What is the premise?
Download 0.98 Mb. View original pdf
|
- Navigate this page:
- CREATING AN ORGANIC PLOT
| Casablanca (play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, 1942) Casablanca is a love story with an opening world of slavery that constantly jabs at Rick's weakness. His fabulous bar, the Cafe Americain, reminds him at every turn of the love he lost in romantic Paris. The club is also all about making money, which Rick can do only if he pays off a traitorous French police captain. Every magnificent corner of his bar shows Rick how far he has fallen into a self- centered cynicism while the world cries out for leaders. Fantasy is another story form that places special emphasis on this technique of matching the world of slavery to the hero's weakness. A good fantasy always starts the heroin some version of a mundane world and sets up his psychological or moral weakness there. This weakness is the reason the hero cannot seethe true potential of where he lives and of who he can be, and it is what propels him to visit the fantasy world. CREATING AN ORGANIC PLOT Now that you are well armed with knowledge of some of the major plot strategies, the big question arises, How do you create an organic plot for your particular characters Here is the sequence for writing an organic plot 4. Decide whether you wish to use a storyteller. This can have a big effect on how you tell the audience what happens and thus how you design the plot. 5. Figure out the structure in detail, using the twenty-two structure steps of every great story (which we'll discuss in a moment. This will give you most of your plot beats (major actions or events, and it will guarantee, as much as any technique can, that your plot is organic. 6. Decide if you want your story to use one or more genres. If so, you must add the plot beats unique to those genres at the appropriate places and twist them in someway so that your plot is not predictable. Although you should decide if you want a storyteller before using the twenty- two building blocks to figure out your plot, I am going to explain these powerful and advanced tools in reverse chronology, since this is the easiest way to understand them. 1. Sell-revelation, need, and desire 2. Ghost and story world 3. Weakness and need 14 4. Inciting event 5. Desire 6. Ally or allies 7. Opponent and/or mystery 8. Fake-ally opponent 9. First revelation and decision Changed desire and motive 10. Plan 11. Opponent's plan and main counterattack 12. Drive 13. Attack by ally 14. Apparent defeat 15. Second revelation and decision Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive 16. Audience revelation 17. Third revelation and decision 18. Gate, gauntlet, visit to death 19. Battle 20. Self-revelation 21. Moral decision 22. New equilibrium At first glance, using the twenty-two steps may appear to stunt your creativity, to give you a mechanical story rather than an organic one. This is part of a deeper fear that many writers have of too much planning. But the result is that they try to make the story up as they go and end up with a mess. Using the twenty-two steps avoids either of these extremes and actually increases your creativity. The twenty-two steps are not a formula for writing. Instead they provide the scaffolding you need to do something really creative and know that it will work as your story unfolds organically. Similarly, don't get hung upon the number twenty-two. A story may have more or fewer than twenty-two steps, depending on its type and length. Think of a story as an accordion. It is limited only in how much it can contract. It must have no fewer than the seven steps, because that is the least number of steps in an organic story. Even a thirty-second commercial, if it's goodwill follow the seven steps. But the longer a story gets, the more structure steps it will need. For example, a short story or a situation comedy can only hit the seven major steps in the limited time the story has to unfold. A movie, a short novel, or a one-hour drama for television will usually have at least twenty-two steps (unless the drama is 15 multistrand, in which case each strand hits the seven steps. A longer novel, with its added twists and surprises, has fat-more than twenty-two structure steps. For example, David Copperfield has more than sixty revelations. If you were to study the twenty-two steps in depth, you would see that they are really a combination of many systems of the story body woven into a single plotline. They combine the character web, the moral argument, the story world, and the series of actual events that comprise the plot. The twenty-two steps represent a detailed choreography of hero versus opponents as the hero tries to reach a goal and solve a much deeper life problem. In effect, the twenty-two steps guarantee that your main character drives your plot. The table on page 270 shows the twenty-two steps broken down into four major threads, or story subsystems. Keep in mind that each step can bean expression of more than one subsystem. For example, drive, which is the set of actions the hero takes to reach the goal, is primarily a plot step. But it is also a step where the hero may take immoral action to win, which is part of the moral argument. The following description of the twenty-two steps will show you how to use them to figure out your plot. After I explain a step, I will show you an example of that step from two films, Casablanca and Tootsie. These films represent two different genres—love story and comedy—and were written forty years apart. Yet both hit the twenty-two steps as they build their organic plots steadily from beginning to end. Always remember that these steps area powerful tool for writing but are not carved in stone. So be flexible when applying them. Every good story works through the steps in a slightly different order. You must find the order that works best for your unique plot and characters. |