Plotting Part 6 - Foreshadowing

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Check out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Part 5 - Action Is Character. )

Today, I'm going to talk about foreshadowing and we're only going to talk about one movie here: The opening three or four minutes of Spike Lee's heist/mystery/thriller movie, Inside Man.

This is a movie I am going to probably follow throughout all the elements of plot, because it is a masterpiece of plotting, and the more I look at it, the more I find. I really recommend that you find it and watch it.

This is also going to be a little bit of a review, since we haven't talked about this movie yet -- but we're going to focus today on Foreshadowing.

Opening Image, Character Intro, AND Foreshadowing

Inside Man is a heist mystery.  The tagline for it is "You can't judge a crime by its cover."  This is the story of a perfect bank robbery that was designed to go wrong from the start.  Nothing about this crime is what it seems.

And the opening sets us up for that.  It's an incredible and efficient opening.

As with Fargo the filmmaker gives us a verbal opening that grabs our attention and makes us sit still through the images of the credits.

In this case, the picture actually starts before the opening image -- over the studio logos, we hear the music begin.  Unless you know the song or the language, it just sounds like some mournful, eery, Middle-eastern music.

Then bam, we are in close up on Clive Owen.  He's looking us in the eye, addressing us directly.  He is calm, precise, and you get the feeling he is a man very much in control.  He seems, in essense, like a master criminal or terrorist, filming a statement or manifesto for the world.

"Pay strict attention to what I say because I chose my words carefully and I never repeat myself."

He gives us the who, where, what, when. why and how of the story.  We understand that this is filmed in retrospect, from "what could most readily be described as a prison cell" -- but he tells us right off that even that is not exactly what it seems.

But I want you to watch more than that, because the credits themselves are a part of the story.




So... We have the opening imsge. We have an introduction of the antagonist of the story, though at this point, it is really unclear whether he might be the protagonist.  He's more than just a thief, but what, we don't know. That will be the puzzle of the story.

And he has already given us all the back story we need to understand what happens next: we're seeing the preparations for a perfect bank robbery.  We see the team being picked up by a gray van. We may not know yet that they are on their way to the robbery, but we know they're getting ready.

We see the setting.  Post-9-11 New York.  We start in Brooklyn -- I presume that is Coney Island, but not inside the park. This isn't tourist New York. This is diverse, real-people New York.  The city of immigrants.  The music we hear is Bollywood music.

Bollywood music with an orchestra added.  This is important because this is where "Foreshadowing" starts to come into it.

The Music

Throughout the credits, we get shots of sculptures and archetectural elements.  Nearly all of these are from one building: 20 Exchange Place, a gorgeous art-deco building down in the financial district. This building is standing in for the fictional bank that will be robbed.  Neither the fictional bank nor the real building is in Brooklyn -- but we start seeing these shots even before the van crosses the Brooklyn bridge.

So this is the target.  This is where they are headed.

We get a feeling for this because we know this is about a bank robbery, and we get a couple shots of the name of the bank -- including a medallion that says when the bank was founded.  This will be important but we don't know that.

But I said the music was important in the foreshadowing. It is.  When we first see these sculptures and plaques, the music adds a deep, ominous layer of orchestra: particularly brass and strings.  One note,  then two notes, then a mini-fanfare.  This ominous fanfare is used throughout the movie to represent authority.  Whenever the camera pans across the police presence, we'll get that fanfare.

Interesting. Hmmmm.

Because it becomes more and more clear that the robbers are the antagonists.  And they aren't nice guys and gals.  Furthermore, the hero of this story is a police negotiator.  And the police are universally displayed as imperfect good guys here.

But it's their side that gets the ominous fanfare.

However, that fanfare does not play for them as individuals. It only shows up when the movie shows them as an overall impersonal force. The police as an army.  The police as an arm of the powers that the bank represents.

(EDITED TO ADD: I just rewatched this and realize that the very first moment we get the fragment of fanfare is when Jodie Foster's name appears on screen -- which really seriously fits with this idea of what the fanfare represents.)

This is foreshadowing, at its most subtle and wonderful: the music is giving us this Pavlov's bell effect.  It's training us to remember and react to authority and power as maybe not such a great thing.


The Sculptures

There is more subtle foreshadowing in this credit sequence: like those monumental sculptures of the figures looking down, with the water stains that make them look like they are weeping.

I don't know the allegory they are supposed to represent, and I don't know which way Spike Lee intended to use them: but they look kind of medieval, don't they?  Almost ... old testament.  But whichever way you look at them, they are art deco -- representations of a mythic past done in the 1930's.  I suspect this is a subtle foreshadowing of some things revealed in the movie's midpoint, and I'll talk about that when we get there.


The Sign on the Truck

And another more obvious bit of foreshadowing, that you didn't get a clear look at in the clip, but there is a better shot in the part of the credits that were cut:

The side of the dusty gray van sports a bright red sign.  It says, in large letters:

"Perfectly Planned Painters."

Since the lead robber already said his robbery was perfectly planned, we know this is him being clever.  However, there is a slogan under that title:

"We NEVER leave until the job is DONE."

This is foresahdowing of what the mystery of the story will be: the robbers will prove themselves oddly uninterested in leaving. Furthermore, there will be another meaning to that by the time we get to the end.


Okay, that's as much as I have time for this week. Next week I'm going to talk about the rest of the first fifteen minutes of Inside Man, and also about some things I skipped over when talking about In the Heat of the Night.  This will concern a very basic kind of storytelling set up that Blake Snyder emphasizes: setting up "What Is Wrong" with the base situation of the story.

All of these other things we've talked about, especially the character introductions, will probably set up much of what is wrong.  But I do agree with Snyder that it doesn't hurt to think consciously about this element. It's the thing that will give form the others. And it will also bring us up to the thing that ends the "set up" and gets the story going - the inciting incident.  Because that, in some sense, is the Big thing that is wrong.

See you in the funny papers.

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Plotting Part 5 - Action Is Character

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Chcek out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Next week: Part 6 - Foreshadowing. )

"Action Is Character"  -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes you'll hear writers argue character vs. plot.  What comes first, what's more important, yadda yadda.  This is a silly argument.  F. Scott Fitzgerald explained it famously and best when he said "Action is character."

Plot and character are inextricable.

Characterization is more than backstory.  It's more than just reactions, or how a character delivers lines and approaches plot points.  What the character does actually creates the plot. 

This is why I spent a little extra time on character entrances (and still didn't get to all I wanted to say): because character entrances are plot points.  They are also, very often "wows" -- or those exciting wonderful moments the audience bought the book or ticket for.

French Scenes

In drama they take entrances and exits so seriously, that one school of thought actually considers any entrance or exit -- even by minor characters -- as being a whole new scene.

They call it a "French scene."  Even if there is a continuous conversation going on between two characters, the coming and going another character in the background changes the dynamics of the scene - if only through changing how the audience sees it.  It's as though each character has a certain amount of gravitational pull on the audience's attention. And when there are two characters, the center of gravity falls between them.  When a third character enters, that center of gravity moves, because that third character also has some sort of gravitational pull.

This is something that actors feel acutely, even if it doesn't always feel overt to the audience.

Now, of course, in this context, when I say "character entrance" I don't just mean that first entrance where the character is introduced, I mean any time the character walks on the stage.  In a play, each character will probably have several entrances.

I should also add that, unlike a book or even a movie, with a stage play, the entrance of an actor has an additional special effect on the audience: the stage is a pretty static place.  Inspite of all sorts of techincal tricks these days, stages don't move much.  It's all on the actors to bring the thing to life.   So yes, any time a character walks on or off, it has a special effect.

In a book or movie, comings and goings of characters don't have quite as much oomph... except for the first entrance.

The fact is, the entrance of various characters can be one of the greatest ways to deal with a major plot point. 

It's for this reason that I do not believe in the old rule that you should introduce every character in the opening "set up" sequence of a story -- be it movie or book.

It's not just that certain genres or kinds of stories demand that some character be introduced later.  ALL stories can sometimes benefit from spreading out your character entrances.

Saving Character Entrances for Later

When I reviewed some of the films I've talked about in this series, and some I'm going to talk about, I notice that major characters appear all sorts of places -- sometimes well past the mid-point. 

For instance, in In The Heat of the Night, we don't meet the widow of the murdered man until the second act.  She actually appears at the start of the second act, and she changes the whole chemistry of the situation.

When I talk about "Finding the Wow" http://daringnovelist.blogspot.com/2014/01/creating-situation-game-was-easy.html , I played a clip from The Third Man, in which Orson Welles makes his first appearance in that flick.  That's just about halfway through the movie. And yes, you betcha, that event -- the appearance of Harry Lime -- is a huge change of direction for the story.

Of course that entrance is foreshadowed.  People talk about Harry Lime from the first moment of the movie, so you could say he had already made his entrance. (More on that below.)

But in Flashback, the buddy/road picture about the old hippie and the uptight young FBI agent, we don't get any hint of a very important character who doesn't appear until more than two thirds of the way through the picture. Her entrance is part of a key plot point -- "The Secret Is Revealed" -- that I'll talk about later.

So even though character introductions are a key part of your opening set up, you don't have to shoehorn every character into that segment. You don't always have to even get at all the important ones.

Generally, though, the most important characters -- the ones who drive the action of the plot -- need to be introduced in some way.  So I'm going to finish up by talking about delayed entrances: those times when you foreshadow a character's entrance, but let it happen later.

The Star Turn

Orson Welles called his role in The Third Man a special kind of Star Turn. (Or maybe he just said Star Role.)  He likened it to another Star Turn he played on stage many years earlier.  It was a character named Mr. Woo.

All throughout the first act of that play (and with a play, the first act tends to last a long time, maybe as long as half the story), the other characters talked about Mr. Woo.  "Oh, dear, I wonder what Mr. Woo will think of that!" says one.  "You just wait until Mr. Woo gets here!" declares another. They are in awe, afraid, eager for Mr. Woo's arrival.

Finally at the end of the act, we see a silhouette of a bridge in the backdrop, and a figure appears, and walks across it.  It's Mr. Woo! He has arrived!  And the curtain comes down for the intermission.

And the audience goes out into the lobby and talks about nothing but Mr. Woo.  They aren't even thinking about the other characters. They may even, according to Welles, exclaim about what a great performance the actor playing Mr. Woo has put on.

Of course, that comment is not really about Mr. Woo -- it's about Harry Lime.  Welles did a great job playing Harry Lime, but the role did the work for him.  By the time he enters, all he has to do is smile slyly, and it's one of the great moments in film history.

The Teaser

One movie I'll be talking about more is one I haven't introduced to you yet: Inside Man.  It's a wonderful, smart mystery thriller by Spike Lee.  (If you haven't seen it because you aren't into Spike Lee's arthouse flicks, do yourself a favor and rent it. It's very mainstream Hollywood heist flick, but twice as clever.)

In Inside Man, the Set Up section of the story is very efficient, and like so many smart mystery thrillers, full of foreshadowing.  Full of questions.  We meet the bank robber (Clive Owen). We meet the NYPD negotiator who will face off with him.  And we spend most of the first act getting the robbery underway and the police reaction underway.  But this mystery is truly a mystery. There is something else going on. A third force affects the course of the story, who will be personified by Jodie Foster.  But she won't enter until the end of the first act.

Instead we get a glimpse of what will bring her into the story: At the 13 minute mark (just before that key 15 minute mark) we meet the owner/CEO of the bank, Christopher Plummer.  He is dignified and far above it all.  He gets news that one of his (many) bank branches is being robbed, and he is properly saddened.  Then they tell him which branch it is, and he hesitates and continues with his polite, concerned-but-above-it-all demeanor... but as soon as he is alone, he drops into a chair and says "Oh, dear god."

That's it.  We don't know him. We don't know what's what.  We just know that there is another shoe to drop.  The center of gravity on the story shifts just because we've seen him and his reaction, even though it's another 15 minutes or so before we meet the person who he will send to deal with whatever he's so upset about.

The Disguised Entrance

Finally, I want to mention a kind of entrance that is very common in mystery, but which I don't have a movie clip for right off.  Sometimes you want to save a character for later, but you want the dramatic entrance to be a surprise.  In that case you don't want to build it up like Mr. Woo, or tease us with anticipation like the banker with a secret.

But you do want the audience to feel some satisfaction of a tied up loose end, and you want to engage in fair play by not bringing this character in out of nowhere.  In that case, you can introduce an important character as though they are not important.  The key to this technique, though, is that the character must be memorable even as you lead the audience to believe he or she isn't important.

A bad guy might be footling around as an annoying tourist who keeps getting lost.  Or that prissy schoolmarm who is annoyingly nosy turns out to be the undercover agent whose job it is to protect the heroine from harm.

Sometimes, though, you can do this without trickery at all.  Your hero meets a nice couple who help him find his way to where he's going. They are not in disguise, but they are also not identified.  Later, they turn out to be the key witnesses he's been looking for.  Or they may just be friendly folks he can turn to when he needs some help right at the key moment.

I would give one example of this from the children's story by E. Nesbit, The Railway Children.  The children wave to the trains going by and make distant friends with various passengers -- people they never really meet, just wave to every day.  Later, when they need someone important to help them, they call on a dignified fellow they call "the Old Gentleman" and ask him.  As it turns out, he helps them in ways far beyond what they expected.

This sort of misdirection is well-known to mystery writers, but all kinds of fiction can benefit from it.

The key here is not to think of these kinds of delayed entrances as a trick so mucg as to think of them as another kind of foreshadowing.

Well, that's enough for now. 

On Friday I'll talk more about the new Mystery Game.

And next Tuesday for the Plotting series, we still won't quite get to the end of the Set Up.  We'll talk about foreshadowing, and have a little bit of a review of what we've talked about so far when we look at the first few minutes of Inside Man.

See you in the funny papers.

Addendum to Character Intros - some books

Just an addendum to the previous post: I've been wracking my mind for an example in prose that handles a large number of characters in a way similar to Bad Day at Black Rock does in a movie.

I think one of the best ways I've seen this done is in non-fiction.  Walter Lord's book about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night To Remember, uses the voice of an omniscient reporter to quickly dip in and out of the point of view of many characters. While his prose can't move as quickly as a camera can in a movie, his technique is definitely a well-established one for giving us a relatively fast picture of many individual characters.

You can check out a sample of the Kindle edition at Amazon.  A Night to Remember.

That brought another book to mind, The False Inspector Dew, a mystery novel by Peter Lovesey.  Lovesey  borrowed from Lord's style to set up some back story to the book's mystery: the  sinking of the Luisitania. He actually has two set up scenes, so this one happens as chapter 2. This is also in the sample available online.  The False Inspector Dew.

I know there are many more. I suspect there are quite a few such scenes in various hard-boiled novels and in short fiction and literary fiction.  I think John Le Carre has also included such scenes (he's fond of interesting points of view like omniscient.)  But none come to mind immediately.  I remember the stories, not the styles.

ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM: the first few comments here have got me thinking.  I'm going to make the next post about introducing a large cast of characters -- in a different way than Bad Day at Black Rock did.   This is the way books more or less have to do it: as individuals.

I will probably talk about one or another of Robert Altman's films.  (Probably Cookie's Fortune.) But here is where we can also talk about books -- mysteries and some kinds of romance in particular.  Georgette Heyer did both good and bad work with this sort of thing.  Christie didn't often have a huge relevant cast... but when she did, she did it masterfully. (Murder on the Orient Express, anyone?)

But I'll also talk about the delayed entrance, which helps with a large cast, but also is a dramatic technique that works fine with smaller casts.We'll see if that turns into more than one post....


See you in the funny papers.

Plotting Part 4 - Character Introductions 1b

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Check out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1. Part 4 - Character Intros 2. Part 5 - Action Is Character. Part 6 - Foreshadowing.)

So last week we started to talk about how characters first enter the scene.   We talked about the two lead characters from the 1967 movie In The Heat of the Night -- Virgil Tibbs and Chief of Police Gillespie.  These are a pair of characters who kinda come pre-introduced, in that their political and cultural surroundings pit them against each other regardless of who they are as individuals.

So to get started, we don't have to know anything about either of them except that Tibbs is black, and Gillespie is police chief in a small Mississippi town in 1967.

However, these two guys are not symbolic cartoons for a political drama.  The fact is, the story is an ordinary melodrama -- a murder mystery -- and our two protagonists are regular, complicated people.  The political message of the story is merely that the cultural situation surrounding them makes it a real challenge to do their jobs.

But that political situation also makes it really easy to get the story going, and get our interest in the characters before we really see who they are.

There is a risk to using this method however, which I'll talk about at the end of this post, after I mention two more pictures that use external conflict as a way of introducting the characters.


Flashback -- The Old Hippie And The Young Fed

Back in 1990, there was a little gem of a "buddy movie" called Flashback.  It starred Dennis Hopper as Huey Walker, an old hippie radica, and Keifer Sutherland, as Special Agent Buckner, a straightlaced young FBI agent.

Like In The Heat of the Night, this movie introduces the main characters by just telling us the key thing that puts them in conflict -- old hippie vs. g-man.  Unlike Heat, the characters are very comfortable in their roles.  As matter of fact, they are so comfortable, that they prefer the roles to reality.

That's a part of what this movie is about, and why it is interesting to talk about.  We have two characters who are overtly wearing masks: A Fed must remain professional and keep his authority to the front, never letting us see who he is, because that would make him vulnerable.  And all politicians -- even hippie radicals -- are at least one part conman. Their job is to charm and lie and do what's necessary to win people over.

And we know that these guys are hiding who they really are.

Somehow this allows the filmmakers to pull off something interesting: they don't hint much at where the story is going.  There are some great twists and turns, but I just rewatched the setup section, and there is actually very minimal foreshadowing here.

I'm going to talk about foreshadowing later, and I'll go into what I found in this flick then, but suffice it to say that in general, this picture doesn't find the need to keep use interested with hints of what will come.  Instead, the filmmakers have chosen to do something brave: they let the current situation carry itself.

I've said before how what keeps the reader reading and the viewer watching is that the story makes promises of great things to come.  There are many ways to do this.  In this case, the premise -- a cop transporting a fugitive -- makes all the promises we need.  The fact that the cop is holding to his official personna, and the fugitive is a crafty clown, adds lots of color to the simple fact that we know the fugitive will want to escape, and the cop will want to keep control.

That all by itself gives us a natural story, even if we never learn a thing about these characters. You can read a dry news story about a criminal escape and manhunt, and not know a thing about the characters, and still be fascinated by how it shakes out.

But this is still a story about getting to know these guys.  The opening sequence, their entrances, is all about the surface conflict of their personalities. (Unfortuantely, I have no clips about that.)  Neither takes the other seriously.  They spar.  Dennis Hopper chews the scenery, setting up jokes which others walk right into.  Keifer Sutherland holds his temper and sasses him back.  We see that these two are a reasonable match for each other.

Or at least we think they are.  We can't see beneath their masks, so we can't be sure.  We know were' going to see more.  We just don't know how or when, or if those faces beneath the masks are going to play a big part in the plot itself, or if it's just going to be the heartwarming character development subplot.

However, if youi're paying attention, you will get a clue from what happens at the 15 minute mark.  Remember how I said that is usually seen as a significant moment in movies?

In the clip I showed you of In The Heat of the Night, that was the moment when Virgil Tibbs decides to tell his story, to actively engage with Chief Gillespie.

The clip below is just about the exact same moment from Flashback.  (I couldn't find any earlier clips, but I suppose that's okay.)  It's a long clip, but I'm mostly interested in what happens in the first three and a half minutes. (However, watch until the end and you will see a classic Inciting Incident.)

The start of this is kind of a mini version of the whole movie until that point, at least as far as these two characters are concerned.  Huey (Dennis Hopper) is effusive and jabbers and jokes endlessly.  Buckner (Keiffer Sutherland) is unimpressed, reserved, official.

But watch what happens at the 2:30 mark in this clip: Huey decides to go after Buckner's mask.  He gets personal and says, "You like me."

And it works.  Buckner relents and tells us something about himself -- as proof of why he does NOT like Huey. 



Now, it's relatively clear that Buckner has not really let the mask slip here.  What he has done instead is held up a stronger form of defense.  Huey is all about emotions and sensitivity, so Buckner uses an emotional tool (and an old cliche "My father died in Vietnam to protect creeps like you") to shut him down.

The fact that this happens at the fifteen minute mark indicates it's not just another joust between characters who have been jousting all along.  But unless you're watching the clock while watching the movie, you don't necessarily realize that this is a clue to what the story is about. You really don't know that there is a mystery here and that the truth will get more and more interesting.

So for now, the moment passes and it just seems like the characters are jousting, and that Huey is using personal stuff to try to get under Buckner's skin. We don't actually need to know more.  What we're really expecting is the cop vs. fugitive plot to start ramping up.  And that plot is fun and very very straightforward and clear about where it is going, so we don't miss the mystery we never noticed is there.

Which is all a very long way of saying that you don't need to tell everything about a character to develop that character into something complex, deep and interesting.  It can be good to start with simple and clear, and let the audience see more as you go.

But you also can be complex and mysterious, if you want....


Bad Day at Black Rock

In the comments to last week's post, Steve Vernon pointed out another pot-boiler movie that begins with a train arriving in a town, carrying a catalyst character who will set the story in motion.

The train in Bad Day at Black Rock brings Spencer Tracy, a one-armed veteran just after WWII, who comes to a tiny tiny desert town on a mysterious mission.  And everybody in town is freaked out by his arrival.  It's not that they don't like strangers, or just that strangers hardly ever visit this town (though both of these seem to be true); no, it's something else. Something neither we nor Tracy know anything about.  I'ts just weird.

After a little hunting, I found a clip of the opening on YouTube.  The credits act as the "opening image."  A train races through the desert to loud, urgent music.  It has that inexorable feel of fate racing into the story (a little like Fargo's car in the blizzard, but less ironic.

(NOTE: the credits go on until the 1:20 point, if you want to click ahead. And  at the 4:15 mark, It SKIPS TO THE END OF THE MOVIE, so you may want to stop watching then.)




This story begins with nothing BUT mystery and menace.  We don't know what Tracy is there for, and we don't know why the town reacts the way it does.  All we know is that the very first things we see, other than the train roaring across the dessert, is that when the train just slows down, everybody in town steps out to look.  And not in a friendly curious way.

They aren't exactly scared either. They're suspicous, on edge, and they clearly think that the train stopping is just plain not right. The station agent is aggreived.  "Nobody told me this train was stopping!  And they ought to!"

We see just about every one of the characters even before he speaks.  However, we don't actually get to meet them -- and there are too many to remember at this point.

Now, the good thing about a movie is that when you have an opening like this, you see the actor's faces, so you get a sense of them each being different people.  Even if you don't know who Ernest Bourgnine or Lee Marvin or Anne Francis or Walter Brennan are, you see individuals when you see them.  So when they make their formal entrance, you have been set up to meet them.

In fiction you have a different advantage. A bunch of people sitting or standing outside in a western town are generally all dressed alike. You can't necessarily guess much about them. In a book, though, they have a label.  One guy is the doctor.  Another is a cowhand.  Another is the hotel clerk.

So you can still have that kind of introduction if you want it.  The problem is that it is harder to pull off.  With a movie, one shot can have three guys step forward, looking perplexed, and you don't waste time or focus on them.  With fiction, you have to either describe them, which takes time and draws undue attention, or you summarize to get the same effect, but then you don't see the individuals.

What it usually means is that you have to be selective about your details.  You might not even mention all of the characters, even in summary.  You mention as many as would give you a picture, and let the others be introduced later. 

As for how these characters are really introduced: they make their real entrances one or a few at a time, mainly in their interactions with the stranger or with each other.

But because their interactions are so mysterious, and at first they are all acting as a group, the person we mainly get to know is the stranger played by Spencer Tracy.  They don't want him to know anything about themselves. They put up a front....

So the first thing we learn is how Spencer Tracy handles this brick wall they put up in front of him.  Like Sidney Poitier, Tracy remains polite and vigilant, but his situation is different from Poitier's.  He has more natural power.  These people are wary of him, and so he uses their closed-in stubbornness against them. He steps around them.

Just after the clip, inside the hotel, the deskman tells him there isn't a room available, but the stranger just ignores and steps around him.  He signs in anyway, and he steps over and takes a key.

But then we start meeting the individual townsfolk as they each try new ways to get information out of him without giving any themselves.  And that's when we start to see them reveal character. Lee Marvin tries to bully him.  Walter Brennan is friendly but also doesn't have luck getting info.

BTW, this movie is relatively short, so you could say that it has two moments that are like the 15 minute mark.  Normally that would be about halfway through the opening act.  With this picture, that moment is about 11 minutes in -- and that is when the lead villain enters the story.  But we don't actually quite meet him.  We don't know that he's the lead villain.  He's just a guy in a truck with a dead deer on the front. 

He doesn't speak.  His sidekick steps into Spencer Tracy's path, but Tracy sidesteps them both and continues on his way.

The dead deer is clearly meant to be a symbolic detail -- a touch of extra menace in a town full of subtle menace -- but the thing that really makes it memorable and disquieting is subtle. The deer is not tied across the hood.  It's tied just to the driver's side, strangely off balance like it could slide off.  I suspect this is a clue to the fact that the driver here is the chief menace.  Even though his sidekick is big and belligerant and more menacing, it's the driver (who at this point seems nondescript and unassuming) who is the hunter.

We meet him for real just moments later as he goes into the hotel to meet with his people.  And by the end of that scene... it hits the 15 minute spot, and by golly something significant happens.

But I will tell you about that  when I get to inciting incidents.

Before I get to that, however, I'd like to talk a little more about introducing characters, and how they set up the story.  I was hoping to maybe do an extra post tomorrow, but the novel I've started working on is going great, so... I'm going to stick to the Tuesday schedule for these plot theory posts.

In the meantime, on Friday, I'll tell you a little about this Whodunnit/Mystery Plotting Game that seems to be working for me.

(NOTE: I posted an addendum to this post, just a quick suggestion of some books which introduce a whole community of characters.)

See you in the funny papers.

Plotting Part 3 - Character Introductions 1

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Chcek out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1.  Part 4 - Character Intros 1b. )


I didn't end up writing about what I thought I was going to write about.  I meant to write generally about how you introduce characters, different methods and techniques, how character entrance can be a "wow" (or memorable satisfying moment) in and of themselves.

However, I found myself riffing on a theme I started last week when I talked about opening images.

You know how I said last week that you can't immerse your audience in the story with just one paragraph or image, because there is just too much information for them to know before they actually can see the whole story?   So you've got to start simple, and lure them in, maybe with only one bit of info at a time?

Well, characters are like worlds. They are complex, they have surprises built into them, they have backstories and motivations -- some of which are obvious, and some of which even the character doesn't understand.

So introducing a character is a lot like introducing a whole story.  You start with something simple, usually the aspect that is most relevant to the story.  Or at least the element that is most relevant to the situation at the start of the story.

And with the three movies I'm going to talk about today, the thing that gets introduced first and foremost is conflict.  Even though I was going to hold off talking about the "Inciting Incident" that starts the story later, it happens that with all three of these movies, the inciting incident really is the situation itself. These characters start out in conflict, and the story has already begun before the credits end.

In The Heat Of The Night - again

Last week we talked about opening images of In the Heat of the Night.  In middle of a hot night, a train pulls in to a small own in Mississippi in 1967, and an anonymous black man in a suit gets off.

We don't really get to meet that man.  So is it really a character entrance?  Or is it more of a teaser of an entrance?  At this point, it sets the stage for something interesting to happen.

Then we get more stage setting: while we do meet most of hte most important characters in the next ten minutes, we start with secondary characters.  The counterman at the late night diner, the cop on the beat. They annoy each other, we get the feeling of a hot night and short tempers and we see a glimpse of the meanness we expect as the counterman lies to the cop about whether there's any pie or not.

Then we get a quick survey of town as the cop gets back in his patrol car and makes his rounds. We another character or two, in ways that reflect how they will be involved in the story.  Then the cop finds a body.

And then we finally meet the secondary protagonist: the Chief of Police (Rod Steiger).  In some ways, you could say that he is the first protagonist. He and his town have the most to learn.  But I'll revisit this because most of the plot points actually fit with Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) as the protag.)

We first meet the chief standing over the body, chewing gum like he'd like to chew off the heads of everyone around him.  He doesn't seem like a soft spoken guy, but he is reserved, thoughtful and keeps his voice low.  He is in charge. Everyone defers to him.  He asks immediately pertinent questions and gives immediately important orders.

This entrance is actually pretty low key.  Later we will see a man who is belligerant, and derisive.  That later image would be a stereotype of hte obnoxious small town Southern police chief or sheriff.  But the guy we see standing over that body, while he doesn't seem like a nice guy, is a professional dealing with a problem.

And the fact that we see this first gives us a sense that this is the most important aspect of his character. So we give him a little leeway when we meet him again....

In the meantime, we get a reminder of Virgil Tibbs -- our passenger from the train at the opening -- waiting in the trainstation, when the chief decides that the killer is likely to be someone passing through town, and he orders his patrolman to check out all the places a vagrant might be, including the pool hall, and the train station.

And that's when we finally meet the passenger from the train, but even then, we don't get to meet him as a person quite yet.  The cop (Warren Oates) sees a black man sitting in the depot, and he immediately pulls his gun and hauls him in.  Tibbs doesn't even say anything.  He is surprised, for just a second, disbelieving. But once he realizes what is happening he is completely correct, expressionless.

And he doesn't say a word or do a thing.  He's like the civil rights activists sitting at a segregated lunch counter -- exerting complete self-control and correct behavior.

And so we still don't know him.

All the same, we know enough.  He's a guy in a situation with a problem.  Just the fact that he didn't believe it for a moment when the cop pulled a gun on him tells us that he has nothing to hide.  But we know he has a lot to fear.

It's only when we bring these two protagonists together that we actually get to meet these two characters, to know who they are. 

Here is the scene where we actually meet the characters for real.  Especially  Virgil Tibbs.  He hasn't said a word until this moment. Nor has he done anything that tells us anything about him as an individual. Heck, he doesn't even move until about halfway through this scene.

And you could say the same for the chief of police -- he was reserved and busy with a crisis at the moment we met him earlier.  Now we can see him in his regular habitat. We can see the attitudes that Virgil Tibbs is disrupting.  He is now ornery and bigoted and not particularly likeable.  And yet, he is not stupid.  He knows when he has made a mistake.



The thing that is interesting here, is that the moment when Virgil Tibbs finally moves -- he sets down his suitcase and faces the chief and starts telling his story -- is at exactly the 15 minute mark.

The 15 minute mark in movies is generally considered a key moment. The inciting incident often happens there.  It's supposed to be the moment when we see the character's life is thrown out of balance, forcing him to act.  In action movies, which often have a longer set up, this is where the villain may make his entrance. (I believe that in Die Hard, this is where the ominous van appears on the streets, heading for the Nakotomi building where all the action will take place.)

In this movie, these characters really already had their lives thrown out of balance, but this still is the significant moment -- this story is about two protagonists trying to achieve something, in spite of all sorts of conflicts and forces working against them.  This is the moment when they both become fully aware of the other. 

I'll talk more about what happens next later.

And... oh crap, it's late, and I have more movies I want to talk about with this.  Different approaches to the same idea of stories that start with the concept of conflicting characters: Character Introductions 1b.

Well, I'll have to get to that on Tuesday.

See you in the funny papers.

Plotting Part 2 - Opening Image or Paragraph

(Continuing with the Plot Structure Series. Still working on the opening "Set Up" section of the story. Check out Part 1 - Overview. Part 2- Opening Image.  Part 3 - Character Intros 1.  Part 4 - Character Intros 1b. )

I suppose everyone agrees that the opening line or page or paragraph in a novel, or the opening image or scene in a movie, is incredibly important.  Most people however, look at it as a hook. A way to lure in the audience.

And, ironically, that attitude is something that actually leads people away from effective openings sometimes.  They're so busy trying to be special that they forget what the opening image is for in terms of the story: Orientation.

In A Chair With a Cat and A Book

When a reader starts a story, he or she is sitting someplace in the real world, hearing sounds of the real world, feeling the temperature, and the air and the texture of the book. And what he or she sees is not a story yet. It's marks on paper or a screen.

A few hundred marks on that first page just aren't enough to build a whole world for her. You can't just snatch her out of that chair and drop her into that complete and vivid other place.  While you can interest her immediately with details and promises, to immerse her in the world, you have to lay out the information one piece at a time.

And each piece will change the reader's understanding of not only what happened before, but also will affect what she expects and thinks of the next piece of the puzzle.

So last night and this morning I grabed up a bunch of movies from different times and looked at the opening sequence.

Movies have an advantage over text in that they can give you a whole big picture -- lots of people and objects and movement and sound -- all at once in a single image that may take more than a thousand worlds to describe.  Books have an advantage in that they can convey unambiguous information more quickly.  You can just say, outright, what something is or means.

That particular element is important in our first example of an opening image: Fargo.

Fargo: Words and a Tan Ciera From Heck

If you've ever seen Fargo, you remember what you think is the first image.  Anybody who has seen it talks about it.  And yet, that's not really the first image.  It's at least the second, and I would argue that it's the third.

The very first image of the movie Fargo is a black screen with white text.  The text claims that the movie is a true story, and says it took place in Minnesota in the 1980s, and something about the survivors and those who died.

This slide is a lie.  The story is not even loosely based on anything real.  That title card is there as a part of the story itself.  It might seem like a hoax, or a weird Coen Brothers trick, but the Coen Brothers weren't the first to do this.  It was a common practice in the old days.

The Prisoner of Zenda, for instance, starts with a similar title card, mentioning a great scandal that was whispered in the great halls of Europe -- although they claim this is not that story.  But that disclaimer is there to make you feel like it is the real story. (I mean. that's what you say about gossip.)  It's a fantasy of reality, and it's there for a the same reason it's there in Fargo: it tells the audience what kind of story is coming up.  It tells them how to interpret the images they will see next.

(With the Prizoner of Zenda, this is not the actual opening image. The opening image is a line of trumpeters playing a royal fanfare, and then we get the credits over a moonlit scene. Then we get the title card.  Then we get the story.  Each of these images, along with the sweeping music, tells us something about how to interpret what we will see. Here is the first ten minutes if you're interested.)

But back to Fargo....

Fargo opens with that title card (which I am told was later removed from some DVD version, perhaps by studio lawyers who feared getting sued for telling a lie).  So the audience is sitting in darkness, and now they know something.  This is a "true crime" style story. A melodrama about crime and chaos striking at the heartland of America.

The next image we see is complete gray.  Note that even though this image doesn't give you much information, it also doesn't give you confusing information either.  Instead, the blank gray makes the audience wait, and concentrate. That is partly because the title card which came ahead of it gave us information.  We are patient because the story has started already.

We soon see that this blank screen is actually the whiteout of a blizzard. The music is melancholy, and also sounds kind of folksy, and this plays into the true crime melodrama in the heartland story.

Then the first thing we actually make out dimly is weird.  It's a bird flying around in the blizzard.  Which feels like an artsy symbolic movie trick (and that's actually why it's there.)  But almost immediately, we make out a couple of other details: a fence line, and a road.  A rural road, an isolated location, a blizzard, and an incongruous bird.  And headlights -- but dim and distant headlights.  We don't know yet if those headlights are what we're supposed to be watching or not. They disappear from view.

The music becomes incredibly omninous. And suddenly the headlights reappear, much closer.  Almost bursting out of the dim grey of the storm.  An anonymous car, towing something behind it, sending up rooster tails of snow, going fast for conditions -- and yet in that weird, silent steady way of a car in a blizzard. Also it's filmed in slow motion.  It feels ... inexorable.  Like a demon or fury, which has just burst from hell into our world.

It's fateful.  And it's coming for somebody.  Not us. It doesn't pause or hesitate for us, it just keeps going. Again, like a Scandinavian art film, where death or the fates or the furies gallop by us in their chariots.

And then.... the blizzard is gone.  And it's an ordinary car, towing an ordinary tan Ciera into the parking lot of a roadside bar.  It's night, and that ominous misty gray is gone: We've got black and color and white, like a normal atmosphere.

The story then begins, and we find out that the guy driving that car is not the demon, but rather is the foolish and weak wizard who summoned the demons, who are waiting for him in the bar....



If they had started with the meeting in the bar, the story would have been fine, but we would not have had this ominous feeling hanging over our heads.  The humor would have put us at our ease, and we would have expected people to survive, the way they do in comedies.  We would not have the respect for the potential for real evil, nor would we have the level respect for our mild mannered heroine who will stand up to it.

And we wouldn't be ready for the nastiness, and we would feel betrayed.

The other thing that this opening does is give the story meaning.  The idea of chaos and evil affecting ordinary people.  It also allows the ending to feel more like a bookend.  We start with a symbolic demon bursting out of the storm in a car on a highway. We end with our heroine with the surviving "demon" locked in the back of her patrol car, driving him to where he belongs.  Minnesota Nice has survived and triumphed.  And as she comments, unlike the opening, "it's a beautiful day."


In The Heat of The Night

In The Heat of the Night is similar to Fargo.  It doesn't begin with text (other than the title), but it does begin with words -- in this case, lyrics -- and an unresolved image that makes us wait for details.

The opening image is black, with a couple of light haloes -- points of light, shot out of focus.  Ray Charles crooning soulful blues, "In the Heat of the Night."   As Charles sings, the yellow light halo in the center gets brighter and slowly resolved into the headlights of a train.

The train rolls on through a small town, late at night (we know it's late because the streets are empty) and the song and title tells us it's a hot night.  Then the train passes a sign, "Welcome to Sparta, Mississippi."  So we know where we are.

Then the train pulls into the station and we see the legs and hands of the porter as he climbs down and puts down a step for the passenger.  The passenger steps down.  We only see his legs -- clad in a nice suit with shiny shoes, and his hands and suitcase.  But because we see their hands, we know one thing about these characters:

The porter is white and the passenger is black.

(This might be a good time to mention that this movie was made in 1967.)

So we've got the Deep South, the blues, the pssion of the heat of the night, and a black man in a suit in 1967 Mississippi.

The passenger waits, and turns to watch the porter.  It almost seems like he's going to put his hand in his pocket, like maybe he'll give a tip?  But the porter keeps his back to the passenger, throws the step back on the train and the train pulls away.  The passenger pauses and then goes on into the station.

We never see their faces.  We don't know them as people yet.  And the movie cuts away from them anyway, to begin the story in a diner across town.



It's as though the passenger isn't the protagonist, at least not yet. He's like ... that tan Ciera in Fargo. Or even the shark in Jaws.  He is a catalyst.  An incident waiting to happen: something that will upend the balance of the town.

An argument could be made for the idea that Mr. Virgil Tibbs is actually the antagonist in the story of this town, and in particular it's Chief of Police. (Or at least a key impact character.)  Yes, there is a crime to be solved, and Virgil Tibbs will solve it.  But had Virgil Tibbs not been there, the case would have just been another small town crime in a story which changes nothing.  The status quo would continue to rule over justice.

So in some sense, his arrival is the real inciting incident of this story. (And yes, sometime soon we'll get to how inciting incidents can be split and happen both early and later in the first act.)

Of course, Mr. Tibbs isn't just a catalyst.  He is also definitely a protagonist.  He's a very much a character in setting with a problem.  (And oh, boy, is that setting and problem vivid in the mind of the audience of 1967.)  And that opening gives us all the information we need to know about both his problem and the problem the town will face.


A Hard Day's Night

The opening image of A Hard Day's Night is somewhat different: instead of a train or a car coming at us, in a lone and mournful location and an anonymous protagonist we see right off the bat, before credits, a crowded urban street, and at the far end, three of the Beatles are running toward us, pursued by a crowd of crazed teenagers.  They are laughing and tripping, and yet running as if for their lives. The teens are not laughing, but their screaming is passionate, almost desperate.

This opening image is punctuated by sound -- the discordant opening chord of the song "A Hard Day's Night."  And over that song and credits, we see John, George and Ringo dodging and running through a train station.  Paul is there too, but because he's in disguise and accompanied a sneering little old man, so he isn't being pursued.  His presence lets us know that this is a normal and forseeable occurance.



By the end of the credits, the Beatles have all made it onto the train, and we know all we need to know: they are stars, they are footloose, but also trapped by their own fame.  And the film will show us how their lives are an endless chase, as the lads fight to preserve their real nature and identity as the culture around them pushes to get a piece of them.


Say Anything

The 1980's teen romance Say Anything violates an awful lot of the rules of how a story should shake out, and one of those elements is how it opens.  The opening image however is a solid and standard one.  (NOTE: unfortunately YouTube doesn't have a clip of this, so I'll just describe it.)

We see a shot of a town on the water.  Modern day, working class / middle class.  We hear music and the voices of teens, talking about their yearbook.  Even though it feels more like background noise than information, we get the feeling that these are seniors talking about typical end of High School things.

As the camera pulls away from the water and the town and finally into the teen bedroom where the conversation is taking place, it settles on the face of Lloyd Dobbler.  He's not one of the ones talking, but once we see his face, he finally opens his mouth and says, out of the blue "I'm going to take out Diane Cort."  His friends try to dissuade him, and tell him that he'll only get hurt, but he declares "I wanna get hurt!"

Then the credits begin.

The thing that is extraordinary about this scene is that this is what is supposed to happen at the END of the first act. This is supposed to happen AFTER the inciting incident, and the charcter's life has been disrupted and he's considered his options.  He's not supposed to "Commit to the Quest" until after all that!

But ... that's what this story is about.  Lloyd Dobbler was  born committed.  He doesn't care about the consequences to himself.

In some sense, he's also a Mr. Tibbs, a Jaws shark and a tan Ciera.  While the story does test Lloyd, he doesn't really change.  So in some sense, this opening  hints that this story is really about Diane Cort -- who will have something to contend with in Lloyd Dobbler.  The subsequent scenes confirm this idea, as we see Lloyd and his determination long before Diane is even aware of him.

I should probably have saved this one until I talk about the "character commts" part of the story, but I just wanted to show you how sometimes, that opening image is literally just an establishing shot.  The image of the town, the talk of Lloyd's gal pals are not grabbers.  But they do efficiently set the stage.  We know the culture and the kinds of problems people of that age have.

So we understand what is at stake.  So, as with seeing a well-dress black man in 1967 Mississipi, Lloyd's declaration promises a us a story worth watching.


Okay, that's a lot of scenes.  I could talk about more movies, but I think I'll move on.

Next week, we'll talk about Character Entrances... part 1.  There are a number of subjects to talk about with that, and we'll start with another look at In the Heat of the Night as we look at introduction by conflict.

See you in the funny papers.

If you read this blog, and find it useful or entertaining, buy a book once in a while, or make a donation. 

Here's a link to a list of my books.  And ... hey, look at that!  There's a donation link right below this sentence. (Donations are via Paypal)

Plotting Part 1 - The Set Up

I was going to break up my discussion of plot into four parts, but I realized I wanted to drill down deeper.  Then I thought I would do seven parts -- to coincide with the 7-Act MOW structure I told you about last summer.

But as I get into it, I realize that even that doesn't quite go deep enough... at least for the opening sections of a story.  Maybe the other acts will turn out to be simpler, but there really is a lot to do in the opening of a story.

So I'm going to give you an overview of everything I can recall about various theories of each act of a story.  I'll introduce one section, and then drill down with additional posts about aspects I think are important or complicated.  I'd especially like to talk about elements that I don't hear others talk about as much.

If you wanted to get yourself a text book for this series of posts, you could get yourself a copy of Blake Snyder's book Save The Cat.  I will refer a lot to his beat sheet.  Most of the other things I'll talk about come from so many diverse sources -- many of which are lectures or advice from mentors.  I don't know if they are written down anywhere.

So (to paraphrase Cole Porter) let's Begin the Beginning....

The Set Up

The first section of a story sets up what will come later, so it's not surprising that most plot theory refers to this section as the set up. With some screenwriting theories, this section is very strictly defined as the first 15 minutes of a movie.  In most novels I'd say it's the first three chapters, regardless of the length of the book.

Why wouldn't the length of the book matter?

Because three chapters (unless they are unusually short or long) is about as much as it takes to get the audience into the story.  That's what the set up section is for: To ease the audience into the world of the story.  Also, traditionally, three chapters is what you submit to a publisher as a sample of the book -- so it has to be a unit that sets up the story... and ends with something that gets the plot fully rolling.

And that's the real secret here: that's the real definition of the set up section: it's everything that happens up to the point of the "Inciting Incident."  That moment is also called the Catalyst, or the Thing That Throws The Protagonist's Life Out of Balance.  More on that later.

Character in a Setting with a Problem

The first theory of story plotting I ever learned was at Clarion. Algis Budrys gave us a lecture about it the first day: a story always begins with a character in a setting with a problem.

That's a good summary of what the set up section of the story is supposed to provide: information about character, setting and the conflict that drives the plot.

The great thing about this advice is that it is not only clear what it means, but it isn't really a formula.  You can play with the timing of how you introduce the setting and the character and when you get to the problem.   But there are some more advanced elements that this doesn't get to, so we're going to break this up into several elements:

The Opening Image or Paragraph

Writers aren't the only ones who start a story with a blank page.  The audience too starts a story knowing nothing, or nearly nothing.  You could say they have a blank stage in their heads.  Often they will have read the blurb and seen the cover illustration and maybe a review or something.  But just as often, especially in these days of ebooks, the audience has forgotten those by the time they get around to reading a book.  The book has been sitting on their e-reader for a while, and all the readers sees now is the title.

Furthermore, even if the audience just read the blurb and cover and a review, that usually tells them something about where the story is going... but it doesn't tell them where the story is starting out.  It doesn't put them inside the world. It doesn't set that stage.

And you can't give the audience the full picture of everything they need to know all at once. You have to fill that stage a piece at a time -- and how they relate to everything in the story will be affected by what you show them first.

We'll be talking about this in depth on Friday.

Entrances of Characters

There's an old rule of thumb in screenwriting that you should introduce all of the characters in the first ten pages. I've seen similar rules for fiction.  It's not a bad rule of thumb but it's a silly rule to stick too closely to.

What's important is to think about who you introduce in this section and how.  Who should make a grand entrance. Who might be more subtle.  We're going to talk about this one in depth next week.  But in short: you do need to introduce your protagonist, and any other character you will be setting up for a pay off at the end.  However, some characters can be set up by reputation. (More about that next Friday, with a discussion of Harry Lime and "Mr. Woo.")

Setting

Setting is sometimes one of those invisible things that we don't think about and the audience doesn't either.  And yet it's important to every element of the story.  Without setting, your characters are disembodied ghosts.

Setting is more than physical location. It's also time and social setting.  Setting is a part of your characters' limits and strengths.  It gives us the mood, and sometimes even indicates the whole meaning of the story.

Setting delineates the problem.  And very often it is the thing you need to estabish in that first image or paragraph.  (However, you don't necessarily need to establish it in depth.  Sometimes a quick word gives the audience all it needs to know.)

Foreshadowing

Blake Snyder prescribes one very specific bit of foreshadowing: he insists on a "statement of theme" on page five of a screenplay. (That's when a charcter says something that foreshadows what the story will turn out to be about.)  It's an effective technique of setting the audience up for the story, but I like to take a more flexible view on this.

The thing I am not flexible about is that the opening set up section should be making promises and giving hints as to what is to come.  Some of this will be subtle, some will be blatant. Some will be blatant but impossible to understand until you see what happens in the rest of the story.

Foreshadowing is also something that can and should happen throughout the story, but it's especially important to the beginning.

And yes, some of the foreshadowing probably should tell the audience what the character will come to learn -- which leads to the next item:

What's Wrong?

Before we even get to the Inciting Incident, we will see problems with your main character's life.  Blake Snyder calls this "Six Things That Have To Be Fixed" (six being an arbitrary number you can change).

I mentioned a month or so ago that a story reflects the five stages of grief?  This opening section coincides with "denial."  The character may or may not be in denial -- but to the audience it should be clear that things are already wrong.  Usually it's that the character is flawed in some way.  He might be too timid, or too careless. He might be ignoring his family, or be too arrogant with his friends.

Or your character might have real problems: be broke, and the car breaks down and there's no money for the groceries and she's peddaling as fast as she can to keep ahead.  But these may be ordinary problems that seem to have no real solution: bad luck.

These problems are a kind of foreshadowing too.  They create tension or conflict.  They hint at where the story is going. They promise the audience satisfaction of some sort.

The Inciting Incident

Finally, this section of the story will end with something that shakes up the situation you just set up.

The inciting incident is sometimes called a catalyst.  But whatever you call it, it's something that the protagonist can't ignore.

Sometimes the inciting incident doesn't actually happen at this point -- it happens earlier, but nobody knows about it until this point.  Sometimes it affects a character other than the protagonist, but it's something that the audience knows for sure will affect the main character.

I'll be talking about this one later too.


As for how all this will fit into the story game, I'm not sure yet.  But when we get into specific examples, I suspect we'll get some ideas.

On Friday, we'll get to Plot Part 2: Opening Images, and talk about the movie Fargo, among others.  However, I have written before about different kinds of opening pages for fiction, First Page Series.  You can read that if you want to get some ideas about how and where to start a story.

See you in the funny papers.

If you read this blog, and find it useful or entertaining, buy a book once in a while, or make a donation. 

Here's a link to a list of my books.  And ... hey, look at that!  There's a donation link right below this sentence. (Donations are via Paypal)

Story Game: Plot Structure and Finding The Wow

(I'm working on a central directory page for the Story Game, until then, you can review the Situation Game from Fall via the last post: Let's Play! which has an index of posts up to to that point.)

Creating the Situation Game was easy.  I'm stumbling as I try to figure out how to deal with the Plot Game.  And I think it's partly because I know so much about plot theory -- the dozens of theories of story structure, etc. -- that it's hard to get a handle on where you spin the wheel.  Every story has an Inciting Incident in the first act.  And at the end of the first act the character commits to the quest.
There is no way to do a "wheel of inciting incidents" or "wheel of character commitment."  They are things that happen, but not kinds of things that happen.  And they really have to adhere to your situation.

So, even though plot theory is a part of the game, the actual game itself has got to get its hooks in a completely different kind of theory.  You've got to drill down into genre, archetypes and a little something that Hollywood calls a "Wow."

So I'm going to tell you about one more plot structure theory.  A very simple one.  A very very simple one:

Action Movie Structure: put in a WOW every seven minutes.

That's it.  Sometimes people say a Wow goes in every ten minutes or every five minutes.  Sometimes it's three little wows and then every half hour you have one big WOW. intil the end, which is all Big Wows.But the overall theory is pretty much, keep hitting the audience with Wows.

And we've seen those action movies.  I call that genre "Movies In Which Things Blow Up For Absolutely No Reason Whatsoever."  I also call them "Friday Movies," because they are a great thing to watch on a Friday night after a very tough week at work.

But the concept is not just limited to those kinds of movies.  Comedies, for instance, often use this same concept.  Keep the jokes coming, and if one fails, well, the audience will laugh at the next.  The theory behind this is that you should never bore the audience. It's related to Raymond Chandler's advice to bring in a man with a gun whenever the story flags.

Wow Isn't Just About Big Explosions

There are good stupid action movies and bad stupid action movies.  The bad ones are where it's just noise and flash and there is no actual Wow invovled.  There is more to a Wow than just making something big and loud, and if we're going to take this concept outside of the stupid action movie genre, we have to understand what a Wow is.

A Wow has to be satisfying.  This may involve paying off on something we expect, but usually it pays off unexpectedly or ironically.

Star Wars (the original Episode IV) starts with a classic Wow: a space ship racing though space, blasters firing. We think we're seeing a pretty big space ship...

But then from just above the camera (as if it is coming from behind the audience) we see the bigger ship that's chasing it.  That is, we see the front of it enter the screen.  Oh, yeah, we think, that's bigger.  But then it keeps coming.  We haven't seen the end of it yet.  Oh, that's just the front bumper!  It's still coming, and coming.  OMG, it's really really big!  The ship just goes on and on and on.

If you've never seen this on the big screen you have no idea what it was like back in 1977 when theater screens were enormous. That scene would actually make you hunker down in your seat.

That's a wow.

A similar Wow with a different effect is when the Tyrannosaurus Rex is chasing the jeep in Jurassic Park and you can see in the rear view mirror 'Objects in mirror are larger than they appear."  This one works because it's surprisingly understated and ironic.  Same with Jaws when the shark flashes out of the water to be properly seen for the first time.  Only Roy Scheider sees it.  He's scared stiff (as we are) and says "We're gonna need a bigger boat. " (Spielberg was the master of the Wow, especially the ironic wow -- which contrasts something shocking or impressive with an understated comment.

Wows are about the audience's emotional response.  Which means a lot of the time they are archetypes or cliches.  The audience wants to experience it again and again... except that it doesn't always work so well when it's not unexpected.  Then the creator has to work at it.

For instance, dropping a luxury car out of an airplane was a Wow the first time it happened, but thereafter it was a Ho Hum.  It's no longer a surprise, and the irony isn't enough to make it fly.  But that leads me to an example of another kind of Wow, the Payoff Wow.

The Payoff Wow

There's a great "Stupid Action Movie" called Con Air.  I sometimes think the premise of that movie is "What if everyone in the universe, including God, had their IQ docked by about 25 percent?"  This is a movie which didn't try to do anything new, they just worked really hard to put a little extra something into every cliche to turn it back into a Wow.  They didn't always succeed, but like a fast-paced comedy, they keep coming at you so fast that if one thing doesn't work, the next thing probably will.

They used the old "luxury car drops from the sky" routine, and they turned it into a Wow by giving the audience a relationship with the car.  It belongs to a character you really hate, the the more you know him the more you hate him.  The car is a symbol of what you hate about the character, so you hate the car too.  The car almost has it's own subplot, and they build multiple Wows into it. At some point the car gets to fly through the air.  Wow.  Then when that car falls out of the sky... it falls at the feet of the owner.  The guy we hate.

And that's a big Wow.  Because it's a payoff.  It's like a punchline of a joke.  We are rewarded for patience.

Even Art House Movies Have Wows

An intellectual movie will Wow it's audience with moments of insight.  These will also involve irony or unexpected turns or payoffs.  They also have their equivalent of the big loud explosions: beautiful imagery in a movie, or incredible poetic language in a book.

There is a famous scene in the middle of The Third Man, when Joseph Cotton is walking home in the dark and empty streets of Vienna.  He thinks his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) died before he even arrived in Vienna. (At this point in the movie, we haven't even seen a picture of Harry.)  And he knows that he's under surveillance by cops and crooks.  He's drunk and pissed off so when he sees someone concealed in the shadow of a doorway, he taunts the guy. Calls for him to come out and show himself.  The guy doesn't come out, but then someone opens a window and casts a light into the shadow.... it's Harry.



That's a Wow, too. It's surprising and ironic, and what a classic look on Orson Welles' face!

The Third Man is chock full of "art movie" Wows (gorgeous cinematography, and careful counter-intuitive pacing, spritely zither music in a thriller plot). You could say it's the Arthouse equivalent of Con Air: You are barraged with Wow moments.

A wow can be a joke or a speech or a kiss, or surprise.  But it can also be something expected.  It can be the thing that the audience hopes for and anticipates with glee.  When Columbo turns around and says "Oh, there's just one more thing..."  That's a Wow for the audience waiting for it.  In a slapstick comedy, when there's a pie on the mantelpiece, you just know the movie ain't over until it is thrown.

A Wow, then, is basically any moment or event that gives the audience satisfaction.  In every kind of book or movie or poem or play, the Wow is what the audience is watching or reading or listening for.  That's why so many cliches are also Wows, because anything good is going to get used over and over again.

Part of what defines a genre is what kind of Wow the audience is expecting.  And because they've seen it all before, one of the skills of the master of any genre is to be clever and interesting with those expected Wows.  The masters are those who find a way to make them unexpected.

Wows and The Story Game

I'm thinking that the Plotting Game is going to have to revolve around Wows.  Yes, we'll start with plot theory, but to create a form for a plotting game, we're going to have to drill down from that into Wow territory.

So we're going to take a look at each act in a four-act structure and think about how it applies to genre, and then create Wheels of Wow for each item we identify.

So next week, I think we can finally get to Act 1.

See you in the funny papers.

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Story Game - The Psychology of Plot

Welcome back to The Story Game!

This fall we created The Situation Game (which focuses on everything in place before the story starts -- characters, motivations, conflicts).  I have a few people testing it, and it's shaping up nicely, but there are a few tweaks I'll need to do.

(The last post for the Situation Game -- "Let's Play" -- starts with an index to all posts in that series.)

This Winter we're going to focus on plot.

And even though the game itself focuses on formulaic fiction, the goal is to understand the mechanics that apply to all kinds of fiction. (Or at least more kinds of fiction.)

So though I will, as usual, bring in ideas and examples from literature and movies and comic strips and any storytelling medium, the focus of the game right now is still the "Woman in Jeopardy" Romantic Suspense Story.

(However, I myself will be pushing over into other mystery genres as much as possible soon.)

Plot As Game

When you think of turning story telling into a game, plotting certainly seems to be the most natural part to use.  Especially when you're talking about pulp fiction formulas.  Part of the inspiration for this game was Erle Stanley Gardner's plot wheels.

Oddly, I found when I started this phase of the game, the pieces of this part of the game were just not falling into place.  Perhaps it's because I have a lovely image in my mind as to what a story game should look like:

The image involves a wonderful three-dimensional game board representing the journey of the protagonist through an unknown landscape, with cards and dice rolls and spins of the wheel springing surprises on him as he goes.

That's attractive, because it mimicks the experience of reading formula fiction.  You sorta know where it's going, but the details and twists and turns are a surprise when they happen.  And, if you anticipate those twists and turns too much you get bored.

And I think that's why this magic game board is attractive to me: writers know what's going to happen.  Sure, ideas come at you by surprise sometimes, but the actual process of writing is slow enough that most of the time, you're ahead of any surprises, and far ahead of even the most astute reader.   You have to set the twists and turns up.

Being a writer can be like being an actor.

An actor has to know the play and rehearse his actions long before he presents his art to the audience -- and so he has to find ways to keep it fresh for himself, to keep some sense of spontaneity going.  Of course, live performances have one thing that keeps everything fresh: accidents happen.  Another actor misses a beat, or delivers a line differently, and you have to adapt for that.  Noises in the audience, a missing prop.  All of this keeps live drama from being boring.  Sometimes actors even introduce challenges intentionally -- surprising (an annoying) their fellow actors with unrehearsed twists and turns.

That's what Improv is.  Making it up as you go along, playing with the cards you're dealt (and having no script to fall back on).

For a lot of plotting games out there, that's the purpose of using a random choice generator.  It creates an improvisational freshness.  You never know what's going to happen next, and a choice could throw you off your plans, so you are, in essense, writing on the edge.

It's sort of like writing a round-robin story by yourself.

(You know what a round robin story is, don't you?  One person writes a page or a chapter and hands it off to the next person, who writes the next bit.  Each person taking an equal part, locked into what went before and having to come up with the next bit based on it.)

But there is a problem with this kind of beat-by-beat improvisation, though.  Most round robin stories start off strong, but they quickly go down hill and become boring and dissatisfying.  This is because the parts are equal and there is no opportunity to set up anything. There is never a real arc -- just leaping back and forth of the story line.

The Pulp Plot Formula

If you just look at the standard pulp plot formula, as the Lester Dent formula for pulp short stories, or my own Maverick formula, you see something similar going on.  These descriptions of plot may be useful to seeing structure -- but the fact is they are very straight line descriptions.  Basically, the same thing happens in each act.. only more so.  The hero gets in trouble, then he gets in worse trouble, then in the worst trouble possible, and then gets out of it.

That doesn't really get into what a good plot does.  Even in the most formulaic plot, the pulp hero doesn't just get himself into deeper and deeper trouble at random.  The trouble builds, on piece on another.  Each action affects what happens next.  And more important, each action reveals more information, which changes the perspective of the audience -- what the audience thinks. (This was partly touched on by the Maverick formula -- as Maverick also has his mind changed with each act).

If the story is to feel satisfying, it has to be a psychological unit.  It must lead the character -- and the audience -- through a psychological cycle.


The Psychology of a Story

Stories exist to play "what if?"  The point is to put us through a virtual crisis.  Or maybe I should call it a "Virtual Change in Conditions" -- because the crisis could be a happy one or a terrifying one.  Although all humans react differently to different changes and crises, there is a common pattern that happens inside our heads.  Stories reflect that.

I was thinking about it last fall, and I realized that the standard plot formula -- whether it's the 7-Act Movie-of-the-Week structure I talked about it last summer, or the 4-act structures of Lester Dent and Maverick, or the classic Hollywood 3-Act structure -- all have mild association with Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief.

I don't think this makes a good formula for your writing (well, it might) but it does help us see the psychological progression of a story.  We may rational purposes of all kinds for any particular story, but this is about the irrational side of us -- that psychological pattern that needs to be gone through to feel satisfied.


Act 1 - Denial  (The Set Up - What It's Like When Everything's Fine)

Every story starts with set up.  The character and audience believes the world is a certain way.  The story often lets the audience know that something is wrong before the character, but not always.  Either way, there is something wrong, something that the character doesn't realize he has to react to.  Then the inciting incident happens, and the character is forced to recognize it and react to it.

Act 2 - Bargaining (Treating the Problem Rationally, Because Everything is Still Fine)

Usually this is the second half of Act 1.  The character first reacts by thinking they can take ordinary action that fits into their worldview (that is the "denial" worldview that everything really is, basically, fine).  They run around trying to do things the right or habital way.  Aliens attack their house, they try to call the cops, or run away or hide or do those things we plan to do in a crisis.

In other words, they feel the problem is a reasonable one and you can take normal, reasonable actions to "bargain" it away.  But they find they are wrong, and that they must react more strongly than they ever thought.  And that makes them more determined to deal with this problem than ever.

Act 3 - Anger (Expending Energy, Because Things Are Not Fine)

At first glance this section (which Hollywood would refer to as the first half of the second act) would seem like it isn't about anger.  But think about what anger is: a release of stress and energy.  And what triggers anger? Frustration.  When you try to deal with something reasonably, and that doesn't work you get frustrated, and that pushes you to do things you wouldn't have thought to do otherwise.  And maybe that means Hulk Smash!, or maybe that means you set aside your ordinary tasks and go after the problem.  This is the point when the kids screwing around in the basement actually did make Mom come down there and settle it.

So though this equates to the anger part, this is also the most energectic and often fun part of the story.  This is where the characters go all out for something. At least until they crash.

Act 4 - Depression (Failure, Desperation and Truth)

Merely going after the problem with more energy and commitment failed.  You might have achieved some joyously exuberant triumph, but it's a an empty success.  The Thing That Is Not Fine is still there.  And maybe it's not only stronger than you though, it's worse than you thought.  The stakes are higher than you thought... and yuou're not up to it.  You expended all that energy for nothing. You may have even made things worse.  You feel weak, inadequate, and you don't know what to do.

But that's what it takes to give up on denial.  You have to hit bottom before you can see the truth.  

This is the part of the story where all seems lost, and many secrets are revealed -- at least one of which is significant enough to give you some kind of renewed hope.  You don't know if you're strong enough or smart enough, but at last you understand what is going on.

Act 5 - Acceptance (Facing Reality and Conquering It)

When you see and understand the truth, you are at last able to go after the problem in a realistic way that has hope of success.  And because you were wrong about the problem before, this section isn't just about overcoming the biggest problem, it's about surviving and becoming a new person, a wiser person.

This Is Not a Plot Formula

Don't take the psychological points above too seriously in terms of what your character faces or how he or she reacts to it.  It's really about emotional energy -- it's a way of seeing what emotions dig into the "lizard brain" of your audience as the story progresses.  It's what the brain expects to feel:

The opening is logical, then next section high energy, the next low energy, and finally satisfaction and wisdom. (And because this is about emotions, "wisdom" can mean completely dumb things like blowing up the bad guys.)


What does this have to do with The Story Game, then?

Well, first it explains why creating wheels of problems which act like beads on a string won't create a satisfying story.  The difficulties that assail the character from plot point to plot point can't be equal in this kind of story. (There are other structures that don't work like this, or which only deal with part of it -- I'll be talking about some of those later -- probably not within the Friday Story Game posts, but maybe on a Tuesday -- just going into different kinds of story theory.)

What I'm thinking is that the way to approach this part of the game may be to peel it back in layers, or to take it in "modules." We're going to use the above theory, as well as the MoW theory I mentioned last summer as a kind of lens, as we look at our Romantic Suspense genre plot (as well as other kinds of stories) act-by-act in a four act structure.

Next week we'll talk about Act One - the Set Up. Which is a very busy act in terms of things you have to do with it.  You've got to introduce everything, sew the seeds of your ending, "Save the Cat" (and maybe "Kill the Puppy" for you villain), as well as have your hero and heroine "Meet Cute." (Though I think they might also "Meet Suspicious" in a romantic suspense story.)

Before that, we'll have a Sunday Update, and on Monday I'll have an Artisan Writer thoughts on the upcoming year in publishing.

See you in the funny papers.