No Stone Left Unturned

SELECTING THE DETAILS

Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. -Charles Mingus

.
SAYING MORE WITH LESS

Real life is far more complex than any story ever written.

During even the most mundane events, if I were to fully record what actually happens, there wouldn’t be enough room in any book to hold all of the characters, viewpoints, and memories — and nobody would want to experience this mountain of information in a story even if I could somehow capture and present every detail exactly as it happened.

For this reason, a story must be selective.

Instead of portraying every character who might possibly occupy a setting, the writer picks out a representative few. Instead of showing everything that could actually happen in a real-life situation, the writer trims events to just a handful representative scenes.

A full-length motion picture screenplay contains about as much material as a 70-page paperback novella and lasts on-screen about two hours. A 300-page novel can be read comfortably in a weekend and a computer game can be played in a week or two — and yet we live our lives on this Earth for decades by comparison and meet hundreds of people each year.

How can I possibly create more than the vaguest story in just seventy pages? …or three hundred pages? Or even a gigabyte of graphics, sound, and text on my computer disk?

We do this by selecting the details that matter to the story and use them in ways that say more with less.

And we leave out everything else.

.
MOTIF

Long ago playwrights discovered how people in the audience dislike extraneous characters — for example, a minor character who makes a splashy entrance, says or does something memorable, then vanishes without explanation. During the remainder of the entire play the audience will track this character in their inventory of story elements, and when the character fails to return, the audience feels a sense of wasted effort.

The same can be said for an extraneous event left unresolved in some noticeable way. The audience will keep events in mind as they follow the story — assigning them a measure of significance as they wait for a follow up event. They assume that everything in a story is there for a reason and if the event is left unresolved, this also leaves the audience feeling a sense of wasted effort.

This would not happen except that writers are constantly tempted to replicate real life, and nothing is more realistic than leaving your characters and events hanging.

Isn’t that a worthy objective?

Actually, no, because real life is far too unresolved and messy, and once a story begins, the audience wants a story that comes to a point — not a home movie that meanders all over the place full of distractions and dead ends. In a story, characters and events play their roles as completely as the space of the story allows, then clearly exit from the stage. Instead of realism, the writer must focus on efficient use of the elements selected – applying these to great effect to make a point, and be done with it.

Yet no matter how well we introduce and remove characters or how clearly we develop and resolve each scene, we still can’t tell a story with characters that are constantly doing new and unique things, with all the necessary explanations involved — nor can events happen only once, with each event completely different with its own needs for introduction and resolution. That takes too long, is too complicated, and simply isn’t how storytelling is done.

Since the dawn of storytelling, playwrights and other artists have instead developed a shortcut of recurring themes, symbols, and mannerisms — all of which can be introduced at length, then reused without reintroduction as the story unfolds.

This sort of shorthand is called a motif [mow-TEEF]. And it is the only way we can hope to fit everything into a story without driving the audience nuts.

Early in Episode 28 of the original Star Trek series we see how Spock must cover his Vulcan ears to avoid suspicion from 1930s New Yorkers (as though anyone there might have noticed!). As the story unfolds, he also is wearing his hat to remind us of how strangely out-of-place these events are for the characters. Nothing more is said about the hat. It’s just there making the point over and over. We also see how Sulu is injured by a flash of electrical sparks — and see this again when Spock’s memory machine fails. And we see how Spock and Kirk steal clothes out of desperation just just as they later “borrow” tools for the same reason.

Once a motif is set, it can be reused like a familiar sequence of notes in a symphony, or a repeating pattern of colors in a painting, or a simple gesture from a character associated with everything else that has ever happen when we’ve seen that same gesture – like how McCoy is always chewing his thumbnail when nervous. And through this device more can be said with less because the writer can now tell the story using fewer unique pieces, while the audience can absorb the story without having track so many loose elements that never show up again.

Here are some other shorthand techniques…

.
ALLUSION and GENRE

Through the use of motif we can greatly reduce the complexity of a story, yet even with this shorthand of recurring elements there is still a limit to how many new elements can be introduced during any one story.

What if the writer could borrow established motifs by just assuming that the audience has already experienced these in other stories?

This is exactly what happens all the time.

By borrowing from a familiar story, the writer only needs to introduce those elements that are truly new and unique to his/her own story. For example, instead of showing all the details associated with traveling by airplane, perhaps the character is only shown leaving the airport in a cab — because we’ve all seen other stories showing us what air travel might have looked like in that time in history. Or when a space ship goes into “hyperspace” — we have don’t need to have this explained because Star Trek and Star Wars have made this a standard solution for faster-than-light travel.

When these shortcuts are used, the writer is mining a treasure trove of established ideas and ways of saying things by tapping into a structure we call genre [ZHON-ra].

As a small example, observe my parenthetical remark about Spock’s ears and New Yorkers in the previous section above. In this I allude strongly to the big joke in Men in Black where aliens are required to stay in New York City because of how this is the one place where nobody would notice. And in this same way, writers borrow constantly from other stories.

The look, the feel, the colors, the sounds — everything can be borrowed. And when this happens –as it should– stories begin to take on a somewhat familiar flavor, thus easing the decoding chore of the audience and freeing the writer to develop the details that are unique to this particular story.

In the end, borrowing story elements results in a type of story — like a western, or science fiction, or historical drama, or comedy, or fantasy, and as we apply these labels we are assigning the story to an established genre — ready to borrow all the shortcut references of the genre.

There is nothing sacred about genre and there is nothing about it that keeps the writer from exploring new territory. It is only serves a practical function. In fact, new genres are are evolving all the time. Men in Black, for example, breaks new ground as a blend of two genres — science fiction and situational comedy, whereas before this film almost all science fiction was serious drama, and almost all comedy stuck to more mundane events. Computer games have genres, too, and over time the treasure trove of available ideas has grown from “Pong” and “Pac Man” to games about war, skateboarding, car racing, football, and a host of others including sneaking around old castles to steal from rich guys.

.
COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

Going all the way back to the beginning of storytelling, every story has fallen into two basic genres — comedy and tragedy. In fact, the whole happy-face sad-face motif on playbills originates with the ancient Greeks who made a big point of this distinction. A tragedy relieves rising tension by allowing the protagonist to survive each conflict with some hope of continuing the battle. Whereas a comedy relieves rising tension by poking fun.

Many storytellers have discovered how a slight blending of both techniques sometimes works even better, such as in Stars Wars where all kinds of crazy thing are getting said in the heat of battle — especially when Han Solo is around. Yet ultimately the Star Wars series is a tragedy because of how Luke finally saves his father only to have him die soon afterwords.

The groundbreaking TV series MASH, on the other hand is basically a comedy which often includes serious material (and sometimes whole episodes without a laugh track) in order to keep the overall story from turning into a melodramatic farce.

Tragedy is used inside a comedy to keep it from getting too light, just as comedy is used inside a tragedy to keep it from getting too heavy. But no story should ever completely cross the boundary between comedy and tragedy once it gets rolling — certainly never after the midpoint crisis. Otherwise the audience will not know if they should be laughing or crying …taking the story as a joke, or taking it seriously.

.
FORESHADOWING

Every important story element should be shown early in the story in order to prepare the audience for critical scenes which come later — to be used when the pace has picked up and there is no longer any time left to explain anything. Foreshadowing is a special use of motifs just for this purpose.

The whole idea of foreshadowing rests on what I’ve been saying about the prologue — the audience has no idea what anything means near the beginning of a story. Anything can happen early and still not say too much. Motifs used as foreshadowing lay in all of the critical story elements early in order to plant these ideas firmly for later use.

Early in Episode 28 of the original Star Trek series we see several foreshadowing events… Spock berates himself for failing to record history as it flashes through the time machine annulus. Kirk dives for McCoy as McCoy runs into the portal, hitting the deck hard with is arms wrapped around thin air. Kirk and Spock escape from a New York City cop with Kirk saying, “lets get out of here!” Of course these three elements seem fairly ordinary — until we see how Spock’s recording is central to their success… Or how the next time Kirk grabs for McCoy he keeps McCoy from saving Edith Keeler… Or just after escaping from their trap in time that Kirk once again talks about leaving, but this time adds the “h” word for good measure (which almost kept the episode from airing in 1967).

The other day I saw the best example yet of foreshadowing on the DVD jacket for the movie Planet of the Apes. Here, painted in exquisite detail, is the final climatic semi-mind-blowing scene of the whole movie — but without knowing the story, nothing is spoiled and instead the image is simply pre-planted for maximum impact once the truth is finally revealed on-screen.

Consider everything that will happen at critical moments in your story and make sure that it has already happened in some other way beforehand. By doing this the audience is prepared to recognize these images immediately for what they are and what they mean. Or as the pros say — “plant it it early and plant it often!”

And if something is planeted that isn’t use later – get rid of it.

.
CHARACTER FOIBLES

Characters are the most complicated elements of any story, which means that considerable attention needs to be paid when developing motifs for everyone in the story. Dialogue is particularly troublesome, because characters, like real people, could very well say just about anything at any time. But a character can’t do this without totally confusing the audience.

Just like how events are recycled, characters need to reuse various mannerisms and catch phrases. For example, Han Solo has a bad feeling about a lot of things — and we get what he means without saying anything else. C3-P0 shuffles along and gets flustered in much the same way throughout every Star Wars movie, and notice how much mileage George Lucas gets out of R2-D2′s various whistles and techno-squeeks.

Character mannerisms and catch-phrases take the place of extended dialog, allowing the dialog to focus more on the overt events of the story. This reveals clues to the underlying emotional state of the characters, yet only if the audience understands exactly what the mannerisms mean. So a major task of live actors is to present these mannerisms in an authentic way.  Some of this can be written ahead of time – most needs to be invented later during detailed writing to say what can’t be said easily any other way. There are unclear rules for non-verbal communication, so this is a matter of trial and error to some extent.

One think to keep in mind is not to overuse these sorts of shortcuts, or stick to something that is cool, but really could be said better with actions and more detailed dialog. Sometime we know a character well, and the mannerisms flow easily. Other times, a character isn’t a creature of many mannerisms – such as Spock, who is very good at withholding his emotions, and where his mannerism are shown as out of the ordinary, rather than a shortcut for recognizable reactions.

In short – if a character can reveal something about themselves without saying anything – that’s usually the better way to go, and recognizable quirks and gestures is one way to do this.

.
CARVING UP YOUR CHARACTERS

One trick screenwriters use to compres a story is inventing just a handful of characters, then slicing them into several people at different ages (or even different genders). The boy, the man, the grandfather, and the cousin can sometimes all be the same basic character seen in various forms at differnet stages in their life. And by doing this, the common elements of these character-sets can bring about a quick sense of familiarity — saving time  otherwise wasted on introducing a bunch of similar players. This is such a powerful tool that most writers won’t tell you about it — nothing beats a great character more than having the same character in many forms. Is not Obi-Wan Kenobi really just an older version of Luke Skywalker? (Or George Lucas, for that matter.)

Of course these sub-characters take different paths and tend to evolve into unique people, but only insofar as they need to. In every other way they can be nearly the same, and by doing this the writer removes extreneous differences form the story — saving precious space and time to say what is truly different, and unique. There simply is no time for most things to happen in different ways when they could just as easily happen in the same way many times — so why not create a few really interesting characters that you slice up and reuse everywhere?

.
OTHER SHORT-HANDS

Creating motifs can take any form. In Men in Black we see bugs everywhere because the antagonist is a bug. In Stars Wars the light sabers of the Jedi say so much about battle and the minimal use of force to achieve spectacular ends. In Apollo 13, Jim Lovell watches the Moon drifting by the window of his crippled command module and without saying a word we know what this means — that he will never get to walk there. In ET, the plant is dying, then is suddenly revived — and we now know that the Alien is alive again.

Writing stories is very much the process of creating these motifs — the basic elements of the story — then using and reusing them to build what happens from the more or less standard-shaped lego blocks.

Much can be said with the smallest of these details once we know what they mean. As you begin to see possibilities for motifs in your own story, take a moment to consider everything about each element that seems important and how it might be reused from beginning to end.

In Apollo 13, for example, the story begins with the real-life launch-pad fire of Apollo 1 where three American astronauts are incinerated, and as the story unfolds we see how the motif of this fire shows up at every major turning point in the movie. The fire comes up in the beginning with the Apollo 1 pad disaster …it comes up again when Jim Lovell explains the risks to his family before his mission It comes up during problems with their training It comes up at the launch of the massive Saturn 5 rocket It come up one more time when their service module explodes …and finally, it comes up during the climactic sequence as the crew reenters the Earth’s atmosphere like a human-occupied fireball with no clear idea if they are on-course or doomed to a fiery death themselves.

Consider every detail to see how you might reuse each to underline similar events or moods or things about to happen. Your story will say far more with far less, and leave your audience much more satisfied with the results.

.
Next Time: Re-Writing — What we Really Do!

Table of Contents