Story-Writing

As the new year begins, people make goals: to reduce waistlines, to be disciplined, to succeed, to self-cultivate - and just, as my friend would say, to do better. Be better. Done and done.

Sure. But I want to add a question to this year's list of intentions, a question I want to understand and answer as fully as I can in the months ahead.

The question's just a little thing: What is Story?

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'Story' itself has different meanings. The simplest is, that a story is a narrative. Story is a unit of media that has a beginning, middle, end, credits. That's it.

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The second meaning is little more complex, but, in essence can be defined as a the aspect of media having human appeal, based primarily on conflict. Conflict can be big or small, Hungry Caterpillar’s endless desire or King Lear's rejection by his favorite daughter.

The human-appeal aspect of Story is when a story presents human conflict and desire, and suggests, implicitly or explicitly, a possibility of resolution.

The human-appeal aspect of story-telling is a bit of an x-factor. It is the answer to the question, Why should watch/read/listen-to this? For a good story experience, we empathize with the subjects of a story, and we resonate with the story in certain specific ways. Human-appeal can be basic and universal empathy (I cared for Frodo and the hobbits, as well as a few other million people around the world), but it can also be connected to the presentation of specific identities, specific conditions, and specific cultural moments. A story can gain special power and resonance if it tells the story of a group or condition that has not gotten much airtime in culture at large. Below, I talk about the film The Master. I connected to the film strongly, not because I was a WWII vet or that my life resembles the life of the main character in any external way, but the movie felt to me to be about certain conflicts of being an man, and maybe more specifically, an american man. I felt the story was telling a story about *me* that hadn't been told before.

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Two examples of stories with both narrative and human-appeal: There is a problem (A plague in Thebes; A handsome Lothario who can't form an emotional relationship with a woman [Classic Greek fun, rom-com trope, respectively]), an exploration of the problem through the character (The king of Thebes investigates; The Lothario tries his calculated seduction tricks on a woman he respects and crushes on), a crisis point (The king learns the cause of the plague - himself; The ladykiller loses the woman to a rival), and a resolution (The king punishes himself to save Thebes; The man learns how to open up to a woman and be himself).

Both these stories are clearly narrative, and both have pretty strong human-appeal. Oedipus Rex has been reread and re-enacted for over two millennia, and whatever cliche Romantic comedy I described made millions of dollars in the box office last week.

Sometimes, though, a piece's narrative is weak, despite it's human-appeal being great, and sometimes the narrative and writing craft is great, but the human-appeal is thin.

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Different media effect story. Highly commercial film must have excellent narrative (a lot happens). Art films can be baggy - an exploration of conflict, but without a narrative sense of direction, or promise of resolution. Novels also have looser plot structure, and the lens of the novelist is one of the critical features (perspective, essays, language.)

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Let's look at some examples.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World would be a great example of a movie whose narrative and writing are great, and who's story (human-appeal) is thin. The narrative: boy falls in love with girl, boy must defeat who 7 evil exes in order to be with her, boy does so. The film is a blend of video game, manga, and indie culture humor. The movie is great (unless you just don't like it) and offers up some a little meat for interpretation and discussion. The story, though, hinges on, subsists on, Scott's infatuation with a girl, and her reciprocated interest in him. This is not drawn out in any interesting or relatable way. She's stylish and hot. He's a dork. She goes on a date with him, and that's that. She takes him to bed, despite his utter un-smoothness, and suddenly, the conflict is, Scott can 'win' the girl if he can beat her seven evil exes. It is the barest kind of outlining of boy-meets-girl, because both we don't know why she would want him, and, besides her hotness, we have no idea why he would care so much about her as to face down the overwhelming obstacles. So, the heart of the story is weak. But this movie doesn't need a heart, because this movie isn't the kind of story-creature that needs a heart. It is a sugary, funny, narrative romp.*

*(I also love the movie - and the books they're based on - on other grounds. I won't get into them here, but, in short, no book or movie I know has paid homage and played with video games of the late eighties and early nineties. Video games, being a bastardized, insipid medium they are considered, are sent at the little boys' table of culture, and don't get much air time in the general cultural discussion, despite the fact that many of us who grew up playing them are adults, and many of those games were early and exciting experiences of story. Unique cultural appeal there.)

The P.T. Anderson film The Master has a great story in terms of conflict and creative human appeal, but a slack narrative. The film has good plot-flow up until the mid-point, when Freddie verbally breaks with the Master, but then, afterward, is still part of the group, as if the break hadn't happened, and so things are generally murky to the audience from then on, and then, at the climax, Freddie does finally break with the Master.

One could criticize the narrative flow, then - but the Story and conflict is great, drawn on at multiple levels, from intimate personal break-down to national trauma.

WW2 is the set-up, and Freddie Quill is our traumatized, tortured hero. We seem him as socially incapable, acting out through sex and drink. He is an animal, who does not feel constrained by societal rules, and who is motivated by pleasure and confused anger. He is destructive, but sincere. He is a wild man without a higher ideal to strive for or check himself against. Enter Lancaster Dodd upon his illuminated, loving, party boat, and Freddie encounters a number of things: a group of supportive people not put off by his strangeness, a charismatic man who loves Freddie, and can match him, if not wield authority over him, and a new age cult. Conflict: the lonely, feral man. The loving, supportive cult, and the man who leads it who has his followers call him 'Master.' How does Freddie negotiate this choice, misery and integrity on one side, acceptance and submission to a fraud on the other? How does the Self negotiate such a proposition?

The end of the movie, for all its psychological complexity and sadness, if not tragedy, made me the happiest I'd been at the movie in a long time. The chemical high lasted for the next day. My happiness was not a about happy ending, which there wasn't - it was about hearing the story I didn't know I needed to see, and having the experience of a character's/our trauma transformed into something different, and something shared.