The Anatomy of Story (32 page)

How do you do this? In a nutshell, you create a visual seven steps. Each of the seven key story structure steps tends to have a story world all its own. Each of these is a unique visual world within the overall story arena. Notice what a huge advantage this is: the story world has texture but also changes along with the change in the hero. To the seven structure steps you attach the other physical elements of the world, like natural settings, man-made spaces, technology, and time. This is how you create a total orchestration of story and world.

These are the structure steps that tend to have their own unique sub-world ("apparent defeat or temporary freedom" and "visit to death" are not among the seven key structure steps):

■ Weakness and need

■ Desire

■ Opponent

■ Apparent defeat or temporary freedom

■ Visit to death

■ Battle

■ Freedom or slavery

■ Weakness and Need
At the beginning of the story, you show a subworld that is a physical manifestation of the hero's weakness or fear.

■ Desire
This is a subworld in which the hero expresses his goal.

■ Opponent The opponent (or opponents) lives or works in a unique place that expresses his power and ability to attack the hero's great weakness. This world of the opponent should also be an extreme version of the hero's world of slavery.

■ Apparent Defeat or Temporary Freedom
Apparent defeat
is the moment when tlie hero wrongly believes he has lost to the opponent (we'll discuss it in more detail in Chapter 8 on plot). The world of the hero's apparent defeat is typically the narrowest space in the story up to that point. All of the forces defeating and enslaving the hero are literally pressing in on him.

In those rare stories where the hero ends enslaved or dead, he often experiences a moment of temporary freedom at the same point when most heroes experience apparent defeat. This usually occurs in some kind of Utopia that is the perfect place for the hero if he will only realize it in time.

■ Visit to Death
In the visit to death (another step we'll discuss in Chapter 8), the hero travels to the underworld, or, in more modern stories, he has a sudden sense that he will die. He should encounter his mortality in a place that represents the elements of decline, aging, and death.

■ Battle
The battle should occur in the most confined place of the entire story. The physical compression creates a kind of pressure-cooker effect, in which the final conflict builds to its hottest point and explodes.

■ Freedom or Slavery
The world completes its detailed development by ending as a place of freedom or greater slavery and death. Again, the specific place should represent in physical terms the final maturation or decline of the character.

Here are some examples of how the visual seven steps work and how you attach the other four major elements—natural settings, man-made spaces, technology, and time—of the story world (indicated
in italics).

Star Wars

(by George Lucas, 1977)
Outer space is the overall world and arena.

■ Weakness and Need, Desire?
Desert wilderness.
In this barren landscape, where somehow farming is done, Luke feels stuck. "I'll never get out of here," he complains. The event that triggers Luke's desire is a hologram, a miniature, of Princess Leia asking for help.

■
Opponent
Death Star.
Fantasy allows you to use abstract shapes
as real objects. Mere the opponent's subworld, the Death Star, is a giant sphere. Inside, Darth Vader interrogates Princess Leia. Later the Death Star commanders learn that the emperor has disbanded the last remnants of the republic, and Darth Vader shows them the deadly power of the Force.
■ Apparent Defeat and Visit to Death
Collapsing garbage dump with a monster under water.
Combining "apparent defeat" and "visit to death," writer George Lucas places the characters in water, with a deadly creature underneath. And the room isn't just the narrowest space in the story up to that point; it is a collapsing room, which means it gives us a narrowing of space and time,
■ Battle
Trench.
Realistically, a dogfight would occur in open space where the pilots have room to maneuver. But Lucas understands that the best battle occurs in the tightest space possible. So he has the hero dive his plane into a long trench, with walls on both sides, and the endpoint of the hero's desire, the weak spot where the Death Star can be destroyed, at the far end of the trench. As if that's not enough, Luke's main opponent, Darth Vader, is chasing him. Luke takes his shot, and that small spot at the end of the trench is the convergent point of the entire film. An epic that covers the universe funnels down, visually and structurally, to a single point.
■ Freedom
Hall of Heroes.
The warriors' success is celebrated in a large hall where all the other warriors give their public approval.

The Wild Bunch

(story by Walon Green and Roy N. Sickner, screenplay by Walon Green and Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
This story uses a single-line journey through barren territory, and it gets progressively more barren. The story also places the characters in a society that is undergoing fundamental change, from village to city. New technology, in the form of cars and machine guns, has arrived, and the Bunch doesn't know how to adapt to this new world.

■ Problem
Town.
The story begins when soldiers enter a town in the American Southwest. But this is a dystopian town, because the

soldiers are really outlaws and the lawmen waiting to capture them are worse than the outlaws. Between them they have a gunfight that massacres a good number of the townspeople. The Wild Bunch has entered the town to rob the bank, but they have been betrayed by one of their own, and many of them do not make it out alive.

■ Weakness and Need
Barren cantina.
After the massacre, the Bunch almost breaks apart in a barren cantina until their leader, Pike, gives them an ultimatum: either they stick together or they die. Their problem worsens when they discover that the silver coins they had stolen from the bank are worthless.

■ Desire
Campfire.
Lying in front of a warm fire, Pike tells his second in command, Dutch, his desire: he'd like to make one last score and back off. Dutch immediately underscores the hollowness of this desire by asking, "Back off to what?" This line foreshadows the overall development of the story from slavery to greater slavery and death.

■ Temporary Freedom
Under the trees.
Although its overall development goes from slavery to death,
The Wild Bunch
uses the technique of the Utopian place in the middle of the story. Here the Bunch stops at a Mexican village, home of one of their comrades, Angel. This is the one communal place in the entire story, set under the trees, where children play. This is an arcadian vision, and it is where these hardscrabble men should live. But they move on, and they die.

■ Visit to Death
Bridge.
Once again, this step occurs at the narrowest space in the story so far, which is on a bridge. If the Bunch gets to the other side, they are free, at least temporarily. If they don't, they die. The writers add the technique of the narrowing of time; the dynamite on the bridge is already lit when the Bunch gets stuck trying to cross.

■ Battle
Coliseum of Mapache.
A big, violent battle of this sort would almost certainly occur in wide-open spaces. But these writers know that a great story battle needs walls and a small space to get maximum compression. So the four remaining members of the Bunch walk into a coliseum, which is stuffed with hundreds of opponents. When this pressure cooker explodes, it is one of the great battles in movie history.

■ Slavery or Death
Wind blown ghost town.
The story ends not just with the death of the main characters but with the destruction of the entire town. To increase the sense of devastation, the writers add wind.

Meet Me in St. Louis

(novel by Sally Benson, screenplay by Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe, 1944)

The overall arena is small-town America, centered on a single large house. Setting their story at the turn of the twentieth century, the writers place t he characters in a society changing from town to city. They structure the story based on the four seasons, using the classic one-to-one connection between the change of the seasons and the fall and rise of the family.

■ Freedom
Summer in the warm house.
The opening scene shows a Utopian world, a perfect balance of land, people, and technology. Horse and carriage coexists with horseless carriage on a tree-lined drive. A boy on a bicycle rides up to the large, gabled house, and inside we go, starting with the warmest, most communal room in the house, the kitchen. The writers build the sense of community—a
Utopia
within the house—by having one of the girls in the family sing the title song ("Meet Me in St. Louis") while she walks upstairs. This establishes the musical, shows the audience the details of the main story space, and introduces most of the minor characters.

The girl then passes the song, like a baton, to her grandfather, who walks through another part of the house. This technique adds to the community, not just literally by showing us more characters but also qualitatively because this is an extended family where three generations live together happily under one roof. Having introduced the minor characters, the main song, and the nooks and crannies of the warm house, the writers take us full circle out the window, where we meet the main character, Esther, with the best voice of all, singing the title song as she climbs the front steps.

Matching the
Utopian
world, the hero, Esther, is happy as she begins the story. She has no weakness, need, or problem yet, but she is vulnerable to attack.

■ Weakness and Need, Problem, Opponent
Autumn in the terrifying house.
With season number two, autumn, the warm house now looks terrifying. Sure enough, the season and house are matched with Halloween, the holiday that acknowledges the dead. This is also where the family begins its decline. It is breaking apart because the two older girls may get married and move away and also because the opponent, the father, decides the family should move from small-town St. Louis to big-city New York.

The writers use Halloween to extend their critique beyond this one family to the society itself. The two little girls are about to go trick-or-treating, and they spread rumors about one of their neighbors, claiming he poisons cats. Later, the youngest girl, Tootie, falsely claims that Esther's boyfriend molested her. This is the dark side of small-town life, where lies and rumors can destroy someone in an instant.

■ Apparent Defeat
Winter in the bleak house.
With winter, the family reaches its lowest point. They are packed and ready to move. Esther sings Tootie a sad song about the hope for a happier Christmas next year: "Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." This family community is about to fragment and die.
■ New Freedom
Spring in the warm house.
As a comedy and a musical, this story ends with the characters passing through the crisis—father decides to keep the family in St. Louis—and emerging, in spring, with the family community reborn. There are not one but two marriages, and the now even larger family heads off to enjoy the World's Fair. The World's Fair is another subworld, a temporary
Utopia
and miniature future of America, built to show this family, and the audience, that we can have individual opportunity without destroying community, "right here in our own back yard."

It's a Wonderful Life

(short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern, screenplay by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, 1946)
One of the greatest examples of connecting story with world, this advanced social fantasy is designed to allow the audience to see, and com-pare in great detail, two distinct versions of an entire town. This small town is a miniature of America, and the two versions are based on two different sets of values, both of which are central to American life.

The arena is Bedford Falls, a bustling little town of two-story buildings where someone can wave hello from the second floor to a friend on the street below. The story uses the holiday of Christmas as one of its foundations, although it really tracks the philosophy of Easter by using the hero's "death" and rebirth for its basic structure.