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.
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
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.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Beginnings
How you begin any story is important. You have to interest people from the start. There’s a good chance that some potential reader might pick up your book in the store, read the first page, and decide if it looks interesting. You have to nail them on the spot. You have to make them go: “I gotta buy this!”
So when you sit down to think what that first page is going to show, think of it as the money shot. That first page has the potential to sell your book. It also sets the tone. It can also be used to establish the premise or a theme. In FORREST GUMP, the first image we saw was a floating feather, which was a metaphor for one of story’s themes.
If you do a splash page, you should try to think of an original and interesting opening. One they will pay attention to. Jack Kirby was great with those back in the sixties. When I was a kid, I would grab his comics off the rack just to see what the opening shot was. He always came up with something that made you go “Wow!”
As a rule of thumb, your story should begin in motion. Events should be taking place which are going to upset the balance of your Hero’s life. As we discussed earlier, the first act is going to be relatively short. And the turning point of the first act is going to throw the protagonist headlong, directly at the conflict. So you might as well get the ball rolling from panel one. Start in medias res. Use action, conflict, mystery or humor to get us interested in what is going on. Make the audience wonder and care who the people are and what is going to happen to them. Hit the ground running.
It’s not a bad idea to show the Hero’s life is already in a state of flux. Either he’s between jobs, his wife hates him, there’s no money coming in and he might have to move, something that tells us he’s ready for a change of some kind. Change is what life is all about and stories are metaphors for life. Remember?
Having the balance of things upset at the beginning gives it inertia from panel one. You can then propel the story further along with every panel there after.
In monthly comics it’s hard to have the character’s life in upheaval at the beginning of every story, so many writers try to do it by leaving cliff hangers at the end of the previous issue. This keeps the momentum going, but if done improperly it can also ruin the energy of the story. If you start out with a slam bang at the beginning you have to top it by the end. There’s no way to keep doing this month after month, so it’s not wise to fall into that trap.
Normally, the way to get momentum going in the beginning is with the Trigger Event. Which just happens to be our next chapter.
Rising Action
When a story begins we usually enter into a series of events known as rising action. These scenes establish the momentum of the story from the beginning. The events in this part of the story are a logical progression of what was set up at the start. We’ve met some characters. We’ve been given a rough idea what they want to do. Now they are setting out to accomplish their goals. And naturally, these goals just happen to be in direct opposition to what some other characters want. Or, if it’s a story about internal conflict, what the hero’s inner self wants.
The rising action serves to build the story’s energy toward the first big reversal. The Turning Point. In the midst of all this is Trigger Event, which is the force that starts the whole ball rolling.
The rising action phase of the story needs to be really compelling because this will determine if you’ve hooked the reader or not. If the audience isn’t hooked in the beginning of the story, they may put it down to read later. So already, you’ve bored them. The story isn’t interesting enough for them to keep reading.
If that’s the case, you’re in trouble.
Take a good hard look at the beginning of your story. Is it really exciting? Is it really interesting? Don’t think that a shot of some guy blasting a machine gun at us is exciting. It’s not something we haven’t seen before. They were doing that kind of shot in 1950s war comics. Exciting isn’t just action. Exciting is something that sucks us in. That draws our attention. It can be a naked body. It can be an unusual sight. Or…it can even be a shot of action. But we’d better care about who is involved in that action. Remember the rules of conflict.
The rising action scenes also establish the mood of the story. As we discussed before, once the mood is set, you have to stick with it until the next act. And even then, don’t make the mistake of confusing the audience. There must be a pervasive mood to every story.
You should also use the action to tell us who the characters are and why they are in opposition to each other. In the first act we need to know who the hero is, what he’s after, and why he’s not able to get it. Who the villain is and why they’re in the way should also be clear.
When introducing the villain, make sure his first scene is really interesting. The villain is the linchpin of the story. He has to grab the audience’s attention in a big way.
REMEMBER: Start with momentum and keep us interested from the first shot.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Sequences
Sequences are a section of the story, composed of scenes, relating a major incident in the act. In THE GODFATHER, the first sequence is the Wedding. It’s composed of myriad scenes which show different things happening at the Wedding of Vito Corleone’s daughter. The second sequence is the Hollywood Deal. Tom Hagan goes to Hollywood to try to convince a producer that he must hire an actor friend of the Godfather’s. The producer refuses and wakes up the next morning with a severed horse’s head lying between his legs. These sequences tell us a section of the story which are building toward act’s climax. They serve to narrate a progression of events that the scenes have constructed.
Sequences are generally thematically linked. They form a bigger picture than the scene. The scene is only showing us one event that happened. A sequence tells us how a series of events formed a greater whole and this is the end result.
Like scenes and acts, the sequence builds toward a climax. It has it’s own resolution. It follows the general formula of A>B Just as scenes should follow a logical order, sequences need to construct the story in a pattern that makes sense. Some stories tell sequences out of order, but this is done to fill in the story different parts at a time until the whole picture is complete. If a sequence is something that takes place out of the continuity of the previous and following sequence, you may want to put it somewhere else. Remember that you are building towards something and the choice of appropriate scenes and sequences are essential. REMEMBER: Sequences build toward the act’s climax. Order them well.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Serialized Stories
ACT STRUCTURE IN SERIALIZED FICTION
This is a very difficult thing to pull off well, but it’s also extremely important to understand if you have to do it.
Just as each story needs to build toward a climax, so does each act. And a serialized comic book story, for example, in multiple parts, can be viewed from this same perspective. Each issue should have a structure, building toward a crisis or climax. At the end of the story is a turning point which throws the momentum of that issue toward the next. This should be done in a compelling enough manner to make us want to read the next one. Make us want it BAD!
The concept of story polarity becomes extremely useful when we deal with serialized fiction. We need to start positive, end negative or visa versa, and with a vengeance! The end of each story must make us really want more. To do that you have to show a build in story energy toward that climax.
The ebb and flow between the Hero and the Villain should become more and more frenzied in each issue. The first issue’s tensions build toward a climax that’s level 2 in strength. The next issue needs to build to level 3. The following issue needs to build even higher until it can’t go any further. Then, that’s when you end it.
But the audience doesn’t want story arcs longer than five or six issues anymore. It’s really hard to sustain their interest that long. Even then, you’re pushing it. Long, drawn out epics will earn you a plethora of ill will if you aren’t careful. And then it’s hard to woo the readers back to the book.
Keep those story arcs short and sweet. Three issues is plenty in most cases. It’s hard to sustain story energy over too many acts. You start to experience diminishing returns. The audience has a hard time remembering plot details from month to month. You can’t expect them to do that. Especially if they read a lot of titles.
Your set ups shouldn’t be paid off three issues later. People are confused easily these days. The Audience has developed a taste for instant gratification, so you have to get to the point. Therefore, it’s advisable to make your stories tight. Get those points across quickly and succinctly and build toward a story climax soon.
Personally, I think the industry should return to a standard of one issue stories, with multi-part stories being reserved for truly important epics. It becomes far too easy for writers to pad out their plots over multiple issues while they try to figure out what the next story arc is going to be. Single issue stories tend to be a lot more satisfying for the readers. They get a complete package for the price of their comic. They get a fix on who each character is and what they’re about. When you come into the middle of some multi-part epic, it’s really confusing. All those brain addled books of the early to mid-90s have done a lot to drive our audience away. We need to win them back.
With the price of comics being what they are these days, it’s suicide to expect people to fork out the money for a multi-part story unless it’s one of the coolest things they’ve read in a long while. Single issue stories are more satisfying. They tend to be what sells a new reader on a book. Alan Moore established himself well on SWAMP THING with “Anatomy Lessons” and other one issue tales. Grant Morrison sold new readers on ANIMAL MAN with one issue stories like “Coyote Gospel” and “Death of the Red Mask”. Neil Gaiman probably sold more readers with his one issue stories in SANDMAN because, again, they are complete reads for the price of a single comic. Nothing shows the merit of a writer’s talent better than a single issue story. To date, my most financially successful comics were LEX LUTHOR: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY and HARDCASE #1…both single issue stories.
Also, when you have to pay more money to read the rest of a story it seems like a rip off. Especially when the story wasn’t that great to begin with. The industry has expected people to just keep buying these half-assed titles and readers have been voting with their pocketbooks. They’re voting NO!
The Audience wants a pay off. They want consequences in their stories, not just fight scenes they’ve seen a million times already. They aren’t shelling out two bucks or more for nothing. If nothing is what they get, nothing is what your readership is going to be. Sooner than you think.
It’s a rare story that can sustain readership over a long haul. WATCHMEN did it, but it was also a limited series. The readers knew they would only have to buy 12 issues to get the whole story. And it kept most of them interested enough to keep reading.
The two or three issue arc is the safest bet for most continued stories. If you really need more than three issues, you’d better make it worth the while of the Audience. There must be truly original surprises and pay offs in each issue. There must be a sense of great momentum. Failure to achieve that will result in huge drop offs in readership.
When you continue a story, make sure the turning point at the end is a major surprise. The villain standing over the apparently dead or unconscious form of the hero is not a surprising ending. It’s an ending that has been flogged to death since the 1970s. Nowadays, you need a turning point that has major implications for the character. It raises an urgent question in the mind of the reader: “Oh, god! How the hell are they going to straighten THIS out!?”
The old, Villain standing over the unconscious Hero scene does not raise that question. Because everyone thinks: “Oh, he’s just going to wake up, the villain is going to spill his plans, and then the hero will beat him.” They’ve seen it a zillion times already. Even if you plan a different scene in the next issue, it doesn’t matter. The audience has already decided what will happen and thirty days later they may not be interested in buying your story to continue.
You must give them a real reason to come back. It must be so compelling they are quaking like junkies experiencing withdrawal until that next issue comes out. This can be done with a major reversal using story values, a subject we delve into shortly.
And if you can’t pull off a great cliffhanger, write a one issue story, dammit!
REMEMBER: Keep those story arcs short and sweet. One issue stories are best.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Story Energy
It’s important to understand the concept of polarity. Every action has a polarity in story terms. Positive or negative. Non action is neutral. But as we discussed before, neutral action does nothing, so it must be used sparingly.
We either start a scene with a positive or negative action. Positive means things are going well for someone (pleasure), negative means things are going bad (pain). If it isn’t clear what’s happening then it’s neutral until we know better.
An action can be a line of dialog, an event or the expression on someone’s face. It’s up to you to decide what that is.
Every scene starts either positive or negative. And whatever the polarity of the beginning, the end should have reverse polarity. Otherwise the scene exhibits no change. Nothing happened. Everything evened out.
It’s possible to switch from neutral to negative or positive. In the case of an opening scene, maybe we started with an establishing shot of a house. There’s nothing positive or negative about a shot like that unless you show a missile coming down on the house, or show a party going on in the front yard with people having a good time. The house might be positive if it’s beautiful with a nicely kept yard. It would be negative if it is a dump with weeds and a car on blocks in the front yard. A visual like a shot of something is often symbolic in a positive or negative way.
Failing that, the shot is neutral. Starting neutral means an undynamic opening. It’s your choice.
Polarity allows you to build the story energy, leading up to the Turning Point. Just as every scene starts with a certain polarity and ends with the opposite polarity, so should the sequence and so should the act. This gives the audience a feeling that things are happening. Tensions are building.
When you start positive and end negative, that shows change in the status quo, from good to bad. Reverse the polarity at the beginning and ending of a scene and you have a scene change from bad to good. You can go from negative to negative or positive to positive, but it should be a huge jump in polarity intensity so we feel something happened.
The level of intensity is determined by how strong the charge is. An example of a weak negative charge is a customer saying “No thanks” to a waiter offering dessert. A strong negative charge would be him shooting the waiter between the eyes. A weak positive charge would be the customer saying “Okay, what’s your pies today?” A strong positive would be the customer giving the waiter a million dollar tip. .
Audiences need to feel an ebb and flow. A steady stream of positive or negative is wearing. Too much positive is boring. Too much negative is a downer. Too much neutral puts you to sleep. You need to alternate the polarities of your scenes, as well as the strength of the charge. So you might start with mild charges and slowly build toward your climax. Or you might start medium and then lower the charges from there and then build them up again as you go along. You should have lower charged scenes every now and then between high voltage scenes to keep the energy from being too wearing on the reader. Some people call these “quiet moments”, and they serve a good purpose when used properly.
It’s also important to note that the next scene, sequence, or act, should begin with a different polarity than the previous one ended. If you go from negative to negative, the audience starts feeling depressed. If you go from positive to positive it’s not interesting. Too many negatives or positives in a row and the energy level starts to drop in the audience’s mind. The charges should go the way you want them to go. It’s okay to link charges if we’re building toward an act climax. Then you can go from bad to worse, from good to great, spending on your goal. But save that kind energy flow for last.
Neutral charges can be like throwing a bucket of cold water on a horny person. It can take all the fun out of things. So beware of neutral charges. Use them only when you want to deal with irony or are starting a story. They can be used to bridge scenes with extreme polarities, if you want to create quiet moments, but again, think carefully when using them.
Because we’re dealing with a visual medium in comics or film, we have a lot of choice in how we present data to the audience’s eye. In comics, text can add the charge, but one has to be careful using copy without a supporting image. Copy requires you to take the time to read it. An image can tell you something instantly. If you’re relying on copy, make sure it’s short and sweet.
REMEMBER: Start positive, end negative, or visa-versa
Copyright © 2008 James D. Hudnall. All Rights Reserved
This page has been viewed 3671508 timesPage rendered in 0.5861 seconds
Total Entries: 2440 / Total Comments: 4862 / Total Trackbacks: 0
Most Recent Entry: 11/19/2008 04:58 pm / Most Recent Comment on: 11/20/2008 12:09 am
Total Members: 77 / Total Logged in members: 1 / Total guests: 24 / Total anonymous users: 0
Most Recent Visitor on: 11/20/2008 12:22 am
The most visitors ever was 847 on 11/15/2007 03:28 am
Current Logged-in Members: Toren
