What is the premise?
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- Changed Motive
- PLOT TECHNIQUE TRAINING
| Casablanca * Revelation Ilsa shows up at Rick's bar later that night. * Decision Rick decides to hurt her as deeply as he can. * Changed Desire Until Ilsa arrived, Rick simply wanted to run his bar, make money, and be left alone. Now he wants her to feel as much pain as he feels. * Changed Motive She deserves it for breaking his heart in Paris. 10. Plan The plan is the set of guidelines and strategies the hero will use to overcome his opponent and reach the goal. KEY POINT Beware of having your hero simply play out the plan. This gives you a predictable plot and a superficial hero. In good stories, the hero's initial plan almost always fails. The opponent is too strong at this point in the story. The hero needs to dig deep and come up with abetter strategy, one that takes into account the power and weapons at the opponent's disposal. Casablanca Rick's initial plan to win Ilsa back is both arrogant and passive he knows she will come to him, and he tells her so. His main plan, which he figures out relatively late in the story, is to use Ugarte's exit visas to help Ilsa and Laszlo escape the Nazis. The advantage of having such a late plan is that the plot twists reveals) near the end are rapid and breathtaking. PLOT TECHNIQUE TRAINING Most heroes are already trained to do what they must do to succeed in the story. Their failure in the early part of the plot comes because they have not looked within and confronted their weaknesses. But training is an important part of certain genres, and in these stories, it is often the most popular part of the plot. Training is most common in sports stories, war stories (including the suicide mission, as in The Dirty Dozen), and caper stories (usually involving a heist, as in Ocean's Eleven). If you include training in your story, it will probably come right after the plan and before the main action and conflict lines kick in. |