STORY TECHNIQUES FOR NOVELISTS AND SCREENWRITERS
I recently had the pleasure of being a guest in Caroline Leavitt’s UCLA Novel Writing Class. Caroline is an award-winning novelist and her class always draws excellent student writers. Not surprisingly, the questions they asked were quite perceptive, and I thought you might find them helpful.
Q: I've heard some people call your story structure more along the lines of Campbell’s myths and archetypes.
Are you a fan of Joseph Campbell and do you think you are modeling plot in the Campbell lineage?
A: This is a common misconception, perhaps because we both refer to the main character as the hero and both highlight certain structural beats that appear in a story. Campbell is very valuable for understanding how a myth story works. But what I’ve tried to do is see how all story forms work, not just myth.
One of the biggest mistakes writers make is to try to apply the Campbell myth beats to a non-myth story. This is usually a disaster. For example, drama stories don’t follow those beats at all (unless a writer is purposely combining the myth and drama forms). Not to get too technical, but you will notice that Campbell’s beats are more content oriented, like Call to adventure, Crossing the First Threshold and Return with Elixir, and are clearly focused on myth stories. The beats I have outlined in the 7 and 22 steps are formal, such as need, desire, revelation etc. In other words, they are stages that any character will go through in their development as they work through a plot, no matter what the particular genre may be.
One of the most interesting things I found when breaking down the different genres for classes and software is that each genre hit the 22 steps of every good story, like need, desire, and revelation, but each genre filled those beats with different content unique to that form. Myth is just one of those major genres, albeit an important one.
Q: In your book, you describe several ways to create the never-ending story, including not revealing the hero's decision on the final moral choice. How can the writer achieve that goal without frustrating the reader, or creating an unsatisfying ending?
A: You’ve put your finger on why most writers don’t write an open-ended story. They think it’s an either/or choice: satisfying closure or frustrating open end. In fact readers are frustrated by the various kinds of false endings – premature, arbitrary and closed – I discuss at the beginning of that chapter.
A true never-ending story is one that is so exciting in the possibilities it suggests that the reader is immediately motivated to read the whole story again. Take a look at some of the ways I suggest to create an “infinite story tapestry” in the later part of the chapter. Most important is infusing your characters with some degree of ambiguity from the beginning, so that the dynamic among them can reverberate and be seen by the reader in a number of different ways.
Q: Can a need be both psychological and moral? A woman who pushes away love is hurting herself (psychological need?), but also the daughter who needs that love (moral need?)
A: Yes, yes and yes. All moral needs are the result of a psychological need. The person is compensating for something missing, or hurting, within themselves and is taking it out on someone else. Or, from blindness or selfishness, they are failing to act in a way that can help someone else. Where many writers go wrong is that they come up with a good psychological need for their hero but it has no moral component, ie the hero is not hurting anyone else.
Q: I love the plot technique of the thematic revelation gained by the audience and the example of the ending in Places in the Heart. How can a writer tell when it works, or if it just sounds preachy or pretentious?
A: That’s the $64 million question. And it is answered by everything that came before that scene. If you have woven your moral argument through the structure, your thematic revelation scene can sit on that powerful structure and you can avoid the preachiness of dialogue, which is simply an author giving up on their craft and saying, “what the hell, this is what I’m trying to say.” Notice none of the main characters in “Places” is saying to the other, “I see now that it is time for me to forgive you.” We only hear the words of the preacher as he speaks philosophically about love. We see a wife taking the hand of the husband who has hurt her. And we see the characters take communion, even some who were opponents.
The other key to making that particular thematic revelation work without being preachy is that the scene itself goes from concrete – totally realistic – to abstract. These are real characters in the story taking communion. But as the plate moves, the characters themselves become subtly but progressively more abstract. The Danny Glover character, who has left the story, is there. And finally there is the husband and the boy, both dead. It’s like a plane taking off, from the reality of the ground to the abstraction of the sky, in one smooth seamless arc.
Q: My story has three main characters. I am writing it in the first person so you can see the world from each one’s eyes. One is the hero and the other two are his opponents. How important is it to disclose early how they will interact? One of the opponents is obvious but the other is not. Ultimately the hero must realize who he is and confront him but for much of the story this opponent is just building his corrupt business.
A: You must understand the deepest implications of having three first person storytellers to get the most out of your story and structure it properly. First, you have three heroes, not one hero and two opponents. Also, your story is inherently comparative, so the three first persons should also show the audience how each is blind about themselves and/or wrong about the others, each in a different way.
Also, having three main characters puts special emphasis on the story weave. The juxtaposition of actions, done primarily through the juxtaposition of scenes, will be more important, at least at times, than what is in each scene. In other words, you want to create new insights in your reader – show them a surprising deeper pattern – by how you contrast the actions of each of the three characters going after their goals.
With that in mind, you probably shouldn’t have a character who is just building his corrupt business through most of the story. That person does not rise to the level of a main character and will give you a weak plot. The key craft technique for your story is to make sure each main character has their own 7 steps, ie is a complete story. Also, because you have three main characters, you are using some form of branching structure (again putting more emphasis on scene weave). And that means that to make this a unified story (3 stories becoming 1), in spite of the branches, each character will probably be the opponent in some way of the other two.
Q: You stress the importance of a moral need. Does the character's moral need have to be a trait that always hurts or can it be something that is sometimes appropriate and other times not? In my story the hero's moral needs are: he does not trust and he doesn’t forgive. In the case of not trusting, sometimes its appropriate but often it is not.
A: As you say, these are weaknesses that are not necessarily weaknesses. And when they are weaknesses, they are not necessarily moral. If I don’t trust someone who is offering to sell me a gold mine on the internet, I’m not wrong and I’m not immoral. You’ve got to come up with a weakness that is really hurting your hero at the beginning and causes him/her to take actions that hurt other people. And we have to see those actions and their negative effects.
Q: Your methodology is best when used from the start. How do you advise writers to use it when they are well into their story?
A: When I do a script or story consultation, we don’t start at the “start.” The first thing I ask for is a scene outline. Each scene described in one line. Then I apply all these techniques and methods “backwards”. In other words, I use that outline to see how and why the story is not working, by doing a 7 step and then a 22 step structure breakdown. It’s amazing how that removes the clutter and shows me how to fix the story. I believe you will have a similar experience.
Q: In your Blockbuster software there is a place to put the entire story, scene by scene. Do you recommend using the software for rewrites or is it better to work in word and then cut and paste so the story ends up in your software?
A: Many people use the software for rewrites, and it was designed for that (and one of the main buttons is called Rewrite). I always recommend people write and rewrite their story in Blockbuster rather than Word because you have the story tools in Blockbuster to see what is wrong with the story and fix it. Also, you don’t need to cut and paste. When you import a script or story, Blockbuster automatically brings it in and breaks it into individual scenes as long as each scene begins with either the letters INT or EXT.
Q: So in my novel, I have a couple of points of audience revelation, but they mostly take place in a couple of flashbacks that reveal information that the POV character experienced as a child so did not fully understand. Is it necessary for audience revelation to take place in the present story time? I noticed that you suggested the audience revelation take place in the later third of the book when the "audience" is starting to lose interest.
Given that in the novel form, the audience can put the book down and come back to it, how does that impact the placement of the revelations?
A: The placement of revelations is based on your particular story and genre (if any), not on the medium you are using. The reason audience revelations usually, but not always, happen later in the story is the same reason regular revelations happen most often there. You need to hide information about various characters, especially about the opponents, for a certain amount of time before you can reveal them. Also, the longer you wait to reveal the more dramatic the revelation becomes. This is also why we usually see an increasing frequency of reveals as we move toward the end of the story.
Having said that, one way novels are different from scripts is that novels have many more reveals than scripts. And they will not all happen in the later part of the story. For example, a personal epic like David Copperfield has over 60 reveals and they are sprinkled throughout.
It is usually a bad idea to go back to the past, especially childhood, for a reveal because you are literally stopping the present story and taking the audience backward, and they don’t like that. The only exception is when the reveal about the past gives the character new story information in the present. For example, in a detective story the hero may recall a past event but see it from a different angle or interpret it in a totally different way and see the key information they need to solve the crime in the present.
Q: I have a question regarding inner thoughts. At some point I would like to adapt my novel into a screenplay and was wondering what the best way to handle the characters inner thoughts would be when doing so. I have seen several book to screen adaptations where this is handled through use of a voice over. Are there other ways to do this?
Forgive me, if this is already covered in your book...which I am tackling right now!
A: Voice over is a great technique but is usually misused. Check out the section on storyteller in the Plot chapter to get the most out of the technique if you choose to use it.
The other way to express inner thoughts of course is to make them public, ie dialogue. Movies are a dramatic medium. However, when you write your script, you will notice that the screenplay form places much more emphasis on structure to carry meaning. If you get the structure right, you should find that expressing most of the characters’ inner thoughts is suddenly unnecessary. Finally don’t underestimate the power of acting. Expressing thoughts without words is their job.
Q: I have a backstory problem relating to screenwriting. I know what to do with it in a novel, but what is the best way to handle backstory in a script so that it doesn't bog things down? (I know the famous Clint Eastwood line, "What was your childhood like?" the answer: "Short.") Is it better to use flashback or dialogue or try to dispense with the backstory as much as possible? But since the backstory often holds the all important ghost, what is the best way to show that without doing a flashback?
A: It is usually not a good idea to express ghost through flashback, for reasons stated above. Also, putting the ghost in the first scene is rare – an exception is Vertigo – because we usually don’t want to do one scene and then jump forward a few years to do the rest of the story. Ghost is usually expressed through dialogue and typically within the first third of the script. An example is in The Verdict when the hero’s friend tells his girlfriend how the hero fell so low. Ideally there should be a story value in the present for telling this information. Another nice technique for expressing backstory and ghost without sounding expositional and bogging things down is through some kind of conflict scene where people fight about it.
Q: I have one more question about adapting novels into scripts. What advice do you have about adapting a novel into a script? Would it be finding and pulling out the 22 steps?
A: Exactly. Do a scene outline of the novel, then tag any scene that includes one of the 22 steps. That’s the bones of the story, the essentials that must be in the script. Any other non-structure scene may be in as well, or you may create new scenes to make the story play more dramatically. But all decisions start with the bones.
Q: Last question. The film Leaving Las Vegas has a hero who doesn't change, who starts out with one want and never veers from it (I'm sure you saw the film, but just in case, it's about a guy whose wife and child died and he's decided to drink himself to death. He hires a prostitute to help him and she tries to stop him and then she decides to help him, too. And of course, he dies at the end, just as he intended. He doesn't have a self-revelation (unless I am remembering it wrong) and yet it was a really powerful film. How and why do you think the film worked, despite not having that change? Or was the change in the character of the prostitute?
A: Some story forms, like black comedy, intentionally prevent the hero from having a self-revelation so the audience will have it instead. This is also done in pathos, an example being Death of A Salesman. Take a look at the discussion of that in the Moral Argument chapter. It’s just a different strategy. The problem with the pathos strategy, as opposed to the tragic strategy where the hero falls but does have a self-revelation, is that it’s more hopeless, more depressing for the audience. These stories are often powerful, because you’re seeing a full, articulate, sensitive human being hammered down to the level of an animal. Another problem with the pathos strategy is it tends to kill the plot since we are just watching one long decline with an end that is clear early on.
As you point out, authors sometimes relieve the hopelessness by giving a partial but real self-revelation to a secondary character. In “Death”, it’s the wife, Linda.
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The Anatomy of Story:
22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
By John Truby
Related Products:
Software:
Blockbuster 5.0
Classes:
Great Screenwriting
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