Thursday, December 21, 2006

Secrets of Writing: Story Vs Plot

WHAT IS A STORY?

This is a subject many writers disagree on. The difference between a plot and a story has been argued since Aristotle stirred things up back in Old Athens. For the record, I’m going to take the side of writers like George Bernard Shaw who said: “There are only two stories. ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’”

Translation: “Boy Meets Girl” and “The Hero on a Quest”.

However, I part company with Mr. Shaw on the number of stories. There is only one story. The Hero on a Quest. Because Boy Meets Girl is about one or more characters questing for an object of desire. Love.

Man Vs Nature is often quoted as another basic story. But that story is about a hero questing for peace and quiet, or better weather. When you really think about it, all stories are about characters trying to get something. Either an abstract, like peace of mind, or a material object, like a bag of money.

The definition of “quest” is: to seek for something, or a mission to perform a goal. Therefore, we find many completely different plots all end up with the same basic story. Examples:

JURASSIC PARK: Scientists seek to survive when monsters get loose.
STAR WARS: A young man seeks justice in a troubled universe.
JAWS: The sheriff of a beach town on a mission to kill a monster.
THE GODFATHER: A young man seeks to create order in a troubled world.
THE WIZARD OF OZ: A young girl searches for home when she is lost.
GONE WITH THE WIND: A young woman seeks love in a troubled world.
CITIZEN KANE: A reporter seeks for the secret to “Rosebud”
FORREST GUMP: A retarded man seeks for love in a troubled world.
SCHINDLER’S LIST: A Nazi seeks to save Jews from injustice.
BATMAN: A hero seeks to create justice in a troubled world.
HARRY POTTER: An orphan seeks to create order in a troubled world.
JAMES BOND: A spy seeks to create order in a troubled world.
LORD OF THE RINGS: A hobbit seeks destroy a ring and restore order to a troubled world.

As you can see, in all these stories we have a character, or characters, seeking to obtain something or achieve a goal. They are all heroes on a quest.

Notice that all these stories involve people wanting something. That’s because from the moment we are born, we want something: Air, food, love, money, sex, entertainment, excitement, power. It’s a common thing to all humans. Our desires is what defines us.

Characters in stories are motivated by one of two things: Making a gain or preventing a loss.

Ultimately, when you boil a story down, either people want to get something they don’t have, whether it be peace of mind or wealth. Or, they want to prevent something from being lost. Example: In Lord of the Rings, Frodo and company want to prevent the loss of their way of life because Sauron wants to take over the world. So they set about to destroy the ring. The Villains of the story, Sauron and Gollum, want to prevent the destruction of the ring which would be a loss for them.

Boil down any story and you end up with this formula: A>B

A (the hero) wants C (the Object of Desire) and B (the conflict/villain) stands in the way.

Just as there is one basic story, there are only three possible endings to a story. Success, failure, or neutral results. But we’ll get to that in a later chapter.

If you understand there is only one kind of story, it makes it a lot easier to focus on your goals. You now know that in every story, your hero is trying to achieve something. You have to decide what that is. It doesn’t have to be limited to one goal, as we will discuss later, there are usually multiple goals in a story, but they are usually part and parcel of the same thing.

We are all trying to get something. We are all motivated by desire. We are creatures of need. Hunger is something everyone can relate to. Stories satisfy us when we can identify with a Hero and his desires, even if we disagree with his motives or methods.

To make your story unique, you elaborate on the one story in a way the Audience has either never seen, or never expected. But it has to be in a manner they will agree with and enjoy.

Therein lies the rub.

REMEMBER: Every story is about “A” wanting “C” and “B” stands in the way.

WHAT IS A PLOT?

There is only one basic story, but an infinite variety of plots. Plots are like a machine. You start with a bunch of parts, which are the story elements, and put them together until the thing works. The purpose of this machine is to arouse the Audience’s expectations. To move them in some way.

A plot is the mechanism of the story. It makes the story tick. A plot that’s well constructed hums along and has lots of power. A bad plot coughs, sputters, even falls apart. That’s why you have to learn how to be a good plot mechanic, to make it all run smoothly.

Plots come in two levels. There is the basic plot, or synopsis, which is the plot boiled down to a paragraph. And there’s the expanded plot, or the outline, which is the sequence of events around which a story is decorated and embellished. The plot’s plot, if you will.

A plot is what many people call a story. And it’s not wrong to call it a story. Every plot is a story. It’s merely a story dressed up as a plot. It gets confusing when writers argue the difference between plot and story. My definition keeps things simple. Why get complicated?

In case you’re confused by the above ramble, I’ll explain it another way. A plot is the story blown up and embellished with events, characters, and scenes. Think of the story as an evergreen and the plot as all the blinking lights, tinsel, and colored glass balls needed to turn that bland evergreen into a Christmas tree.

Every Christmas tree is unique, because the size of the tree can be large or small, the choice of decorations are as varied as the tastes of the decorators. But everyone knows it’s a Christmas tree when they see it.

A plot, like a Christmas tree, will be as unique as the imagination of the writer can make it.

The decorations are the characters, scenes, and techniques used to make the story more exciting. Once they’re all in place you have a plot.

TYPES OF PLOT

In classic story structure, plots take one of two basic forms:

The Progressive Version is where the conflict keeps getting more and more intense for the hero as the story progresses until he reaches a point of no return. This is the crisis of the story where the whole outcome is determined.

Examples: DIE HARD, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, STAR WARS.

The Sequential Version is where the hero has a series of adventures that each advance the story, explore the premise, and lead us to an inevitable conclusion. This form is hard to pull off and maintain direction.

Examples: FORREST GUMP, HUCKLEBERRY FINN

REMEMBER: There is only one story, but a zillion plots. 

7 Stupid Deaths

Famous People who died in dumb ways, starting with Attila the Hun. Here’s one:

Jerome Irving Rodale:
Founding father of the organic food movement, creator of “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine, and founder of Rodale Press, a major publishing corporation.
How he died: On the “Dick Cavett Show”, while discussing the benefits of organic foods.
Rodale, who bragged “I’m going to live to be 100 unless I’m run down by a sugar-crazed taxi driver,” was only 72 when he appeared on the “Dick Cavett Show” in January 1971. Part way through the interview, he dropped dead in his chair. Cause of death: heart attack. The show was never aired.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

What Was That Again?

Remember that old cliche that keeps getting trotted out about illegal aliens? How they take jobs Americans don’t want to do?

Lies.

The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.

Among them was Derrick Stegall, who carefully filled out paperwork he hoped would get him an interview and eventually land him a job as a slaughterer. Two of his friends had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and he felt compelled to fill their rubber boots.

There are a lot of Americans who would like many of the jobs illegals take. This has been one of the most pernicious lies of our times, and Republicans like Bush have used it over and over again. I would like to see more of these ICE raids just to see what happened next. 

Hicks Comes in Decent

Despite what Drudge says on his site, Taylor Hicks debut CD is selling well. It just failed to debut at #1 this week.

“Idol" season-five winner Taylor Hicks got the good news and bad news Wednesday when his debut sold 298,000 but came in at No. 2 behind Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy, whose sophomore disc “The Inspiration” (Def Jam) sold 352,000 copies in the week ended Sunday.

As sales go, Hicks wasn’t that far behind the debut of season-four winner Carrie Underwood, whose “Some Hearts” sold 315,000 in its first week.

Hicks’ self-titled disc barely edged the debut of Kelly Clarkson, whose “Thankful” moved 297,000 copies when it was released in April 2003.

The top dog among the “Idol” champs is Ruben Studdard, who sold 417,000 copies of his debut when it was released in December 2003.

His single the Runaround has not shot up the charts yet. Hopefully it will. It seems Christ Daughtry’s CD is also doing well. I notice one of his songs is getting airplay on the Adult Contemporary channel I listen to on XM. But his CD has been out over a month now. We’ll see how Taylor does. I think many Idols do better on their second album. Both Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood really took off with their follow up CDs. I never watched Idol until season 4, so I missed Clarkson, but I have become a fan of her recent stuff. And Carrie Underwood has really gotten good.

All the season 5 Idols who recorded CDs so far have put out decent stuff. I recommend Elliot Yamin’s Christmas song on iTunes, as well.

By the way, Taylor has a book coming out in April.

Secrets of Writing: Structure Explained

Back by popular demand. I’m working on the print version of this series with an editor. But since the blog disaster wiped out the articles, I will be reposting them here.

WHAT IS STORY STRUCTURE?

We are, by nature, a creative animal. We’re driven to make our mark on the world in some fashion, beyond our need to survive. Some people satisfy their creativity in the business world, in cooking, in decorating their home.  Some satisfy it with music or dance. We’re going to focus on that most ancient of trades...storytelling.

Mankind, as we know it, has been on earth for at least 70,000 years. We can safely assume that somewhere in the midst of that time, people started telling stories. It probably originated around the campfire when we lived in caves and hunted with flint spears. Stories began as one hunter bragged about some sabretooth he killed, or a fish that got away. As people’s tastes became more sophisticated, the demands on a story grew. The teller of the tale would elaborate. The fish that got away got bigger. Then, maybe a monster attacked him while he was trying to catch the fish, which is why he lost it. But people learned when someone was making things up, so the storyteller had to get more clever in how they spun their yarn. And that was the birth of technique.

We don’t know when people first started formulating story technique, but we know from recorded history thay were doing it in Ancient Greece, about 2,500 years ago. The first known plays were performed there, in honor of the god Dionysius. Stories were acted out with pantomime and dialog before a live audience. Writers quickly saw the need for improving their craft when actors started speaking their lines. Before then, stories were told by one performer, who was usually the author of the piece. When writing was used to record these stories, you had a new medium where flaws in a story became more brutally apparent.

The philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to write a treatise on the subject of storytelling.  In “De Poetica” he laid the groundwork for the theory that we now know as Story Structure.

Story Structure is the foundation upon which all stories are built. It is the framework that holds a story together. You cannot write fiction without employing it. However, if you don’t understand the principles of story structure, you can easily make a mess. This is one reason why so many stories are bad. The authors of these narratives didn’t employ the principles of structure appropriately.

It’s kind of like that old biblical parable about the man who built his house upon the sand, while another built his house on stony ground. The house built on the beach got destroyed because the foundation was built on unstable earth. The same thing happens to a story built with a poor structure. It falls apart.

The last thing any good writer wants is to spend days, months, or years on something that’s ultimately weak. Aside from the blow to your self esteem and the rejection of the public, it doesn’t do your career a whole lot of good.

There is a big problem with structure however. It’s such a vast and complex subject, many people mistakenly think of it as a formula. Aristotle and some of the theorists who followed didn’t help matters by actually defining the formula, as they saw it, rather than revealing structure as a series of principles. Think of it as a form, rather than a formula. Structure is the form your story takes. It’s a shape that has mass.

A solid structure holds together like brick and mortar. A weak structure is like jello and tissue paper.

Formula is used by those who want to safeguard their structure, but they end up sapping it of life. Life is not a formula. And it is often surprising and full of unexpected turns.

Stories that feel like life are what we call organic stories. They seem to build in an natural and believable way. These stories might employ technique, but it is usually invisible. You don’t see the manipulation and the tricks. You don’t see the wires and the man behind the curtain. These kind of stories suck you in completely and make you believe they are real.  To get to that level of skill usually takes experience, but it also requires understanding how formula works.

Formula writers mistakenly believe that plot twists have to occur on a certain page, characters must be introduced a precise way, etc. By dogmatically following these formulas, they end up creating predictable, by-the-numbers plots that don’t do a whole lot to satisfy the audience. You can see this kind of writing in many Hollywood action films. There stories where you can guess what happens next or who the villain is before they’re revealed.

You don’t want to write that kind of tale. Which means, you have understand how to structure things so it does not seem prefabricated, but hand made.

REMEMBER: Story structure is a series of principles. It’s not a formula.

TYPES OF STORY STRUCTURE

There are three basic types. Classical, Minimalist, and Surreal. This series focuses on Classical Structure which is the most popular form with readers and audiences. But it’s important to understand the other two so you can decide if you want to play with them.

CLASSICAL: This is the one most widely used in fiction, especially in film. It has proven to be the structure that creates the greatest emotional response in an audience. We have thousands of years of fiction to prove it. Classical story structure means change for the characters. They don’t come away from the story without their lives being affected in some way. All the questions in the story are answered. All emotions raised are satisfied. In Classical structure the emphasis is mainly on external conflict and causality. The Hero is proactive. The time chronology in the story is usually linear. There is a consistent reality.

In other words, things move from a beginning all the way to the end. When things happen in the story, it’s for a reason. We understand who the characters are, what they want and why they want it. Any sub plots are resolved and everything makes sense in the end.

The reason these stories are more satisfying is that’s how people want life to be like. And these takes serve to show us something that enlightens or educates us in some way. We leave the experience feeling as if we had a good meal for the soul.

MINIMALIST: This form of deals with stories that do not affect change in the character’s lives. They come away the same as when the story began. These stories usually have open endings, unresolved climaxes. Some of the questions in the story get answered, but some are left for the audience to think about. The emphasis in Minimalist Structure is usually on internal conflict. The protagonists are often reactive, rather than proactive. And there can be more than one Hero.

SURREAL: Also known as Anti-Structure. This form deals with conflicting realities. It delves into absurdity. Reality has no meaning. There are no rules. Anything goes. And like Minimalist stories, nothing really changes. The characters are pretty much the same going in as they come out. Time is usually broken up and random. Coincidence occurs more often than causality. These kinds of stories are often annoying. And they often feel fake and manipulative.

It’s possible for a story to fall somewhere between two of these forms. No story has to be purely one form or another. It’s possible to use elements of one form or another, but you have to decide going in which form is the dominate one.

When choosing to do a story in one of the other two forms, it’s best to start out with a classical structure before you lead your story into the other form. This way, the audience won’t be too jarred by what you’re about to do.

Take a look at the fiction out there, the movies you have at home, and study their structures. It will tell you a lot about them. 

The History of Religion

The spread of the world’s major religions is shown in this animated map. It’s obvious from watching it why Christianity and Islam have been duking it out for so long. Notice how Islam spread mostly by conquest. Christianity did in its early years, but most of the spread was from people moving around and missionary work. 

RealEstatemageddon

If my old blog articles hadn’t been lost, I would point to an article I wrote almost two years ago predicting what is happening now. It would have happened sooner, but the lenders kept on lending. I am glad I didn’t take the bait.

Nationwide, nearly 877,000 homeowners were in foreclosure so far this year, up 37 percent from the 640,454 who filed last year, ForeclosureS.com said.

Escalating home values from 2000 to 2005 caused buyers to overextend themselves. Many took out short-term, adjustable-rate mortgages for homes they otherwise couldn’t afford and saw their monthly payments balloon as interest rates rose.

Home prices are going to drop dramatically. Even in so called “hot markets”. Watch. 

Lost Rhapsody 2: Electric Boogaloo

Funky! I love those Weird Al polka medleys. 

Major Suckitude

In case you’re wondering why my blog still doesn’t have the old articles restored, it’s because of a series of Murphy’s Law events that started Friday Morning. My site was down because it was crashing the server for some reason so they shut it off. They turned it back on and I discovered something on the blog page was causing the problem but I couldn’t determine what it was. No one had posted malicious code in a comment. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

So they told me I should move to a better server and plan they had set up. I was running off to San Diego for the weekend, so I saved everything, including the database and determined to deal with it from down there.

I got an email from their tech support telling me how I can move my site, so I followed their instructions only to discover that the move did not automatically move my files. So, fine, I was going to restore it from the database save, except I learned it was corrupted. Not only that but I had to change the DNS, which meant the site would be down for a day regardless of what I did.

On Monday they said they would restore my database. I had set one up in the meantime so my temporary blog would have something to run from. Except they couldn’t find it. It seems it was no longer on the old system because they deleted it. Not only that, but they did not have saves going back to before they deleted it. They only had nightly backups and when I moved the site, their system automatically cleared the space on the old server on Sunday.

Got that? Almost four years of blogging articles down the drain.

Yes, I had backed up my database before, except I never had to restore the files and I discovered the large size of my database made each save unusable because it crashed the save in the middle, before any articles or comments were saved.

My only option is to find some articles on Google cache and copy them into this blog one by one. They have all kinds of formatting problems, but at least that’s an option. I did it for two articles today and I will probably do it for awhile, to get back some of the better stuff I wrote.

But for now, this blog is back to square one. I just have to move forward and not look back, but needless to say, I am not enjoying this.

If you want to help my mood, drop some change in the tip jar to the right. It would be most appreciated.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Food Tyranny

New York Mayor Bloomberg wants to be president, though I think he would fail the high requirement. There’s a sign next to the White House that says you must be this tall to run the country. Maybe his height is where his Napoleon complex comes from. Not only did he ban smoking in every public place, he also banned transfat in foods. John Stossel points out the absurdity of it

A New York Times headline about the ban reads: “A Model for Other Cities.”

“A model for what, exactly?” asks George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux. “Petty tyranny? Or perhaps for similarly inspired bans on other voluntary activities with health risks? Clerking in convenience stores? Walking in the rain?”

Trans fats give foods like French fries that texture I like. They are probably bad for me, but Radley Balko of Reason points out that “despite all of the dire warnings about our increased intake of trans-fats over the last 20 years, heart disease in America has been in swift decline ... So, if they’re killing us, they’re not doing a very good job.”

The control freaks are never satisfied. If you think they’ll stop there, tell that to smokers.