Saturday, January 27, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Technique

“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
H.L. Mencken

We’ve just learned all the basics of writing, from the definitions of story and plot to the basics of story structure. Now we’re going to delve into the more advanced area of technique. These are the tools you’ll use to make your story stronger. Knowing how to structure a story is only the beginning. Once you lay down the structure, you then have to fine tune it. 

Technique should never be obvious. It should be invisible. The Audience should not be aware that it’s there. The mark of a good writer is their ability to make the technique in their story disappear. They make the story look “easy”. It seems compelling and real. Self aware writing that spends part of its time showing you how clever the writer is by beating you over the head with technique is bad writing. No matter how slick and intelligent such writing may seem, it’s not good if it’s beating you up with technique. Stories are meant to be enjoyed for what they are, not for how they are made. 

There is an exception to this principle. Comedy or surrealistic structure allows you to break down the fourth wall and expose the writer’s hand. But in stories that are meant to be taken seriously, the writer’s hand should never be obvious. Distractions are a sin in fiction. You don’t want the Audience to stop reading all of a sudden to notice some trick you are pulling. You don’t want them to fall out of the trance a good story puts you in.

Your job is to seduce them, not to jump up and down and brag about yourself. You want them to get into the mood and into your bed. Self aware writing tends to spoil the mood. So it’s not a good idea.

I’ve tried to remember all the technique ideas I know and put them in here. I learn new ones all the time, so by the time you read this, I will probably know more. The following list of techniques is pretty useful however. More than enough to help you do your job.

They’re listed in an order I think is logical, based on their priorities and their place in the writing process. You will need to use the first ones before you use some of the later ones. 

SET-UPS AND PAY OFFS

“If a shotgun hangs on the wall in the first act, it must be used by the climax.” Thus spake the great playwright Anton Chekov, who brought us “The Seagull”. Chekov was right, even though he often broke his own rule.

Any item or skill that is critical to the story in some manner, must be set up in the story before you use it. When you use the item that is known as the “pay off”. But it doesn’t stop with items and talents. Lots of things need setting up before being used. 

First let’s understand the set up. It exists to tell the Audience that this item, talent, power, whatever, exists in the Milieu. This way, when it’s used later in the story it doesn’t seem random. We know that it can happen.

If a character ends up performing brain surgery later in the story and we were never told he was a doctor, the Audience loses their suspension of disbelief, and we know what that means. They’re gone.

People don’t like being lied to. They don’t like being made to look like fools. If you surprise them in a nice way, they like it. But if you expect them to swallow an absurdity that’s meant to be taken seriously, they’ll become disgusted with you.

So first you have to let them know that something is coming. But you have to do it in a way that isn’t spoiling the surprise your planning. A bad set up makes for a weak pay off.

Set ups are best done visually. When you set something up with dialog, it doesn’t stick in the mind as well as when people see it. Expositional dialog is also a pain to write naturally. So why make it difficult for yourself? If your character needs to perform a medical operation later in the story, all you need to do is show a Doctor’s Degree on their wall early in the story. Or show a business card that says he’s a doctor.

The same rule applies to super powers, martial arts skills, the ability to solve puzzles quickly, weapons that are used later, you name it. Anything that is crucial to the story must be set up before hand. And the sooner the better.

Since nothing in a story should go to waste, you shouldn’t set up anything you don’t plan to use. Unless you’re trying to trick the audience into thinking the story is going in a different direction than it actually is. You may want to set up some weapon, for example, but when the character goes to use it later, he find out it doesn’t work. This creates a powerful reversal which forces the hero to find another means to win the day.

When you don’t want the audience to see something coming, you should get your set up in early. That way, they may forget about it until later when you finally do the pay off. The object of a set up is to tell the audience that these things are in the world of the story, so they don’t just get pulled out of a hat later. People feel a story is bad when that happens. They may not understand why, but they instinctively feel the writer is bad. So make sure you set things up.

Pay offs are, in essence, the punch lines to the set up. A set up tells you a piece of information. But it’s an incomplete piece. It’s only the first half, like the first part of a joke. You don’t get it until the punchline is thrown at you.

A pay off can be a tremendous boost if it turns out to be extremely important to the story and you set it up cleverly. Alfred Hitchcock movies are worth studying for his use of set ups and pay offs. In VERTIGO, Jimmy Stewart’s character has a fear of heights. During the Turning Point, this fear pays off because it prevents him from seeing a murder. His need to overcome this fear is what allows him to solve the riddle of the crime at the end. So the set up doubles as a bit of characterization which leads to the character’s development. In SABOTEUR the Hero accidentally bumps into a man who later turns out to be a villain. The man drops some letters. When the Hero picks them up he sees an address on them and the name of the sender. This information becomes vital to him later because he gets accused of being a saboteur. The set up was his link to find the Villain. Unfortunately, the information was misleading. So the pay off is also a reversal.

It’s good to make each pay off count in more ways than one. If you can make them not only relevant to the story as information, but also a means of advancing the character or the conflict, you will get a much cooler scene for your effort. But more importantly, it helps create epiphanies for the audience.

The Blink Off

Friday, January 26, 2007

Secrets of Writings: Resolutions and Endings

RESOLUTION

Now your story is basically over and in this final scene you finish up the tale.

This is not a good place to wrap up plot threads. It looks clumsy if you do. Except if there is some kind of twist that your planning with one of the plot threads.

By and large, all questions raised by the story should have been answered by the time you reach this scene. Notice I don’t say scenes. The Resolution should not be a sequence. Long resolutions make for boring ends to stories. How many movies have you seen where there was this long drawn out sequence at the end, after the Climax that bored you silly? WYATT EARP has such a resolution. When I saw the film it drove me crazy.

As we discussed earlier, the Climax isn’t called the climax for nothing. After a climax, people either want to kick your story out of bed or roll over and stare at the wall. The only kind of long resolution that people like is one that serves as a small, quiet mini story that brings an emotional sense of closure to the tale.

The Resolution can also be used to set up a sequel. You could use a twist ending that’s a weaker punch than the end of the Climax, but which tells us that there’s bound to be another. Examples of this kind of ending is where the Villain appears to have been killed, the Hero walks away, and the last shot is the Villain’s hand moving or his eyes opening suddenly.

Many writers use these endings to say: “What you just saw was nothing. The best is yet to come.” There is a problem with that kind of statement, obviously. You want people to like the story they just experienced and it may be really tough to out do what you just did. So be careful with your resolutions.

REMEMBER: Keep your resolutions short.

ENDINGS

Resolutions are the ending of the story, even though the end of the Climax determines the outcome for the hero. The Resolution can put a spin on it that changes everything, however.

There are only three possible endings: Up, Down, and Ironic.

Up (also known has “Happy”) endings are when the Hero wins and everything ends up well and good. These are the most popular endings, and thus are the most used. STAR WARS has the perfect happy ending.

Down (also known as “Sad”) endings are when the Hero loses the Villain wins. But the Premise is still validated. It just means it’s validated at the Hero’s expense. These endings are rare nowadays. But in the deconstructionist 70s, you saw them a lot in movies. They are also common in horror films. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID has a good example of the down ending. The Villain in this movie was authority. Authority (the law) won.

Ironic endings are where both the Hero and the Villain win and lose, thus canceling each other out. Examples of this are movies where the hero is a thief, he steals the million dollars, but as he escapes from the law, the money bag gets blown open and all the dollars fly off in the wind. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE has one of the best ironic endings ever written. So does THE KILLING.

It’s possible to not end a story. There have been stories that just stop as if they ran out of pages or something. These endings are very unsatisfying and are not recommended. The creators of these stories often do that to show that life continues on. It doesn’t just neatly wrap up like it does in fiction. The problem is, as we discussed, people want stories to make sense and have meaning. Stories are almost a substitute for religion. They create meaning out of meaninglessness.

Choose your ending wisely. Because it will be the last thing the Audience experiences before they leave the story. All stories don’t need a happy ending. Negative endings are good for some stories. If you need to make a powerful statement, they are often the best endings to use. Ironic endings are great because most people see life as Ironic. They see the glass as both half full and half empty. People relate to seeing things evening out, because in most people’s lives, they don’t win the big game, but they don’t lose it either. They just plod along with some high and low points in between.

The emotional highs a successful happy ending create is something most people want from a story, only because many of us use fiction as a drug. We try to get high from reading. A good story kicks in the serotonin in the brain and we’re off.

This is why classic story structure is important to understand. If you want to be a successful writer, you must learn how to make people high.

REMEMBER: Endings leave the reader with their last feeling and thought. 

I’m Back!

My flight out of Nashville was canceled yesterday so I had to get the first one out this morning. I just got home. I need to get caught up on things and then I will post some stuff later tonight. 

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Climax

The Climax is where the Hero comes face to face with the Villain and fights him to the finish. This is the make or break scene of your story. It’s the pay off for the whole shebang. If you were to break down the effort that goes into a story, 75% should go into the story and 25% should go into the ending. The ending makes a lasting impression on the Audience. If it’s a weak ending, people will walk away generally unimpressed.

You should try to wrap up the climax with one action that solves everything. Because all the forces should have come to a head. It should all be down to one act of will. One act that will either defeat the Villain or make the Hero lose if it fails.

This creates immense tension right at the moment of truth.

The Audience wants emotional satisfaction. You need to give them what they want, but not like they expect. Endings need to have an element of surprise to be satisfying. If they end exactly the way people expect, they’re going to think you didn’t try very hard. And then they’re going to be more critical of the story.

Try to look at the Climax as a cross roads. The hero has a choice of directions he can take during the climax. Only you, the writer, know where those diverse roads lead. You decide which one the Hero chooses and which fate awaits him at the end.

One way to guarantee the Audience will get turned off is by taking the Climax out of the Hero’s hands. When you let someone else win the Grail or solve the problem, you steal all the energy from the climax. You are saying that the whole story leading up to this point was irrelevant because the Hero wasn’t really needed. That is probably one of the worst things you can do in fiction. It’s called a “deus ex machina” ending, which means “God in a Machine”. In Ancient Greece, a lot of bad plays had gods showing up at the end the climax, waving their hand, solving all the problems in the story. Audiences hated it then and they hate it now. Even if you don’t use gods.

Audiences nowadays have seen so many movies, read so many comics and novels that they are jaded. They want some bang for their buck and you need to wrack your brain to provide some.

It’s a good idea to use a visual that some how represents the premise at the end of the Climax. This is known as a “Key Image” and it can create a powerful, lasting moment that stays with the Audience after they finish your tale.

For example, in CITIZEN KANE the final image is a shot of a child’s sled burning in the flames with the logo ROSEBUD on it. It answers the question of the story, what is Rosebud. It also represents the premise, which is: “Take away a boy’s childhood and you end up with a childish man.” The sled represents his lost childhood going up in flames.

A large portion of the Audiences expectations and satisfaction comes from the end of the climax, so make it worth the price of admission. It’s the most important scene in the whole story.

Let’s go back to Kyle for an example of Climax. When we left off, Kyle was lying on the floor of the convenience store, with glass sticking into his back. And cops were converging on him. This is a crisis situation. How does he get out of it? Let’s find out…

The glass is grinding into his back, jarring Kyle with pain. The gun is slippery in his hand. Milk has sprayed all over him. The sound of the cops footsteps is get louder. Kyle knows they’ll come around the shelves and see him any second. He starts to get up, but the milk sprayed floor makes it hard. His back is in agony. What does he do? Should he give up or get that damned carton?

Kyle looks at the shattered case. One carton remains unscathed. He reaches for it. Gets it. Suddenly he feels renewed. Determination fills him from head to toe. He rams his body against the shelves as he hears the cops coming near.

An avalanche of cans hits them, they topple backward as Kyle leaps up and starts to shoot.

Klik klik klik

The gun’s empty.

Kyle races for the exit, kicking a gun from a cop’s hands before leaping over him. He clutches the milk carton like a football. The store’s exit is the goal line. He’s racing for it. The cop’s partner tries to get up, but slips on the puddle of slurpee slush that’s been growing on the floor like a B-movie monster. His shot goes wild and takes out several cartons of Camels near the cash register.

As Kyle rushes out the door, he hears sirens approaching. More heat! He dives in the cop car and starts the engine. The two cops come running out as he shoves the transmission in reverse. They start firing at him. Bullets shatter the safety glass in the windshield, making it impossible to see. Kyle floors it and the car screeches backward, tires smoking like chimneys.

He swerves the car around and puts it in drive. He smashes his forearm into the windshield, knocking out the glass so he can see. Three cops cars are racing into the parking lot before him, blocking the exit. He floors it and spins the wheel, driving off the sidewalk onto the street. They give chase. He tries to turn left at the intersection, but two more cop cars and an ambulance are blocking that way, so he turns right.

Damn! The crevice is up ahead. No way over it. But the street behind him is full of cop cars!

No choice but to floor it. The ground has risen up on his side of the crevice, making it higher than the other side. As he rushes toward the crevice he sees the whole adventure flashing before his eyes. He sees himself falling into the crevice toward flames. Pitchfork wielding demons are waiting for him below with gleeful expressions on their evil faces. There’s a second where he feels himself falling.

KATHUMP

He made it! The car made it across!

He looks in the rear view mirror. Cop cars are diving in the crevice. Others are trying to stop and end up crashing into each other. One car gets pushed in the hole by the one behind it.

Kyle makes for his apartment, laughing all the way home.

Of course, this was an absurdly overblown action story. But aren’t most comic books? I used the action motif to show the climax in its extreme. But you can do a great job with climaxes without having action. The film DEATH AND THE MAIDEN has a great climax with no action. Another good example is REAR WINDOW. Study films for examples, rather than comics because most comics are bad examples of how to do things.

REMEMBER: The end of the Climax is the make or break scene in your story, in more ways than one.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Crisis

This is right after the last Turning Point in the story. It’s the Crisis that precipitates the Climax.  Your whole story leads up to this point. The level of intensity of your Crisis has a major impact on how good your ending is going to be.

The Crisis is the last possible situation the Hero can deal with. By this time, the Hero has passed the point of no return. All the forces of the Villain and the Antagonists are against him at their utmost strength. If the Hero fails to deal with the Crisis, he loses the Grail and the story has a negative ending. If he wins, the ending is probably going to be positive, unless you set it up otherwise.

During the progressive complication stage of the story, the Hero makes a series of choices which leads to one complication after another. The conflict heats up until it reaches this boiling point. Now your Hero is in a do or die situation. He must win. If he fails, all is lost.  He’s exhausted every possible alternative.

The Crisis can be part of the Climax, but when the Crisis involves a decision, you can place it a scene or two before the Climax so the audience is kept in suspense, wondering if the Hero made the right decision. It also makes the decision seem more complex.

But the decision should not come during the crisis when you use this technique. It should be a static moment. So place it in the next scene, and better if it’s demonstrated rather than said.

At any rate, the decision made as a result of the crisis is the deepest look we get into the character’s psyche. This is the moment of truth. How they choose tells us who they really are. What they are really made of. This scene should produce meaningful emotion in the audience. This is achieved by making the crisis is critically important on as many levels of the conflict as possible.

Meaning produces emotion. Especially when pressure is extreme. By heating up the conflict on the internal, personal, and social levels you can create intense meaning for the crisis. And this can produce a significant emotional response in the Audience.

The other means of achieving this, which is related to the levels of conflict, is through story values. A subject we will explore in detail later. The key thing you have to remember to do is bring all the levels of conflict to a head at the same time and find a way to solve them all in the climax. This way, the power of the story is released in one final explosion.

And then your Audience will hear sweet music.

REMEMBER: The Crisis is the litmus test for your character. Make it meaningful. 

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Nashville

In case you’re wondering, I’m in Nashville this week for a business conference and haven’t had much time to get on the internet. The modem in my room seems toi be defective.

I’m having a great time and will have some interesting news to tell, but right now I can’t say much moore. Alas, I haven’t been able to see the town beyond a TV studio and some nearby restaurants. Ah, well.

More later.

Secrets of Writing: Progressive Complications

This is the meat of the story. This is where a large part of your creativity comes into play because here is where you heat up the conflict and keep the flames stoked high. Without conflict, you have a cold story. A dull story. A story people are not going to care about.

In life, the things that are worth having are the things we have to struggle for. Nothing that comes easy is precious to us. But when we fight for something, it’s like gold. This is a truism every member of your audience can relate to, which is why the conflict is one of the most important components of the story.

When we go about our day-to-day affairs we take the path of least resistance. When we walk to the store, we almost always take the same route. This is the way human beings function. But it’s all pretty boring. It’s not the stuff of fiction.

In a story you have to make your hero’s journey as interesting and exciting as possible.  The greater the conflict, the greater the hero, the greater the audience’s interest level. Progressive complication deals with putting pressure on your character in a way the Audience can relate to. This is done by playing with the technique known as Reversal. Reversals are the walls that spring up between expectation and result.

When you take that walk to the store, something could happen along the way unlike anything that has ever happened all the millions of times you took that same walk. And it could prevent you from getting to the store by taking the path of least resistance. In other words, you have hit a wall. A complication. Now you have to find a way around that wall.

Your Hero is going after the Grail of the story. They need to go after it in a relentless way. They will scale any wall, climb any mountain to get there. And you need to demonstrate that. The value of the Grail is measured by the risk the Hero takes to reach it.

So back to our analogy about walking to the store. Let’s say a carton of milk in the store is the Grail. The Hero’s name is Kyle. Kyle is having a major jones for some Capt. Crunch cereal. He goes to the fridge and finds he’s out of milk. So he heads out and walks down Sycamore street toward the convenience store two blocks away. Suddenly, there’s a terrible earthquake and a huge flaming crevice opens between Kyle and the distant store. He can’t go down Sycamore, which is the route he always takes. So he turns down Willow, a side street that connects to Maple Blvd, which’ll take him south, the direction of the store.

But, because of the quake, police and fire trucks have shown up and are blocking off Maple Blvd. So now Kyle has no choice. He must try another route. He turns and walks down Willow in the opposite direction until he gets to Pine Street. He takes Pine to Oak street and cuts back up Sycamore, on the other side of the crevice. He sees the store in the distance.  But as he walks down the street he sees a mob of looters running amok ahead. Kyle’s on the only street he can take now.  So he decides to go ahead and take his chances. He’s gotta have that milk! As he walks toward the store, a band of thugs come up and try to rob him.

Kyle rushes them like a running back, breaking through their line. He knocks them aside. But one of them has a gun and starts shooting. Kyle dives behind a parked car. The gunman shoots at the car. The gas tank blows. Kyle rolls away as flames and shrapnel go flying. A jagged chunk of hot metal skewers the ground where he just was half a second ago. 

The gunman comes after him, taking aim. Kyle grabs the shrapnel and throws it.  It slices into the looter’s chest, stabbing him in the right lung. He goes down, gurgling blood. His gun falls to the grass. His friends see this and come after Kyle, screaming with rage. Kyle grabs the fallen man’s gun and makes a run for it. They start shooting at him.

Kyle spins, fires, and the looters go down one by one.  Kyle is now only 10 yards from the store. But the police heard the shooting and pull into the parking lot, sirens blaring. They see Kyle has a gun and jump out of their cars, ready to shoot, ordering him to stop.

Kyle ignores them, runs into the store. The cops start firing. Bullets shatter the store windows, hitting product on the shelves. Soda bottles explode. Cartons of cereal go flying, spritzing Cherrios. Kyle rushes to the back, but a Pakistani clerk tries to block his way, jabbering in some foreign tongue.

Kyle throws a punch, it connects with the man’s nose. The clerk goes flying back into the slurpee machine. He hits his head, bounces forward, falling unconscious to the floor. Cherry slurpee slush dribbles onto his back.

Kyle spots the milk just behind the glass door in the refrigerated section. He makes for it. Just then, police enter the store, firing away. Bullets shatter the glass and milk cartons spray their contents. White fountains of the stuff splatters on the floor. Kyle tries to avoid the bullets, slips and falls on his back. Glass shards from the case slice into his flesh and he screams as--

What you just read is a series of progressive complications. If Kyle had just turned around and walked to a different store in the opposite direction, it would’ve been boring. But instead he walked in the direction of the conflict and here is where our story was born. Of course, you have to make sure it was a logical thing for Kyle to do. Otherwise the audience is going to say, “Why didn’t he just go to another store?” So maybe we could add a line that this particular store has a special brand of milk he can’t buy anywhere else. The only brand he finds acceptable.

Notice how each progressive complication was a logical extension of the last one. That’s how they need to work.

When Kyle went around the crevice, he encountered a road block set up because of the crevice caused by the earthquake. And as a result of this earthquake, people started looting. Kyle had to deal with the looters in order to go in the only direction left to take. And because he fought the looters he drew the attention of the police. And because the police fired at him, the milk was shot up, sprayed on the floor, and he slipped on it, falling on the glass. Now he’s lying on a slippery floor, with glass stuck in his back, and a bunch of cops are coming for him.

Every time Kyle went to take an action, something else came up to make his life more difficult. Each time, the stakes were raised. This makes the story more exciting as we read along. It also makes the Grail seem like an object of great value, even though in this case it was only a carton of milk.

Each time Kyle has a choice. He can stop, give up, or he can press on. His determination is what inspires our empathy. We can relate to life throwing road blocks in our path. It happens to us all the time, even if it isn’t as dramatic as the story you just read. Empathy makes us become involved with Kyle’s struggle. We live along side him every step of the way. We feel it when he falls to the floor and glass cuts him. 

Every time Kyle choose to press on, he’s passed a point of no return. Especially as we get closer to the grail. Once he started fighting with those looters, he couldn’t turn around and go home. Now the police are after him. Now he’s in serious trouble. How you solve this crisis is the climax of the story, which we will deal with shortly. 

The Trigger Event in this story was Kyle going to the fridge and finding he was out of milk. The Turning Point was the earthquake. What followed then was a series of progressive complications. This formed the bulk of the action. In a bigger story we would have scenes of dialog, perhaps internal monologues where Kyle debated what he should do. There might be details of the scene described. All of this would flesh out the world and the characters. But when you boil things down to the conflict, this is what you see. One progressive complication after the other. Each slowing down the Hero as he tries to reach the Grail. Each raising the stakes so it gets harder and more frenzied every step of the way. And finally you reach a crisis situation where it’s do or die. This is the point of no return. Either the hero wins the Grail or he loses big time. It should never be easy at the end. The end should be the toughest part of the story.

When creating Progressive Complications think about all the possible outcomes that could happen when the hero takes an action. Then separate the most surprising and believable outcomes and choose one.

This outcome will always force the hero to make a choice. How clever your hero is in dealing with that choice defines his cool factor. When he deals with the reversal and moves on, there should be repercussions that follow. And those repercussions will create a new surprise for him to deal with.

And each complication should make the stakes higher and higher until your hero is facing the ultimate challenge. This ultimate challenge is called the Crisis. And it will decide how good the ending of your story is going to be. You need to build toward a real crisis.

Whatever you do, don’t have the Hero retry the same tactics after they failed. When a hero attempts to repeat previous actions which have proven to be fruitless, it makes the Audience feel the hero is treading water and the story is going nowhere.

You start encountering the laws of diminishing returns when you repeat experiences in a story. And these don’t have to be literally the same. If they even smack of being similar you run the risk of boring the Audience. So be careful.

It’s also important to try to hit the first three levels of conflict if possible. Internal, Personal, and Societal. This makes the intensity of the story all that much greater.  When you have a character with inner conflicts who is also having problems at home and with his boss, it creates a more complex story.

The example of progressive complications we used was the kind found in an action story. But if you want to see progressive complications in a suspense film, I highly recommend DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. If you want to see progressive complications in a comedy, try RUTHLESS PEOPLE. Progressive complications will work in any genre. That’s the beauty of it.

When you get to the end of the second act, or the final scene of the progressive complication stage, this scene must end down. It will, of course, be a Turning Point scene. This scene propels the story into the Crisis. You can’t enter a Crisis on an up note. You have to end down. And the harder, the better. 

REMEMBER: Each progressive complication raises the stakes. Build toward the crisis.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Secrets of Writing: The Turning Point

After the trigger event comes the turning point. The trigger is usually somewhere between the beginning and the middle of the first act. The turning point is a major plot twist that throws us into the next act, full speed ahead.

There is a Turning Point at the end of every act. It serves as the act’s climax. Its purpose is to twist the plot in a different direction than where it was going before. This gives the story more momentum. It also makes it more surprising.

To use our desert road analogy, if you’re driving down a road that goes it a straight line on a flat terrain, there aren’t going to be too many surprises up ahead. You’ll be able to see things coming from miles away. And so would the audience. A story shouldn’t be predictable. We always assume the hero is going to win, but the question should be “How?”. The answer to that question needs to be a surprise.

The Turning Point twists that road so the audience’s and the hero’s expectations are thrown off balance. We now have to figure out what to do next. This helps solidify the Audience Bond because the Audience is now involved with the Hero’s problems.

In THE GODFATHER, the Trigger was Vito Corleone’s refusal to help the crime lord Sollazo with his drug business. This led to the Turning Point of the first act, which was the attempted assassination on Vito. Now Vito is in the hospital and we’re not sure if he’ll live or die. This forces the Hero of the story, Michael Corleone, to get involved in the family business. Up until that time, he avoided any involvement.

The Trigger throws the conflict and the Hero into a collision course. The Turning Point is where they first collide. This has to be a major train wreck, folks. It’s got to seriously upset the Audience’s expectations of the story’s direction.

The Turning Point needs to be a logical result of the Trigger Event. The Audience must feel this was bound to happen as a result of the Trigger. But even though it should be logical, the T.P. should also be surprising. It should make the Audience get excited and interested in what’s going to happen next.

Act climaxes tend to be the longest scenes in a story, and the tension in these scenes is the most extreme. So when you construct your Turning Point, remember to make them exciting as they throw the story in a new direction. These scenes are crucial to keeping the story moving.

REMEMBER: Turning Points throw the story in a new, but logical direction.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Secrets of Writing: The Trigger Event

This is one of the most critical things a story needs. It’s an event that sets the story in motion. Until this event happens, your characters are just muddling through life as they normally do. The Trigger Event kicks the plot into first gear. Now you’re moving in a direction.

Think of a story as a section of your character’s life, which has been edited down to the most interesting and salient parts. We live from day to day, trying to achieve certain objectives. Things happen to us that sometimes changes our plans. And sometimes these events set us on a different path than the one we were on.

That’s what the trigger does. It sets your character on a path with destiny. The destiny you’ve chosen for him at the end of the story. Until the trigger he was headed in the “normal” direction his life was taking, whatever that may be. He had a goal in sight or he was doing a daily routine and everything was hunky dory. More or less.

But then the trigger event came along and totally screwed up everything. It has radically upset the life of the hero whether he realizes it or not. The trigger can either have a positive or negative effect on the hero’s life at first, but it must be dynamic. It must radically alter the status quo in a way that will take a lot of doing to change.

A story needs to have movement. It needs to propel the Audience forward at a pace where they won’t be distracted or have their mind wander. A story also needs direction, and the trigger gives the story the initial direction it needs.

In a story you have two opposing forces, the Hero and the Villain. Both will be at odds over some issue central to the story. That issue will usually be the Grail. The trigger event signals when these two forces first begin to be in opposition to each other. It may not be apparent immediately to some of the characters that this is happening, but the trigger serves as the catalyst to make the story come about.

Let’s look at a few famous movies to see some examples of a trigger event.

E.T.: The UFO that brought E.T. to earth has left without him. He’s stranded on an alien world. The UFO was seen by some government men, including a man with keys on his belt (the story’s Villain). The man with the keys senses E.T.’s presence and gives chase. E.T. runs until he reaches the safety of the garden shed where he’ll eventually meet Henry, the central Hero of the story.

STAR WARS: A spaceship carrying Princess Leia and her two droids is captured by the Empire. Darth Vader, the main Villain, shows up to oversee the operation. The two droids escape to the planet below, where they inevitably meet Luke Skywalker, the main Hero.

BATMAN FOREVER: Bruce Wayne (the main Villain) rejects inventor Edward Nygma’s (the main Villain) plans for a Virtual TV helmet. Therefore, Edward becomes incensed and plots revenge which leads him to become The Riddler.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE: James Bond (the main Hero) has been searching without success for his enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld (the main Villain). He sees a girl trying to drown herself in the ocean. He saves her. And thus meets Tracy, who will cause him to meet her father, the man who has clues to the location of Blofeld.

DIE HARD: John McClane, a New York Cop (the main Hero) shows up at his wife’s office party and goes into her office to make a phone call. Shortly thereafter, a band of criminals (lead by the Villain) show up and take people hostage at the party.

ALIEN: The spaceship Nostromo gets orders to land on an alien planet, where the crew (the Heroes) will come into contact with an alien species (the Villain) which will try to kill them all.

Did you notice something about all these trigger events? Either the Villain, the Hero, or both were introduced in them. This is important, because every story will be about these two forces coming into opposition. You want to make it clear who these characters are and what place do they take in the scheme of things.

So the Trigger Event not only starts the ball rolling in a certain direction, but it serves to give the audience a sense of who’s who and what’s about to go down. In the case of E.T., we know right away that the alien is in trouble and that he’s hunted. That his only hope is to be taken in by someone who will protect him. This is a great trigger incident because it immediately gives you a clear sense of where the story is going and raises a strong question. 

Star Wars also does a good job of establishing the nature of the Villain and his relationship to the Heroes of the story, even though we don’t see Luke Skywalker till a little while later.

Placement of the Trigger Event

The Trigger Event should be placed close to the beginning of the story. You might even want to make it the first scene. The only real reason to hold off using it right away is when you need to set up some backstory so that everything makes sense. For example, in THE GODFATHER, the trigger doesn’t happen until after the large wedding sequence. In fact, it doesn’t happen until after the infamous horse head scene. The wedding scene establishes all the main characters of the story and sets up a back story, showing the Godfather’s relationship with his community, his power over others, and the nature of what he is. The wedding sequence also establishes his son, Michael, who is the Hero of the story. We even wait until after the Hollywood sequence before we get to the Trigger. The Hollywood sequence demonstrates Godfather Vito Corleone’s influence and power via the infamous “horse head” scene. Before then, we only heard second hand stories about the Godfather’s power. Now we’ve seen it in action. We see the fear he creates in others. We are led to believe that someone would have to be crazy to ever think of messing with this dude. This is all a set up for the Turning Point of the first act.

The Trigger Event is the scene where Vito rejects Virgil Pollazo’s offer to join him in the drug trade. By refusing Pollazo, the Godfather has created a powerful enemy who will attempt to have him assassinated at the Turning Point of the first act.

So, sometimes it’s necessary to wait before you use the trigger. Sometimes you need to get to know the victims first. But in any event, it must be somewhere in the first quarter of your story.

The Trigger Event can sometimes be in the backstory, rather than a scene in the first act. In WATCHMEN it was in the murder of the Comedian, which we only see the aftermath of in the beginning. This is because Watchmen is a mystery and it would give away the story’s big twist if we knew who killed the Comedian. This technique of placing the Trigger in the backstory is common in the mystery and crime genres. 

The Story’s Question

When the Trigger Event takes place, it should immediately create the following question in the Audience’s mind.

“Oh my god! How does this end?”

Your Trigger Event needs to be interesting enough to make the Audience wonder how the hero is going to win. Or at least make people wonder where this is going, in a positive way. After all, the last thing you want is people to feel is indifference. Boredom is the enemy of all stories.

The Trigger should provoke an image in the mind of the Audience of what the final confrontation will be, even though you may have other plans. It gives them something to stick around for.

What the Trigger does is make clear to the audience that after this event, nothing is going to be the same. The Hero will not be able to just mosey along as he always has. The T.E. has screwed him major. It has put him in a situation that he is going to have to figure a way out of, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Let’s examine a few examples for clarification.

DIE HARD: The trigger forces John McClane to fight the criminals who’ve invaded the building. He could have just surrendered right away like the other people did, but because he was a cop and a man of honor, he had to do the right thing. Either way, he was not going to walk away from this story without some major changes to his life. If he didn’t fight the criminals, his self respect and his relationship with his estranged wife and kids might have suffered.

E.T. The trigger sends E.T. to the garden shed where he meets Eliot. While Eliot is the main Hero, E.T. is the main protagonist. Both of their lives are affected by the trigger. Because Eliot takes in this creature he’s now going to risk the wrath of the mysterious man with the keys and the big bad Feds. E.T. can’t get home unless he gets help from an earthling, and by lucky coincidence, he meets someone in suburbia who isn’t frightened enough by his looks to shoot him.

THE WIZARD OF OZ: The trigger event in this story is when Mrs. Gulch shows up at Dorothy’s house and takes Toto away to be killed. This forces Dorothy into despair, motivating her to run away when Toto escapes. By running away she ends up in the house when the Tornado comes and whisks her and Toto off to the land of Oz. But the scene where she runs away is not the Trigger. It is the Turning point at the end of Act One.

KRAMER VS KRAMER: Mr. Kramer’s wife (played by Meryl Streep) leaves him without much of an explanation (maybe she ran off with Clint Eastwood?), forcing this workaholic man to take care of his kid. A job he is most unprepared for.

JAWS: The shark kills a young girl who was swimming naked in the ocean late at night (some people are crazy, what can I say?). This forces the Sheriff (the Hero), to deal with the problem.

As we see in these examples, the trigger forces the hero to make a choice of some kind, which will effect the outcome of the story. The choice is not always immediate. The choice will often have to be made after the turning point of the first act.

The choice which will eventually be forced upon the hero by the Trigger is what raises the story question in the audience’s mind. They immediately begin to see what the possible outcomes are, and this is the start of a phenomena known as the “Audience Bond”.

The Audience Bond

Once you have the audience wondering what’s going to happen next, you have created an empathy for the Hero. This bond between the audience and your characters is critical to the success of your work.

Just as we discussed in the choice section, people respond to gambles. High stakes with large pay offs and consequences attached. Not knowing which is the right choice is what makes it exciting. When you force the Hero to make hard choices, you give the audience the means to feel right along with the Hero as he has to make his decision. You’ve created a bond between the Audience and the Hero. It’s critical that you don’t blow it once you’ve done this.

You can blow it by having the character make stupid choices for no good reason. If the character acts in an unsympathetic manner, we lose empathy for them.

Another mistake is to use cheap surprise, which is having illogical or unbelievable things happen at random for shock value. In one bad suspense movie whose title escapes me at the moment, the Heroine hears a noise in her kitchen late at night. She’s afraid a killer is stalking her. For some reason she goes in the kitchen with the lights off and opens a cupboard. SURPRISE! Her cat leaps out at her! It’s never explained why the cat would be in the cupboard with the doors closed. Events like that aren’t credible and they will annoy your audience.

The Audience Bond is an important thing to sustain. It’s essential to making your story work, because maintaining a grasp on the audience’s attention is the difference between being remembered and being discarded.

REMEMBER: The Trigger Event gets your story moving. Make sure it evokes the story question.