Are You Receiving Me...?!

When a writer gets inspired, he takes the world he wishes to communicate and telescopes it down, through the limiting lens of language, into a written form. What we get as readers - perhaps 100 years later, perhaps a world away - is a pile of paper with symbols on it. The reader doesn't get given a world by the author - the author isn't there - the reader gets a lot of words to interpret, and draws the author's world out of himself.

Reception Theory...
...is a branch of literary theory that deals with the critical role played by the reader in the literary process. Without a reader, the pile of paper bequeathed to us by a writer is a dormant, useless object - as lifeless as a stone. It takes a reader with adequate ability to bring meaning to the writers words and generate a version of the writer's world in the form of mental structures in his mind, created exclusively from the reader's own knowledge and experience. A child may know all the words in an adult book, but cannot make sense of it because he doesn't have the necessary life experience and knowledge to create the intended structures in mind. And - get this - because we all have a different profile in terms of life knowledge and human experience, every single reading of a text produces a unique individual production of the writer's world. Every single reading of a text is a unique interpretation. A new version of that story personalised to that reader at that time of reading. Even two readings by the same reader will be different from each other.

A receiver of a narrative is not simply a reader of text but a producer of story.

Wow.

How Can I Use This as a Writer?

Well, if a reader draws on his own life and human experience to produce a version of your story, you, as a writer, must write about the shared human values and experiences that will stimulate and excite the mind of your reader. What kind of writer activity does that to best effect?

To do this, we have to write in two ways: Firstly, Denoted information. We provide solid, factual information that is interpreted the same way by all readers to create a consistent story framework. If I tell you a story about a 'BEAR', you will get an image in your mind. But this is not enough information. She got a Polar bear; he got a fluffy teddy; you got a koala; I meant Angry Grizzly. So the denoted information must be clear and solid in order that the framework of the story is the same for everyone whatever their life experience. If I say I am about to be attacked by an angry Grizzy bear, we're all aligned with the same denoted picture in mind because we all have a common understanding of what an angry Grizzly bear 'means' to a person.

Secondly, Connotated information. This is where we get to the very substance of story. This is the information the reader brings to the party himself that fills in the gaps we deliberately leave in-between the planks of our clear and solid denoted framework. Let me put some more structures in your mind. I tell you I am being attacked by an angry Grizzly bear. I am cornered in a college music room and have only instruments to protect myself. You have a clear (denoted) picture of the situation because you know what an angry Grizzly 'means' and you know what a college music room is like; but now, you do something more. Your human understanding of the position of being cornered by an angry Grizzly has you responding emotionally and appropriately. The human in you wants to survive the bear attack, and your mind instantly searches for answers. There are possibilities that are unstated, and you instantly begin filling in gaps yourself - projecting possibilities, running through a mental list of musical instruments to find which I could possibly use to protect myself from being torn to pieces by a bear. THIS is story - not what I said, but what I didn't say. Not what I gave you, but what you gave to yourself from the threat you perceive that stimulated your human emotional response. If you are being attacked by a bear in a music room, what do you do to protect yourself? You can guess, and you do guess instinctively, but now we are getting somewhere as a writer, because the reader will read on, because he wants to know what happens next, and he instinctively feels a need for more information. This is the need you must work on as a writer. You have (presumably) no experience of bears in music rooms, so the story has stimulated you to new mental structures and new mental stimuli. The human brain likes this.

Mental stimulation through story comes from knowledge gaps. Show someone a gap in knowledge in your (denoted) story framework - work on human emotions to raise questions and create unknowns - and your readers will project knowledge into the gap and test it whether you ask them to or not. Then they read more. They cast around your story, desperate for new and more information to fill knowledge gaps because there is nothing like a gap in knowledge to make a person feel uncomfortable, insecure, intrigued, curious... and utterly engaged in the process of finding out the information that goes into that gap in knowledge and fills in the denoted framework from their own experience. This is story. And your reader needs to know what happens next...

What happened next? Me and the bear are forming a band. He's an amazing lead guitarist. Giraffe on drums. Mole on piano. Three hippos in short skirts on backing vocals. 

Did you get a picture...?! Of course you did. But if I said that in my band there was a dremble-fogger mindi-lobbing furiously on a lingle, it wouldn't mean anything, and you won't get a picture (not the same as anyone else's, anyway!); not because they don't exist - they do - I invented them - but because these things are not part of our shared life experience. I sincerely hope not, anyway. Those dremble-foggers can give you nightmares when they mindi-lob...

How to Write... How NOT to Write...

Many writers fear story theory. "It will damage my natural talent!" they cry. And I understand entirely. As I return to writing fiction again with a decade of story theory in my head, how will my 'formal' knowledge influence how I write now? Am I ruined?

Perhaps more importantly, how do I feel about the things I've said to aspiring writers on this blog and in my paid work as a story consultant now I'm trying to write under the influence of this kind of knowledge myself?

The Big Idea
I think the main thing that hits me is that my knowledge of story theory doesn't impact my early writing process at all. The fundamental fact that kinda undermines all theories is this: do you have a killer idea for a story? If you don't have a great story idea, or characters with compelling conflicts, all the knowledge in the world is absolutely no use to you. I guess this is why so few story analysts are writers of fiction themselves: they don't have any winning story ideas.

Write it... Or Analyse it?
And the first thing you must do when you have a story idea is let it pour out of you. If it feels good, don't stand there thinking about it - get deeply immersed in it! This is the joy of writing - the creativity, the world you build in your mind, the imagination and escapism - it's all brilliant, and I don't think I stress strongly enough in my story seminars or books the importance of just being yourself and getting stuck in. This is your story, you must draw it from your own heart, and the very last thing you should do is let someone else get their hands dirty in amongst your natural ability at this stage.

I feel my analytical work makes it seem like developing a story is a very formal - almost scientific - process, but it really isn't and it really shouldn't be. Just write. Write lots. Get stuck in and follow your heart. It doesn't matter if you throw away 90% of what you write, but write you must if you are going to find out if your stories work or not.

I get lots of inspiration and new ideas from getting into the detail, so I just write - without editing and without polish - in order to get deeper into the characters and possibilities. I accept that I will not keep much of this rough content, but I get a great deal of progress out of it. Then it's back up to the top level analysis view to see how things are shaping up. I think my analysis work might encourage people to spend too much time thinking and not enough time writing. Juuuust get stuck in!

Productivity - the Key Differentiator
Too many writers wait for inspiration. These people rarely become professional. Successful writers work very, very hard to dig for inspiration by forcing themselves to write at the coal-face every day, even on those days when they have no inspiration at all. The successful writers work the hardest, in a very real sense, and I have no doubt that sheer dogged determination to keep delivering a word count and to hit deadlines is a massive differentiator in those writers who can:

a) find inspiration when none is arriving by itself; and
b) be productive enough to produce a book a year and thereby turn professional.

So my advice is this: write from the heart; write lots and let it flow. Then re-write using your head, your story theory knowledge and the dustbin. Be confident in yourself - there is no 'right and wrong' - if you write from the heart you will be fulfilled, irrespective of commercial success. Yes, learn the craft of story in order to help optimise your ideas and speed your process, not to dictate your ideas or BE your process.

So, what am I writing?
Thank you for asking... I'm currently writing my third humorous book. I've never really spoken about my humorous writing on this blog but if you are interested to see if a story theorist can actually write, here is the link to my first book of humorous tales. This book got me my first proper publishing deal. This is a fine book, in my opinion, and judging by the reviews, people do seem to like it. I do hate marketing so make the most of this - I don't plan to do it very often!

OCEAN BOULEVARD (Amazon- UK - Hard copy and Kindle)

OCEAN BOULEVARD (Amazon.com  Kindle store)

"David Baboulene is a seriously funny man with a great gift for storytelling. One of the funniest books I have ever read." City Talk.

I hope you love it! Feel free to let me know what you think!

David

The Writer's First Tripwire...

One of the first traps that a writer often falls into in their early career looks like this.

Most writers get confidence in their early writing from some success with some short pieces. A writer might place an article or two, a short story published - 1500 words that get roundly admired. Then he does it again and feels a terrific - and well justified - sense of achievement as he receives the accolades of people who have genuinely enjoyed his work and he maybe even trousers his first payment for writing. Feels great, right?!

And it is at this point that the writer decides to set about the novel or screenplay he's been brooding over for the last few years. They open a new document, take a deep breath... and begin with their own version of 'Once upon a time...'

And this is the mistake. The trap is sprung. The writer is in trouble, and he doesn't even know it.

Writing 100,000 words or two hours of screenplay is a totally different discipline from writing a short piece. With 1000 words, we can begin at the beginning, write through to the the end, read it through, rewrite it, reorder things, screw it up and start again - whatever. Our writing method is simply to rewrite; read it again; then re-write again until it reads cleanly and no further changes are necessary. This is manageable, because even the most fundamental of changes can be managed and accommodated across the arc of the whole story.

So we set about our first full-length work in exactly the same way. Unfortunately, this rarely - very rarely - leads to success. To get to the end of a 100,000 word first draft, and then read it through and realise there are one or two wonderful changes you'd like to incorporate is a major new piece of work. To successfully manage all the ripple effects of even the smallest of changes is very, very tricky, and to do this two, three, four times is simply not sustainable in one lifetime. The vast majority of stories that are written this way end up dying in a drawer somewhere as the writer loses all sight of what the story was about, loses all vitality and connection with the heartbeat of the story and has no mental energy left to lift themselves for yet another re-write of such an enormous beast.

There is a saying that there are no writers, only re-writers, and there is no doubt that this is true. But there are limits, and a full length work needs to be approached in a different way if it is to have the best chance of getting itself finished. In my experience, the most effective method looks like this:

1. Begin with an idea. Question that idea to develop it. Ask what if? What if? What if...?

2. Focus on the ending. Once you are armed with your ending, you have your story. And from a working point of view, once you have your ending, you know where the goal is, so all the component story events (chapters/sequences/scenes...) can be geared to that ending. 

3. Once the idea has grown into a series of 20 to 30 component events leading to a clear ending, start pitching the story to people. Tell it out loud. It might not be something you want to do, but it is the single most valuable exercise in story development. Tell your story (that is what it is FOR!!) and you will learn SO much about it - the improvements will amaze you.

4. If there are frustrations in your story, think about meaningful conflict, character growth and subtext in every event and across the story as a whole. The source of your frustration will almost certainly be in one of these areas. Learn about these key story elements in order to speed up your writing process.

5. You are now ready to write the first draft. Even this process, because it is slower, will generate new ideas, so be prepared to go back up to the previous level and rework the story at the event level.

If you follow this process - without writing a single word in earnest until you know your entire story from front to back and have broken it down into manageable chunks - subsequent changes to the drafts will be minimal and editorial rather than fundamental, and your chances of becoming the proud creator of a fine, finished product will be greatly enhanced.

This is a brief, blog version of the method. An in-depth analysis of a proven story development method can be found in The Story Book; A develoment method discussed in step-by-step detail, from the seed of the idea to the distributed film, with Bob Gale on how he and Robert Zemekis developed their story: Back to the Future. 

Two Types of Key Question

Leading on from my last post on The Subtext of Character Growth, I would like to refine - and hopefully clarify - the information by using this post to identify two types of key question. I am calling these an 'Event' key question and a 'Character Development' key question. Let's look at two simple children's stories and see what's going on.

Event Key Question
As discussed, the classic story structure we learn in our first year of story theory looks like this: an inciting incident raises a key question in the mind of the audience. The key question is pushed and pulled in the battle between the forces of protagonism and those of antagonism until the climax when we find out the answer to the key question. So, for example, the tortoise challenges the hare to a race (inciting incident). The key question is raised: 'who will win the race?' At climax, we find out the answer to the key question (the tortoise won the race).

This is a key question raised through an event. A 'plot' level key question - and although this is very clear and simple and is a fine mechanism, found in many great stories, it is evident that the very finest and most highly rated stories often do not have a clear and evident Event Key Question. So what do the finest stories have instead?

Character Growth Key Question
In the more highly rated stories, we in the audience are asking ourselves: 'What will happen next?' and we are gripped, but there is no clear and identifiable inciting incident raising a key question that carries us forwards. The Ugly Duckling is an example of such a story. A duck is born. It is different from the other ducklings, and suffers bullying, ridicule and social exclusion. No obvious key question is raised. So why are we intrigued?

Because we are powerfully locked on to the question of fulfilment for our protagonist. We are aware that our protagonist has a yearning - an ambition - with which we empathise. In life, we naturally crave a sense of belonging; we desire successful relationships and we feel secure if we fit in with communities and groups. So we want the duckling to be fulfilled as we desire to be fulfilled ourselves. We recognise the character suffering in these terms, and we are gripped by our own feelings about these issues in our own life, so we want to see what will happen to the protagonist's fortunes. The duck becomes a beautiful swan, achieves a sense of belonging in a group of other glorious swans, and the bad guy animals who ridiculed and excluded the ugly duckling look foolish and rather ugly themselves. The Ugly Duckling becomes fulfilled through an unexpected reversal in fortunes, and we are heartened and satisfied by the story and by the 'life' lessons we have understood. So the key question is there, but it is: "Will the protagonist find fulfilment?"

This is kinda important, because every single story of all time has either an 'event' key question, or a character growth key question, or both. Always and forever. Although a character growth key question tends to characterise the very finest stories, I would suggest that the easiest high power stories to write are probably those that have both. The Hare and The Tortoise is based around a very clear key question (Who will win the race?) but also has a second strand of character growth. We (and The Hare) learn a life lesson along the lines of 'more haste less speed'.

So as a writer, I would suggest that when you find a story idea that has potential, you need to look for how the story idea is going to describe a character arc of growth up the ladder of human values, and how that character arc is going to be achieved in the context of the real world challenges presented by the plot level 'event' that look like they will take the protagonist downwards in life.

Or to give an example from a story that has both, let's look at - guess what - Back to the Future. Marty McFly is sent back to 1955 in a time machine ('plot' event) raising the key question: 'Will he ever get back to 1985?'. Answer at climax - yes, he will); but the real story lives and grips and engages us on the question of George McFly's character growth. When George grows from weak and unassertive to take out Biff with one punch, he grows into a strong and confident man, and it is this life growth that defines the whole story.
 Will George find fulfilment? He certainly does, and there is the Character Development Key Question.

The Subtext of Character Growth

Story theorists down the centuries have faced one recurring problem. They discover early on their journey to becoming a guru - in a eureka moment of intense revelation - that most stories are based around a key question. It works like this: An inciting incident raises the key question in the mind of the audience; the key question keeps the audience gripped across the long haul before being answered at the climax to the story. This, he decides, IS story structure. Act l is the bit up to the inciting incident. Act lll is the climax where the answer to the key question is addressed. Act ll is the bit in between where the forces of protagonism and antagonism battle for supremacy. Simple as that. This is the template for story power.

Now, it's true that most stories indeed have this basic framework. Take Back to the Future. The inciting incident is when Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time, raising the key question: 'Will he ever get home to 1985 again?' The issue is then thrown into doubt as the forces of protagonism and antagonism battle it out through act ll, and the question is finally addressed to our satisfaction at climax, when Marty does, indeed, make it back home to 1985. Classic story structure. 

The problem for a story theorist is that there are exceptions. And as the exceptions mount up, we find that it's actually the very finest and highest rated stories that do NOT have a framework based on a key question. Stories I have discussed recently in Writing Magazine and on this blog, including Hugo, The Kings Speech and The Shawshank Redemption have no obvious key question - at least, not one that is up front and in your face. And this is not only inconvenient for story theorists who want to make a science of story, it's a bummer for the film studios, too, because even an accountant can tell if a story has a key question, so for decades the studios have only been giving the green light to those that do. This implicitly throws out the very best stories with the trash, which, in turn, is why there have been an enormous number of formulaic and somewhat mediocre stories since the key question became the God of story decisions around the early 1980s. 

So what do the very finest stories have instead? Well, what these stories have is Character Growth. Great stories all appear to resonate psychologically through the evident growth of a character towards personal fulfilment. As human beings, we very naturally strive for fulfilment, and are driven (often subconsciously) to advance ourselves in terms of social values. We love stories that show us the journeys of others up the ladder of life. The key question mentioned above in Back to the Future is a 'plot' question, not a character question, but think of the basic 'life values' at stake in Back to the Future in terms of character growth: Will George get it on with Lorraine and have children? Will Marty be born? Will the bad guy, Biff (who we know from the sequel intends to promote his own gene pool at the expense of Marty's) succeed in getting Lorraine and power? And think how clearly Marty's family have progressed in social/fulfilment terms by the end; and all because George overcame his daemons and became strong and assertive (character growth).

In The Shawshank Redemption, we don't know what the story is about in terms of any key question, but we do have lots of questions about our protagonist and his 'life values': Will he find justice? Will he find freedom? Wow. Justice and Freedom. Fundamentally important subjects, but when we ask ourselves: 'What is going to happen next?' what we really mean is: 'Will our hero progress in life despite the forces of antagonism railed against him?' And as long as someone somewhere learns a life lesson and climbs the ladder of life (or fails to learn, but the opportunity missed is clear to the audience), then we tend to like the story more.Andy Dufresne, in Shawshank Prison, learns patience. He learns to use what he has - time and hope - and turns these into a single devastating escape attempt, wealth and beautiful revenge.

In Hugo, for example - a story with no key question, but five Oscars including Best Screenplay -  it’s not just one character that climbs the ladder and finds fulfilment. It’s all of them:

• Hugo himself goes from alone, grieving and living in fear to having a family, friends, safety and a sense of belonging. A boy gets a family - how basic is that?!

• Papa George journeys from lost and forgotten to being recognised for his achievements. 

• Even Sacha Baron Cohen‘s wonderful bad guy, Gustav, goes from an injured, cruel and heartless child catcher to a happily engaged friend to one and all. 

Mama Jeanne, Tabard, Madame Emile and Frick, Isabelle - everyone is progressed in terms of human values. This is why we feel uplifted and satisfied by the end. 

As writers, how can we use this? When you view the story in the light of Hugo’s life values and character growth it turns out it does have an inciting incident: the death of Hugo’s father is a huge blow to Hugo's life progression. But how does that raise a key question? The obvious one is impossible – “Will Hugo get his father back?”

Because we know Hugo can’t get his father back, the key question – subconsciously but powerfully – is, “Will Hugo find himself a family?” The knock-on effect of this subconscious drive also means that the story does have a protagonist after all. The focus may switch firmly to Papa George by the end, but we are always watching out for what it all means to Hugo. When he ends up getting a family, we love the story. (Indeed, most of the characters, in a sense, 'find a family'. That is the overriding theme of the story.)

A story with a clear key question based on an 'event' (such as travelling through time) rather than through character fulfilment (finding freedom or a family) can still be a great story. However, it seems that the stories that win Oscars and Booker prizes tend to wrestle with the subtext of character growth: 'Will the protagonist overcome the odds and achieve fulfilment (whatever that means for him)? How will he do that? What form will that advancement take?' And as long as every event keeps addressing his fortunes, the story will grip and intrigue in the best ways possible. Better still, is when the character growth is intrinsically connected to the moral argument of the story. For more on this, read my Morality blog post here. 

This is quite tricky to get your head round - and not easy to explain in a small word count. If you'd like to know more, it's addressed in more depth and with the help of some interesting layman's psychology, in the early chapters of The Story Book. 

Subtext through Character Growth. The single most important factor in truly great stories.

A Story about Actors and Auditions...

Here's a little story about an actor who brought his own ideas to an audition...

I just had a fascinating weekend with Craig Hinde (Director) auditioning for the lead roles in my film HeartStoppers. Auditions are a very strange and unusual dynamic between human beings; potential stress and pressure for actors, and very difficult for us too. How can we ever be sure we got it right? Anyway, before we get to the story, here's a perspective on the events that should be interesting and useful to actors and writers alike. 

For me, the key thing I look for in an actor is that sparkle and life that will bring some ideas and creativity to the role; someone who will take it beyond my vision and explode the character into three dimensions in ways I couldn't have envisaged BUT... will limit their imagination and creativity to ideas that do not undermine the story or the director. If an actor thinks s/he has better ideas than those in the script and gets angry or goes all sulky if you won’t take on their suggestions then big problems can ensue in rehearsals, on set and in the overall vibe amongst the other actors and crew. This is a seriously difficult balance for an actor to strike - too much is not right and too little is not right - but if you can strike that balance, you'll get every role you apply for.

Actors:

If you are going for an audition, I believe you need to show that you are outgoing and dynamic and will take ownership of the character, but at the same time you must reassure the director that you will also be happy to be ‘directed’ and can accept that your ideas might need to be changed or rejected for reasons you might not fully understand from the information you have.

So here's what happened. We had a good example of what I'm saying with one of the leading male auditions. The actor had some decent experience, but had got my lead character – ‘Max’ – a bit wrong. Max begins the story without confidence. He’s got a sort of magical knack for playing Cupid, but he's not partnering people up with flare and self-belief. He’s a slightly timid character who is bullied by his boss and even trampled by the customers he is helping. He has a gift, but it kinda happens to him – he doesn’t wield his capability with pride and swagger. This actor didn’t get that. He felt that the character was smooth and cool – like ‘Hitch’ in the film of the same name - helping losers to become suave, like him, to get what they want. He therefore delivered the character very differently from my vision during the script reading. This isn't 'wrong' - it's just his interpretation. His interpretation might be brilliant and there could be times when this might be exactly what's required (in other words, this is the kind of proactive approach to a role that I like to see from an actor). But not in this case, because the story relies upon Max growing from a starting point of timidity to a summit of confidence by the resolution, so he couldn’t start with the personality the actor was giving him. All wrong. Would the actor deflate and feel devastated – or take on board what I was saying? He explained how he viewed the character - revealing another misinterpretation. He thought the kiosk in which Max works was a burger bar. All wrong. The kiosk is a matchmaking business. Burger bar? Where did that come from? Just shows how we all interpret a text differently.

But here’s the thing. I explained to the actor that he couldn't change the character to his vision of him because it would fundamentally change the dynamics required for the story to work. We then asked the actor to do the reading again – this time re-creating his version of Max to match the character my story required. He turned around and nailed it with a whole new persona. He got the job. He brought ideas and creativity, and although it led to some slightly awkward conversations, he took on board immediately the points we were making that required him to adapt. He didn’t take it personally – he didn’t see our request for change as ‘criticism’ – he was talented enough to take it on, understand it, change and develop – and he turned himself into the Max the story needed there and then in front of my very eyes. Wonderful! His attitude made it very easy to discuss the role and the character – he even put me on the spot a bit concerning Max’s backstory. I felt sure he would bring ideas that would work, and would accept a negative response if his ideas would not work. Perfect.

And his wrongness might prove to be righter than my rightness - if that makes any sense at all. I think the kiosk possibly should be a Burger Bar! I'm working with the idea and I suspect this might just solve a couple of story issues I had and bring genuine improvements to the story!  

So here's what I think we need to take on board:

Writers:
Be flexible to change. You want people to bring their ideas and creativity to your story. If you have written your story well, so that every event or character facet in that story is justified by a contribution to the bigger picture, you can assess a proposed 'improvement' or idea very accurately. If the publisher/producer/guru/actor - ANYBODY! - wants to make a change, you can say 'yes' if the change is a genuine improvement, or you can say 'no' with confidence because you know exactly what the impact on the story will be. And when you defend your story with knowledge and certainty even Mr Speilberg will back off, because it becomes so clear that you know your own story inside out. Many publishers and editors and producers suggest changes. The best thing ever - for them as well as you - is when you can say 'no', and mean it, and know exactly why the story has to stay as it is.

How to Pass Auditions:
Bring personality and vibrance to an audition and to a character. And yes, bring ideas and suggestions, but make sure the director knows you are perfectly happy for these ideas to be rejected and reassure him/her that, ultimately, you will accept direction. When you suggest an idea, say out loud: 'I'm not precious about it - just a suggestion. I understand if you think it doesn't work in the bigger picture.' They LOVE to hear suggestions, but couched in these ego-free terms. On the one hand, a director does not want to have to direct you so much he has to drag the acting out of you. On the other hand, he doesn't want to have to fight you back into line to deliver the part appropriately. He wants you to take responsibility for delivering the role and show dynamism... but listen and accept direction so he can guide your dynamism into perfect shape.

You are helping to deliver someone else's story. If you can add to the character or to the story's power, that will be welcome, but if you are going to be too insistent on your ideas being accepted, you'll either fail the audition or ruin the story!

Don't be too hard on yourself if you don't get a role. There are many, many reasons for rejection, very few of which are to do with your talent or ability.

HUGO - Story Analysis

WARNING - Contains spoilers!

Hugo - a `U` certificate (MPAA `G` in the USA) film that is as entrancing for a 7-year-old as it is for a 70-year-old - has a very different structure from anything else you might see this year. People love the film - but what do they say when you ask them what the story is about? They enthuse about the magic of the world to which the film takes us. They love the theme of clocks and clockwork. They adore the setting in Paris and the fantastic artwork and cinematography. But none of that is the story; it's all the other stuff. Let's try and focus in. 

What is the story's key question? Well, it doesn't have one. Who is the protagonist? Well, we are surely led to believe it is Hugo, and yet by the end, the protagonist is undoubtedly Papa George. What is the story about? Well, some people would say it's about the history of cinema. Some would say it's about the life of the film maker, Georges Melies. Some would say it's about Hugo's quest to finish building the automaton he started to build with his father and uncover its secrets.

So given that Hugo has such a disjointed story, how come it is so highly rated by the public? Well, for us story tellers, it simply re-enforces the key point in what makes the very best stories - hands up if you know what that is? 

Character Growth. In all great stories, at least one character, somewhere and somehow, climbs the ladder of life towards fulfilment. It is the number one factor in making a story that audiences appreciate. And despite all the difficulties with the story of Hugo, they all fade into insignificance because:

Every major character learns, develops and grows through the course of Hugo.

Think about it: Hugo goes from alone, grieving and living in fear to having a family, friends, safety and a sense of belonging.

Papa George goes from lost and forgotten to recognised for his achievements, talents and contribution to the world.

Even the (wonderful) bad guy, Gustav, goes from an injured, cruel and heartless child catcher to a happily engaged friend of one and all.

Even the supporting and secondary characters - Mama Jeanne, Tabard, Madame Emile and Frick, Isabelle - everyone (I guess with the exception of Hugo's father and Uncle, whose deaths trigger the story), are carried onwards and upwards in terms of human values and fulfilment by the events that comprise the story. This is why we feel uplifted and satisfied by the end.

Character growth. Look at any great story and I'll bet you a beer at least one character changes and grows through the telling (or fails to change and grow but the lessons to learn or the opportunity offered are evident to the audience). 

Make sure at least one of your characters changes and learns and grows, and your story will have a greater chance of being a winner.

The Story Structure Choo Choo

People seemed to rather like my somewhat academic post on Reception Theory. So let's see if we can push it any further and still get a positive response. Try getting your head around this... 

In psychological terms, there are three elements to a text:

a) The words;
b) the things the words label, indicate or signify;
c) the conceptual meaning those words generate in the mind of the individual.

Words and what they label and signify are clearly variables and therefore not useful for analysis in themselves (imagine if they are in a foreign language - the words don't signify anything and the text becomes a useless scribble. Language is simply an agreed set of conventions shared by a community). No, a text is a dead pile of paper until it is brought to life through reading and the tangible value of a text is in the conceptual clouds of meaning that it can generate in the mind of the reader. If I give you a signifier: say, TRAIN you instantly have an image in mind and structural mental concepts bolted all around it to do with carriages, stations, track, ticket inspectors, passengers, drivers, signals, timetables and innumerable other things that make the signifier TRAIN meaningful to you in the real world.

But what exactly is the '8.15 Brighton to London' train? We all know, conceptually, what it is. But tomorrow it will be a different locomotive, different passengers, different driver, different carriages. It might not even leave at 8.15. But we all know what we mean.  

This is structure. Everything you can think of (in the peculiarly human, imaginative sense of thinking) exists only in linguistic patterns and only in terms of the other mental concepts you can place around it to give it a meaningful context. And it is ALL in the mind. But - and here lieth the problem - meaning is four-dimensional. The structures change continuously over time. When we absorb a text, we read one word at a time and the structures the words generate change and grow with every new word we add. Structure changes in mind, second by second, forever.

Let's take our train a little further. Every turn of the wheels forces new clouds of smoke into the sky above the smokestack. The smoke emerges in powerful billows, builds and grows, then as the train moves on, the smoke settles and floats a while, then dissipates in the distance. The smoke and its precise shape at any given moment can only ever be a snapshot of precisely that moment on that one and only journey. As readers, our eyes run like a train along the rails, taking in a journey of words. Every word we read billows cloud-shaped structures of meaning in our minds. We read sequentially, and each word we take in forces the smoke-like structures of meaning to change and grow. Strongest at the point of immediacy; but as we read, we forget. Like the smoke that changes above the smoke stack and dissipates in the distance, we cannot remember our precise mindset when we took on a new word and its meaning to the story at a particular moment along the way; we only retain the broad essentials that we need to understand the story going forwards. We end up completing a story, and we derive learning and pleasure and new understanding from completing that journey, but we don't remember the precise shape of our understanding of the story at any particular point, because it was ever-changing and amorphous. The journey was a unique, personal one-off experience, not an object that can ever be fixed. It never had a single, unified, grand structure that defined it.

And in the same way that a snapshot of the smoke billowing from a train's stack cannot possibly tell us anything about the individual journey that is being made by that train (let alone any individual passenger's feelings on that journey), so any structure that claims to represent any story is lost like wisps of smoke into far distant skies.

Stories are mental concepts. The text is merely the track along which our eyes run. Stories are the journey-in-mind - they have a time dimension. There is never a single representative structure that defines any story because it changes over time. There couldn't possibly be a single journey-defining shape of the smoke. Ever.

Structuralists have noticed that every time they find some rails they can successfully deduce information about a journey. And they go on to presume lots of things about the signals, stations, ticket inspectors, drinks trolleys, carriages and the rest of it.  

However, the real structure of a story is not about the rails; it's not about having three acts, a turning point on page 27 and four types of conflict. Story structure is different for every reader. It is more like the smoke above the stack. Ever-changing, indefinable, unique at every single moment and never, ever available for definitive structural analysis. A journey is about the way people feel and what they experience, not about the rails on which the journey took place. 

Interview with The Creative Penn

I was recently privileged to spend some time with Joanna Penn - an author who has taken full advantage of new media to provide some of the best known author support resources on the internet.

She interviewed me one sunny day in London and then edited my ramblings very kindly to make me sound like I know what I'm talking about.

Below I have added a couple of points that aren't as clear as they could be in the video, but first, here's the video:



To add a couple of points to my answers, one of the finest ways a series writer (like John Sullivan - Only Fools and Horses or Lee Child - the Jack Reacher series) incorporates character growth into the story without his protagonist growing out of any chance of a sequel is not only to have a secondary character change and learn and grow instead of the protagonist. One of the best techniques for keeping your main character unchanged is to have him win through to the opportunity to change and grow and then turn it down. Jack Reacher does this a lot, actually, and I forgot to mention it. As part of his crime-busting adventures he might, for example, meet a wonderful woman and having become a hero in the town he could easily settle down there and become a family man with the keys to the city... but he isn't ready for that. He is still brooding and troubled, and (usually at dead of night) tears himself sadly away, slips out of town and disappears for ever... All ready to rock up in another troublespot to fight crime and climb the character growth ladder from a good low starting position all over again in the next book.

Many great stories either have a secondary character doing the changing and the growing (Marty's dad, in Back to the Future) or the lead character is offered the chance to change and grow (to the point that we in the audience recognise the opportunity) but for some reason - such as Jack Reacher's ongoing search for himself - does not take that opportunity (Robert Neville in I Am Legend has to kill himself to realise the benefit to humanity of the journey he has taken).

This is really important - the most powerful stories have a character change and grow across the telling of the story, and yet the reason sequels often fail to grip is because the protagonist has already made his life-defining journey - his character has grown. In my opinion, my first book (Ocean Boulevard) is the most powerful, because it describes a journey from a boy to a man; life defining character growth. Whilst the second book (Jumping Ships) is very funny and appears pretty popular, it's not as good as Ocean Boulevard because the protagonist (me!) can't go from a boy to a man more than once. After that, it is 'adventures of a man', and the character growth is limited.

So be careful with character growth. It's the most powerful story component... but the character, once fulfilled, won't be able to make the same growth again.

Do Writers Make Any Money...?

Many of the published authors I know - quite understandably - like to give the impression that they are fully professional, but the truth is they are earning less than £10k a year (with the occasional exception we shall come to in a minute...)

OK. So if I'm going to be brutal about this, who better to start in on than Me. I am able to say perfectly honestly that my book sales are in the thousands each month, and I am top 10 (and even number 1!) in some Amazon categories. All very impressive and worthy and yes, I'm very proud of that; BUT... at an average net profit of around 50p per book, that still doesn't amount to a decent living. As George Bush once said: Do the math: I would need to sell 100,000 books a year to get £50k before tax, and then pull off the same trick year after year after year to call it a living. I have five books out there, and yet I still take extra work as a story consultant, I give seminars, write articles and I take writing contracts for corporations in order to turn my earnings into a 'proper' living. 

I think it is important that aspiring writers understand the world they are entering - one of the very biggest disappointments in my career was when, having finally got a proper professional publishing deal that would put my books in the shops, I still couldn't 'turn pro'. I was so massively proud to get a deal, and yet I couldn't give up my day job.

As a writer, as you mooch about on Twitter and Facebook and look enviously at the blogs (and sometimes, the self-hype) of 'successful' authors, remember this: The writers making serious money are either:

      a) celebrities with a sideline in books (David Beckham, Katie Price, etc. sell more books than all of us 'real' writers put together...);

      b) writers with major film deals for their stories;  

      c) authors with at least six published books in the shops.

As a rule of thumb, if you ain't heard of someone from their writing, they ain't making a decent living from their writing...

So How Can *I* Make Money?
The VERY best way to plan realistically and to be sure to make money yourself is to plan towards c) above. Aim to write every day in order that you produce a book every year in order that you start to make a living from pure writing in 6 years. 

This might seem like a ridiculously long time, but in publisher terms, this is normal cycle times to plan against, and pushing very hard to get a deal on your one and only first novel is not going to get you far unless it is quite extraordinary. Bear in mind that even if you got a deal tomorrow, it would be around 2 years before your book hit the shelves anyway. So a five-year plan is the best timeframe to have in mind if you want to succeed. Get this: 

500 words a day, six days a week will give you back a 100,000 word book in 8 months. Polish and edit for four months == a book a year. Now, that's manageable, isn't it?! 

Fire and Forget
It also helps enormously if you don't sit at home watching the letterbox. Fire and forget, is my motto. In other words, remember How to Be a Writer in Three Simple Steps: 

1) Write the best stuff you can. 
2) Send it off, and forget it; 
3) Go to 1. 

Forget the submission. Get on with the next one. Rejected or accepted, you have a lot of work to do, so move on and keep busy. Expect rejection (there WILL be rejection...) and be pleasantly surprised when (not if...) you get something other than rejection. 

Writing is very much a 'more haste, less speed' world, but you can't get anywhere without product, and if you work hard,you increase your chances of overall success with every year that passes. And stick to a genre! Become known in the one field. That might not be something you want to do, but if you want commercial success, you have to stay within a genre (See my blog post on the critical importance of Genre HERE).

The writers I know who get success are highly professional. They are highly productive. They hit one genre. They don't daydream about being a writer - they get stuck in and do it. They are single-minded and they work very hard at getting product out there.  Does this describe YOU?! 

Masochist: "Whip Me!" Sadist: "No!"

In case it's not obvious from the title, this blog is about Discipline. I regularly catch writers out at my seminars. They have fantastic 'plans', but not nearly enough writing is actually going on. Lots of thinking, not a lot of doing.
"Let me guess," I say. "You're planning a year out, right? And you're going to use it to write a complete work."
The year out is the top answer, or a carefully planned overseas retreat somewhere sunny, or a five-year plan to a career change that will allow them to turn pro... They are surprised that I know their plans, but are also genuinely yearning for the year to come when they can go full-time, act like a professional and really immerse themselves in their novel.

Well, if you are in this space, awaiting some perfect world in which you will write soulfully and immersively and professionally, I have news for you...

9 out of 10 of the people who work like this won't ever get that year out. The 1 in 10 who do will be hugely shocked to find that, when given the time to write full-time, they actually can't manage more than around 4 hours a day anyway. The fact is, you can't deliver effectively for more than this; not every day. Most pro writers deliver an average of around 2000 words a day, and guess what... you can do that now in your daily life. Make time - today - and tomorrow - and the next day - and just do it. Don't wait for the mythical year off. Don't wait for the retreat. Don't dream it. Do it. Now.

When I had an office job, I used to get up at 5.30am and write for 1.5 hours. Then another half-hour on the train and another at lunchtime, and still did right by my employer (sort of...) and by my family in the evening. Steven King said this: 'Talent is as cheap as table salt. The difference between the talented and the successful is the work they are prepared to put in.' Do you want to be successful - or are you merely talented?

Whatever it takes, if you're serious, you must write every day. 2000 words a day can bring you a substantial book - 100,000 words - in 50 days. Let's say you can do half that - no, half it again - 500 words a day. You do 500 words every day - that's a single page of A4 every day - you'll have a 100,000 word book in under 7 months. Polish it and edit it and rewrite it - that's a book a year, no problem at all...

Discipline, folks. If you have talent, productivity is the secret of success.

David

Character and Plot - One and The Same Thing..?

Due entirely to the lovely words written about me by Jenny Long in this month's Writing Magazine letters page (thank you, Jenny, if you read this...), I would like to share with you the magazine article she was so pleased with in the hope that it causes uncontrollable love for me in you too. Feel free - don't be shy. I have an unlimited capacity for love, particularly for ladies who write to magazines to tell them how wonderful I am, so you go for it. If that's the way you feel, you let it all out. Treat yourself. I won't complain. :-)

Here we go then. A cut down version of the full article.

If you are like me, you are unlikely to understand the next two paragraphs, but by the end of this article we will visit them again and hopefully you will understand them and your life will be all the richer for it and you will love me. Here we go, then:
 

Plot is character, and character is plot, because as soon as a character takes a meaningful action, his action is driving your plot (whether you like it or not). Conversely, as soon as an event happens which elicits a meaningful reaction from your character, then his true character is developing in the eyes of the audience (whether you like it or not).

Note that it is not the event which reveals a player’s character, but his reaction to the event. The action he takes defines his character. Similarly, it is not the event which drives the plot (as you might expect), but the action taken by the character that defines the event, and drives the plot.

Confused? Let’s step through some explanation, and then come back to these paragraphs at the end and see if we have got anywhere.

Action without character

Let’s look at what happens if we separate plot from character. There are three levels of action without character, each with increasing subtlety.

1.       At the blatant end, we have an event with no character involvement whatsoever. Lightning strikes a tree in a remote forest. So what? It’s not a story because no reaction is required of an emotional protagonist. This is not a story. This is a screensaver.

2.       In the middle ground, we have an ‘emotionally detached’ action. If you watch the news and see that someone was killed in New York, the event is meaningless because you are not emotionally connected with the individuals on the news.

If we increase the known character, we increase the emotion: say we find out that John Lennon has been shot in New York. This is a person we ‘know’; we have been through his Act l and Act ll, and now relate to the tragedy at climax. Look at the emotion on the faces of the friends and relatives of the deceased in New York as they experience the same death, but on a different level of emotional involvement.

3.       The most subtle example of action without character actually happens rather a lot in stories that fail to grip. A character takes an action, but it is not a meaningful action, because there is no dilemma riding on his decision to act. If the character is, say, Luke Skywalker, we know he will ‘decide’ to kill the next stormtrooper to come round the corner, and the one after that, and the one after that. Sure, his life is under threat, but that just serves to make his decision to kill even more obvious. His decisions involve no dilemma, so we learn nothing about his true character. However, if the next representative of the Dark Side to come round the corner is also... his father, suddenly he has meaningful decisions and difficult choices with severe consequences Can he kill his father? Can he risk not killing his father? Now his decision is meaningful... and we in the audience cannot move until we know what he is going to do...

Character without Action

From the opposite end of the argument, let’s say we are shown a man. So what? Until he does something, we don’t know anything about him. Let’s dress him up as a policeman. OK, so now we have some characteristics as our brains overlay stereotypical presumptions about what makes up ‘Policemen’, but beware: this is still an individual without character.

Characteristics are just the wrapping. We don’t know if this person is courageous, extrovert, alcoholic, cowardly or a good father. We don’t even know if he is a criminal or not! Only his actions can reveal these things. When he is faced with a difficult decision - say, to risk his own life to save someone else’s, that is when we will find out about his true character. What he does will define him. And guess what: what he does – the actions he takes - instantly becomes the plot (whether you like it or not).

A player’s character is defined only by his meaningful actions

                               

The plot is defined only by the actions taken by the players

Writers are taught to define their characters in isolation. They also have a plot they have mapped out to the finest detail. They then find that the way the character wants to behave, if he’s true to himself, is not helpful towards a plot which needs a different behaviour to drive it believably. The story is compromised from the outset because the character is not credible in taking the actions the plot demands.

Considering either plot or character in isolation from the other will trip you up, because whichever you consider will drive the other whether you like it or not. The practical point is that we effectively have to develop both plot and character at the same time and as the same thing. Join them together. Don’t think about ‘plot’ and ‘character’. Think about the two as one story made of Character Behaviours.

Stories are about character behaviours. What characters do is who they are and what characters do is what happens.

When your writing has this unity of character and plot, your stories will burst into a third dimension of power that comes from consummating their relationship. And you’ll know it and feel it when it happens, and you’ll never write without it again. So, do those first two paragraphs make sense now?! I do hope so!

David

The Kings Speech - Why is this such a Great Bad Movie?

More people have asked me about The King’s Speech than any other this last year or two (that and Benjamin bloomin’ Button). Why do some people love it and some people hate it? We all know it is a successful film, but where lies the power in the story, and why does it polarise opinion to such an extreme? Here’s why:  

The King’s Speech (2010) is a character drama, based on fact, with a story driven by the kind of subtext that audiences find most powerful: character growth and learning. If a character changes and learns and grows through his or her experiences through a story (or is offered the chance to change and grow but fails), these tend to be the stories that audiences rate most highly. Protagonist ‘Bertie’ takes such a journey of development, from a stuttering prince, lacking in confidence and dreading the idea that he might ever be required to take over the throne, to managing his speech impediment, becoming ‘his own man’, able to give speeches and strong enough to take on the responsibilities of monarchy with confidence and authority. The story’s major focus on character growth and learning leaves The King’s Speech well placed to become a classic. However...

...despite this massive positive, on the negative side, the story is low or skewed on most of the other forms of subtext that would be required for it to be extraordinary. There is, for example, a large bias towards revelation subtext over privilege (i.e., most storylines involve information being kept back from the audience and revealed at the end of the story event (revelation) rather than ‘privileged’ information being given to the audience and kept back from a character). Most great stories have a broad equality between these two fundamental forms, or a bias towards privilege if anything. The King’s Speech has a bias towards revelation, one or two examples of which would have been much more powerful in privilege and would have given the overall story more power and balance.

For example, the speech therapist, Logue, is not properly educated or qualified for the role he takes on. King George refers to him as ‘Doctor Logue’ and Logue does nothing to correct this misinformation. We in the audience also assume he is a doctor and qualified speech therapist, so when he is uncovered, the revelation comes for us at the same time as it does for The King. This subterfuge would have been far more powerful if the audience been given privileged knowledge that Logue was deceiving the king throughout, a continuous subtext would have been in place for a large proportion of the story, manifested in the form of a key question for the audience: ‘what will happen when The King finds out?’ This would also have introduced an element of antagonism to the key relationship, again a highly important factor that is largely missing. There is no out-and-out ‘bad guy’, and the main relationship is far too friendly and respectful to be as intriguing as it could so easily have been.

There is almost no subtext through subplot. What subplot there is - principally that surrounding the love life of Bertie’s brother, Edward, is not developed or used dramatically in itself (i.e., there is no effective storyline concerning the arc of Edward and Mrs Simpson), and therefore this subplot does not prove an effective facilitator for subtext in the main storyline. (It is effective in providing a key turning point - Edward`s relationship with Mrs Simpson was the reason ‘Bertie’ had to become king - but the opportunity this relationship offered was not used to its optimum in story terms.) 

Other forms of subtext through, for example, dialogue, action, implication, promise, metaphor and question are not used to any great extent at all. The story lives and breathes only through the character growth and learning of Bertie.

Conflict and Antagonism is similarly narrow in depth and presence. Of the four types of conflict (internal, relationship, institutional, external), only one is genuinely deployed - internal conflict - the conflict between Bertie and his own internal daemons. This is clearly fine, and defines the story, but a little restrictive in a 2 hour film. There is very little relationship conflict, given the nature of the story - no out-and-out antagonist to speak of - and great opportunity is missed at the institutional level, given that we are talking about the Royal Family here, and the rules and regulations to which they are subject. There is also almost no external/coincidental conflict. It is extremely unusual for a successful story to have so little conflict beyond the main driver, and almost unheard of for there to be so little relationship conflict.

The King’s Speech is like the most boring boxer you’ve ever seen... but with the most amazing single punch. If he lands it, we have a spectacular knockout. If he doesn’t, it’s desperately dull. The King’s Speech manages to land a big enough punch to be a winner, and because that punch lands in the area of Character Growth and Learning, this is a film that will stand the test of time. It is also interesting to note that, because much of the revelation subtext turns to privilege on all but the first viewing of the film, this is a film that gets better with subsequent viewings.

If you are a writer reading this, make a note to self on just how important character growth and learning is to a story. All the greatest stories have it, and without it, The King’s Speech would be absolutely nowhere.

We have only really scratched the surface here in analysis terms. However, in the next year or two, as part of my PhD, I am going to have to undertake deep subtextual analysis of film stories like this and will publish the full documents here. Keep hanging out with me and I'll try to use this work to explain how Subtext totally defines the power, balance and grip of story! 

David