The Anatomy of Story (14 page)

3. Cynic to Participant
This development is really a specialized form of going from adult to leader. Here the character begins as someone who sees value only in himself. He has pulled away from the larger society and is interested in pleasure, personal freedom, and money. By the end of the story, the hero has learned the value of making the larger world right and has rejoined society as a leader. Stories like
Casablanca
and the Han Solo character in
Star Wars
show this change.

4. Leader to Tyrant
Not all character change is positive. In leader-to-tyrant stories, the character moves from helping a few others find the right path to forcing others to follow his path. A lot of actors are afraid to play this change because they think it makes them look bad. But it usually makes for great drama. You can see it in
LA. Confidential, A Few Good Men, Howards End, Red River, The Godfather,
and
Macbeth.

5. Leader to Visionary
In this change, a character goes from helping a few others find the right path to seeing how an entire society should change and live in the future. We see this in the great religious stories and in some creation myths.

Writers often use the Moses story structure when depicting this change. For example,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
has an everyman, Roy, who has a vision of a mountain. He climbs to the top of the mountain, and there he sees the future of the universe in the form of a giant spaceship.

Beware of a big problem you must overcome if you want to show a character becoming a visionary.
You
must come up with the vision. Most writers who try to tell this story get to the end and are shocked to realize they don't have a vision of how the entire society should act differently in the future. So at the moment of final revelation, they have the character see a white light or beautiful images of nature.

This doesn't work. The character's vision must be a detailed
moral
vision. Moses' Ten Commandments are ten moral laws. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is a series of moral laws. Make sure yours are too, or don't write this type of story.

6. Metamorphosis
In horror, fantasy, fairy tale, and certain intense psychological dramas, the character may undergo metamorphosis, or extreme character change. Here the character actually becomes another person, animal, or thing.

This is radical and costly change, and it implies a self that is initially weak, fractured, or devastated. At its best, this development shows an act of extreme empathy. At its worst, it marks the complete destruction of the old self and entrapment in the new.

In horror stories like
The Wolf Man, Wolfen,
and
The Fly,
the human's change into an animal marks his complete surrender to sexual passion and predatory behavior. We watch the devolutionary process as man returns to his animal roots.

On rare occasions in stories, a character may change from beast to human. Arguably King Kong is such a character, when he seems to fall in love with Fay Wray's character and dies to be with her. "It was beauty killed the beast," says the far more predatory producer. The Feral Kid in
The Road Warrior
is a grunting animal child who not only learns to be human by watching Mad Max but ends as leader of his tribe. In
Gilgamesh,
the animal man, Enkidu, becomes human when he is tricked into sleeping with a woman.

In Kafka's
Metamorphosis,
in what might be called a "switch tragedy," traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has turned into a bug. This is a rare example of the character change happening at the beginning of the story, with the rest of the tale given over to the experience of being a bug (reportedly, it's the height of alienation).

Character change of this extreme sort necessarily involves the use of a symbol. Take a look at Chapter 7, "Symbol Web," to see the techniques for attaching a symbol to a character.

Creating Character Change in Your Story

Having looked at how character change works in storytelling, the question now becomes, how do you build this change for
your
story?

In Chapter 2, on premise, we explored the technique of going to the opposites of the basic action in the story to get a sense of the possible character change of your hero. You'll recall that
The Godfather
works like this:

■ Premise
The youngest son of a Mafia family takes revenge on the men who shot his father and becomes the new Godfather. W—weaknesses at the beginning: unconcerned, afraid, mainstream,

legitimate, separated from the family A—basic action: takes revenge

C— changed person: tyrannical, absolute ruler of the family

Then in Chapter 3, we talked about how you set up the seven main structural steps of your story so that the character drives the plot and experiences deep change at the same time. Here I want to focus in much greater detail on the techniques for creating the character change that will serve as the foundation for your story.

When I asked earlier how you build this change, I used the word "build" purposely, because this is where you literally set the frame of your story.

KEY POINT:
Always begin at the end of the change, with the self revelation; then go back and determine the starting point of the change, which is the hero's need and desire; then figure out the steps of development in between.

This is one of the most valuable techniques in all of fiction writing. Use it, and you will see your storytelling ability improve dramatically. The reason you start at the endpoint is that every story is a
journey of learning
that your hero takes (which may or may not be accompanied by a physical journey). As with any journey, before you can take your first step, you have to know the endpoint of where you're going. Otherwise, you walk in circles or wander aimlessly.

By starting with the self-revelation, the end of the character change, you know that every step your character takes will lead to that end. There will be no padding, nothing extraneous. This is the only way to make the story
organic
(internally logical), to guarantee that every step on the journey is necessarily connected to every other step and that the journey builds to a crescendo.

Some writers are afraid of this technique because they think it constricts them or forces them to write schematically. In fact, this technique gives you greater freedom because you always have a safety net. No matter where you are in the story, you know your eventual destination. So you can take chances and try out story events that may appear on the surface to be off the path but are actually taking you in a more creative way to where you need to go.

Remember, the self-revelation is made possible at the beginning of the story. This means that a good self-revelation has two parts: the revelation itself and the setup.

The
moment of revelation
should have these qualities:

■ It should be sudden, so that it has maximum dramatic force for the hero and the audience.

■ It should create a burst of emotion for the audience as they share the realization with the hero.

■ It should be
new
information for the hero: he must see, for the first time, that he has been living a lie about himself and that he has hurt others.

■ It should trigger the hero to take new moral action immediately, proving that the revelation is real and has profoundly changed him.

The
setup
to the revelation should have these qualities:

■ The hero must be a thinking person, someone who is capable of seeing the truth and knowing right action.

■ The hero must be hiding something from himself.

■ This lie or delusion must be hurting the hero in a very real way.

You may notice what appears to be a contradiction: a thinking person who is lying to himself. But even though this may be a contradiction, it is real. We all suffer from it. One of the powers of storytelling is showing us how a human being who is so capable of brilliant and creative thought is also capable of intricate and enslaving delusion.

CHARACTER TECHNIQUE: DOUBLE REVERSAL

T
he standard way of expressing character change is to give the hero a need and a self-revelation. He challenges and changes his basic beliefs and then takes new moral action. Because the audience identifies with the hero, they learn when he learns.

But a problem arises: How do you show your own moral vision of right and wrong action as distinct from the hero's? These visions are not necessarily the same. Also, you may wish to express the character change with more complexity and emotional impact than the standard method allows.

An advanced technique for showing character change in a story is a unique kind of self-revelation, what I call the "double reversal." In this technique, you give the opponent, as well as the hero, a self-revelation. Each learns from the other, and the audience receives two insights about how to act and live in the world instead of one.

There are a couple of advantages to using the double reversal over the standard single self-revelation. First, by using the comparative method, you can show the audience the right way of acting and being that is both subtler and clearer than a single revelation. Think of it as the difference between stereo and mono sound. Second, the audience is not so locked onto the hero. They can more easily step back and see the bigger picture, the larger ramifications of the story.

To create a double reversal, take these steps.

1. Give both the hero and the main opponent a weakness and a need (the weaknesses and needs of the hero and the opponent do not have to be the same or even similar).

2. Make the opponent human. That means that he must be capable of learning and changing.

3. During or just after the battle, give the opponent as well as the hero a self-revelation.

4. Connect the two self-revelations. The hero should learn something from the opponent, and the opponent should learn something from the hero.

5. Your moral vision is the best of what both characters learn.

The double reversal is a powerful technique, but it is not common. That's because most writers don't create opponents who are capable of a self-revelation. If your opponent is evil, innately and completely bad, he will not discover how wrong he has been at the end of the story. For exam-ple, an opponent who reaches into people's chests and rips their heart out for dinner is not going to realize he needs to change.

Not surprisingly, you see the greatest use of the double reversal in love stories, which are designed so that the hero and the lover (the main opponent) learn from each other. You can see examples of double reversal in films like
Kramer vs. Kramer; Adam's Rib; Pride and Prejudice; Casablanca; Pretty Woman; sex, lies, and videotape; Scent of a Woman;
and
The Music Man.

Once you have figured out your hero's self-revelation, you go back to the need. One of the benefits of creating the self-revelation first is that it automatically tells you your hero's need. If the self-revelation is what the hero learns, the need is what the hero doesn't yet know but must learn to have a better life. Your hero needs to see through the great delusion he is living under to overcome the great weakness that is crippling his life.

Creating Your Hero, Step 3: Desire

The third step in creating a strong hero is to create the desire line. Chapter 3 described this step as the spine of the story. Keep in mind three rules for a strong desire line:

1. You want only one desire line that builds steadily in importance and intensity. If you have more than one desire line, the story will fall apart. It will literally go in two or three directions at once, leaving it with no narrative drive and leaving the audience confused. In good stories, the hero has a single overriding goal that he pursues with greater and greater intensity. The story moves faster and faster, and the narrative drive becomes overwhelming.

2. The desire should be specific—and the more specific, the better. To make sure your desire line is specific enough, ask yourself if there is a specific moment in the story when the audience knows whether your hero has accomplished his goal or not. In
Top Gun,
I know when the hero succeeds or fails in winning the Top Gun award because the head of the flight school hands it to someone else. In
Flashdance,
I know when the hero succeeds or fails in reaching her desire of getting into the ballet school because she gets a letter telling her she got in.

Sometimes a writer will say something like "My hero's desire is to