Tag Archives: writing

Who is shooting who in the Culture War?

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Charlie Jane Anders sent out a fabulous piece yesterday called Maybe endless stories about escalating wars weren’t a great idea after all on her mailing list (which I highly recommend, btw). The piece is about story structure and its effects in the real world. Her main point is that one of the standard story structures you see in fiction (called a rising action) can be seen being mirrored in the world around us.

In a rising action, the hero faces a seemingly endless escalation of conflict. Then right at the last possible moment, they save the day, usually against all odds. You see this story structure not only in most novels, but in most movies and tv shows. Marvel movies all do this, as do pretty much every popcorn movie. You see it in every thing from Rocky, to Top Gun to even Star Wars. Even much of the more highbrow stories in movies and tv follow this pattern.

I’m not going to disagree with Charlie Jane. I think her point is spot on. My only quibble is I think she is aiming too low.

I’ve long thought that this kind of dramatic story structure is found not just in our media, but in our day-to-day lives. Ever since I first stumbled upon the short and densely packed Three Uses of a Knife by David Mamet, with its opening chapter on wind chill, I realized that humans don’t just consume dramatic stories in our media, we generate them. Once you know where to look you see stories everywhere. Even something prosaic as buying coffee, can be made into a story.

No one just buys a coffee. They have to park their car, then wait in line, someone needs to take their order, then they have to wait for their name to be called. Finally they need to check if their order is correct. Each of this steps offers a chance for drama. Either this name is misspelled, or someone cuts in line, or the barista gets the coffee wrong, or their name. Something is almost guaranteed to happen, and when it does we will immediately recognize it as drama. Someone is doing something against our friend. We know this instinctively. We know they will buy a coffee, we will see them with the coffee in their hand. We already know how the story is going to end, and yet if told right, and if enough events occur, a good teller can make the story last three minutes or more, and have everyone around them laughing of crying.

But even the simplest of stories do this. It’s really hard to tell someone about your day without it automatically being converted to story structure.

My inexpert name for this phenomena is the Narration.* That is, we take simple occurrences in our lives, and convert them into a story. Usually this story has rising conflict and comes to a conclusion. Most importantly the story has a hero, or a protagonist. Usually the hero is ourselves. All stories we tell are reflective of this, even the stories we tell about others say as much about ourselves. But for a story to work the hero needs a villain, or an antagonist. Sometimes there isn’t a definable antagonist, but more like what they call in fiction writing “forces of antagonism.” For instance, if someone tells you the wind knocked them over, we generally don’t think of the wind was actually trying to kill them, we understand it was making things more difficult for them. The wind isn’t necessarily a villain, but it is playing the role (for the sake of the story) as one.

btw, you can also find forces of protagonism in stories. If you’ve ever watched a leaf boat make its way down the gutter on a rainy day, (some of the best drama you will ever experience with a toddler) then you know what it is like to see a leaf become a hero. Certainly no one thinks the leaf is directing its actions, and yet that is exactly what we tell ourselves.

So a story needs at least four things: A rising action, a conclusion, a hero, and a villain. And like I said above, once you start to look for these things, you find them everywhere.

My main point to all this, and why I mentioned Charlie Jane’s piece at the top, is that I believe humans natively think in Narration. It is our default setting, so to speak. That is, we inherently think in story structure.

If this is true, then it’s not that Hollywood, or big publishing is leading us into ever more drama, it’s that we are naturally doing it ourselves. Narrative is internal and essential to the human experience. Why else would we sit through a two hour popcorn movie and find it entertaining if it wasn’t speaking to our inner language? Why else sit for hours with a good book, or binge all night a TV series?

We not only think in Narration, we demand it back from the world. Things that are not natively in Narrative form we don’t understand. It is foreign to us. Don’t believe me, trying explaining quantum mechanics, climate change, or the holy trinity to someone you don’t know. At some point it will become difficult because there are some things that naturally resist the Narrative format. Sure, things are happening, you might even have some data, but that date doesn’t lend itself well to a story, and thus it’s hard to comprehend.

As to culture wars, you can see here my idea on those. To me, culture wars have existed forever. They are intrinsic to the human experience, just like Narration. As soon as you have a bunch of people think of themselves as a “group,” then they automatically become the heroes or their story. Once that happens then Narration will insist that someone else play the role of the antagonist. You need an opposing team, be they Democrats or the Chicago Bulls. At that point, all it takes is the least bit of provocation, and suddenly a story bursts forth. Both sides will be neatly lined up, and the result will be deeply satisfying to everyone.

Once you understand this, then politics makes a lot more sense. Sports too. Why else to we prefer to see two teams compete against each other, or two individuals athletes. It’s because one plays the role of the hero, and the other the villain.

Anyway, I challenge you to pay attention to this idea in your day-to-day communications. See if you don’t find the Narrative everywhere.




*I’m sure someone had a better term for it, I just don’t know it.




Bad Writing Advice #1 On setting goals for your characters

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Rule #1 in a non-existent series of bad advice for writers.

When you (as a writer) introduce a character to a reader, it is like introducing them to a new friend. But that character won’t really become your reader’s friend until you give that character a goal. Once you give him or her a specific goal to direct their actions–they need to avenge their father, they need to kill a monstrous whale, or even they need to get home to their family–it is at that point that the reader will start to anticipate that character’s actions. And that is the point of stories. We live to anticipate.

For example: If you are playing a game of chess only a few minutes of your game time is taken up with the physical movements of the pieces. This is true even of a game that lasts for hours. The vast majority of your game consists of watching your opponent and anticipating both their moves and your own. And it is in this watching and predicting that we take our enjoyment. In short, the enjoyment of the game comes from the anticipation.
In the same way, a reader will enjoy your story as long as they can anticipate your character’s direction. It doesn’t matter if they anticipate wrongly (indeed there are many good reasons to mislead your reader) what matters is if they can. Objects and obstacles only enhance the experience of the reader. They love to see the impossible pulled off. But they need to know what to anticipate, and if you don’t provide that (in terms of a clearly defined goal for your characters), then you’ve failed.

 

Early 2015 clean up

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Sand at Palm Desert

Sand at Palm Desert

L.A. is a desert. A desert with water. An ancient ocean-bed, dry and long buried, suddenly thrust back to the surface.

At any time, day or night, if you listen carefully you can hear the sound of the ancient sea, lost amongst the cacophony of millions of automobiles whooshing past or the harsh dry winds called the Santa Anas. The sound comes from the ghost of an ocean or some vast inland sea, calling up from the long dried mud on its bottom, begging to be wet again, to be submerged.

And the land responds. You can hear it whispering in the hot dry wind, or catch it rising slowly from the hot flat stretches of cement.

It says, “Never.”

It says, “No.”

It says, “Leave us alone.”

It says, “Goodbye.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

This morning I was going over my notes from the past year, many of which I wrote on the way to work and hadn’t yet integrated into my stories. I got in the habit of using the Notes App on my phone to write down ideas as they come, and then later integrate them into my flow. The entry above was one of the things I put down, way back on April 16 of last year.

Going back over them this morning was deeply refreshing. I kept finding these unexpected ideas and many of them were very good. It was a nice affirmation. One of those, “Oh yeah. I guess you can write after all,” moments.

Last year was not a good one for my writing. I really got bogged down in a lot of stuff which was all useful, but difficult to get through. Sort of a winter of discontent. Some things are like that; they are simply difficult to get through and there’s no easy way to get around them. There’s no shortcut. Grief is one of them. I supposed a long illness like cancer would be another. To get better you simply just have to keep going until you break through.

So I’m slugging away hoping to break through. Hopefully we’re near that point. I don’t know. I just keep putting my nose to the wheel and try to learn as fast as I can.