Starting with Idea: The Thought-driven Story

 Let's talk today about “idea” as a way to start a story. Some stories, especially those classified as “speculative fiction,” start not with anything concrete like character or setting, but with an idea to be explored.

As science fiction writer Orson Scott Card explains, “Idea stories are about the process of seeking and discovering new information through the eyes of characters who are driven to make the discoveries.”

That’s really the appeal of an idea story. No matter what it turns out to be, it starts as an intellectual puzzle. In the spirit of that sort of intellectual mission, let’s consider some ways an idea can start a story.

Questions. For example, many mysteries start with a scene that presents a question, one of the oldest questions of all, “Whodunnit?” But most authors add some additional complication, like, what could kill a man alone in a locked room? (Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal detective story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” was perhaps the first to pose that question.) The point of these “idea-mysteries” is to challenge the intellect of the sleuth (and author and reader) to go beyond the expected and familiar to speculate, innovate, and interrelate clues to come up with possible though unlikely solutions.

What-ifs. This is a specialized question that truly is speculative, as it seeks to imagine something that hasn’t happened (and probably won’t). This is more of an experiment than an exploration. A good recent example is The Martian, which poses the question, “What if an astronaut was left behind on Mars?” A great classic example is Oedipus the King, which asks, “What if the detective learns he’s actually the murderer?”

There’s also a what-if variety that experiments with the past. Alternative histories like Harry Turtledove’s The Great War inspire the author and reader to consider how the present might be changed if an important past event were changed. These alternative histories have a point beyond the mere alteration, however. Philip K. Dick’s “Man in the High Castle” takes the question “What if the Nazis had taken over the United States?” to pose the deeper question, “Would Americans resist?”

Themes. A theme is a message, a “moral to the story,” that can usually be stated in a sentence, but is better developed through story events. The film Chinatown, for example, uses the “water wars” of southern California to explore the theme of “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The difficult task in theme-based stories is to avoid being preachy. I’d suggest having the theme in mind and creating characters who have to discover that truth, but only at the END of the story. That way, the theme evolution will be a more organic process.

Perspective. A perspective-based story requires, you guessed it, an alteration of perspective, demonstrating that what you see is dictated partly by where you’re seeing from. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities juxtaposes the experience of the French Revolution in Paris with that of London, that of a victim with that of an observer. A variation of this perspective-test is the “fish out of water” plot, where our world is viewed through the eyes of an alien or stranger.

In my opinion, this is one of the most socially important genres, as it forces our notoriously solipsistic species to examine ourselves objectively—something more and more essential in a diverse culture.

Concepts. A concept is the simplest and yet most profound of ideas, often expressed in a single word— Freedom. Dispossession. Exile. The speculative aspect of this comes from recognizing that simple concepts are actually the opposite of simple and that only a story and a character can truly portray the complexities. For example, the film Casablanca explores the concept of “neutrality” through the cynical and detached character of Rick, a symbol of the isolationist United States trying to stay isolated in those dark months before Pearl Harbor.

Starting with the concept but developing it through the complications of a 3-D person within a culture is a good way to avoid the sort of closed system that readers of speculative fiction loathe.

Twists. This story takes something conventional and twists it to produce something both familiar and exotic. You’ll often see this in novels aimed at teens and pre-teens, as connecting the normal with the unusual trains them in the important mental skill of skepticism and imagination.

The trick here is to make the base story perfectly plausible (Harry Potter really is going to boarding school and taking courses, but they’re about incantations and potions), so that the twist is more fun, making the familiar unfamiliar.

All of these idea types pose the risk of becoming just tricks. To avoid that risk, consider that each of these should lead to a deeper question, and that is in the end what we want to explore in the story.

When I read Ender’s Game, for example, the "twist" is clear-- (spoiler warning) the children thought they were training on a videogame to stop an alien invasion, but in the end, it turns out the game was real and they'd just stopped the invasion. But I found the deeper question to be, “Why do we sacrifice our children for war?” That deeper question leads to the plot development that the adults deceive the children that war is just a game.

Another way to make an idea into a full-fledged story is to embody the idea inside a character’s journey. Ask yourself who needs to learn this theme or experience this twist? Oedipus, for example, is an arrogant man who will not accept the power of the gods over him. So he has to be forcibly confronted with the fact that they control his fate.

The most successful idea stories start with an idea… but they don’t end there. The idea is more than just a statement or speculation, but rather a process whereby the reader and characters experience the idea and come to understand what it really means.

Exploration of a theme

Here's an interview with Joshua Foer about the theme of "memory."
Alicia

Horrible thoughts

I'm just going to jot down some thoughts coming out of a discussion over lunch with my son about Stephen King and horror fiction and stuff. Other thoughts or speculations?

1) Horror is not just a genre. Like "romance" and "mystery" and "suspense," it's an emotion that can be generated within a book about something else. Why would we want to have a scene or passage or more of horror in a non-horror-genre book? To deepen the darkness of the book? To heighten the relief of a happy ending? I do think that horror would provide contrast (in the color sense) to the rest of the book, as long as it doesn't overwhelm with darkness.

2) Horror is not about the dreadful event... it's about the dread of the event. As with suspense, the buildup becomes all-important, to create that sense of dread within the character and the reader. Scene design, word choice, pacing-- these must combine. Pacing will slow down, sentences will lengthen, so the scene can lovingly, almost lubriciously, develop the creepy horror-ness. Presentation (the development) will be more important than plot (the event).

3) Horror is created by -knowing-. You have to know what's coming to be horrified by it. (Looking back on a horrible event works too, because you -know- it can happen now.) Notice how in "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson builds the dread by making it clear that everyone in the village knows what's going to happen (even if the reader doesn't). Go ahead, read the story (it's only eight pages), and see how the relatively bright tone in opening paragraph becomes progressively darker as the festive mood gives way to anxiety. The villagers all know what's coming.

4) Horror is inspired by the writer taking access to his/her deepest fears. But the event doesn't have to be all that dramatic. What's important is that either it's a common fear, or the writer describes the feeling well to make the reader "know" it.

Stephen King, I remember, was asked what in his life prepared him to write horror, and he spoke of two very common, nearly universal events. Once, when he was a child, he had an ear infection, and (presumably this was before antibiotics were used routinely) the doctor was going to lance the eardrum to release the pus. The boy (King) knew what was going to happen and that it was going to be terrible, and ran and hid in a closet. And his mother and the doctor had to come and drag him out and perform the procedure. Maybe few of us get our eardrums lanced, but we all got shots (I have to inject myself with medicine, and no matter how often I have done it, every single time there's a moment of horror involved in the breaking of the skin).
(I'm writing from memory here, so tell me if I have the details wrong.)

Then the other incident was watching one of his children run into danger (collision with a snow plow? I forget) while King was too far away to rescue the child, and had to watch in dread (there's that word again).  (Nothing happened, but every parent has memories like this.)

Just take it slow. Read King's horror scenes, or Dean Koontz's, and see how slooooow the scenes develop. You can't shorthand horror. Dread has to build, through gradually darkening events and prose. That takes time and probably several revisions. It's not adventure. It's slow-paced, not fast-paced. There really aren't any shortcuts to horrifying readers.

5) To get in touch with what will horrify, remember your nightmares, and study the most common nightmare types. If you can invent scenes that include some common nightmare element, you'll be making a direct connection to our subconscious, and to the collective unconscious.

For example, one of my recurrent nightmares is seeing a plane on fire in the night sky, and it sails over a ridge, and then I hear an explosion and see a fireburst on the ridge. I suspect most people have a nightmare where (as with King's example above) they know something terrible is about to happen and can't stop it. That would make a great horror scene (especially if at that moment, the character had a friend or loved one taking a flight). 

Another recurrent nightmare I have-- and you probably do too-- is being chased. But with mine, there's an added terror. I run through a shadowy street to get to my own front door. I fall into my house, slam the door closed, stand there panting but relieved. And then, slowly, I become aware that whatever was chasing me is in the house. And I'm locked in with this evil.

Now if that sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it in a few horror movies.

6) Horror elements, as a conduit to the subconscious, can trigger strong emotion even in other types of scenes. An example is the famous burlesque scene "Slowly I Turn," which uses the slow, mechanical, and repetitive language of a horror film to comic effect.
(Here's Lucille Ball: Slowly I Turn, Step by Step.)

That horror scene of the chase through a shadowy street? Watch the end of Gone with the Wind. It's a romantic "horror"-- the terror that is "chasing" her is her fear of abandonment, and she gets home, and there is Rhett, and she sighs in relief-- she's home. She's safe. But then the terror is right there with her, in  her own home: Rhett announces he's leaving.

If  you want strong emotion, whether it's comedy or romance, try using the horror tropes in some way.

7) Horror is, at essence, about a fear of loss. Just as Scarlett feared losing love, a horror story character might fear losing control, or losing face, or losing trust, or losing some power. You know what's a great horror story? Flowers for Algernon. In that story, researchers manage to increase the IQ of a white rat (Algernon), and then try the technique on a man of low IQ (Charlie). Rapidly, he becomes a genius, and for the first time feels the great pleasure of learning and inventing and understanding. (And he falls in love.) But then Algernon begins to fade and lose his genius at running mazes. Charlie, witnessing this, realizes that he too will shortly be losing all the intellectual gains he made. This is the horror. He knows what is coming. He dreads the loss. He can't stop it.

That is how we create horror. Establish something of value, and then predict its loss.

What else? What do you think? Help?

Alicia

Show and tell: Character

I'm reading a book that I could describe as the "British Kramer vs. Kramer" because (except for the fact it's broadcasting a tragic ending, you know, "I didn't know then that this was the last time we'd be happy...."-- annoying) it's hit almost every event in the film. Anyway, there's something I'm noticing that reminded me of "concreteness" and how important it is in establishing authority (by the author) and trust (in the reader).

I think (I am not sure, because the author screwed up, if you don't mind my saying so) that the intended theme is something like romance is temporary, but love is forever-- love is better/more than romance. And the way this would be set up as a dialectic, very simplified (usually we start with the -wrong- and show it's wrong):
Thesis: Romance is better than longterm love.
Antithesis: Longterm love is better than romance.
Synthesis: Longterm love has its own type of romance.

 The protagonist in this book gets dumped by his wife (for good reason-- his one-night stand) and then by his new girlfriend, and both say the same thing, "You don't really want love. You just want romance, and that doesn't last, and you're disappointed when it does."

An astute criticism, except that... there's nothing in the events or his actions that suggests that. In fact, he seems to love the whole domesticity experience, the just-being-together aspect of a long relationship, the visits-to-in-laws-and-kids'-birthday-parties as the height of excitement. Even his one-night-stand was mostly the result of getting himself into a situation where it would be embarrassing not to stay the night. His women, in fact, are the total romantics, always proclaiming high-flown desires like, "I want a man who will love me totally and only and never ever look at another woman!" "I want a white knight who will always be there and love me unconditionally and rescue me from peril!"

But they keep saying that his problem is that he wants romance and adventure and excitement, not longterm love. This could be ironic, except it isn't. There's no point in the book where he even says, "Wait a minute.That's not me at all."  So it seems pretty clear that the author had in his head the notion that the protagonist just wants romance, but also had in his head a plot where "a man learns to be a father," and never makes good on the proclamation that the man wants romance above all and must learn to value the quotidian.

It occurs to me that this deeply frustrating reading experience is showing me something about writing. As a reader, I can tell there's a disconnect between what is told and what is shown, between the author's idea of the theme, and the actual theme as played out in the events of the plot. This is a good reason to occasionally try to see your book as a reader would, of course!

Anyway, I was thinking--- if I were the one writing the book and wanted to go with that whole romance/adventure illusion problem, what I'd do is make it clearer in the beginning that the character is acting out of a need for romance. For example, this one-night-stand, which was almost an accident, and immediately regretted and no fun at all, could be set up as much more of a product of romantic longing. Rather than just some gal from work inviting him for a drink, she could be someone who embodies his secret dreams of the ideal woman, that he's been longing for, and her "choosing" him could be not just a chance thing, but the culmination of that secret desire. He could be describing her not really in physical terms but in emotional terms-- dream come true, all that. And then there's the shock of returning home and being found out, and his making excuses about true love and romantic fantasy and such, and in that case, her accusing him of wanting romance over love might ring more true.

Point is, if your theme doesn't match your book, you have to change the theme or change the book. Often this won't require a major change to get the coherence you seek. Sometimes it's just a matter of taking one event that is sticking out like a sore thumb as showing something other than the theme and refining that event to make it develop rather than contradict the theme. In this case, the problem was actually in the setup (act 1, the thesis part of the theme) which didn't show him ever acting out the "romance is best" belief.

What's your book theme, and how are you showing it developing in your scenes?

Alicia

The End of the Beginning

(Here are some posts on my own blog that discuss openings.) To keep this relatively short, I want to focus on the all-important last paragraph.

The beginning of a story has a lot to do, and it might be most helpful to write your opening, write the rest of your story, then come back and revise the opening so it is more effective in setting up the plot questions and themes. I was helping a friend with a story just today, and we discussed the "end of the beginning." This book is about a girl raised in Europe who was forced by her parents to study piano for years. She is disillusioned by music and eager to get far away from her parents, so she chooses a college in the US that has lost its music program. That's the opening, setting up her college story.

I suggested that the author think about what is going to happen later in the book. The college is going to resuscitate the music program and recruit the protagonist to be the first major, and in the end of the book she's going to found her own punk band, showing that she has chosen her own way (not the parents or school). Boy! This is good, because it forces her to change, to learn to value her own talent, to choose rather than just react.

The end of the opening, however, could set up the "praxis" of her journey, by posing a bit of a conflict or question. In a way, the last paragraph in the opening could serve as a "hinge" to the rest of the story, actually helping to open up to the rising conflict and rising action of the middle, and hinting at the theme that will be resolved in the ending.

His first chapter has her choosing a college, deliberately selecting the one that has lost its music program. I suggested a final paragraph that would emphasize what he wants the reader to think about. But to achieve that, he must identify what that is! Does he want the reader to think about her disorientation at being in the US after Europe, a fish out of water? Or her sense of her musical talent being trapped by the expectations of her parents even as she arrives in this new place?

He agreed with the latter, that her journey should start with her resistance to those expectations, and so he wanted to draw the reader's attention to this. So he ended the first chapter this way, "My first class was History of Culture, in the Humanities Quad. Shoved into a corner of the lecture hall was a grand piano, swaddled in a gray quilted cover. I hurried past and took a seat in the center, directly in front of the professor."

This sets up the conflict between her desire to be "merely a student" and her musical talent and provides a concrete action (hurrying past the piano) to symbolize the beginning of her journey from resistance to self-acceptance. If the author wanted to emphasize her "fish out of water" aspect, how could that be achieved with the same situation (entering her first class lecture hall)?

Another way to use that final paragraph in the first chapter is to set up a motif (a recurring thematic image or concept) which the rest of the story will develop. For example, in my Regency novel Poetic Justice, the first chapter pits the hero John against an enemy, who tries to trick him by offering an alliance and then trying to kill him. I was worried that the adventure of this opening would conflict with the quieter aspects of the rest of the story. But when I realized that no matter what the situation, John was always being "tested," especially by the class system that scorns him as a tradesman.

By the time his shipmates arrived panting, daggers drawn, the light was gone entirely and the dock was slippery with blood. Two of the bandits had fled, and the third lay unconscious on the dock. John loosed his death grip on the saddlebag, let his first mate take it, let his steward peel his fingers from around the knife and put it away. He nudged the bandit with his foot. "Tell your employer," he said, then paused to drag in a breath, "that I passed that test too."

Thus, in the final paragraph of the first chapter, I emphasized this motif to connect this scene with the rest of the story, which develops and finally resolves the recurrent pattern.

Look at your own first chapter and think of how you might use that last paragraph to wet up the rest of the book, by establishing the context or conflict, by posing a question the rest of the story will answer, or by connecting the first scene with the rest of the story using a theme or motif. Any examples from your work?

Making use of the tools at hand

When we come to the end of the book and want to wrap things up and resolve the conflict and finish the theme, a technique that can help "coherence" is making use of the tools-- motifs, objects, and patterns-- that we've set up earlier in the book.  This can help connect the ending to the rest of the book and make the climax feel more 'fitting," more like it really finishes this book and not just, oh, a generic mystery.

For example, that play I just saw by August Wilson, Golf Radio, has two "connectors" in the end.  Earlier, a secondary character had used paint to mark himself (the paint was itself an important prop, as the character was painting with it a house set for demolition, and so the paint symbolized sort of a futile action).  The character marks his face like a Hollywood Indian going into battle, to the amusement and horror of the main character Harmond (who is set to demolish the building).  Later, in the last scene, Harmond also paints his face as he leaves his office to join the forces protesting the demolition. The face-paint shows that he has chosen to fight for the right, and not just the legal, but also connects back to the earlier character and shows how far Harmond has come from despising that man and his quest.

Second is the "radio." Each scene in the play starts with the local radio station coming on with the traffic and weather and what's going on in the Black community that day.  The radio station is bought during the fourth act, by a predatory businessman who is trying to exploit Harmond's partner by putting him as the "local face" of the new ownership. The implication is that the radio station is going to stop covering the community and become some sort of generic Clear Channel clone.  I was wondering how the ending would deal with this, as the play had set up that each morning of the story starts with the radio coming on.  (Groundhog Day uses the same effective technique.)  The playwright understood, however, how to make use of the tools at hand, and has the radio announcer announce the "paint party" at the protest site, showing (I think) that the community radio is still tuned in to the community, and also that Harmond's old partner might actually be undermining his new boss.

Anyway, whenever we make use of the tools we've used earlier, we're adding to the coherence of the story. More than that, even without consciously trying, we're showing the change in character and the development of the theme since the last time in the story that the tool was used. The reader understands that all scenes using this tool are linked, and that the differences between how the tool is used or the effect it has will manifest a new meaning.

Give it a try.  The parellelity of the scenes using the tools actually creates meaning and subtext, whether we're conscious of it or not.

Alicia

Your Turn - Spot the Themes

We've been talking about routine tasks in fiction this week. First we talked about two common errors in the reliance on routine tasks, and then we looked at two example of scenes in which routine tasks are manipulated to highlight theme.

Now it's your turn to apply some of the ideas we've been using. But I'm not going to make it easy for you! This clip is of a scene sequence from the film Pretty Woman, the eponymous shopping scene. This sequence is not without its problems, but it also contains elements which many viewers loved. The trick now is for you to watch the sequence with the concept of deeper story architecture in mind. What are the themes, and how do those themes resonate in this sequence?

Another Good Example - Dinner Done Right

We've been talking about routine tasks such as cooking and getting dressed. We started by looking at two ways these kinds of actions are misused in the narrative, with clues to diagnose and tips to repair them. Then yesterday, we looked at the first minute and a half of Lawrence Kasdan's film, The Big Chill, as an example of how routine tasks are manipulated to establish the dominant themes of the film. Today I thought we could take a look at another example from film, this time a classic dinner scene from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.

First, take a look at the scene. Henry (Ray Liotta) and his partner have been sentenced to ten years for beating up a bookie. This scene takes places in prison.

It's a dinner scene, yes, and it goes into detail about a lot of mundane points: the thinness of the garlic slices, the number of onions, the need for pork in the sauce, the bread, the wine, and so on. But these details serve a deeper purpose by reinforcing the theme. This is a film that attempts to convince us that the mobster's life was glamorous and privileged even as it depicted the grittiness and tawdriness of it all. This scene hits that theme hard. They are in prison. It's not a pretty environment. Paulie wears a bathrobe, black socks, and sandals while he slices the garlic -- far from a glamorous look, and yet it shows us how relaxed his is, even in the cement-block prison environment. A single sheet hangs over the window in place of a curtain, and yet there is a linen tablecloth on the table. The gangsters have lobsters and steaks on ice in a makeshift cooler hidden behind an ugly oilcloth sheet. Everywhere you look, there are these pairings of something ugly with something that speaks to privilege and a better lifestyle.

What else do you notice in this scene that ties into the themes of the movie?

Theresa

How to Use Routine Tasks to Make a Deeper Point

In my post yesterday, we talked about scenes and scene starts which rely on trivial action in the wrong way. Today I thought it might be useful to look at an example of a scene that uses the same kind of action to make a larger point. I suspect most of you are familiar with the Lawrence Kasdan film, The Big Chill. The first minute and a half of that film portrays routine actions: a dad bathing his toddler son, a mom taking a phone call, a man dressing. I found a youtube clip of the opening -- it's got subtitles, but it was the only video I could find of the first scene. Take a look at the first minute and a half.

Now, the film's dominant themes have to do with the loss of innocence and the tension between idealism and everyday concerns. This opening sequence sets the thematic tone by using everyday, routine tasks as a counterpoint to the phone call that changes everything. One of my favorite moments in this sequence comes when, after the phone rings several times and is finally answered by the mom, the dad asks, "What's that?" We're all wondering the same thing because we know phone calls in movies usually have a big impact on the action. But, even though the dad has one eye on the phone call, the question, "What's that?" is actually posed to the kid, who answers, "Super-Nothing." The call is not about a superhero. It's about a Super-Nothing, a man who never found his way in life but now has found his way to death. The tragic news is delivered against the backdrop of a child in a bubble-filled tub singing Joy to the World.This image is filled with innocence and imagination, two key ingredients in the idealism examined by the film.

And then the opening credits are played over an image of a man getting dressed -- or being dressed, rather, for burial. Getting dressed is a routine act that we do every day, but we only are dressed for burial one time. The ordinary act is made extraordinary by its unique context.

Do you notice anything else here about the way the ordinary actions are used to make bigger points?

Theresa

Exploring an Issue for Coherence

So I'm reading this annoying legal thriller, which is especially annoying because it turns out to be better than I first thought. And as I get deeper into it, I'm coming to realize that the author sets things up in order to turn them around. And the author is also doing something that I think immensely aids the coherence of the story and kept me reading even when I was really annoyed at what I saw as the smugness and complacency of the main character.

See, what the author is doing is exploring an issue. This is more thematic than structural, but the decision to explore this issue helps select (and de-select -- what DO you think of that as a verb?) plot events, and shape them to explore this issue more.

The issue in this book is "power".  This takes place mostly in a courtroom, and the power is mostly about the power of the judge, and there's an implicit question revealed as the story goes on: What happens when a sociopath becomes a judge? (Answer: He uses the over-the-top power of a judge within the courtroom to send his lover's husband to an asylum and the attorney to jail.) But it's not just power as in power over others. There's the related issue of "control" (power over oneself). The attorney thinks of himself as utterly in control of his demeanor, attitude, courtroom performance. He's proud of his ability to control the responses of witnesses by asking questions in just the right way.  And he has sympathetic scorn for his friend the alcoholic (who keeps talking about how you have to accept your own powerlessness) and scornful sympathy for mental patients who have no control over themselves.  In fact, almost everything in the story has a bit of a "power" resonance, either power or the lack of power. 

Identifying an issue to explore (or that is being explored) can help us select events and even the trajectory of the journey.  For example, where does the story begin? Maybe, if we're exploring the issue of power, we want to start with an event that has to do with power. (The thriller starts with the judge's murder-- lack of power-- suggesting it is the result of the real opening, the main character's recollection of this judge sending him to jail-- abuse of power.)  And even the romance is about this issue-- the protagonist seems to will himself to fall in love, and then finds out that he actually doesn't have much control at all. He thought he could control the volatile nature of human interaction. No luck. :) Then other aspects of power might be explored throughout the story-- the powerlessness of defendants in the courtroom and of abused children, the machiavellian power of one brilliant seemingly powerless mental patient.

Once we identify an issue that's being explored, we can emphasize that in scenes. For example, Huck Finn is all about family-- blood families, adopted families, chosen families, fake families.  Where does the story start?   Huck has been "adopted" by the Widow Douglas, but when his birth father arrives back in town, a judge who believes that family is all about blood transfers custody. In contrast to the Widow Douglas's selfless if clumsy parenthood, the motivation of Huck's father is to get Huck's cache of gold. He is drunken and abusive.  Clearly the "birth family" is no ideal.
And in fact the adoptive family, though better for Huck, isn't an ideal either. Huck runs away and meets up with Jim, a slave of the Widow's sister.  He has overheard her talking about selling him away from his own family, and has fled hoping to find freedom and bring his family back together. "Family" is presented for both Huck and Jim as the opposite of "freedom".
In this picaresque novel, plenty of things happen, of course.  But Twain textually and subtextually connects almost every event with some aspect of "family."  So in the beginning, while Huck chafes at the confinement of his adopted family (and is soon literally chained up by his father), he longs for the chosen bonds he's forged with Tom Sawyer (his "brother") and Tom's new "robber gang".

Here's how Twain describes the initiation into Tom's gang. Notice how he makes it about "family."
   Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said, some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had it.

   Some thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in. Then Ben Rogers says:

   "Here's Huck Finn, he hain't got no family; what you going to do 'bout him?"

   "Well, hain't he got a father?" says Tom Sawyer.

   "Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find him these days. He used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain't been seen in these parts for a year or more."

   They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to do -- everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson -- they could kill her. Everybody said:   "Oh, she'll do. That's all right. Huck can come in."

   Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper.

 Later Huck uses the excuse that his father has smallpox as a way to escape from attackers. Again, this is a casual but purposeful use of "family." Huck could have said that anyone was the smallpox sufferer (he'd made it all up), but he said his father-- a family echo.

 In another "family" example, Huck meets a nice family (the Grangerfords), which is family enough, sure. But Twain chooses to have them in a feud with a neighboring family. The latest complication of the feud?  The boy of one family and the girl of another fell in love and ran off together (creating their own family and joining the two families, whether they liked it or not). 


And the duke and the dauphin seem like garden-variety (if oddly erudite) con men. But what's their next con? They impersonate brothers seeking to collect on an inheritance, and trying to scam a set of sisters.

Huck and Jim then stumble on a family of nice people who not-so-nicely are planning to "sell" Jim back to his owners to collect a reward. However, they mistake Huck for their nephew Tom (yes, THAT Tom), who is set to arrive. Huck goes along with the error in order to protect Jim, and when Tom arrives, he has to take on the masquerade of his own little brother Sid. In this complicated way, Huck finds himself truly (well, sort of) the "brother" of the boy he has thought of as a brother-- the sibling relationship is made real (though of course it's not :).  The fractals here of real and artificial and created families become ever more complicated. But always "benevolence and love" win out over blood, as Jim ends up sacrificing his chance at freedom to take care of Huck.

(And  Huck, btw, rejects the family, both invented and adopted, and chooses freedom. But Twain has him specifically choosing freedom over family.)

Always keep in mind that you as the author have choices. You can choose to have the hero escape through a window or through a door. You can choose to have the dispute about a will or about a loan.  You're in charge here.  Think about making some choices reflect the central issue under consideration.This will give you more direction in scene design, and help you make the story more coherent and meaningful. You don't have to know the "theme" of the story to accomplish this. You just have to identify for yourself a major issue you want to explore.

So everyone identify an issue you're exploring!  I'm working on a romance where I think the major issue is "self"-deception. I don't mean so much deceiving yourself as deceiving others about who your-self is. So the heroine has kept secret her identity, and let the world think she's just  another housewife. Only the hero knows that there's something more in her. But I think I'll play with the whole issue of masked identity, of people hiding behind nicknames and false names, and hiding who they really are.

What about your story? What's an issue you're going to explore?

Alicia

Off the Stage and Off the Page

One of the things we sometimes debate is what to leave off the page. There are those obvious things like household chores and other non-dramatic moments that are best cut. (Thinking now of a manuscript I once edited where every change of clothing was narrated as it was changed. Really, we don't need that.)

But there are also times when otherwise dramatic events are left out for thematic reasons, and I had a strong reminder of that last night at the theater. I saw a Chekhov play, The Seagull, and as with many of his other writings, key events happened off stage during the act breaks. I thought it might be useful to break it down here and ponder why these particular events are left out.

The story takes place on the lakefront estate of a Russian farmer during a visit from his actress sister. The main themes have to do with unrequited love, tension between generations, and the nature and form of drama and writing. For our purpose, we're primarily concerned with the unrequited love in two of the triangles.

Triangle #1
There are two writers, an established older novelist and a young struggling dramatist. The dramatist is in love with Nina, the lead actress in a play he's staging. Nina is in love with the novelist.

Triangle #2
A young depressive named Masha is in love with the dramatist. A schoolteacher is in love with Masha.


Keep in mind, none of these loves are returned. However, between the third and fourth acts, a gap of about two years, the nature of these relationships changes.

Triangle #1
Nina has an affair with the novelist. She has a baby, the baby dies, and the affair ends.

Triangle #2
Masha marries the schoolteacher. They have a baby together.


These are key events, right? Ordinarily, a writer might be tempted, in a story about love triangles, to write the scenes in which a character finds some form of romantic satisfaction (although not love) with the object of their affections. So why is it left off stage?

I think it's because the play isn't about finding that kind of romantic satisfaction. It's about how this kind of passion can drive someone to desperate moves. It's possible that in the beginning of the affair or at the start of the marriage, at least one and perhaps both of the lovers would be happy -- or at least happier than we've seen them otherwise. And the play isn't about the kind of happiness we feel in the arms of a lover.

So those scenes are left off. We skip over the newlywed phase and are left to imagine whether there was passion (two babies, so there must have been some passion), or any true meeting of the minds, or any meaningful bonding of the hearts or spirits. And audiences can debate whether Masha might have found a temporary abatement of her depression in the early months of her marriage -- but in the end, it doesn't really matter. Because at the start of the fourth act, after the two year gap, she's right back to her depressed yearning for the dramatist.

And that yearning with it's consequent depression is a necessary thematic state for this character.

I don't know that I can take this example and reduce it to a tight set of principles (something you know I ordinarily would do), because I think this sort of decision is very case specific. But this is a good example of the kind of analysis that might transfer, regardless of context. What is the theme of your story? And how are those themes enhanced or undercut by scenes that might be skip-worthy?

Theresa

author intent

Jorge-Luis Borges:
Since I do not think often about what I have written, I had not realized (that his story "El Aleph" is about the acceptance of fate). Nevertheless, it is better that (theme) should be instinctive and not intellectual, don't you think? The instinctive is what counts in a story. What the writer wants to say is the least important thing;the most important is said through him or in spite of him."

Emphasis mine.

A

Theme in Query Letters

Okay, before we get into the tricky concept of theme in query letters, we have to start off with a definition of theme itself.

Theme is the central idea which controls a literary work. It is the underlying meaning, the aphorism around which the plot and characters coalesce.

Theme can be broad and abstract. Most would say, for example, that the theme of Othello is jealousy. Othello is jealous of Desdemona, Iago is jealous of them both, and so on. This jealousy drives them to wild actions and tragic ends. Each character embodies a slightly different aspect of jealousy, and the plot explores the consequences of jealous behavior.

So, should Shakespeare include in his query, "My theme is jealousy"?

No. Nor should you state your theme so baldly. I really don't need to see the following sentences in any query letter:

• Love conquers all.
• Love heals all wounds.
• Love is blind.
• True love lasts forever.

Because, let's face it, these are cliches. They might be great themes for novels, but the statements themselves are about as interesting as a coma.

What is interesting -- or what, at least, has the potential to be interesting -- is the way you explore the theme in your query. Just as the theme can be the unifying principle for your novel, so can it be the organizing principle for your query. (Or synopsis. Or pitch. Think about it after you've read this whole post.) So your goal is not to present the generic version of your theme in a coma-inducing statement, but to illustrate it using specific detail from your novel.

Let's say your theme is love heals all wounds. Your first job is to do a little brainstorming. Get out a sheet of paper. Write the key words from your theme in the center of the page, and draw bubbles around each word. Like so:














And now you begin to probe each part of that statement as it relates to your novel. Look not just for plot and character details which support your theme, but also for details which contradict it.

We'll make up an example to see how this goes. Your story is about Marissa and Jake, who hate each other on page one but fall in love in the end. Along the way, their nemesis Dr. Badboy kidnaps Marissa's elderly but frail grandmother. He forgets to also steal Grandma's medicine cabinet, meaning her health will be in ever greater peril as the plot develops. Jake is the superhero/FBI guy/rogue cop who investigates the case, overcomes Marissa's trust issues from a past cheating bastard boyfriend, and gets shot in Dr. Badboy's lair. Grandma's poodle is the only eyewitness to the crime and plays a key role in the investigation.

We've all seen plots something like this before, right? Marissa has a wounded heart, and she must learn to love again over the course of the plot, hence the theme, love heals all wounds.

But there's more to it than that. Your plot will contain other details supporting the theme -- concrete, specific details -- and we're going to jot them down on our paper. The easiest way to do this is to think of each keyword in the theme one at a time. Ask the journalist's questions of each keyword: who, what, where, why, when, how? For example:

• Love: Who feels love? Is it strong or weak? Does anyone feel hatred? On the first/last page, who feels love or hate?
• Heals: Heals how? Automatically, as aspirin heals a headache? Or behaviorally, as changes in activity can create change in other areas of life? There's other medication in the plot. Hmm. And the villain is named Doctor -- not Mister or His Grace the Duke of Evil.
• All: Oh, really? Are there any exceptions to ALL? Why ALL and not SOME or MOST?
  
• Wounds: Here's a concrete noun. Everything else has been abstract so far. So can we list actual physical wounds or conditions, as well as psychic trauma? Which are healed and which are unhealed?

As you ask these questions, jot down the answers in bubbles around the central theme, and draw lines to connect them to the relevant keywords. Like so:













As you test the way your novel supports your theme, you'll discover some interesting angles you might not have thought about before. For example, Dr. Badboy, the villain, dies of his wounds. Bot nobody loved him, right? So that supports your theme, and it can be expressed thematically in your plot summary:

No one grieves when the hateful Dr. Badboy dies of his chest wounds, and everyone rejoices when Grandma's insulin shot saves her life.

Okay, not a brilliant sentence, but you get the idea. We have very specific statements containing plot details which support your theme. How about,

As Grandma recovers in the ER, Jake and Marissa join hands, proclaim their mutual love, and find an empty hospital bed in the maternity ward to seal the deal.

(tee hee) Maybe not in those words, but do you see the theme lurking in that sentence, too? Compare these two sentences to,

In the end, Grandma is rescued and Dr. Badboy dies.

Here we lose the sense of wounds, healing, and love which floats just under the surface of the first two sentences. Also, you might want to rethink whether to include this:

Pinky Poodlepiffle, Grandma's beloved dog, is caught in the crossfire and dies in Dr. Badboy's lair.

Because it doesn't support your theme.

You can be bold about this. You can include the words love, heals, all, and wounds -- just not together in a single sentence with nothing else. You can also be more subtle, and use synonyms for these keywords. (You can also brainstorm these synonyms on your bubble map.)

Now that you've examined your theme within the context of this process, can you revise it to get more story specific? Maybe it's not love heals all wounds, but love overcomes what hate creates. If you can generate a more specific and less cliched version of your theme, you might be able to get away with stating it directly in your query. Otherwise, stick to the ideas outlined above and focus on creating a plot summary which supports the theme without stating it in cliched terms.

Theresa

First principles

I'm not planning on commenting much on the whole Harlequin mess (but if you're interested, here's a long blog colloquy/comment with lots of links and Nora Roberts :),

but I had a conversation about this with a friend, and she said, "90% of the time, people's problems can be traced back to a decision/choice they themselves made .. maybe not recently, but at some point they had a choice or made a decision that led to their current quandary." And it's true, and maybe it's something we might think about when we're creating (or rather discovering) our character's conflicts.

But if we do as my friend suggests and go back to the origins of a disaster or conflict, maybe what we'll see is that the start was a decision, choice, or action that went against "the first principle".

What's the "first principle?" Well, to me it's that sort of personal edict of value or morality or behavior that you've chosen as a guide to action and decision. Not everyone has this, and many would have it but would never have articulated it. In organizations, the first principle usually is stated in the mission statement, or is so essential a part of the corporate culture everyone knows it. Usually these are "positive":
Treat stakeholders (employees, stockholders, suppliers, customers) with respect
Be fair
Act with mercy
Be thoughtful and conscious of the implications of actions
Be generous
Know yourself
Be prepared

Let's try some which aren't so wimpy-good but are still action-edicts:
With your shield or on it
You can never be too careful
Never leave a man behind on the battlefield (and how many soldiers have died for this one!)
Don't hang your dirty linen out for all to see (notice this is the opposition to "Be honest")
Don't rock the boat
Never make a scene (how many "ladies" grew up with that as the dominating principle)
Beauty is truth
Always do your best
Always be your best
Always look your best
Don't let the bastards get you down
Don't sweat the small stuff

Some are more practical:
Be the first off the starting block
Avoid the generic (very good first principle for novelists :)
Innovate
Focus on the bottom line
Winning is the only thing
There is strength in diversity
Concentrate on your strengths

Some are more likely to lead to conflict than others (fictional example supplied)
Expect and reward loyalty (Godfather)
Seek the truth no matter what (Oedipus)
Always think before acting (Hamlet)

Some of these might seem trivial, but we probably all know people who have what we consider trivial principles. "Always look your best" sounds like vanity, but don't we admire those grands dames who manage to wear the right scarf even when they're going to chemotherapy? Think about signal actions like that, and trace them back-- what's the principle that underlies it?

What's the difference between this and a value or strength? Hmm. Well, they're all related, certainly-- principles would be based on values, probably. But I think a principle is a CODE, an edict, not just a feeling or attitude. You'd identify a value as a comparison ("Loyalty is more important than truth to me"). You'd state a principle as an imperative. "Reward loyalty." So the first principle is more aimed at action from the start. Try making a value into a principle statement and see if that helps you imagine more action and conflict.

Anyway, it's useful, I think, to identify a first principle, because you can discover conflict in two ways from that:

1) What happens when you follow your first principle.
2) What happens when you go against your first principle.

A publishing company might, for example, have as a first principle "never forget the reader." Now of course, businesses are trying to make a profit, but that's certainly not the first principle for many companies, or they'd all be seeking new trends constantly rather than sticking to their original business. (In fact, one of the paradoxes of publishing lately has been that companies who have earned steady if small profits for 100 years by focusing mostly on getting books out have started losing money as soon as the focus came to be "maximizing profit". Maybe that's not so paradoxical, or at least, it shouldn't be.)

"Never forget the reader" isn't as immediately and uniformly positive as, say, "Act with love." What's involved in that? Oh, maybe "giving the reader what he/she wants" might mean less challenging books, or a greater reliance on focus groups and market surveys than on the editor's gut in determining types of books to buy. It might mean identifying some little meme readers seem to like and inserting it in book after book (remember the "makeover scene" trend? "Everyone loved the makeover scene in Pretty Woman! Let's put that in all our books!"). But a continued dedication to the reader would lead against an action that puts a lot of energy and work and corporate reputation into making money from making books readers will never read.

Double-edged, definitely. But that's where the conflict is. What do you give up when you concentrate on one principle? That's conflict. You can't innovate much when your first principle commits you to concentrating first and foremost on customer desires. You can't lay off half your employees for better productivity if your first principle is "loyalty". You can't maximize your investment income if "slow and steady wins the race" has been your guiding principle.

So there's conflict to be found in acting within your principle, or rather, in avoiding other possible actions. The older son offers the example of Roland, The Gunslinger in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Roland is the very model of a principled character, and his principle is "Never give up the fight." This is a long series, so the choices and consequences are spread out over seven books. The first book shows him sticking to his principle of refusing to give up the fight, even when he's forced to choose to let Jake, his surrogate son, fall to his death. (The entire series deals with this theme of sacrificing love for principle and the reverse. King is a classical plotter-- his use, btw, of the gun as a motif is a masterclass in how to embed theme in objects.)

This conflict seems to lead to a more traditional heroic story. Here is the man of principle to whom bad things happen because he sticks to his core value. The husband offers the example of the Matthew Broderick character in Glory, whose properly soldierly dedication to the chain of command and following orders leads to him having to accept racist treatment (he is in charge of the black regiment) from his commanders. He kept trying to follow the rules, and finally he does have a bit of rebellion (when he raids the supply shop to get necessities for his men), he could say it was within the rules (he had been promised the supplies by his commander). He even goes against his own morality to follow orders when he orders the flogging of Trip. The conflict comes from obeying his first principle no matter what, and his journey is towards a more nuanced understanding of his duty and of the complicated politics of the military.

Another protagonist who sticks to his first principle and runs into conflict for it is Oedipus, of course. His first principle is "seek the truth"-- he is the riddle-solver, the one who figures things out, the one who isn't afraid of the truth. And that leads him to discover an unbearable truth, along the way pretty much destroying his family and his kingship.

When the protagonist sticks to the principle, uses that to guide most of his actions (and especially the early actions), the conflict might come fast and hard. After all, what use is a principle if it is easy to stick to, if there are no consequences to holding it? So stories that use this model might have front-loaded conflict (bad things happen pretty quickly).

(Talk about sticking to principles. I'm watching the Colts-Ravens game, and what an example. Now I'm in Indy, and we love our Colts, and Baltimore loves its Ravens-- won a Super Bowl!-- but Baltimore has never forgotten that the Colts owner in the middle of the night a couple decades ago moved the team from there to here. Anyway, this game is in Baltimore, and the announcer and the scoreboard guys do not refer to the "Colts" or the "Indianapolis Colts"-- they say, "The Indianapolis Professional Football Team." The scoreboard says, "Indy," not "Colts". That's principle!)

While I think we see the "sticking to principle" conflict coming more from truly heroic characters, Moby Dick is a good example of how it can easily become monomania. Ahab's intense dedication to the principle of getting revenge and his unwillingness to swerve from that principle leads to destruction, and Melville definitely doesn't present him as heroic.

Now what about #2? What happens when you act AGAINST your first principle?
I guess the first thing is to make sure that the first principle is established in early scenes. You are going to have him violate it pretty quick, so you won't have the luxury of setting it up over the first half of the book as you do with scenario #1. So how can you show that her first principle is to seek the truth or to be loyal or whatever early on, knowing that you're going to show her going against it pretty soon? If you don't set it up as important, as a principle, early on, then her violation of it will have no dramatic weight-- the action will be only a response to exigency, not a real conflict.

But I think it's also important to get the character acting against principle pretty early-- and to motivate that well. For example, one great cultural principle set up in many classical stories is "Be hospitable." It sounds sort of wimpy, but in fact, the Greeks made such big deal about this, even having myths where the vagrant who appears at the doorstep turns out to be a god. So every homeowner knew that he had to offer food and shelter and treat intruders as honored guests-- and in return, the guests had to treat the host with respect.
So this is the cultural backdrop of the great drama of the Iliad, and notice what happens. Paris comes to Menelaus's kingdom (the myths vary as to how this happens) and they should treat each other with the mutual respect required by the principle of hospitality. But here comes the greatest motivation of all-- he falls in love with Menelaus's wife (Aphrodite's doing), and runs off with her, violating the principle and starting a war.

Macbeth is shown in his first scene as a good soldier, brave and triumphant. But soon his wife's appeal to his ambition (and his male insecurity) turns him against the soldierly principle of respect for chain of command and he kills his king and usurps the kingdom.

The initial violation is usually done because of exigency-- some seemingly good reason, some goal that could be reached just by violating ("just this once") this principle. So maybe it's good to set up the principle and set up a conflicting (but understandable) goal. "You can achieve your goal if you just ..." Also, I think that the character might be quickly rewarded for this pragmatic choice, so that there is a postponement of external bad consequences (so you'll have more action in the second half of the book). But an initial reward for doing the pragmatic/unprincipled thing can also put the focus on the internal consequences that come from violating principle, with the costs of this choice coming from within primarily-- the guilt, Lady Macbeth's madness, maybe.

What are some other examples of this (early) violation of principle? So are there some principles that would lend themselves better to violation? Or rather to creating good conflict by violation? "Act with honor," for example?

I notice that the examples I can think of for #1 tend to be heroic, and the ones I can think of for #2 are not really heroic. That is, maybe we understand that heroes might have to violate their principles, but we want it to be a difficult decision in furtherance perhaps to what they realize is a higher principle. ?

Any other examples, like of characters who sacrifice the first principle early for some other goal, and you regard as heroic?

And how does this affect the trajectory of your plot?

And what would you identify as your protagonist's first principle?

Hmm. Thinking of mine... "Be responsible." I know there's a better way to say that, but I mean he thinks he should always do the right thing, that everything relies on his doing the right thing. That makes me think that I need to have him choose the first action (where he pretends to be someone else) because he thinks it's the right thing to do, maybe, that he has to do it to make things work. I realize now that "tell the truth" isn't his principle, it's more "do the right thing." I'm now wondering if I've made it too easy for him just to start pretending he's someone else. I wonder if he would do that right away, or if I need to make sure it's consonant with that first principle, or make it consonant anyway, change the circumstances so that assuming the disguise is the responsible thing to do. I'm a bit afraid of making him too saintly, so I'll have to check out alternate scenarios.

Alicia

Mad men and the structure created by a theme

Vanity Fair article about Mad Men.

What's helpful, I think, about Mad Men's writing is that the episodes are often unified by a theme. I think the theme or episode 3.1 might be "being someone other than yourself"-- Don, of course; but also Sal, the self-denying closeted gay man; and Hooker, the "assistant" who says he's certainly NOT a secretary and takes over an office (only to be slapped down by his boss). Don actually voices this, as a veiled bit of advice to Sal-- "Limit your exposure." You cannot be yourself in this world. (Connects of course with the whole ad agency thing.)

How does this help them select events? Well, everything is presented with that filter. The office manager Joan, who is Ms. Efficient in the office, meets Peggy in the elevator early one morning, and Peggy starts complaining about her secretary (Peggy used to be a secretary, and is trying to distance herself from that). Joan snaps, "I'm not at work yet." That is, I'm not that person yet, the one who has to care about your secretarial problems. (Now I'm thinking that Joan set up the male assistant by giving him the office, kind of leading him into getting above himself, so that the boss can put him back in his place. Efficient Joan, recognizing his superior status and rewarding it with an office-- so that he can be humiliated... see, she's using his self-delusion by pretending to be properly respectful of him.)

There's also the prop of Don's valise, which is broken. This lets him use a suitcase that has his brother-in-law's name on it, and the stewardess calls him by that name, and he goes along with it and gets her into bed under that false name. When he gets home, his daughter comes clean and confesses to breaking his valise in the hope he won't leave home to go on the trip. Restored now to her parents' love, she lies with them and asks about the night she was born, and they start to tell her about that night. (This is a close to the frame that started the episode, where Don remembers, or envisions, his prostitute mother giving birth to him in agony-- she dies during the delivery-- and anger.) Betty (the wife) smiles as she tells the little girl that Don brought her the stuffed Eeyore that was the baby's first toy.

So the episode is about imposters... but it ends with the child's honesty and her parents' true story of her birth. (Don only invents the "memory" of his birth-- he of course can't remember it, and it's presented as a play he's watching.)


"Limit your exposure" -- well, Don is forgetting his own advice. He's exposing himself, making promises ("I'll always come home") he shouldn't want to keep, finding meaning in life when he knows there isn't any.

Alicia

Mirrors and time and stuff

My poetry study group's theme last night was "mirrors", and we had some interesting poems that examined that motif. Does a mirror give an exact replica (as Plath says) or a distorted view? What does the mirror's reversal mean to how we interpret its information? What are some mirrors that aren't glass (like Hamlet's use of the play to "catch a king," mirroring Claudius's crime, or a photograph in "the day's mirror" -- the newspaper-- of a lynching forcing the viewer into the "shoes" of the hanged man)?

Anyway, it's a fascinating motif. Dottie brought a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, who many might remember as a creator of puzzles in prose, always examining paradoxes and presenting conundrums (and the one who said, memorably, "Every story benefits from a mystery"). Dottie translated it herself (she is a Spanish teacher), and we discussed how the long poem explored most of the thematic issues presented by mirrors. Dottie had this to say about Borges' fascination with "contingency" and its connection to time, and the refutation of that by story (and image, I think):

"The real world is one of contingency in which everything depends on space and time existing in a logical order, but within books, space and time are not contingent. So we see a lot of contemporary authors playing with time and space. The reader has to supply the logic in order to understand what's going on, so you have a reader who participates in the re-creation of the story. In Borges' story El Aleph, he describes a device that the narrator witnesses which allows him to perceive the universe all at once --all of time and space in one global concept, but then you realize that the narrator is outside of the universe looking at it from a separate point of view and describing it from a different point in time, so it can't be everything in the universe."

Not sure what it means, but "Aleph" is, of course, the first letter in the Semitic alphabets. So the device for seeing beyond time and space is language?

Alicia

If you want to send a message, write a bumper sticker: The Decline of 24

I've been watching, off and on, the Fox show 24 since it started. This year's episodes made me think about why what was a must-see four years ago is excruciating now-- and why starting with a message so often destroys a story.

I'm not going to worry too much about the 24 producers' politics. Yeah, this is Rupert Murdoch's network, and he's a bit of a rightwinger, but I doubt he's actually intervening a lot personally in any show. (Then again, we don't see a whole lot of nice liberal warm-and-fuzzy shows on Fox... but nice liberal probably doesn't sell well... so little conflict, huh?) And anyway, the number one political aim of most rich CEO types is... making more money, so if 24's politics antagonized a lot of viewers, I suspect the show would stop with the torture right quick.

Anyway, the first couple seasons were pretty entertaining, very fast-paced and novel. The operating premise was that all the action took place in the 24 hours of one day. Every season had a new day and a new dilemma. But somewhere along the line, this became a show about torture. Torture torture torture. Poor Jack Bauer kept having to torture people to find out where the nuclear bomb was, to find out who was going to set off the virus that would kill us all, or to decipher whatever the dilemma du jour is. The first time he resorted to torture, it was subversively thrilling-- we weren't used to the good guy doing something bad. And we couldn't escape the intriguing echo of what was actually happening in the real world-- journalists and whistleblowers revealing the US (considered the good guy at least by, uh, the US) was engaging in acts that used to be considered torture. Okay, that was provocative, timely, even groundbreaking.

But then... I don't know if the writers were just attempting to recapture that jerk of a thrill we had with that first act of torture, or if they were driven mad by 9/11, or if they wanted to support the president, or .... I think maybe that what happened is they got addicted to the torture "conflict" (I air-quote that because the story then constantly undercuts the conflict) and couldn't give it up. I know the feeling-- I went through a time when I couldn't figure out any way to end a book that didn't involve kidnapping the protagonist. And it apparently didn't hurt all that much, because 24 is still on the air, still requiring torture and superhuman effort from poor Jack Bauer, still enthralling rightwing radio hosts who seem to think that Jack is not only real, but also a great role model.

But I'm not going to evaluate the marketability of torture, rather the dangers of deciding on a theme (in the sense of a moral message) and then building the story to "prove" that.

Since "torture" became Jack's dominant mode of action, 24 seems to be designed to show that torture is not only necessary but moral, and that torturers are actually heroes. I don't want to debate this (I'm agin torture, btw :), only to use it as an example of letting the message be the medium. The story should generate the message, should create the theme. Whenever you let the theme generate the story, your story is likely to end up preachy and monochromatic.

So using 24 as an example (and I have found it intensely boring the last couple seasons, so I will probably mess up some of the details), here is my suggestion:

If you want to send a message, write a bumper sticker. Write a blog post. Write a rant. Just don't write a story. If you want to write a story, write a story. Aim for an interesting plot, intriguing characters, a credible voice. If you have something to say, it should come out in the story... without your forcing it.

Here's the danger of starting with the message:

You lose the story.

1) Instead of developing a journey or plot, you start inventing events to push the theme. In the extreme -- like 24-- the whole story becomes an excuse for the theme. This season (and last, IIRC, and I probably don't, because it was sooooo boring) theoretically has some overall story arc, but mostly the terrorist attacks are used to set up opportunities for Jack to torture someone.

2) Ideally, the theme is "one-note"-- it doesn't develop throughout as a theme should, so that only when you've finished reading the whole story do you fully get the theme. Any story where the theme is presented straight out in a scene (rather than accumulating) is going to be unsubtle. And any story where that theme is demonstrated the same way several times is going to be repetitive.

3) Why does that happen? I think it's because you can't plan to develop a theme. That is, you can plan a plot, and you can plan a character-- you can outline those. But you can't outline a theme, not effectively anyway, because it should arise out of the story as a whole-- and out of you as a writer and you as a person and your worldview and your values-- and that can't be just generated. Also, the readers matter too, in effectively developing a theme (sometimes they actually come up with their own understanding of what the theme is), and you can't plan your readers. So rather than trusting the story to generate a theme, you might try to push the theme in various places-- causing repetition rather than accumulation. For example, let's say you decide you're going to write a story with the theme (I'm getting basic here :) that cocaine is bad. When you start with that as your aim, when you think about the purpose of your story as being to prove that, you are going to be wary of showing, oh, that cocaine is fun. You might start out with someone using cocaine and stumbling out into the street and getting hit by a car. (Cocaine is bad.) And the cop who comes to investigate the accident sees the little baggie of white powder fall out of the victim's pocket, and steals it and snorts it later and gets caught by his captain. (Cocaine is bad.) The captain pockets the rest of the stash and his daughter later finds it, snorts it, becomes addicted, and ends up a stripper. (You laugh, but isn't this pretty much how Reefer Madness works? And while that is a joke now, it was meant to show kids how bad reefer is... over and over.... You were never confused about the message there. The only question was-- why would anybody use this terrible drug? Oh, right, we can't ever show that drugs can be fun, because that wouldn't prove the theme in chapter 2.)

4) Events that are going to create a particular message are likely to repeat conflict, rather than developing it-- conflict starting in the beginning of the story (or TV season :), then rising in intensity and complication in the middle, and resolving in the end. Now probably terrorism as a major conflict would get repetitive anyway, especially when we cannot seriously (in this country) discuss it as anything but the embodiment of Satan, much less actually explore the motivations behind it. It becomes conflict without the purpose of change. So we end up with a conflict without any cause... just sort of free-floating evil. The motivation is: They're evil. So they do evil. And they'll always be evil and do evil because, well, they're evil. Yeah. Talk about one-dimensional villainy. But see, they have to be evil, because otherwise, we might have some qualms about Jack torturing them. In earlier seasons, a couple times Jack actually aimed his pain at innocents-- the child of an evil guy, the wife of another evil guy. But I think that might have been too morally complicated (though kind of interesting, especially when he shot the guy's wife in the knee and the guy STILL didn't give over). Better just to torture evil guys. No moral complexity then. No questions, no .... hmm. No conflict.
24 example: So far, most of the "terrorists" have been non-white, non-western-- Mexican drug runners, Muslims jihadists, African revolutionaries or whatever the heck they are this season. Now the "secret master villain" is often white, and seems to be played by Jon Voight every season (but I could be mistaken :), but the minions who do most of the dirty work are non-white. This is the show, lest we forget, that had not one but two African-American presidents before Obama, and I wonder if maybe someone got uncomfortable with the notion that we only torture non-whites/non-Christians (though I bet that's pretty close to reality). So there's usually a scene where Jack tortures some white guy-- usually one of his colleagues or a presidential aide-- just to show (well, I'm sure there's some intra-story reason :) that Jack isn't a racist. And that torture can be (even if it's not right this minute) equal-opportunity.

5) Just as the villains must needs become one-dimensional, so too the protagonist. Since the protagonist's role is sort of prescribed by the theme-- he's the "good guy", on the right side of the theme-- so his actions are required to proceed in the "right" way. So character action derives from the intended message, and the character only grows then in ways that reinforce the theme. 24 sometimes flirts with complexity, where Jack, the hero, actually tortures unsuccessfully. Once he tortured his girlfriend's charming ex-husband (so sue me... I'm a sucker for men named Paul with a British accent :), and it turned out he was wrong! Amazing! The ex was NOT the bad guy! Okay, that's interesting... Jack makes a mistake. Now this could deepen his characterization. First, we might see him realizing that torture can make anyone confess to anything... and wondering whether the other victims of his torture weren't guilty of what they confessed to. Second, we might have him wondering if he tortures because he, you know, sort of likes it, or maybe it has something to do with his need for vengeance, for 9/11 or with ex-husbands. Third, he might wonder if this whole torture thing was, you know, corrupting him, making him jaded and callous.
But no. The ex and the girlfriend both forgive him, and that's the end of that. If there's a dark night of the soul, if Jack rethinks his need to inflict pain on others, if he even wonders whether maybe he tortured Paul for some personal reason, and if so, if his judgment about who should be tortured is reliable... well, it doesn't have much effect on his actions, though he does seem to be getting progressively grumpier.

6) Shorn of the need to change that is brought on by a more organic story, the protagonist tends also to become a victim or a symbol or a martyr or a saint or whatever is best going to push the message-- a role, not a character. He becomes a flat character because he can't change much or the message might not get through (the ability to change is what makes a character "round" in Frye's terms). In fact, in 24, making Jack a victim (of torture, of kidnap, of imprisonment, of disgrace... and it's never his fault :) becomes subtextually rather interesting as it becomes clearer that he's supposed to represent the United States. Perhaps the US is like that, insisting that it is the victim when it is holding the instruments of torture, as poor depressed Jack is the victim of these evildoers who, for reasons unexplored, force him to hurt them.

In a story, it is usually actions and reactions that are the criteria for judging a character or the plot-- for plausibility, for morality, for power. But when the message dominates, action and reaction lose their centrality to whatever event serves the plot. If a "terrorist" does it, or "a traitor," it's perforce bad. But the same sort of action by the protagonist is regarded in a different light. The terrorist's torturing is unmitigated evil, and is needed to be regarded so to allow the protagonist to fulfill the demands of the message. So when Jack shoots an innocent woman in the kneecap, that's regrettable but moral. But when a revolutionary threatens to cut out the eye of the president's daughter (he doesn't actually do it), that is proof that he's evil. That is, the upshot is that it's not the action but the perpetrator that determines the moral content. This seems to me a dangerous ethical presumption, but it's really damaging to the story (though the "essentialist vs. existentialist" dilemma can be profitably explored in fiction, as the Buffy show demonstrates). The reader is actually discouraged from using her own judgment and value system-- what's good and bad is preordained when these characters were born (and woe to him who is not born in the United States!) If the protagonist's actions don't matter to how the reader is supposed to judge him, then the story is very likely going to be static-- everyone maintains the moral status held in the beginning. Essence cannot change unless action matters.

So... this is a lesson to us all. Don't write a lesson. Write a story. Write about situations and conflicts and people which interest you, doing things that change the plot and the world of the story. Trust that the theme, your message, whatever you think is important, will arise out of the story. Don't force it, or the whole story will be forced.
Alicia

Tell it slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Just a reminder to us all that the fiction in fiction is metaphor-- not of the word variety (hope is the thing with feathers) particularly, but still "slant". Fiction is not just the retelling of something that could have happened, but rather a metaphor for truth. There should be a metaphoric "slant" to a story. If you just want to send a message, write a bumper sticker. If you want the reader to experience the process of creating meaning, write a story.

Example: In Hitchcock's Rear Window, the James Stewart character is a photographer. He looks at the world through a camera lens. This is a metaphor for the experience of filmmaking (one of Hitchcock's preoccupations), but also of sexual voyeurism. And as in order to watch his neighbor's sexual encounters, he has to ignore Grace Kelly (in fab de la Renta's dresses!), it's also a metaphor for the fear of commitment. Now of course the "camera lens" isn't just a metaphor-- it's an integral part of the plot (the longer lens lets him see the activities that convince him there's been a murder). But it's the metaphorical aspect that transforms this from just a tale to an actual story.

Think about your own story. What is going to make it more than just a retelling of events? What's the underlying metaphor that connects this to something human or something universal?

I'm thinking about the story I just started. I think that it's not just about the heroine's secrets or the murder, but about choosing to live again after grief. So I should think of a central metaphor that represents that grief. Maybe it's loss-- she loses her purse and loses all her money, and that starts everything going, that loss. I don't know exactly, but I'm going to keep out a watch for some central metaphor which adds that fictional layer.

Alicia

More themes

Anonymous said...

How about: being true to your dream(s)?

Now this is sort of the opposite problem as the last one-- this is not too individualized; it's truncated. Being true to your dreams what? Do you mean a moral edict here? You should be true to your dreams? Or a recommendation: Being true to your dreams will bring you happiness? Or a warning: Pleasing others will mean you can't be true to your dreams? Or Being true to your dreams will make you selfish?

(Themes do not have to be sentences. There's a different type of theme that I call "the concept theme", where a concept like fate or evil is explored, as Oedipus the King explores the theme of fate. But for reasons I haven't deciphered yet, positive or happy ending stories seem usually to have sentence themes, perhaps because these stories are usually meant to be morally exemplary, so have an aphoristic approach.)

So let's assume that the theme is a positive one, that being true your dreams is good. So how to set up?
Let's look at a rather clever (if I do say so myself) way to present the process of theme in the three-act structure. It's based on Hegel's dialectic, which kind of applies to everything. ;)

Thesis: The statement. (NOT THE THEME. The theme derives from working through the story.)
Antithesis: The negation or flipside of the thesis.
Synthesis: What after going through those two in the story, the crisis/climax third act leads to.


Let's try a very common thematic progression, where a character has been hiding his past. Oh, you know, there's some of that in MAD MEN, so let's use that as an example.

Thesis: You can escape your past. (Don has discarded his past, has a new name, a new history, and it's a success-- he married a beauty queen, started a great career, lives in the suburbs. No one knows about his humble origins.)
Antithesis: You can't escape your past. (Don's younger brother finds him and contacts him. The brother wants his love, wants to be part of his family, but Don cannot allow it. The young man commits suicide, breaking Don's heart but-- it seems-- keeping the past secret. Then a young rival coworker -- who is interestingly like his brother in looks, but is rotten and venal-- finds out part of the secret and threatens to expose him. Don defies him, and manages to get away with it-- the boss doesn't mind... "All ad men lie, big deal." But now his secret is coming out.)
Synthesis: Only by accepting the past can you move on into the future. (Maybe that'll happen in the next season. :)

See how that breaks into the standard Aristotelian three-act structure:
Shortish setup
Long complication and reversal, rising action and conflict.
Explosion into crisis, then climax and conflict resolution.


Okay, so how does that apply to "Being true to your dreams is (something positive)"? I don't want to assume what it is in a statement form, but just thinking generally, this is just an example of how this might be structured:
Thesis: Adulthood is all about giving up your youthful dreams. (When I grew up, I put away childish things.)
Antithesis: Giving up your youthful dreams means giving up your self.
Synthesis: Maturity means finding and fulfilling a dream that works with your new adult self. (Groan... okay, so the synthesis should be like that only intelligent. :)

That is, in the process of the book, the theme might actually evolve. Like maybe we start off with a preliminary theme that we should stay true to our dreams. But as we write the story, we just can't make it work that our hero is going to end up abandoning his family and business career to fulfill his childhood dream of being a professional comedian. But we also can't condemn the poor guy to the life he thinks is trapping him. And so we come to some synthesis in the end that takes into account the totality of the story, maybe that he starts doing standup on the weekends at a local club, creating a new dream that is more consonant with his adult self and the responsibilities and joys of his life, yada yada. (I once knew a guy who in his thirties, decided that he was going to fulfill exactly that youthful dream. Interestingly, his first step in doing this was to dump his girlfriend-- a friend of mine-- to date another friend whose father was kind of prominent in Hollywood. Kind of an unheroic route to fulfilling his dream!)

Anyway, how would you set that up in the opening? Seems to me that you might not show his dream so much as his current life... but there's something that hints at the previous dream. Like maybe he's actually really funny. He's teaching math at the local high school, and his students think he's hilarious because he's always wisecracking. So maybe the first scene starts with him teaching an algebra class, and he can't help himself-- he makes some joke, and the kids fall apart laughing, and he looks through the little window in the door and the principal is passing by. And he's suddenly reminded of his responsibilities and snaps into stern-teacher-mode. (This might really respond to parallel structure-- the very last scene replicating the setting and situation -- hero in his classroom, but this time, he goes with his gift, knowing that the students will learn better if they're engaged, maybe. One of my favorite books, Up the Down Staircase, uses this structure. The new teacher in the first scene regards a student yelling, "Hey, teach!" at her a sign of disrespect. When in the end scene, a student yells that at her, she responds with a cheery, "Hey, pupe!")

So we see in the first scene his sense that he must be responsible and sober, and there is only a hint of that youthful dream of being a comedian, and-- I think this is important-- we see him specifically "putting away childish things" by assuming that stern mode.

I do think it's essential to SHOW things happening. It's not enough, I'd say, to have him teaching in a classroom. That doesn't present the thesis of putting away the youthful dream. (You do not have to get explicit, like it might be if he threw his copy of "How to Make It in Standup Comedy" into the trash.) While the readers might not immediately understand the importance of his telling a joke to his students, then seeing the principal, then assuming a stern mien, they will add that in to all that the story unfolds, and later see this especially in contrast with what happens in the second and third acts. The readers accumulate understanding of your story-- everything adds up (if you do it right). And the theme is the product of this process of accumulating meaning through the unfolding of the plot and the change in the characters.

Alicia