to an audience his or her ability to fulfill a story’s promise? By making a down payment on it. That communicates an ability to pay off on the story’s larger promise, just as someone making a payment on a debt suggests an ability to pay off the whole debt.
How does one make this down payment?
The Usual Suspects opens on Keaton, a survivor of great carnage on a ship. Keaton is ready to destroy himself in a fiery explosion. This makes clear that Keaton has a powerful will. But will he succeed? The dramatic answer is that a man of even stronger will interrupts and won’t let Keaton die. This man speaks to Keaton, and Keaton gives the other man a name, Keyser. They speak briefly, then Keyser kills Keaton and walks away. He reignites the flame Keaton began and makes a narrow escape from the explosion that consumes the ship. A dramatic entrance and exit, indeed.
This scene suggests the story will be about the power of will by showing this life and death contest of wills. That’s how the story makes a down payment on its promise. It sets up a question within the initial scene revolving around the power of will, and dramatically answers the question. At the same time it sets up larger questions that will draw the audience through the story. Who is Keyser? What happened on the ship?
In the opening chapter of The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, Clancy sets up the question: will Ramius, the commander of the Red October, be able to implement his plan to escape the oppression of Soviet communism? The dramatic answer is yes. While that provides a down payment on the story’s promise, the “how” and “where to” of Ramius’s intent to escape are left for future chapters.
In Rocky, an early question is: will Rocky find a way to convince a young girl that by hanging out on the street she’s picking up the wrong kind of reputation? The dramatic answer is no. The girl recognizes Rocky is everything he’s telling her not to be, a nobody hanging out on the streets. That sets up an even more powerful question: will Rocky be able to gain the self-respect he obviously thinks is valuable? Getting the answer to that question requires sharing the dramatic journey to the end of the story.
Romeo and Juliet opens with a lethal brawl that raises the question, is Romeo safe? When Benvolio is sent to check on Romeo, he discovers that Romeo is lovesick for Rosalind. He advises Romeo to go someplace he can see other beauties, advice which Romeo rejects because of the depth of his feelings for Rosalind, but wanting to see Rosalind leads him to Juliet.
The Wizard of Oz opens with Dorothy trying to keep Toto safe from a neighbor. Trying to make sure Toto has a place where he belongs leads to Dorothy’s adventure in Oz.
To test whether you’re making a down payment on your promise, use the zero-five-ten scale to write out how you’re making that down payment in a way that is obvious, then obscure, then suggestive. Let yourself be obvious, then obscure, then move into being suggestive. If you want to start with being suggestive and work back toward obvious and obscure, that’s fine as well. The important point is to understand the difference.
Demonstrating an ability to make a down payment on a story’s promise is another important aspect of creating a well-told story. How to sustain that promise throughout the course of a story is the focus of the next chapter.
Chapter Questions
How are you making a down payment on your promise in your opening scenes?
How does your initial down payment draw your audience deeper into your story?
How are you setting up a story question in your opening scenes so that it will draw your audience to the end of your story?
Chapter Six, Writing Dramatic Moments
Just as a story engages the interest of an audience by introducing its promise in a dramatic way, the moments within a story’s scenes can also suggest a smaller kind of dramatic promise. To that end, moments in scenes can be designed to be emotionally or thoughtfully engaging, or illuminating of ideas that add depth to a story, or designed to offer fresh, vivid perceptions of a story’s events.
To understand this process of writing dramatic moments, keep in mind that anticipation is the key to creating drama. To create anticipation, something must either be set into motion as a scene opens, or something must be presented as ripe with a sense of impending movement. To show this process in action, consider again The Usual Suspects. The opening scene introduces Keaton, a wounded man. Dead bodies close by suggest a recent battle. Keaton lights a cigarette, then ignites a line of fuel that leads toward some fuel tanks. We anticipate that the explosion and fire will kill him.
That’s the introduction to this moment. Note how it’s tied to the central issue of the story’s promise—the power of will. Keaton is presented as a man of strong will, ready to take his own life. If the moment continued and the ship had blown up, the audience would have been left with simple questions. What happened on the ship? Who was the man who set the fire?
Before the line of flame sets off an explosion, however, someone urinates on the flame from above, extinguishing it. This develops more drama around the outcome of the initial moment. It takes the moment in a direction not expected. Because the scene was taken in an unexpected direction, the audience is given an answer to one question: will the line of flame set off an explosion? The answer is no. Which sets up a larger question: who is the man who put out the flame? Note how the dramatic shape and details of the moments of this scene draw us into desiring answers to this larger question.
With the attention of the audience drawn to the question of the identity of the second man, he joins the first man and asks, “How you doing, Keaton?” This answers the question: who is the first man? At the same time, the sequence of action sets up other, larger questions. What was Keaton doing there? Was he trying to set off an explosion that would kill himself as well as the second man? Who is the second man? What starts out as a simple moment—will the line of fire set off an explosion?—continues to deepen. There is a process here of both setting up a moment with a potential outcome and then shaping the moment to have an unexpected twist that heightens its dramatic impact.
In that vein, the process of setting up questions and providing answers continues. Keaton gives an identity to the second man, the name Keyser. This gives a partial answer to the question, who is he? Note, however, that we don’t see Keyser’s face, and that sets up other questions. What does he look like? Why is his identity being withheld? To get those answers, we have to journey forward. That’s the purpose of these moments, to draw the story’s audience deeper into the story in an engaging way.
This same process can be applied to any moment in any scene. By each moment in a story having a dramatic question that sets up a desire for an answer, the storyteller creates moments that draw an audience through scenes.
This does not mean that every moment in the story must have a dramatic shape with a beginning, middle, and end. As Suspects continues, Verbal, the narrator, testifies before a grand jury and says, “It all started…” This is a promise to give us the answers to what happened on the ship. Once that purpose is met, the scene is over. The scene is only as long as it needs to be to fulfill its dramatic purpose.
What follows the opening scenes of The Usual Suspects are the quick introductions to several characters. Each introduction is given a dramatic shape around the outcome to a question; hence, each introduction continues to draw the story’s audience forward. Each scene also comments on the underlying story issue of the power of will.
Todd Hockney works in a garage. As armed police rush into the garage and toward him with guns drawn, he calmly reaches for something. Will he be shot? Will he shoot someone? This moment demonstrates the power of his will. The other character introductions follow. Each introduction gives each character a distinctive personality while also suggesting how tough each man is. As an audience, we’ve been set up to expect something to come out of the powerful willfulness of these men.
The dramatic moments in The Usual Suspects generally revolve around action. Another storyteller telling a story about the power of will might create scenes that revolve around a process of illumination of ideas about the power of will. For example, Fellini’s 8 1/2 dramatically presents a film director who is adrift in a sea of choices with no ability—no will—to make up his mind. It’s a story that covers some of the same terrain but with an entirely different artistic purpose and outcome from The Usual Suspects. The storytelling process—how to set into motion a story via scenes that advance the story along its story and plot lines—is the same.
Struggling storytellers often damage their stories by simply presenting information about characters without creating dramatic moments that suggest anticipation of some outcome around their actions. To give us details about what Verbal and the others look like is not the same as setting a story into motion via their actions. Filling scenes with details about the environment of a story risks creating scenes that collectively have no dramatic tension, no conflict over an outcome, no sense of dramatic purpose. Such moments are inert. A collection of non-dramatic moments creates a non-dramatic story.
Beginning a screenplay with an action that raises questions is also called an inciting incident, or a hook. Some novels open with prologues that raise powerful questions; getting to the answers requires reading to the end of the book.
A moment in a scene has a beginning, middle, and end. Its outcome can be made dramatic, unexpected to both the characters and the audience. That is what makes some stories so stimulating. Both the audience and the characters can never quite know, moment to moment, how things are going to turn out. Both the audience and the characters have to keep going deeper into the story to find out.
A storyteller who gives an audience no choice about having to find out what will happen next understands a vital aspect of the craft of storytelling.
Chapter Questions
Can you describe the beginning, middle, and end of a dramatic moment from the opening scene of your story?
What did you do to make the outcome of that opening moment dramatic?
What information did you offer in that moment that names your story’s promise?
How does your opening moment set your plot into motion?
Chapter Seven, Suggesting a Dramatic Truth
Characters in a story ring true because they have a role to play in fulfilling a story’s promise. When a story’s characters embody dramatic truths, those characters feel compelled to resolve issues of human need. Drama is an anticipation of an outcome. A character who embodies a dramatic truth suggests to a story’s audience a character‘s purpose. A character who fails to embody a dramatic truth risks coming across as a collection of details; worse, purposeless. Let me demonstrate.
“John was five foot eight, with blond hair, a senior in college, an avid chess player.”
This collection of words makes a statement about John. It creates no sense of anticipation about John as a character, nor does it suggest an issue of human need that John feels compelled to resolve. A collection of similar statements in sequence would risk simply assembling details about John for an audience to try and understand. This quickly becomes frustrating for readers because there’s nothing to assign meaning to all the details.
If I write, “John was lonely,” that’s still a statement about John, but in a story about loneliness, it serves to name the story. Still, it fails to create a sense of anticipation about what might arise from John’s loneliness, or what might compel John to act to resolve his loneliness.
Writing, “A sense of loneliness radiated from John,” makes John’s state of emotion more vivid, but not more dramatic. It still creates no sense of drama over an outcome to what we know about John. But if I write, “John thought he understood the true depths and pain of loneliness until he met Mary,” that creates a sense of anticipation, and that anticipation revolves around the issue of loneliness. Now a description of John’s loneliness ties into John’s dramatic truth. It is part of the beginning of a story about loneliness with characters named John and Mary, and it suggests that something about Mary has made John’s loneliness untenable. It’s an obvious beginning, but a beginning that could be revised to be more subtle or suggestive, artful or elusive.
To avoid being obvious, many writers offer details about characters that are obscure, that do not suggest a dramatic truth. I advise writers be obvious about a character’s dramatic truth as a way station toward writing about a character that is dramatically suggestive.
Just as characters can embody a dramatic truth, a story’s environment embodies a dramatic truth when it impacts a story’s characters in a purposeful manner. For example, a lonely character might be put into a warm, loving environment that increases his or her loneliness. A character struggling to control his or her temper could be placed into an environment that is aggravating, sunlight too bright, noises too loud, etc. The movie Insomnia places a character who can’t sleep into an environment where the sun never sets.
Environments that fail to embody dramatic truths risk being passive details that fail to ring true because they lack a context within a story’s truth.
Words that lack an active sense of purpose that revolves around a dramatic truth are passive. They are literal truths that simply describe. This holds true even if a writer is describing characters in actions or events that are explosive, if no underlying story movement around resolution of a dramatic truth is created.
When words revolve around a discernible dramatic purpose that advances a story, they can create a vivid, palpable sense of movement toward a story-like destination. Note the quality of purposeful drama suggested by these words from the opening of Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; when it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand on me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.
By introducing a man obsessed with this “November in my soul,” a story issue about obsession is named. The storyteller also sets out how Ishmael’s obsession has grown and threatens to take over his life. He is a ripe dramatic character, both physically and emotionally, because he is compelled to deal with his obsession.
The story deepens with the introduction of Ahab and his obsession that, unlike Ishmael’s, will lead to the deaths of a number of others. The issue of obsession in this story evolves into a thoughtful story question. When does an obsession for a good cause become evil? That is one of the more compelling questions of modern times, with the many millions who have died as a result of others’ obsessions. It is one reason Moby-Dick is acknowledged as a classic. Melville took a dramatic truth that spoke to future generations and wrote a compelling story that fulfilled its promise via rich, poetic language.