The Anatomy of Story (29 page)

The Shining

(novel by Stephen King, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson,

1980)

In
The Shining,
Jack Torrance, while procrastinating writing, views in miniature the huge garden labyrinth behind the hotel. Gazing down at it from directly overhead, taking the "God perspective," he sees the tiny figures of his wife and son walking. This miniature is a foreshadowing (a kind of miniature of time) of his attempt to murder his son in the real garden at the end of the story.

Big to Small, Small to Big

Changing the physical size of a character is a great way of calling attention to the relationship between character and story world. In effect, you cause a revolutionary shift in the minds of the audience, forcing them to rethink both the character and the world in a radically new way. The audience is suddenly confronted by the underlying principles, or abstractions, of what they once took for granted; the very foundations of the world are now totally different.

One of the main reasons the fantasy genre exists is to allow us to see things as though for the first time. Making a character tiny does that better than any other story technique. Whenever a character shrinks, he regresses to a small child. Negatively, he experiences a sudden loss of power and may even be terrified by his now massive and domineering surroundings. Positively, the character and the audience have the amazing feeling of seeing the world anew. "The man with the magnifying glass is . . . youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of the child. . . . Thus the minuscule, the narrow gate, opens up an entire world."
¹⁰

It is at the shift moment that the underlying principles of the world jump out at the audience, and yet the world remains intensely real. Suddenly, the mundane is sublime. In
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,
the backyard lawn becomes a terrifying jungle. In
Fantastic Voyage,
the human body becomes a monstrous but beautiful inner space. In
Alice in Wonderland,
Alice's tears become an ocean in which she almost drowns. In
King Kong,
the subway train is a giant snake to Kong, and the Empire State Building is the tallest tree he has ever known.

The main value in making a character small is that he immediately becomes more heroic. Jack climbs a bean stalk to battle a giant, and he must use his brain, not his brawn, to win this fight. So too must Odysseus, who defeats the Cyclops by clinging to the underbelly of a sheep and telling the Cyclops that the one who blinded him is named Noman.

Other examples of stories of tiny characters or of characters becoming small include
Gulliver's Travels, Stuart Little, Thumbelina, The Borrowers, Tom Thumb, Ben and Me,
and
The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Getting big is always less interesting in a story than getting small be-cause it removes the possibility of subtlety and plot. The monstrously large character becomes the proverbial bull in the china shop. Everything is straight-line dominance. That's why Alice is a giant in Wonderland only near the beginning of the story, when she fills the house to overflowing. The wonder of Wonderland would quickly be wiped out if Alice were to clomp through it as the fifty-foot woman. That's also why the best part of Gulliver's trip to Lilliput is the early part when he is still enslaved by the six-inch Lilliputians. When Gulliver, as a giant, towers over the warring fictions, he makes the abstract point that conflict between nations is absurd. But the story has essentially stopped. Nothing can happen unless Gulliver lets it happen.

A wonderful fantasy story,
Big
is an apparent exception to the rule that getting big is less interesting than getting small. But
Big
is not the story of a man who becomes a giant among little people.
Big
puts a twist on the tale of a man getting small by having a boy wake up as a man. The charm of the story is in seeing the Tom Hanks character, physically an adult, behaving with the personality, mind, and enthusiasm of a boy.

Passageways Between Worlds

Anytime you set up at least two subworlds in your story arena, you give yourself the possibility of using a great technique, the passageway between worlds. A passageway is normally used in a story only when two subworlds are extremely different. We see this most often in the fantasy genre when the character must pass from the mundane world to the fantastic. Some of the classic passageways are the rabbit hole, the keyhole, and the mirror
(Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass),
the cyclone
(The Wizard of Oz),
the wardrobe closet (
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe),
the painting and the chimney (
Mary Poppins),
the computer screen (
Tron
), and the television set (
Pleasantville; Poltergeist).

A passageway has two main uses in a story. First, it literally gets your character from one place to another. Second, and more important, it is a kind of decompression chamber, allowing your audience to make the transition from the realistic to the fantastic. It tells the audience that the rules of the story world are about to change in a big way. The passageway says, "Loosen up; don't apply your normal concept of reality to what you arc about to see." This is essential in a highly symbolic, allegorical form like fantasy, whose underlying themes explore the importance of looking at life from new perspectives and finding possibilities in even the most ordinary things.

Ideally, you want your character to move through the passageway slowly. A passageway is a special world unto itself; it should be filled with things and inhabitants that are both strange and organic to your story. Let your character linger there. Your audience will love you for it. The passageway to another world is one of the most popular of all story techniques. Come up with a unique one, and your story is halfway there.

Technology (Tools)

Tools are extensions of the human form, taking a simple capability and magnifying its power. They are a fundamental way that characters connect to the world. Any tool a character uses becomes part of his identity, showing not only how his own power has been magnified but also how well he is able to manipulate the world and maneuver through it.

Technology is most useful in genres that place the most emphasis on the story world, such as science fiction and fantasy, and in highly ambitious stories that place the hero within a larger social system. Because you, the writer, create the world in science fiction, the specific technology you invent highlights those elements of mankind that most trouble you. And because all great science fiction is about the writer's view of universal evolution, the relationship of humans to technology is always central. In fantasy, a tool such as a magic wand is a symbol of a character's self-mastery and indicates whether he uses his knowledge for good or evil.

In stories where characters are trapped in a system, tools let you show how the system exercises its power. This is especially true in modernization stories, where an entire society shifts to a more complex and technologically advanced stage. For example,
The Magnificent Ambersons
shows the effects of the rise of the automobile. In
Cinema Paradiso,
the movie house is torn down to make way for a parking lot. In the classic anti-Western
The Wild Bunch,
set in the last days of the American frontier, the aging cowboys encounter their first automobile and machine gun.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
another great anti-Western, has a terrific scene in which an

enterprising bicycle salesman makes his pitch to people reluctant to join a posse.

Even in story forms that do not explore the larger world, tools can be helpful. For example, action stories place tremendous emphasis on the hero's ability to turn everyday objects into weapons or use them to gain superiority over the enemy. In drama, the tools of daily life are so common as to be practically invisible. But even here, technology (and sometimes the lack thereof) helps define a character and his place in the world. In
Death of a Salesman,
Willy Loman brings home $70 in commission, but he owes $16 on the refrigerator. His son Happy gives him $50 at Christmas, but fixing the hot water heater costs $97, and he's been putting off that motor job on the car. Willy is always "getting stuck on the machine."

C ONNECTING THE WORLD TO THE HERO'S OVERALL DEVELOPMENT

The first step to building your story world is identifying the key visual oppositions based on characters and values. The second step is looking at the endpoints of your hero's development.

This is similar to the process we used when creating characters. There we began by sketching out the character web, since each character, through contrast and similarity, helps define the others. Then, focusing on the hero, we looked first at his overall range of change, starting at the endpoint (self-revelation), going back to the beginning (weakness and need, desire), and then creating the structure steps in between. We did that because every story is a journey of learning that the hero goes through, and as writers, we have to know the end of that journey before we can take any steps.

You need to match that process exactly when detailing the story world. We've already examined some of the major visual oppositions in the world by looking at the character web. Now we have to focus on the hero's overall change to see what the world will be like at the beginning and end of the story.

In the vast majority of stories, the hero's overall change moves from slavery to freedom. If that's true in your story, the visual world will prob

ably move from slavery to freedom as well. Here's how the overall movement of character and world match up.

A
character
is enslaved primarily because of his psychological and moral weaknesses. A
world
is enslaving (or freeing) based on the relationship of the three major elements—land (natural settings), people (man-made spaces), and technology (tools)—and how they affect your hero. The unique way you combine these elements defines the nature of the story world.

■ Beginning (slavery): If the land, people, and technology are out of balance, everyone is out for himself, each is reduced to an animal clawing for scarce resources or a cog working for the greater good of a machine. This is a world of slavery and, taken to its extreme, a dystopia, or hell on earth.

■ Endpoint (freedom): If the land, people, and technology are in balance (as you define it), you have a
community,
where individuals can grow in their own way, supported by others. This is a world of freedom and, taken to the extreme, a Utopia, or heaven on earth.

Besides slavery and dystopia, freedom and Utopia, there is one other kind of world you can create for the beginning or end of your story: the apparent Utopia. This world appears to be perfect, but the perfection is only skin deep. Below the surface, the world is actually corrupt, rotten, and enslaving. Everyone is desperate to put on a good face to hide a psychological or moral disaster. This technique is used in the opening of
L.A. Confidential
and
Blue Velvet.

The point of creating these different kinds of worlds is to connect them to your hero. In the vast majority of stories, there is a one-to-one connection between hero and world. For example, an enslaved hero lives in a world of slavery A free hero lives in and, in getting free, often creates a free world.

KEY POINT: In most stories you write, the world is a physical expression of who your hero is and how he develops.

In this technique, the world helps define your main character through the structure of the story. It shows his needs, his values, his desires (both

good and bad), and the obstacles be faces. And since in the vast majority of stories your hero begins the story enslaved in some way, you must focus on slavery.

KEY POINT: Always ask yourself, how is the world of slavery an expression

of my hero's great weakness? The world should embody, highlight, or accentuate your hero's weakness or draw it out in its worst form.

For example, detective stories, crime stories, and thrillers often set up a close connection between the hero's weakness—when it exists—and the "mean streets," or world of slavery in which the hero operates.

Vertigo

(novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, screenplay by Alec Coppel

and Samuel Taylor, 1958)
The world of
Vertigo
highlights the hero's psychological weakness in the opening scene. While chasing a criminal over the rooftops of San Francisco, Scottie slips and hangs by his fingertips five floors above the ground. He looks down, and vertigo overwhelms him. A fellow cop falls to his death trying to help him, which creates a guilt that haunts Scottie for the rest of the story. This technique of the story world highlighting the hero's weakness is repeated later when Scottie's vertigo prevents him from climbing a tower to save the woman he loves from committing suicide. Indeed, this technique is the source of
Vertigo's
greatest strength as a story: the killer uses the detective's own weakness—his vertigo—as the main trick in getting away with murder.