Message Reversals (Shifting Context to Change Message)
When we shift context to create a different message , the structure remains the same, but our appreciation of it changes. This can be seen very clearly in a Twilight Zone episode entitled, Invaders, in which Agnes Moorhead plays a lady alone on a farm besieged by aliens from another world. The aliens in question are only six inches tall, wear odd space suits and attack the simple country woman with space age weapons. Nearly defeated, she finally musters the strength to overcome the little demons, and smashes their miniature flying saucer. On its side we see the American Flag, the letters U.S.A. and hear the last broadcast of the landing team saying they have been slaughtered by a giant. Now, the structure didn’t change, but our sympathies sure did, which was the purpose of the piece.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
In it, you’ll learn how some goals are not one thing everyone is after, but one kind of thing.
*******
Some novice writers become so wrapped up in interesting events and bits of action that they forget to have a central unifying goal that gives purpose to all the other events that take place. This creates a plot without a core.
But determining your story’s goal can be difficult, especially if your story is character oriented, and not really about a Grand Quest.
For example, in the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” all the characters are struggling with their relationships and not working toward an apparent common purpose. There is a goal, however, and it is to find happiness in a relationship.
This type of goal is called a “Collective Goal” since it is not about trying to achieve the same thing, but the same KIND of thing.
So don’t try to force some external, singular purpose on your story if it isn’t appropriate. But do find the common purpose in which all your characters share a critical interest.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
Over the course of your story, the Main Character will either grow out of something or grow into something. Authors show their audiences how to view this development of a Main Character by indicating the direction of Growth by the Main Character.
If the story concerns a Main Character who Changes, he will come to believe he is the cause of his own problems (that’s why he eventually changes). If he grows out of an old attitude or approach (e.g. loses the chip on his shoulder), then he is a Stop character. If he grows into a new way of being (e.g. fills a hole in his heart), then he is a Start character.
If the story concerns a Main Character who Remains Steadfast, something in the world around him will appear to be the cause of his troubles. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to stop bothering him, then he is a Stop character. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to begin, then he is a Start character.
If you want the emphasis in your story to be on the source of the troubles which has to stop, choose “Stop.” If you want to emphasize that the remedy to the problems has to begin, choose “Start.”
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
Meaning Reversals (Shifting Context to Change Meaning)
Reversals change context. In other words, part of the meaning of anything we consider is due to its environment. The phrase, guilt by association, expresses this notion. In storytelling, we can play upon audience empathy and sympathy by making it like or dislike something, only to have it find out it was mistaken.
There is an old Mickey Mouse cartoon called Mickey’s Trailer which exemplifies this nicely. The story opens with Mickey stepping from his house in the country with blue skies and white clouds. He yawns, stretches, then pushes a button on the house. All at once, the lawn roll up, the fence folds in and the house becomes a trailer. Then, the sky and clouds fold up revealing the trailer is actually parked in a junkyard. Certainly a reversal from our original understanding.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
Red herrings are designed to make something appear more or less important than it really is. Several good examples of this technique can be found in the motion picture The Fugitive. In one scene a police car flashes its lights and siren at Dr. Kimble, but only to tell him to move along. In another scene, Kimble is in his apartment when an entire battalion of police show up with sirens blazing and guns drawn. It turns out they were really after the son of his landlord and had no interest in him at all. Red herrings can inject storytelling tension where more structurally related weaving may be lethargic.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
This first technique holds audience interest by slowly revealing the true size of something over the course of the story until it can finally be seen to be either larger or smaller than it originally appeared. This makes things appear to grow or diminish as the story unfolds.
Conspiracy stories are usually good examples of increasing scope, as only the tip of the iceberg first comes to light and the full extent is ultimately much more extensive. The motion picture All The President’s Men illustrates this nicely. Others stories about things being less far-reaching than they originally appeared are not unlike The Wizard Of Oz in which a seemingly huge network of power turns out to be just one man behind a curtain.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
A story begins when the Main Character has become stuck in the highest level of justification. Nobody gets there because they are stupid or mean. They get there because their unique life experience has brought them repeated exposures to what appear to be real connections between things like, “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or “Where there’s smoke , there’s fire.”
These connections, such things as – that one needs to adopt a certain attitude to succeed or that a certain kind of person is always lazy or dishonest – these things are not necessarily universally true, but may have been universally true in the Main Character’s personal experience.
This is how we all build up our personalities. We all share the same basic psychology but how it gets “wound up” by experience determines how we see the world. Eventually we reach a point where we’ve had enough experience to arrive at a conclusion that things are always “that way” and to stop considering the issue. And that is how everything from “winning drive” to “prejudice” is formed – not by ill intents or a dull mind but by the fact that no two life experiences are the same.
The conclusions we come to, based on our justifications, free out minds to not have to reconsider every connection we see. If we had to, we’d become bogged down in endlessly reconsidering everything, and that just isn’t a good survival trait if you have to make a quick decision for fight or flight.
So, we come to certain justifications and build upon those with others until we have established a series of mental dependencies and assumptions that runs so deep we can no longer see the bottom of it. This becomes the framework of our thoughts and the template for our behavior.
But what if the situation has changed in some fundamental way so that the entire pyramid of givens we have subconsciously assembled over a period of years is built on a false assumption – the one brick at the bottom that makes all our higher level beliefs and conclusions flawed?
Simply put, we can’t see it. And therefore we cannot help but assume that the problem lies with the situation or with the people involved in that situation, and not with our own point of view.
Stories begin at that moment – when the Main Character’s long-held subconscious belief system, world view, philosophy, or template for behavior comes into conflict with the world around him or her. And the story’s structure is all about how an Influence Character repeatedly brings this conflict to the surface in one context after another until there is so much evidence that the Main Character’s view is incorrect, that he or she must make a choice in a leap of faith: Do I stick with my long-held beliefs, even though they don’t seem to be solving the problem, or do I switch to a new point of view that seems to explain things, yet has never been tried?
Circumstances in the plot force the Main Character to make a choice, or his or her deliberation might go on forever because the evidence is perfectly balanced on each side of this thematic message argument. But in the real world, we are seldom confined in such a way and tend to perpetuate our points of view in the hope that things will eventually work out without having to undo our dearly held beliefs.
And that’s why psychotherapy takes twenty years for us to arrive at the point a Main Character can reach in a two-hour movie or a two hundred-page book.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
The primary colors enable you to create the whole range of shading and tonalities you are trying to achieve in a picture.
Similarly, the primary colors of story structure enable you to create the specific mood and experience you are trying to instill in your readers or audience.
In color theory there are two principal models: RGB (generally used for self-illuminating displays such as computer screens) and CMYK (generally used for print media).
As with colors, narrative structure can be approached both from a three-base system and a four-base system to achieve different dramatic purposes.
Readers or Audience sees in threes – the subjective experience of three acts or of a beginning a middle and an end. But an author sees in fours – the objective experience of seeing time as an element of the story, rather as the order in which events are presented to us.
At the end of a story, the reader or audience assembles the pieces that were doled out over time as if building jigsaw puzzle, and are finally able to join the author in seeing in all four dimensions – the finished product in which the outcome is visible in one glance that also includes the inception.
To create a story that satisfies both in how it unfolds and also makes sense when seen in its totality, each step must make sense and feel right as a progression, and collectively they must add up to a larger message in which each step is also a cog in the greater machine of the story’s structure.
The Dramatica theory of Narrative and the Dramatica software work to ensure that the primary colors of story, both in threes and fours, are present and working together toward the same purpose – your overall purpose as an author to tell this particular story in this particular manner.
Need personalized story development help?
Click below to learn about my story consulting service:
Some novice writers become so wrapped up in interesting events and bits of action that they forget to have a central unifying goal that gives purpose to all the other events that take place. This creates a plot without a core.
A story begins when the Main Character has become stuck in the highest level of justification. Nobody gets there because they are stupid or mean. They get there because their unique life experience has brought them repeated exposures to what appear to be real connections between things like, “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or “Where there’s smoke , there’s fire.”
The primary colors enable you to create the whole range of shading and tonalities you are trying to achieve in a picture.
You must be logged in to post a comment.