Of course, there’s more to a story than just its heart. That’s something we’ll discuss further as the weeks go on, but in the meantime it’s worth kicking around some general thoughts on how most good stories work.
I like to think of stories being woven of three parallel lines, each shaping the others at every point (and thanks to Jennine Lanouette of Screentakes for getting me started thinking about this):
1. The physical plot. This is the stuff that happens: what people are trying to accomplish, what gets in their way, how things are changed by the end. Confusions and clarifications, breakups and marriages, deaths and mysteries, wars and quests. Call it the character’s relationship with the world.
2. The character story. This is what happens to your protagonist inside, the emotional, moral, intellectual, and spiritual changes that are happening while the physical plot is unfolding. Call this the character’s relationship with himself.
3. The theme. This is what the story means, what you, the writer, is telling us about people or life or yourself. This is the character’s relationship with the big questions of life.
By “theme” I don’t necessarily mean any sort of inspiring statement about the meaning of it all. It can be pretty simple, and it can be pretty uninspiring. The theme of Camus’s The Stranger is, more or less, that nothing matters. There’s a great deal of serious fiction out there, especially by Americans in the last few decades, basically saying that families are screwed up but we survive somehow; or that families are so screwed up that a lot of us don’t survive. The theme of an awful lot of Hollywood movies is just that romantic love is really, really, really important. The broadest farces of stage and screen are usually just telling us that life is absurd and not very meaningful, but it’s kind of fun if you don’t worry about much.
Even if your theme modest, though, it’s important not to ignore it or run from it in fear or dismiss it as pretentious. Because if your plot holds together at all, then I can promise you that it’s saying something about your view of the world or people or yourself. And it’ll work better if you’re conscious of that instead of blundering into it by accident.
Spade’s realization takes the form of action when he turns his lover over to the police. That action brings together the most important threads of the physical plot and completes his character story. It’s also what reveals the meaning of the whole thing, what we in the audience are left with both morally and emotionally.
And just as a great story’s theme can be a modest and quiet one, a character’s evolution doesn’t have to be big either. Sam Spade is pretty much the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning, except for that one small, but profound, realization.
These three threads interweave and shape each other through mutual cause and effect. A significant plot event will usually force some change to the character’s inner state (emotional, moral, intellectual relationship with himself). Or a change in the character’s inner state causes him to do something that creates a significant event, which then turns the plot. But then, the turning of the plot probably causes the character to change further; which may then lead her to do something else to turn the plot again.
Of course, some big event can come from outside that changes the plot and the character’s development simultaneously; but even then, the change in the character will probably change her response to the big plot event, which turns the plot, which makes her change more. In other words, each piece of both the physical plot and the character story is at once cause and effect: the cause of the next effect, which becomes the cause of something else.
It’s the way in which that interplay of cause and effect brings the two threads of plot and character together that states your theme. In one sense, you deliver your theme by showing us which causes have the most significant or lasting effects. The final effect in the chain is the one we take away with us.
In addition to the interweaving-thread metaphor, I also like to picture a story as a pyramid or a triangle: the base, the beginning, is broad, in that all sorts of factors are at play and countless possibilities can come true; some of the elements seem very far from the others. As you build toward the apex, the climax, the lines draw closer together, everything happens in an increasingly confined arena, options are eliminated. The essential elements all come together in a point at the end.
For that matter, the river metaphor covers both: little creeks and streams come in from all directions, combining and joining, sometimes pooling into lakes, but ultimately disappearing into the one big river before it reaches the sea.
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At its simplest level, we could describe a story as just “what someone does and what happens as a result.”
Most stories are essentially: “A character wants something. When she tries to get it, things happen that get in her way or enable her, and finally she either gets it or not.”
A common wrinkle to that, which most psychologically significant and emotionally moving stories have in some form: the protagonist knows what she wants, but what she doesn’t know is that she really needs something else.
The same principle can be happy, too: what he wants is to pack a steamer trunk and sail to the South Seas, but what he needs is to realize how important he is to the life of his community and how much more meaningful that is than indulging his personal fantasies. (And every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.)
The want is the character’s motivation, usually what gets the events rolling, but the heart of the story is more often really about his or her need.
George Bailey doesn’t drown himself, so he gets a chance to learn the truth of his life and go home for Christmas. Oedipus learns his lesson too. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get it through his thick skull until the city’s falling apart, his mother’s dead, and his reputation is pretty thoroughly shot. But at their hearts, they’re the same essential story of individual will fighting and losing to a greater purpose.
Most strong stories (but not all) turn on people making decisions. They make choices early on that propel the story inevitably into its heart; then they make choices later that propel the story toward its conclusion. If the character evolves in the course of the story, then the later decisions will flow from the character’s “new self” just as organically as the early ones flowed from her “old self.”
Although your characters will make lots of decisions along the way, it’s helpful to turn the biggest events on two main decisions:
1. The one that kicks the story into gear in the first place (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “old self”).
2. The one that brings it all to completion (and most fully epitomizes the character’s “new self”).
You can think about the whole story as nothing but the process of that character changing from the person who made the first decision to the one who makes the second.
In Thelma and Louise, Thelma is given a hard decision at the start: stay home to please the husband she’s afraid of or go on a joy ride with Louise and risk his anger. Her decision is what makes the whole movie happen. Later in the story, Louise is wavering and confused, so Thelma has to make another decision: surrender to the mercy of the male world, or keep running and take control of their own destinies, even if that’s looking pretty hopeless.
In a sense she’s making the same decision both times: escape male power by taking off with Louise. But the difference in the two versions of Thelma who make those decisions—in the first following Louise’s stronger will, in the second taking over the decision-making for both of them—shows how she has changed. (Oh, and thanks to Jennine Lanouette here too!)
One could also argue that her second big decision is the final one: going over the cliff. Which is also a sort of follow-up to the original decision, but with a great deal more weight on it. On the other hand, one could say that that final decision was just the playing out of her earlier decision to keep running instead of surrendering. These analyses are all pretty flexible. The important thing is how they might help you see your own characters’ decisions—and therefore your own authorial decisions—more clearly.
Your protagonist’s decisions both force and reveal her development, and therefore they also carry your theme. Which means that if someone’s making crucial decisions in your story, then that someone should probably be your protagonist.
In fact, that can reveal who your protagonist is; because the question, “Who is this story really about?” is sometimes not as easily answered as you might think. In the beginning of Thelma and Louise, Thelma is the passive one swept up in a plot initiated by Louise, who suggests the road trip, shoots the guy, and then decides to run for Mexico instead of trusting the American justice system. But during all that, Thelma develops a stronger sense of self, and from about the middle of the story she drives the plot: she’s the one who commits the robbery and assaults the cop and so backs them into their fatal predicament, and she’s the one who wants to “keep going” in the final shot.
You could say it’s a story with two protagonists, but I find it more useful to think of the protagonist being Thelma: it’s the story of one woman’s journey from fear and passivity to courage and action.
Which brings us back to endings, because the ending of Thelma and Louise has everything to do with what it’s about. Had they gotten away, it would have been a story about how inner strength can conquer anything (Hollywood’s favorite theme for the past thirty years). But since they go over the cliff, it’s about how inner strength matters more than anything, even if you’re in a cruel universe that doesn’t give you any chance of conquering anything.
That’s why I suggest another exercise as you flesh out your story: try starting at the end and plotting backward.
Which really means: hold a general ending in mind without committing to much that comes before. Then ask yourself what events need to happen, and what elements you need in place, in order to set up that ending; then look at what you need to set up those events. Keep working backward. Build the pyramid down from its point. Break the river into streams and send them up the mountains. Reverse engineer the story.
Doing that will make even clearer what your creative decisions will have to be. It’ll reveal weak spots, too, places where you’ve let one event lead to another that doesn’t really move you toward your ending or throws your timing off. And remember, that’s a good thing, discovering your weak spots. It only feels bad for a little while. Then you fix it.
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“Action is character,” Fitzgerald said. Which is true. But character is also action. And action is also theme, and theme is character, and all together they’re just story. Ultimately it’s all one. In this workshop, it’s that one thing, that singularity, that “what am I saying here,” that we’re digging to find. The rest will follow.
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