The Anatomy of Story (4 page)

The first technique for finding the gold in an idea is time. Take a lot of it at the beginning of the writing process. I'm not talking about hours or even days. I'm talking about weeks. Don't make the amateurish mistake of getting a hot premise and immediately running off to write scenes. You'll get twenty to thirty pages into the story and run into a dead end you can't escape.

The premise stage of the writing process is where you explore your story's grand strategy—seeing the big picture and figuring out the story's general shape and development. You start out with almost nothing to go on. That's why the premise stage is the most tentative of the entire writing process. You are putting out feelers in the dark, exploring possibilities to see what works and what doesn't, what forms an organic whole and what falls apart.

That means you have to remain flexible, open to all possibilities. For the same reason, this is where using an organic creative method as your guide is most important.

DEVELOPING YOUR PREMISE

In the weeks you take to explore your premise, use these steps to come up with a premise line you can turn into a great story.

Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life

This is a very high standard, but it may be the most valuable piece of advice you'll ever get as a writer. I've never seen a writer go wrong following it. Why? Because if a story is that important to you, it may be that important to a lot of people in the audience. And when you're done writing the story, no matter what else happens, you've changed your life.

You might say, "I'd love to write a story that changes my life, but how do I know it will change my life before I've written it?" Simple: do some self-exploration, something most writers, incredibly enough, never do. Most writers are content to think of a premise that's a loose copy of someone else's movie, book, or play. It seems to have commercial appeal, but it's not personal to the writer in any way. This story will never rise above the generic, and so it is bound to fail.

To explore yourself, to have a chance to write something that may change your life, you have to get some data on who you are. And you have to get it outside of you, in front of you, so you can study it from a distance.

Two exercises can help you do this. First, write down your wish list, a list of everything you would like to see up on the screen, in a book, or at the theater. It's what you are passionately interested in, and it's what entertains you. You might jot down characters you have imagined, cool plot twists, or great lines of dialogue that have popped into your head. You might list themes that you care about or certain genres that always attract you.

Write them all down on as many sheets of paper as you need. This is your own personal wish list, so don't reject anything. Banish thoughts like "That would cost too much money." And don't organize while you write. Let one idea trigger another.

The second exercise is to write a premise list. This is a list of every

premise you've ever thought of. That might be live, twenty, fifty, or more. Again, take as many sheets of paper as you need. The key requirement of the exercise is that you express each premise in one sentence. This forces you to be very clear about each idea. And it allows you to see all your premises together in one place.

Once you have completed both your wish list and your premise list, lay them out before you and study them. Look for core elements that repeat themselves on both lists. Certain characters and character types may recur, a quality of voice may seep through the lines of dialogue, one or two kinds of stories (genres) may repeat, or there may be a theme or subject matter or time period that you keep going back to.

As you study, key patterns will start to emerge about what you love. This, in the rawest form possible, is your vision. It's who you are, as a writer and as a human being, on paper in front of you. Go back to it often.

Notice that these two exercises are designed to open you up and to integrate what is already deep within you. They won't guarantee that you write a story that changes your life. Nothing can do that. But once you've done this essential bit of self-exploration, any premise you come up with is likely to be more personal and original.

Step 2: Look for What's Possible

One of the biggest reasons writers fail at the premise stage is that they don't know how to spot their story's true potential. This takes experience as well as technique. What you're looking for here is where the idea might go, how it might blossom. Don't jump on a single possibility right away, even if it looks really good.

KEY POINT: Explore your options. The intent here is to brainstorm the

many different paths the idea can take and then to choose the best one.

One technique for exploring possibilities is to see if anything is promised by the idea. Some ideas generate certain expectations, things that must happen to satisfy the audience if this idea were to play out in a full story. These "promises" can lead you to the best option for developing the idea.

A more valuable technique for seeing what's possible in the idea is to ask yourself, "What if. . . ?" The "what if" question leads to two places: your story idea and your own mind. It helps you define what is allowed in the story world and what is not. It also helps you explore your mind as it plays in this make-believe landscape. The more often you ask "What if. . . ?" the more fully you can inhabit this landscape, flesh out its details, and make it compelling for an audience.

The point here is to let your mind go free. Don't censor or judge yourself. Don't ever tell yourself that any idea you come up with is stupid. "Stupid" ideas often lead to creative breakthroughs.

To understand this process better, let's look at some stories that have already been written and play around with what the authors might have been thinking as they explored the deeper possibilities of their premise ideas.

Witness

(by Earl W. Wallace & William Kelley, story by William Kelley, 1985)
A boy who witnesses a crime is a classic setup for a thriller. It promises nail-biting jeopardy, intense action, and violence. But what if you push the story much further, to explore violence in America? What if you show the two extremes of the use of force—violence and pacifism—by having the boy travel from the peaceful Amish world to the violent city? What if you then force a good man of violence, the cop hero, to enter the Amish world and fall in love? And then what if you bring violence into the heart of pacifism?

Tootsie

(by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, story by Don McGuire and

Larry Gelbart, 1982)
The promise that immediately comes to the audience's mind for this idea is the fun of seeing a man dressed as a woman. And you know they will want to see this character in as many difficult situations as possible. But what if you go beyond these useful but obvious expectations? What if you play up the hero's strategizing to show how men play the game of love from the inside? What if you make the hero a chauvinist who is forced to take on the one disguise—that of a woman—that he least wants but most needs to take on in order to grow? What if you heighten the pace and the plot by pushing the story toward farce, showing a lot of men and women chasing after each other at the same time?

Chinatown

(by Robert Towne, 1974)
A man who investigates a murder in 1930s Los Angeles promises all the revelations, twists, and surprises of a good whodunit. But what if the crime just keeps getting bigger? What if the detective starts investigating the smallest "crime" possible, adultery, and ends up finding out that the entire city has been built on murder? Then you could make the revelations bigger and bigger until you reveal to the audience the deepest, darkest secrets of American life.

The Godfather

(novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola,

1972)

A story about a Mafia family promises ruthless killers and violent crime. But what if you make the head of the family much bigger, make him a kind of king in America? What if he is the head of the dark side of America, just as powerful in the underworld as the president is in official America? Because this man is a king, you could create grand tragedy, a Shakespearean fall and rise where one king dies and another takes his place. What if you turn a simple crime story into a dark American epic?

Murder on the Orient Express

(novel by Agatha Christie, screenplay by Paul Dehn, 1974) A
man killed in a train compartment right next door to where a brilliant detective is sleeping promises to be an ingenious detective story. But what if you want to take the idea of justice beyond the typical capture of the murderer? What if you want to show the ultimate poetic justice? What if the murdered man deserves to die, and a natural jury of twelve men and women serves as both his judge and his executioner?

Big

(by Gary Ross & Anne Spielberg 1988) A
boy who suddenly wakes up to find he is a full-grown man promises to be a fun comedic fantasy. But what if you write a fantasy not set in some far-off, bizarre world but in a world an average kid would recognize? What if you send him to a real boy's Utopia, a toy company, and let him go out with a pretty, sexy woman? Anil what if the story isn't just about a boy get-ting big physically but one that shows the ideal blend of man and boy for living a happy adult life?

Step 3: Identify the Story Challenges and Problems

There are rules of construction that apply to all stories. But each story has its own unique set of rules, or challenges, as well. These are particular problems that are deeply embedded in the idea, and you cannot escape them. Nor do you want to. These problems are signposts for finding your true story. You must confront these problems head-on and solve them if you are to execute your story well. Most writers, if they identify the problems at all, do so after they've written the complete story. That's fat-too late.

The trick is to learn how to spot inherent problems right at the premise line. Of course, even the best writers can't spot all the problems this soon in the process. But as you master the key techniques of character, plot, theme, story world, symbol, and dialogue, you will be pleasantly surprised at how well you can dig out the difficulties in any idea. Here are just a few of the challenges and problems inherent to the following story ideas.

Star Wars

(by George Lucas, 1977)
In any epic, but especially a space epic like
Star Wars,
you must introduce a wide range of characters quickly and then keep them interacting over vast space and time. You must make the futuristic story believable and recognizable in the present. And you must find a way to create character change in a hero who is morally good from the beginning.

Forrest Gump

(novel by Winston Groom, screenplay by Eric Roth, 1994)
How do you turn forty years of historical moments into a cohesive, organic, personal story? Problems include creating a mentally challenged hero who is able to drive the plot, have believably deep insights, and experience character change while balancing whimsy with genuine sentiment.

Beloved

(by Toni Morrison, 1988)
The main challenge for Toni Morrison is to write a tale of slavery in which the hero is not portrayed as a victim. An ambitious story like this has numerous problems that must be solved: keeping narrative drive in spite of constant jumps between past and present, making events in the distant past seem meaningful to an audience today, driving the plot with reactive characters, showing the effects of slavery on the minds of the people who lived it, and demonstrating how its effects continue to punish years after the slavery is over.

Jaws

(novel by Peter Bencbley, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, 1975)
Writing a "realistic" horror story—in which characters fight one of man's natural predators—poses many problems: creating a fair fight with an opponent that has limited intelligence, setting up a situation where the shark can attack often, and ending the story with the hero going mano a mano with the shark.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(by Mark Twain, 1885)
The main challenge facing the writer of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is huge: How do you show the moral—or more precisely, immoral—fabric of an entire nation in fictional terms? This brilliant story idea carries with it some major problems: using a boy to drive the action; maintaining story momentum and strong opposition in a traveling, episodic structure; and believably showing a simple and not entirely admirable boy gaining great moral insight.

The Great Gats by

(by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
Fitzgerald's challenge is to show the American dream corrupted and reduced to a competition for fame and money. His problems are just as daunting. He must create narrative drive when the hero is someone else's helper, make the audience care about shallow people, and somehow turn a small love story into a metaphor for America.