Post #193 November 18 2019

“Story Basics: Proactive vs Reactive”

The next point to consider in our story lab overview of storytelling basics is this: make your protagonist proactive not reactive.  The website Storysci.com has this to say:

The more proactive your protagonist is, the more invested in him/her your audience will be. They will want what (s)he wants. A protagonist is proactive when (s)he is the one to take charge and initiate events that advance the plot. The opposite of this is a reactive protagonist who responds to events forced on him/her by the plot. A reactive protagonist will not only make the audience feel like something is missing in your story, but they will fail to build a personal connection with the protagonist as well.

This point speaks to the believability of your protagonist.  Readers want to engage with your hero, in some way.  It’s easier to do this when conflict develops as a result of your hero trying to achieve his or her goals.   Remember what we said about conflict last time: conflict is the natural result of one character’s desires intersecting an obstacle. Conflict increases proportionally to the amount that each side pushes back.

In other words, your hero should have a goal or goals to achieve and actively do something to try and achieve them.  Nobody wants to read about a wimp who just lets life happen to them and does nothing to achieve anything or prevent bad things from occurring.  Conflict occurs when your hero acts this way and is prevented from achieving his goals.  That which prevents him from achieving his goals could be his own nature, another character, fate, society, the law or mischievous gods atop Mount Olympus.  But it is in the striving and failing (at least initially) that your hero becomes real to the reader, because we’ve all been through this.

Clearly, this point speaks to how well you know your hero.  How well have you thought out his nature?  Is he an introvert?  Is he a gung-ho Type A personality who is forever making messes that others have to clean up?  Is he just careless, scatterbrained?  Hopelessly romantic?  Whoever your hero is, understand his personality well enough and his goals well enough, to put him in situations where he is trying to achieve those goals but often falls short.  And when he does fall short, what does he do then?  Cry a river?  Buckle down and work harder?  Try another tactic?  Whatever you choose, make sure your hero is actively working to move forward but is all too often stymied in his efforts.

Your reader wants to feel or see or know that they could have been there in your hero’s shoes.  It could have happened to them.  How do you achieve this?  The technique starts with understanding your hero intimately.  Write down his likes and dislikes.  I often spent time describing in a character bio what their early life was like.  Joe Blow was the third son of a plumber and spent many hours helping his Dad cleaning up spills and flooded basements and he could solder a pipe elbow at the age of eight.  Maybe Joe is good with his hands and wants to do something manual.  He wants to open his own business but he doesn’t have a good head for numbers or business operations.  What does he do?   Maybe he tries his luck at running a business but fails miserably and goes deep into debt.  Now what?  Does he become bitter?  Does he become homicidal and kill someone, then spend half a life running from the law?  There are all kinds of possibilities.  But just make sure you show Joe trying to actually do things, either setting up his business, staying up late trying to puzzle out double-entry bookkeeping or trying to keep one step ahead of the collection agencies and the police.  And to think all this came about in part because Joe helped his Dad solder pipe joints and clean up flooded basements.  I spend time developing early-life background for many of my characters because I feel that this is such a formative time for what we become later.

The Word Shed will take a two-week hiatus for the Thanksgiving Holiday, so there won’t be posts for November 25 or December 2.  In the next post on December 9, we’ll continue our story lab with Story Basics Point #4: have a central core to your story.

Have a great and blessed holiday and I’ll see you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

Post #192 November 11, 2019

“Story Basics: Conflict”

The website Storysci.com says this about conflict:

Conflict is the natural result of one character’s desire intersecting an obstacle. Conflict increases proportionally to the amount that each side pushes back. It drives the story forward and keeps the audience interested. Without it, nothing in the plot would be worth mentioning because story without conflict is not story, it’s summary.

Not all story conflict is between people.  Maybe your main character crash lands on an alien planet and has to survive all kind of natural forces or creatures trying to eat him or her.  In Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, the big alien cylinder-ship is the cause of much of the conflict.  But most conflict in stories is between people and this is a storytelling tradition that goes back all the way to Gilgamesh.

Your characters have to want something.  They have to want to do something.  Otherwise, you don’t have a story, as the quote above says.  I just finished a science fiction short story called “Second Sun.”  In this story, the action takes place on a station in orbit around Jupiter.  The station has a mission and the main character (the story is told first-person POV) has a goal of destroying the station and preventing the mission from being accomplished.  However, he learns upon arriving that his own estranged mother is a member of the station crew.  Here’s the conflict: does he continue with his mission, destroy the station and kill his own mother?  Or does this encounter resurrect long-lost feelings and cause him to change his mission in some way, a way that allows him to still fulfill his assignment and yet save his mother (and his self-esteem) from destruction.  The conflict in this story operates on multiple levels: inside the mind of the terrorist-anarchist main character, with and against the station crew and with/against his own mother.  But conflict is at the heart of this story.

How do you engender conflict?  How do you lay the groundwork?

The first thing to do in laying the groundwork is to develop believable, credible characters.  To do this, I often (even for the story mentioned above) write small character bio sketches.  In this way, my characters have a background I can refer to and it’s consistent.  You want your readers to empathize with the character in some fashion.  Is he going to complete his mission?  Is he really going to be responsible for the death of his own mother? 

Next, give your believable characters something to achieve, something to strive for.  Make it important, even life-threatening or altering.  It’s not enough to say Joe Blow is striving to get to the drugstore before it closes and buy a candy bar.  Give him a reason, a critical, existential reason to do that…if he doesn’t, the teen-aged home invader holding his daughter captive may slit her throat.  Now there’s conflict.

 Let’s stay with the example of your daughter being held hostage.  What might happen if the drugstore is closed.  Ah, now we have plot complications.  Maybe the distraught father swipes a candy bar from a neighbor kid.  Maybe he breaks into the house next door and ransacks the cookie jar or pantry.  More complications.  Maybe he can’t call the police because his phone’s not charged and the invader has cut all landlines (does anyone use landline phones anymore?).

Start with an inherent conflict between the desires or needs of one character and how that is impacted when it meets the desires and needs of another character.  Then describes what happens or better yet, show what happens, when these needs clash. 

Even better, as matters escalate in this conflict, maybe one of the characters changes in some way.  Maybe your distraught father is able to trick the home invader and drug the candy bar with rat poison.  Or maybe be comes to empathize with the invader such that he can talk him into surrendering to the SWAT team outside.  And after this ordeal, the distraught father (grateful beyond words that his daughter is safe) begins taking an interest in helping wayward youth.  He’s changed in an important way.

Now you have the outlines of a story.  As I said in the opening post to this series, “We don’t often think much about our skeletal frames unless something’s hurting, but your skeleton is what holds you up and the same is true for storytelling basics.  They hold up a story…or not, depending on how well you take care of them.”

The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 18 and deals with point #4 in our story lab checklist of Top Ten Storytelling Basics: make your protagonist proactive, not reactive.

See you then.

Phil B. 

 

 

 

 

Post #191 November 4, 2019

“Story Basics: Show, Don’t Tell”

Several posts ago, I started a series on story basics…kind of a story lab.  I’m indebted to the website Storysci.com for some of these details.  For point #2, I included this:

Instead of telling the audience that something is happening, show them by devoting screen time (or page time) to the illustration of these events. Telling (aka “summary”) is not very interesting in comparison to the audience experiencing the same thing. You don’t need to state what is going on directly. The audience will figure it out for themselves, and in so doing will create a stronger bond with the story than if you simply told the audience that it happened.

Think about going to Disney World.  Your next-door neighbor just came back and gave you a detailed description of what it was like to ride Space Mountain.  You listen and think: wow!  That sounds great.  Then you visit the Magic Kingdom yourself.  You ride Space Mountain.  Is there any way your neighbor’s description can compare with what you’ve gone through?

Of course not.  Your own experience includes so much more.  It was gut-wrenching.  It was visceral.  You now know what it feels like, what it smells and tastes like, what it looks like.

This is what you should be striving for as a storyteller.  Readers read stories, among other reasons, to vicariously experience things, people and places they would not ordinarily be able to experience.  To describe these things, it’s always better to show them happening to engaging characters than tell the reader what Joe Blow is experiencing.  Let Joe tell the reader.  And before you let Joe speak of his experiences, do your homework and make sure the reader can really empathize with Joe in the first place.

Having said that, it’s clear that you can’t show everything.  The story would be 1000 pages long (and some are). This means you have to pick and choose what to show and tell.  Therein lies the artistry of writing and storytelling.  Choose to show experiences happening to Joe Blow that reveal what Joe is like as a person and that advance the plot of the story, or ideally both.  How does he react to Space Mountain?  Is he terrified because of some childhood trauma?  Does he want more of the same?  Which way would the story go if he refused to even board the roller coaster?  What would that say about Joe?

When you are showing what happens to Joe and describing his reactions, use active voice as much as possible.  Active voice: “Joe screamed his head off when he rode Space Mountain.”  Passive voice: “Joe’s head came off when he screamed as he rode Space Mountain.”  Okay, so maybe that isn’t the best example.  But showing what happens to Joe is more immediate, more experiential, in active voice.  It’s all about putting your reader into the mind and senses and feelings of a character.  Anything that makes the reading more immediate and more real is what I mean by showing, not telling.  In active voice, the subject performs the action stated by the verb.  In passive voice, the subject is acted upon by the verb.  Remember Mrs. Warner in high school English?

One final point about showing vs telling.  Human beings are predominantly visual creatures.  A lot of our brainpower is devoted to interpreting what we see.  But we have other senses.  Often impressions that come in through those senses are the most powerful and impactful of all impressions.  As a storyteller, use that.  What does it really feel like to Joe as he rides Space Mountain?  Does he strain his neck?  Wet his pants?  Throw up?  And what does it sound like?  Is he screaming his lungs hoarse?  Is his mouth dry?  Is his heart pounding so hard he can hear it even over the screams of others? 

When showing, try to engage every sense you can.  Remember Marcel Proust and what happened when he smelled a madeleine?  Just the smell of a cookie dipped in tea resurrected whole chapters of childhood memories.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 11.  In this post, we continue our story lab and deal with Conflict.

See you then.

Phil B.