Setting, Situation, Scene, Story (Part One)

There are a lot of entertainments I concoct in the idle fancies of my delirious mind. I’m a fantasy guy, no question.

Sometimes I dream a world like our own, but somewhat askew. What would the world be like, I wonder, if there were licensed, professional wizards? How would they dress? What would we hire them for? Or, I ask myself, what would the world be like after some great, unexpected transformative event? And sometimes I work on a smaller scale, my wonders to create. What would be the weirdest job office I can think of? Where the mail room staff are all clones of the same person and the receptionists are telepathic.

And sometimes I’m more amused by setting up a mystery, or a puzzle. An unmanned Mars probe finds a Charlie Brown lunch box.  A homeless man in Detroit stumbles across a corpse that is not entirely human.

And, probably because I have script-writing experience, I spin out encounters and moments of dialogue.

   ANGIE: I just what you to know… I’m madly in love with you.

   FRANK: Uh, okay. Hi, I’m Frank, by the way.

  ANGIE: Angie. Pleased to meet you.

I could spin that into a full-blow sequence of events, with humor and clever interactions. I could easily waste an afternoon on it, if I had one to spare.

The  problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that none of these things are stories. They are, in order, settings, situations, and scenes. That they all suggest stories is wonderful. They are starters, if you will, story seeds.

But your audience, be they readers or viewers or listeners, didn’t come for the tease. They didn’t come for anything less than the full show.

So next time we’ll discuss how to give it to them.

Strange Reverses

Conventional writing wisdom tells us that dramatic interest is generated by placing characters in conflict.  I’m  not saying it isn’t true, but I’d like to mention a couple of effective techniques I’ve seen that run a little bit counter to the notion – The Reversal and the Optimistic Cliffhanger.

Readers and audiences are quite accustomed to the notion of conflict in stories – they expect to see their heroes in peril (for horror and adventure stories) or in some emotional, social, or moral turmoil.  But they also like to see conflict resolved.  And it’s fun when the resolution doesn’t occur quite when you’d expect.

The Reversal is an old literary device when the fortunes of the protagonist change suddenly and unexpectedly.  The cool bit is that it works when the change is in favor of our hero.  It works particularly well when our hero creates the change in fortune, so his or her actions save the day. 

Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen anyway?  Sure, but the key to the Reversal is that it happens at an unexpected time.  Also, the Reversal isn’t necessarily the point where everything is tied up nicely with a pretty bow on top – its the point where things turn in favor of the hero, who may still have a fair bit of work to do before all conflicts are resolved.  But now, for the first time in several pages, we’re looking forward to the resolution instead of dreading it.

Not wanting to give specific spoilers here, but the second Star Trek movie, Wrath of Khan includes a great reversal if you need an example.

There’s a newer, similar technique that I’ve observed primarily in serial entertainments such as TV shows and comic books.  It doesn’t have an official term that I’m aware of, so I’ll call it the Optimistic Cliffhanger.  In a traditional cliffhanger, the episode stops at the worst possible moment for the hero.  (Note that cliffhangers work in novels, too – look for them at the end of chapters.)

The Optimistic Cliffhanger occurs when the episode ends a few minutes later – just after the hero has escaped from the trap.  The dramatic tension that keeps the pages turning, that keeps us coming back for the next episode, is generated by the promise of what the hero is going to do next.  Instead of ending when the villain plunges the hero into the tank full of sharks, it ends with the hero soaking wet, heading after the villain and grinning, “Now it’s my turn!”

It is interesting to me that both of these techniques draw their power from the promise of resolution.  They form that dramatic points in which the hero starts to create the resolution of the story, the point where we as readers suddenly realize that success might actually be possible.

Anticipating Explosions

The bomb wants to explode.

I don’t know where I first heard that, but it’s a great phrase. Generally speaking, if you see a bomb in a movie, it’s going to go off. That is its function, after all.

When something big and exciting, like an explosion, becomes possible in a story, the only satisfying way to have it not happen is to replace the event with something equally dramatic and powerful. This is why, when bombs are defused in action movies, our hero is always deciding between the blue wire and the red wire with only three seconds left on the clock.

The impending event doesn’t have to be an explosion, of course. It can be a divorce, a confession, a sex scene, whatever. But once the possibility of drama and excitement is raised, anticipation sets in. The reader/audience wants (or dreads) the fulfillment of that possibility.

There is a famous example from Hitchcock, defining the difference between shock and suspense. Two people walk into a room and a bomb goes off without warning. The audience is shocked for a moment. Two people walk into a room where the audience knows there is a bomb and have an extended conversation while the counter slowly ticks down… Now you have suspense.

Amusingly, striptease works on the same principle. The possibility, the anticipation, and what, in the end, does or does not get delivered.

There is a Jackie Chan fight scene on an adhesive-covered treadmill in a glue factory. In order to move, the fighters have to remove their shoes. When someone is knocked down, he has to take off his pants to stand back up. They fight standing on abandoned articles of clothing. The longer they fight, the less they end up wearing.

Once the pattern is established, Jackie’s beautiful female assistant, an Indian woman wearing little more than a long flowing sari, jumps up on the treadmill…

Admit it – aren’t you curious how the fight scene ends?

The Promise of a Pending Monster

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, back when we were discussing writing in the general rather than the specific, I wrote about keeping implied promises to the reader as a means of crafting a satisfying story. One of the points of this whole April D&D scriptwriting experiment is to show my writing process. And I’ve just found a great example to illustrate that point I made, so many moons ago.

I was writing a monster-fightin’ scene and I felt at the time that another such scene would be a good thing. So after all my monsters were all good and killed, I wrote this bit of sterling dialogue:

DARRION: The beasts of the Night Wood are old legends. There have been no accounts of them in living memory.

BARR DRUMHAND: Not really worried about their history.

DARRION: Nor am I. What concerns me is who may have woken them. And what else they may have awoken.

See that last line there? That’s the promise. Either something else has to have woken in the woods, or that line has to go. Sure, Darrion could just be flat-out wrong. Sure, I could have him speak and then have nothing happen. But the the audience will feel something is missing. They know the promise when they hear it.

Of course, when I got to the scene where I thought the next old night terror should show up and I realized there was something even better I could do instead. It’s actually a little confounding. I knew when I wrote the promise that I was doing it to set up a follow-up scene. I like the line (it’s a little hokey, but that fits with both the genre of the movie and the character delivering the line) and I don’t want to cut it. But I’ve overwritten the follow-up scene with something better.

So we’ll just have to see if I can squeeze another monster in there somewhere. My one consolation: If I cut the line, the audience will never know it was there (unless, of course, they read my blog). But, yes, I do fret that much over the implications of a single line. I do it because my audience will.

I guess I just have to figure out when the worst possible time for a monster to attack would be.