The Science of Story

Encouragement Through Rejection

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:08:00 +0000

So I'm going to tell you something you DIDN'T know about rejection, which will have you raise your eyebrows and maybe - just maybe - look at yourself and your writing a little differently.

First, though, let's just set out the practical things you should know about rejection, then I will try to send your eyebrows up... So here we go: Firstly, we have to face it...

1) Rejection is inevitable. It comes with the job. Show me a successful writer who never got rejected, I'll show you a liar. Nobody likes it, but you do need to accept it and learn to live with it.

2) Rejection is rarely a reflection of your ability. Most of the time, there's a practical, business reason behind rejection. For example, if an publisher/agent can manage 10 writers, once they have ten, they reject everything else until there's some bandwidth. And they have to choose carefully what to do with that limited bandwidth, or they go out of business. Should an agent choose to work on, e.g., David Beckham's new book, or some truly brilliant story by an unknown? Sad but true - the certain money is in the one who isn't even a writer! So you don't even get read; you get rejected. The most common reason for rejection is that the genre of the submission doesn't match the genre of the publisher. Instant rejection. Nothing to do with the merits of your writing. So don't feel hurt personally. It's not usually an ego thing. Learn the lesson (if there is one), turn it around, and send it out again.

3) Rejection makes acceptance soooo much sweeter when it comes. I have my handful of deals, and when I look at the hangar full of rejection letters it took to get there, it makes me smile. And really proud of myself for hanging in there. Turn it on its head. If someone said to you: 'I'll give you a deal if you accept 100 rejections first.' You'd take that, right? Well, that's kind of how it works. Use every rejection to make yourself more determined than ever. Quality DOES win out. You know if you're good. Keep going. Dig deep. Go again. Bank those rejections, and crank up the sweetness of the deal when it comes...

4) Rejection is easier to take if you have already moved on. Get immersed in your next story and get excited by that, and any rejection of previous work is much easier to take. Agents and publishers take AGES getting back... so just fire and forget. Don't sit by the letterbox wringing your hands - people who do that are CRUSHED by those inevitable rejections. Don't phone them up and bug them. move on! Get the next one rolling! If you're going to be professional, you will need more stuff, and now is the time to write it whilst you have time!

Eyebrows UP!
OK. Here's the surprise one. When I work with writers who are taking years and years to finish a story, it sometimes becomes apparent that it's not their artistic nature or perfectionist tendencies that are the issue... it's the fear of Judgement Day. Before you finish something, it's easy to go to parties and flick your hair and say, 'oh, yes, I'm a writer, don't you know...' and discuss your story and the life of a writer; and people are impressed and life is pleasant. But of course, life only stays impressive and pleasant while the story remains unfinished. The day you say you've finished, it's up for evaluation... and the possibility of various forms of rejection. I'd say it's even harder for an aspiring writer, because the evaluation comes primarily from family and friends... and they need to be ignored, because unless they say something that totally resonates with your own self-criticism, it's not helpful. Writing for a 'public' who don't know you except through your writing, is different. Write for yourself. Be your own critic - it's YOUR story, and it's right when you say it is, not your mum or boyfriend (what do they know?!). Send it to agents and industry people, and accept what they say. You don't need to 'work with' your friends and family at all.

So is this you? Aspiring writers, particularly those with no deadlines, can take decades and still never finish, because they are so scared it isn't good enough. But you must never forget...

...the most important thing: it's YOUR story. If YOU say it's right, then it's right. Other people will have their views - including agents and publishers and producers - but you can't bend yourself to every opinion that arrives, and you can't force the commercial process. So put on your rhino skin, take the bull by the horns, bite the bullet, grasp the nettle, and adopt the proven, simple and powerful three steps to success John (Only Fools and Horses) Sullivan gave me:

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

If you think about it, it's all you CAN do. And it's all that every successful writer has ever done. So what are you doing reading this?! Get off the internet and get your work out there!

For more on the publishing process, rejection, story quality and the full conversations with John Sullivan and with publishing head, Stewart Ferris, check out The Story Book, which has full details on How to Do Step 1) !

Character Growth (When You Don't Want Your Characters to Grow)

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:46:00 +0000

If you follow my work, you will know that it is an attribute of the very finest stories - the ones that win Oscars, BAFTAs, Booker prizes and the like - that a character changes and learns and grows across the course of a story. (For more detail on this, read my Character Growth Blog .)

However, what if you don't want your characters to grow? What if you need them to stay exactly as they are in order to write a sequel? How can we use the power of character growth, but not actually allow any character growth?

John Sullivan told me, in discussion about his wonderful series, Only Fools and Horses, that the last thing he needed was character growth, because when writing a series across years and dozens of episodes, character growth can trap the characters against a ceiling. They can only grow so far, then they become fulfilled. They have undergone the change that made them so interesting, and have nowhere else to go.

That is why a truly great story - great because it does feature character growth - is often followed by a poor sequel. The protagonist has already made his life journey, is fulfilled and has learned his life lessons, so there is no room for further growth in the sequel, so the second story disappoints.

Now, John made a big deal of being 'uneducated' in 'how to write', and had, shall we say, a significant distrust of story theory (which made our conversations somewhat interesting...), but it didn't stop him from being brilliant. He played on character growth with every episode of Only Fools and Horses, without letting his characters actually grow. He played on the pathos of failing to grow by having Del Boy and Rodney offered growth... but fail to improve themselves, and despite their efforts and the golden opportunities offered, they endlessly fell back down life’s ladder. This was brilliant story-telling, because it gave us, in the audience, a chance to see the decisions they should take to advance themselves (so in this sense there was character growth in the story), but their failure to learn and grow was both hilarious and frustrating... and allowed them to slide back down to square one so the beginning of the next episode could always start with a clean slate.

John would also use forms of character growth that didn't fundamentally change the character of the character, if you see what I mean. So, for example, Del Boy having a baby was an emotional plot line that would be considered as a form of character growth, but still meant he could be precisely the same Del Boy at the beginning of the following week without any change to his fundamental character.

I had a similar conversation with Lee Child. For his Jack Reacher novels, the eponymous protagonist had to end up exactly where he started if Lee was to produce another book to the same successful recipe (as he has done every single year for the last 17 years). Interestingly - given the success of his series - like John Sullivan, Lee often used character growth without allowing Jack Reacher ultimately to grow. Jack Reacher would begin the story as a drifter, wandering into a new town. During the course of a story that has him work for good as a vigilante against the corrupt and the bullies, he would perhaps find a girl, fall in love, become integrated into a community, be a force for good... but by the end, he would walk away from all this good stuff that might fulfil him. He’d tear it all up, spirit himself away in dead of night, and hit the road, to drift on to the next town. It’s just the way he is... but this hugely convenient character flaw that had him dismantle all that lovely character growth also allowed him to return to the same starting point as he drifts into a new town for his next adventure.

The other fine dynamic for using character growth but avoiding protagonist change is to allow a character other than the protagonist to learn a lesson and to grow. Look no further than my old favourite, Back to the Future, in which the protagonist, Marty McFly, doesn't grow at all. The character growth that gives the story all its amazing power comes from Marty's father - George McFly, who learns to be assertive - and changes his life fortunes to the positive as a result. But Marty remains the same. Imagine trying to continue George McFly's adventures into the sequel from that end-point. That would be really, really difficult, because he's ended this adventure having grown and become fulfilled. His story has been told, and there's no more that can be satisfactorily told. His journey to fulfilment is complete. That's why they moved on to the next generation and to a whole new character (Marty's son) to have someone they could advance up life's ladder.

In all the Jack Reacher novels, Jack stays the same, but the bad guys learn some very serious lessons, and although their progress is generally negative - leading to jail or the grave - this is still a form of character growth - that is why death is such a regular feature of stories even though it is surprisingly rare in our real lives. In most superhero and detective stories it's the bad guys that do the growing - forced down the ladder of life by the lessons they learn.

How can I use This in my Writing?
So characters do not have to change and grow, but you can still use the power of character growth in four ways without your character growing:

1) Have a secondary character change and grow (e.g., George McFly).

2) Have very definite negative character growth in the antagonist (shining a light on positive learning and growth).

3) Offer your protagonist the opportunity to grow... but then have him turn it down (Jack Reacher), or fail to make the most of the opportunity (Del Boy).

4) Use forms of character growth, such as marriage or parenthood, that do not implicitly change the character of the character.

Much, much more on the inordinate power of character growth and learning in The Subtext Book - due out later in 2013.

The C Word...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 09:00:00 +0000

The most obvious difference I see between the successful writers I have met and the aspiring writers is confidence. Confident writers are focused and productive. They say, “This is MY story. I’m writing it MY way, and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” They put their blinkers on, they put the hours into what they think is right, and deliver. After that it’s part luck and part commercial savvy that decides whether the final product attracts deals or not, but this is the right approach to any artistic endeavour. So if self-belief and an uncompromising approach to writing is the way to go, what can a writer do to get precious confidence without getting tainted by someone else’s directions?

The wrong thing to do, which I see a lot in the writers I work with, is to go on endless courses or read a pile of books on ‘How to Write’. They inevitably provide you with a set of rules that seem to apply to famous stories. As soon as you buy into this, your story becomes driven by structure. It becomes a little unnatural and it loses its spark, and you have your creative instinct damaged by someone else’s rules.

That paragraph may seem odd coming from a man who gives courses to aspiring writers, but I am very careful in my approach. The word ‘education’ comes from the Latin ‘to draw out’, and for writers, with precious, highly personal inspiration, the difference between ‘drawing out’ and ‘forcing in’ is a critical distinction. In my experience, what writers really need is not help from the outside to change what is inside. It’s help in making the best possible use of the inspiration that is already there.

The questions writers really want answering are: “How do I make the most of my story ideas? How do I tell my story to its absolute best? How do I guide my ability to tell stories without damaging my natural talent? It takes me months to find out what’s bugging me in my story. How do I understand and solve story problems quickly and effectively? What gives one story power and another one not? What are the story tools that are available to writers that make stories grip and intrigue?”

There is only one person who can tell your story the right way, and that is YOU! Yes, you need knowledge of the craft of story so you are empowered to tell your story your way. Then you will also have the confidence to send it off and, importantly, take rejection knowing that what you’ve done is right irrespective of what the rejection letter says. Many of the writers I meet are hugely restricted by fear of rejection. So much so that they don’t even finish their work. Once it’s finished, it’s judgement day, and that is unbearable, so people keep writing and re-writing for years rather than face the dreaded judgement day. Again, confidence is the issue. If you know you have been true to yourself and true to your story, then you cease to care about external judgement. You listen, of course, in case something constructive resonates with you, but ultimately your own personal judgement is all that matters, so if others choose to reject it for their commercial agenda, so be it. Of course, rejection hurts, but it also goes with the territory, so grasping the rejection nettle and taking the consequences is something you simply have to do. John Sullivan gave me all you need to know about ‘How to be a writer’:

1) Write the best stuff you can.

2) Send it off.

3) Go to 1)

What happens after that is out of your hands, so just go to 1) ,do 2) and forget it. Over time you will improve, and one day something will click. When it does, the weirdest thing happens: the pile of rejections become a massive badge of honour, and the glow you feel from success becomes magnified ten-fold by every single rejection you collected along the way.

Writers who become clients of mine are always surprised when we start work because I won’t read their story. I’m working to help the writer take responsibility for themselves; to find and shape the inspiration that comes from within. There’s only one right way to write your story, and that’s your way. If you think about it, there simply can’t be any other way to write your story. So forget the gurus and take responsibility. Yes, learn about story so you can squeeze the most from your ideas. Write every day, and say to yourself every day:

“My Story. My Way. And balls to the lot of you.”

Say it now. Say it out loud and mean it. Not only will you laugh at yourself, but take responsibility for your own development and suddenly life as a writer, and your path forwards from today, becomes very clear indeed...

Now. Go To 1).

Hunger Games - Story Analysis

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:47:00 +0000

!This Article Contains Spoilers!

Hunger Games is something of an enigma. As you watch it, you love it, and it kinda keeps you gripped, because the premise is so good, the characters are very strong, and the key question provides excellent tension. But it is low rated by public opinion on IMDB, and leaves you feeling a little unsatisfied by the end, although strangely attracted to it at the same time. Here's why.

Firstly, let's outline that key question, because that is what gives it its attraction, and is also what lets it down, because they blow the power of that key question halfway through the story.

In a futuristic vision of North America, The Hunger Games is an annual entertainment put on by the repressive government ('The Capitol'). Each of the twelve districts must donate two people between the age of 12 and 18 to the games. All 24 of these young people - 'tributes', as they are called - are set free in a televised terrain where they must kill or be killed. Only one of the 24 can survive, and return home an honoured hero. The story follows the journey of the two tributes from District 12: Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). The tension in the story comes from our knowledge that, although their relationship is steadily growing and intensifying as the story progresses, only one of them can survive. As the story goes on, they begin to fall in love. Oh, My God. The key question looms large over us and tightens its grip because we know, at some point one of them... is going to have to kill the other one. Excellent, excellent, gripping, powerful story.

So why – oh, please why – did the writers have the ‘Capitol’ introduce a new rule halfway through the game by announcing: ‘actually, just this once, we’re going to let two people survive the games, provided they are from the same district.’ What the hell would you do a stupid thing like that for?! The story is now shot to pieces. Oh! Two can survive now! Well, I wonder who on earth THAT could be?! Might it turn out to be - ooh, let me think now - might it be... Katniss and Peeta (the only district partnership we even know the names of anyway!)? Now we know who will survive. The jeopardy is decimated. The tension is gone. The story is over. There is no other subtext to carry the story. Finished. Forget it. Go home.

And it's SO good up until then! It's a crime! What doubles my horror at the way they utterly blew the story power and then, just in time for the very end, they bring it back in again! The Capitol make another announcement: 'Errr. We've changed our minds, and now only one can survive.'

Yes, it gives the story traction again, because now we feel the tension again - one of them will have to kill the other, but we've had a hour of knowing the outcome, so putting the doubt back in for what turns out to be ONE MINUTE is hardly going to rescue the thing. Clearly, the writers saw that they had to do this to create any kind of cleverness in the ending, so they put it back! Which just makes taking it out in the first place all the more unbelievable!

What makes it even worse is that the Romeo and Juliet ending we are offered at climax (it's not what happens), whereby Katniss and Peeta commit suicide together - thereby removing the power of the Capitol, making their love sublime for all eternity, making them into martyrs and causing a furious revolution in the districts - would have made this film an all time classic – BUT only if they'd kept that tension gripping us throughout. If the jeopardy had been there the whole way through we would have remained utterly gripped by the knowledge that one of them MUST die, doubly gripped when they fall in love, and totally knocked out when they choose to commit suicide together to confound the Capitol and die in perfect love.

As it is, that one announcement makes it a weak story and one of the worst errors and biggest missed opportunities I have ever seen.

Apart from that trashed key question, the other serious issue is that there is no other subtext. All the story participants - the characters, the Capitol, the audience, author, you, me - everyone - know just as much as everyone else. Yes, the Capitol are sneaky and evil - but the moves they make are instantly communicated to all participants. There's no difference in the information held by the different story participants, Katniss and Peeta are trustworthy towards each other, even in the early stages when we know that they fell out in previous years and Katniss has good reason not to trust him now. Even the excellently dubious character who is to coach them - Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) - a previous winner of the games from District 12 - doesn't have an agenda and doesn't do anything dodgy, despite his clear dialogue with the Capitol. It just doesn't go anywhere. Despite the nature of the dog-eat-dog games, everyone knows everything that is going on. The human mind feeds off subtext - it's what we look for in a story, and this is why Hunger Games leaves a nagging hollow feeling you can't quite explain.

I suspect - and hope - that the problems of this first film will be remedied across the course of the trilogy. The Harry Potter series is a little like this. Most of the individual films are rather difficult to enjoy in isolation (unless you've read the books), but the story power across the seven is perfect. Similarly with Hunger Games, the potential is immense, and terrific foundations are now in place, but this first film, taken on its own, is not as powerful as it could have been with more subtext, and with the tension being allowed to persist throughout through knowing that one of the two lovers must die at the hands of the other. If it had been allowed to persist, the lovers could still have been rescued by the Capitol for the sake of government popularity and the avoidance of revolution as it is now (and to allow for a sequel, of course), but the power of the story could have been maintained throughout and magnified with this one simple story flaw being removed.

Shame. Still - greatly enjoyable, and I suspect the trilogy will satisfy in story terms by the end.

The Greeks have a Word for it...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:55:00 +0000

I recently read Aristotle's 'Poetics' - the earliest known work of story theory. It was weird to be spoken to about story theory by a man who died 2,300 years ago, and extraordinary to find him speaking perfect sense in ways that still influence Hollywood today.

Let's see if a modern story can be seen to live up to Aristotle’s key elements, defined literally thousands of years ago. Here they are. An effective story has three essential elements:

Firstly, we have the Harmartia - a ‘fault’ or ‘flaw’ that disturbs the protagonist’s balance of life.

Secondly, the Anagnorisis - the ‘realisation’ of what this flaw means to the protagonist and the action that will be required to restore balance.

Thirdly, the Peripeteia - a reversal of expectation that pays off the story and brings the world back into balance at conclusion - but in a way that is unexpected (in the sense that it didn’t work out the way the protagonist intended and/or the audience thought it would).

So, taking Back to the Future as my example story, do these ancient structural imperatives hold up?

Marty McFly is going about his normal day when he is accidentally sent back in time (Harmartia - a fault which spins his world out of balance).

As he comes to terms with the challenges of getting home, he interferes with his parents' meeting when they were teenagers. Even if he could get home to 1985, he is going to be wiped from existence if his parents don't hook up. He realises (anagnorisis) he must get his parents to fall in love before he leaves, or else he will not exist in the future and will simply disappear.

Marty knows his Mum-to-be likes a strong man. And his Dad-do-be is weak. So Marty plans a big charade with his Dad-to-be to make him look strong in front of his Mum. The peripeteia (reversal) comes when he finally gets his parents together - but not in the way he planned - the charade goes wrong and his father is forced to demonstrate genuine strength. When he finally does get home to 1985 we are surprised to find that his family and quality of life have gone way upmarket compared to the life he left. His impact in 1955 has influenced his father's character and he is therefore born, 17 years later, to a stronger father and a whole different life.

Take a look at your own stories or story events. Do your sequences/chapters/scenes or entire stories live up to Aristotle? I've found that the Peripeteia is particularly significant. I analyse stories that bug me - they have conflict, great characters, key questions - lots of boxes ticked, but something not right... and often the problem is predictability. If a story is great, the chances are it is because it has a wonderful cleverness to it - and that will be the Peripeteia - a beautiful twistiness compared to expectation - shining through.

I imagine that anyone who has remained influential for 2,300 years probably knew what he was talking about, so I'd pause and think about this one if I were you...!

Kindle and Illustrations...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:44:00 +0000

Here's a heads up for all of you who may have written a highly illustrated book in the past and been frustrated that Kindle is realistically only suitable for text-based books.

My highly illustrated children's books sell very few in hard copy, and I'm very pleased to see my first one out there as an iBook. It needed adapting for the iPad/tablet/etc, specifically because you can only view one page at a time, so double-page spreads don't work, but but well worth the effort, and hopefully will make some sales!

There are good instructions on iTunes on how to build the book - fairly easy, I gather, although if you want someone to do it for you, contact me and I'll put you in touch with The Grateful Ted, who did mine for me! Also a great advantage is that the illustrations are multi-lingual, and the little text there is can be translated to Spanish, Japanese, Vulcan - whatever - with relative ease, so suddenly your book can go global with no print costs, no distribution, no storage, no nothing. It's just out there. Forever. Selling...

So if you made a 'Photographic History of Lingerie Through The Ages' do get in touch - I'll help you with that one... Or an illustrated children's book like mine, now's the time to dig it back out and pimp it up for the iPad! Take a look here:

Oopsie - I Forgot!

On iBooks/ iTunes Here

Subtext – The Most Critical Tool in the Story-Teller’s Box

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 10:46:00 +0000

What is subtext? Why is it important? Why is subtext fundamental to a story’s quality.

All writers are told that subtext is the ‘untold’ or ‘underlying’ story, and that stories must be delivered in subtext. Make no mistake - this is true. Without subtext, you literally have no story. However, what the great and the good fail to tell us is how in the world we are supposed to go about telling an ‘untold’ story? How do we bury our story, and still tell it, apparently without mentioning it?

So they give us examples. A character takes a girl by the hands, looks her in the eyes and says, ‘I love you.’ And the audience gasps, because they know that he’s about to leave her for another woman. This is all well and good, but still doesn’t help us understand how to deliver our stories ‘in subtext’.

What we need to know is what writers do to generate subtext.

Creating Subtext

Subtext results from what I call ‘knowledge gaps’. When you craft into your story a difference in the knowledge held by different participants, you introduce a knowledge gap – and simultaneously create intrigue and engagement. This is most easily expressed from the audience or reader perspective:

If the audience knows more or less than any character in the story,

you have story delivery in subtext.

So there are two basic forms of subtext, based on whether the audience knows more or less than a character:

Revelation Subtext

Take a mystery story. We follow the detective through all the events, we see all the clues, and we try to predict whodunit. Then the detective arrests the blonde, and we think, ‘Wha-what? The blonde? But she’s innocent! She’s the victim!’ and our minds go racing back through all that has gone before to try and establish what the detective spotted that we didn’t. The audience knows less than the detective, and revelation subtext is built into the story.

Privilege Subtext

As the detective bravely climbs the dark staircase towards the attic, his candle blows out and a chill runs through us all, because we know that there is an axe-wielding maniac waiting for him behind the door at the top. Knowledge gaps whereby the audience knows more than a character generate Privilege Subtext.

Within these two types there are at least ten mechanisms for introducing knowledge gaps. By introducing a mysterious character; by using a subplot to influence another plot; by raising questions in the mind of the audience (particularly ‘I know what the protagonist wants - how is he going to get it?’); by playing on audience pre-conceptions (just because he looks like a policeman doesn’t mean he’s not a criminal...); subterfuge (a character with a secret, an alter-ego, lies and deceit are all wonderful examples of subtext);

Other less common types of subtext exist, using implication and suggestion, metaphor and allegory, and a character’s subconscious aims, but we are best to leave these for another day.

The more the audience has to work to make up the story for themselves in the knowledge gaps, the finer the story is perceived to be, so make it your business to understand subtext. The quantity, depth and persistence of knowledge gaps in your story directly relate to how well your story engages an audience.

This is my specialist area and the subject of my PhD thesis. for full details and in-depth examples, take a look at section 4 of The Story Book.

Cheers!

David

Does Advertising Work?

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 07:31:00 +0000

So listen, people. I didn't just write The Story Book. I originally got published for writing humorous travel books.

To encourage you to take a look, I've asked the publisher to reduce the price of the kindle edition of my first ever published book - for a limited period only - to a derisory 99 of your English pence.

So show me some love, and I'll return the complement with funny, positive, uplifting writing that I personally promise will brighten your winter blues. Don't take my word for it - look at the sample reviews below and then click the button! This offer must end!

Buy the Book or Ebook from the UK

Buy the Ebook from US Kindle Store

"One of the funniest books I have ever read." City Talk

"Interesting, raucous and very, very funny. When it came to the end it was like saying goodbye to an old friend." TalkSport

"A seriously funny man with a great gift for story-telling." Spirit FM

Still not convinced? If you click on the left there are plenty more reviews on Amazon. Straight five stars across the board on Amazon.com. Here's the latest example:

5 out of 5 Stars. This is a DANGEROUSLY funny book!, October 5, 2012

By Andrew "The Unreconstructed Rebel" (Dover, Germany) - See all my reviews

(REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Ocean Boulevard - Adventures On The High Seas: An Epic and Exhilarating Journey All the Way... from a Boy to a Man (Baboulene's Travels) (Kindle Edition)

This is far and away one of the funniest books I have ever read. The author is a comic genius. I literally fell out of bed laughing.

When I rose from the bedroom floor it seemed advisable to take a break from reading in order to recover my composure, and to give my laugh-exhausted innards a chance to resettle. I did a little cooking and then sat down for a small meal.

Unfortunately I also opened the story again and was soon in the throes of hilarity once more, to the extent that I inhaled my hamburger. Only the mercy of God allowed me to clear the blockage before I turned blue.

I'm telling you, this is a DANGEROUSLY funny book . . .

JAMES BOND SKYFALL - STORY ANALYSIS

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:18:00 +0000

Story Analysis of James Bond - Skyfall

It takes a brave man to criticise something as epic as a new Bond movie. So before I do so, let me just say that there is a great deal to enjoy in Skyfall. I’m a fully signed-up Bond fan and greatly enjoyed the visit to the cinema: Fantastic spectacle, amazing locations, top cinematography, awesome set pieces and classic James Bond moments. But I’m looking at the story. Pure and simple. It’s only a component of the overall experience, but it’s a very important component. And as a story consultant it frustrates me enormously to see a film of such immense pedigree, with an investment of a reported $200 million... with such basic story flaws. The simplest of story fixes could have made this a classic – it makes me want to cry - and the fact that the Bond name and franchise is such high quality, it leaves me staggered that the producers didn’t invest a penny of that eye-watering budget in story consultancy. How could they allow the story to be anything less than perfect?

Let’s take the top four foundation stones of a good story: the key question, character growth, subtext and conflict.

SPOILER ALERT! Don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens!

Key Question

If you have M come out strongly in the story setup and say, ‘Bond! We have to get that list back. It is critical we get the list. It is on that stolen laptop hard drive we just flagged to the audience, and your mission in life is to get the list back. Take all the resources at the British Government’s disposal, and go get the list back, Bond.’

And the audience thinks: ‘Brilliant! We know what the story is all about! We are oriented to the protagonist’s aim. We know what Bond is fighting for and we are going to love seeing how Bond is going to use his brilliance and determination to get the list back.’ And we settle back in our seats feeling that we are in good hands.

This is why we viewers love the first set piece – the motorbike chase in Istanbul. It’s terrific and it’s meaningful, because the guy Bond is chasing is the baddie with the list. Then we like the second set piece as well, because Bond catches up with the baddie (the one with the list) at the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai, and they fight to the death on the edge of a tall building. Brilliant. Bond doesn’t get the list, but he gets a clue as to where it might be from the now-dead baddie, and we’re off to Macau in solid pursuit of the list.

So far, we are around 20 minutes in, and we are all loving it. So why does it go so wrong after this? Well, it’s simple: Bond stops trying to get the list. The list is still out there, but Bond seems to have lost interest. The criminal mastermind, Silva (brilliantly played by Javier Bardem), has begun a Terminator-like dogged pursuit of M, and from this point on, Bond is trying to save M from the relentless Silva. The list never gets mentioned again. Even though it is out there and Silva’s many cronies are no doubt going to continue to release the list on YouTube, thereby endangering the lives of NATO spies the world over. But it’s no longer anything to do with the story protagonists. List? What list? Hard drive? Long forgotten. This is why later set pieces don’t quite grip the same way. The underwater fight-to-the-death, for example, isn’t meaningful or gripping because the guy Bond is fighting underwater doesn’t have anything much to do with the list or any other of the now mildly confused audience expectations.

But all is not lost. We do have a new aim for Bond, and despite the unsettling switch, we try to lock on to the new story question: ‘Can Bond save M from the relentless pursuit of Silva?’ Well, no he can’t. It becomes evident in the final set piece at the Scottish mansion that the ultimate aim for the evil Silva is to kill M and himself at the same time – he wants her to pull the trigger and kill them both with the same bullet in a paroxysm of delight for Silva. Bond kills Silva, but M dies anyway – killed by Silva.

So all in all, from an audience perspective, the main plot line raises 3 key questions:

Will Bond get the list back? Answer? No idea. It never gets mentioned again. It could still be out there for all we know.
Will Silva kill M, or will Bond save her? Answer? Silva successfully kills M, and Bond fails to save her.
Will Bond defeat Silva? Hmmm. Bond does kill Silva, but we have been told that Silva wanted to die with M, which he did. This is unfortunately now a perfect victory for Silva, who got everything he wanted.

Indeed, Bond is fundamentally responsible for M's death, because he could have killed Silva earlier on the island. Instead, he brought Silva back to London (there is no explanation why) where Silva is now nice and near to hunt down M.

Now, it’s not a story-crime to have the protagonist lose occasionally, and a bad guy win, but I would certainly have advised the producers against having James Bond - of all people - fail so badly on every count. But it’s not terrible story-telling - it's a choice that can be made. What is a bad story flaw is to raise a key question in the mind of the audience and then not follow through to address that question at resolution. The film drifts from around halfway through. There was no reason for that to happen. Not good.

Character Growth

All of the very finest stories feature at least one character who changes and learns and grows through his experiences in living the story. (Or fails to change and learn and grow, but the lesson is clear to the audience.)

Character growth is an area of difficulty for the writers of James Bond, of course, just as it is for any ongoing series. If Bond climbs life's ladder and evolves in some meaningful way, it means he is in the wrong personal state to begin the next story. This is often the reason why any sequel fails to satisfy – the protagonist has already made his personal journey. He’s become fulfilled and has nowhere else to go in character growth terms in the second adventure. So the writers need to find slightly oblique ways to give the impression of growth. In Back to the Future, for example, the protagonist, Marty, doesn’t change or grow; his father does, and the power of the story resides right there. There are other mechanisms for bringing character growth to a character without spoiling the next episode. I'll blog on that next. In Skyfall, the character growth is from M. She journeys down the ladder of fulfillment from ‘Alive’ to ‘Dead’, without learning or indicating a 'life lesson' that would have saved her (except, perhaps, 'Don't trust James Bond. He'll fail you'). I’ll leave it to you to decide if this was satisfying story for you.

Subtext

Subtext is the very substance of story. Without subtext there is no story, and the more subtext there is, the finer the story is perceived to be. In essence, a story is received in subtext when the writers embed gaps in the knowledge between the different participants in a story; a gap in knowledge between what the audience knows and what a character knows being the most common. To give a classic example from previous James Bond stories, when he begins getting it on with a beautiful girl, and we in the audience know that his weakness for women is placing him in danger because she has something lethal up her frock... and he’s walking into her trap. We know it, but Bond doesn’t. Classic subtext. Or the inverse: Bond attacks and kills a fellow MI6 agent, and we in the audience think: ‘Whoa! What’s wrong with Bond? He’s attacked Snodgrass!’ But the agent turns out to be the enemy. Bond knew something we in the audience didn’t. This revelation is classic subtext. (For more on subtext see my blog post on the topic, here...)

Subtext is a huge subject with endless possibilities, the vast majority of which are soundly avoided in Skyfall. Knowledge gaps can be embedded using action, dialogue, suggestion or implication, subterfuge, questions, metaphor, promise, sub-plot, distraction, misdirection and many other methods. In Skyfall, the only real subtext is through the ‘question’ raised during the setup: ‘Will James get the list back?’ And, as we know, this was not well delivered. In Skyfall, knowledge is, unfortunately, equal for everybody. Every character says what they mean and does what they say and turns out to be exactly who they appear to be. This is classic poor story-telling, known as writing 'on the nose'. There isn’t even subtext through subterfuge! In a James Bond story!

Conflict

Bond is confronted by a series of challenges. Yes, they are entertaining and there’s a good deal of jaw-dropping backgrounds and action, and of course, any battle is a form of conflict; but in Skyfall none of the conflict is ‘meaningful’ conflict. Yes, the bad guys can fight, and yes there’s lots of ‘em, but we already know, deep down, that James is going to win, and we’re never really quite put on the edge of our seats as the next bunch of thugs comes over the hill. Conflict in a story is essential. And this is not conflict. It’s a challenge, and one we know Bond relishes, so where’s the tension? To create meaningful conflict, Bond would have to make a decision under pressure. He must be placed on the horns of a dilemma, between a rock and a hard place, and offered a choice of evils, for example, using a method I call ‘conflict triangulation’. When Luke Skywalker takes on another 100 storm troopers, we don’t fear for his well being. But when he is fighting the leader of the storm troopers, Darth Vader himself, in a final, to-the-death battle, and then finds out that Vader is his father... Oh my Goodness, what a decision to face: Kill the Dark Lord... and therefore murder his dad. Let his dad live... and risk death at the hands of his bitterest enemy. What will happen next?! This is proper, meaningful conflict. In Bond, there is no such conflict. Just one battle after another, with no real story meaning to any of them.

As I said at the beginning, don’t get me wrong – I am a Bond fan. There’s a lot to be had from the wider cinematic experience beyond the story, but I’m afraid it’s a 2/10 for a very poor story and a criminally missed opportunity. When we meet again, Mr Bond, I do hope a tiny proportion of the budget - say, one-tenth of a single explosion – might be invested in a little story consultancy to provide support for the writers who often get so close to the story that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

For further information visit www.baboulene.com

Are You Receiving Me...?!

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:30:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:42:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:29:00 +0000

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 eighties.

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 fulfillment (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.

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...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:01:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 09:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:24:00 +0000

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...?

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:51:00 +0000

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 from day 1.

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

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, write your stuff, send it off, and forget it; 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. Besides, as you start work on books 6 to 10, you might well begin to see more money from a) and/or b), but at least by aiming for c) you have personal control over your career path, you have product and you increase your chances of overall success with every year that passes.

The writers I know who get success are highly professional. They are highly productive. 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. Is this you?

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:42:00 +0000

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

Antagonism - Connect With Your Dark Side...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:37:00 +0000

If there’s one thing novice writers get wrong more than anything else, it’s the bad side of their story. Why? Because we are good people. We’ve never been murderers or rapists or global dominators or manipulative psychopaths or any of the other species of evil that we end up writing about. I would go further: as writers, we are probably even more pacific and sensitive than the average person and even less capable of handling confrontation. We don’t like evil in our lives, so we instinctively want to save our good guys from grief and give our bad guys a hard time even when they are fictional! We are taught to write from the heart, so we do. The result is that from page one, we are starving our bad guys of the oxygen they need for success... and instantly consigning our scripts to the bin as the forces of antagonism are reduced to nought in the eyes of our audience.

Unless you have suffered yourself, doing justice to the bad guys in your story is not going to come naturally and you will need to work ten times harder to bring evil to life in their work. So you must use all your energy and imagination to make your forces of antagonism convincing, and your bad guy bad. Get right into him and let him take you over. Somewhere in your pure heart is a little black spot. The bastard you could have been if your life had been different. Try to connect with it. You’ve been resentful. You have been jealous. You don’t like to admit it, but you have manipulated. You’ve felt hatred. You know someone you could have murdered, even if only in your darkest moments. Try to scare yourself with your own characters. They all reflect you in some small way, so you must battle with your subconscious to imbue them with evil that has the same levels of integrity you will happily give your good guys. If you don’t, your story will be weak.

Why put myself through that?

If you struggle to be bad yourself, look how hard you make life for yourself from the protagonist‘s viewpoint. Your hero can only be as heroic as the effort it takes him to defeat the bad guys, so you must give your bad guys all the power they need to appear unassailable, and from there you must make them even more powerful – apparently beyond defeat – and weaken your good guys to the point where it seems impossible for the bad guys to lose. From there, your protagonist is going to have to be pretty damn special to win out – and I for one would like to see how he’s going to do it.

Every cinema goer knows, from the moment they see the poster, who is going to win and who is going to lose. They’ve seen enough movies to take their seat feeling pretty confident, deep down, that things will end up fine for the hero. When things get a little tense for my children in the cinema, I whisper to them that everything is going to be fine. I promise them that the good guy will win in the end. And I am always right. Your job, as a screenwriter, is to make me squirm. Make me fear that on top of the amazing plot you are about to deliver, I’ve also just lied to my children, because maybe – just maybe – this is the time when the good guy isn’t actually going to make it. And that is totally dependent upon your ability to deliver powerful, believable, convincing and (almost) unassailable forces of antagonism.

Now, get out there, and be very, VERY BAD!!

David

PS. My turn to be bad - brutally advertising my humorous travel book. Just went top 5 in UK Kindle Travel section.

This is the latest review comment: "You really are a very special writer and Ocean Boulevard is probably the best read I’ve ever had on holiday... truly excellent."

More amazing reviews at UK amazon store: http://tinyurl.com/5s5mumh

EVEN MORE great reviews at US amazon store: http://tinyurl.com/63zhm9m

If you've enjoyed my blog, why not read about my personal badness travelling the world working on ships?!

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

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 20:58:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 26 May 2011 09:37:00 +0000

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

Conflict and the Word Count...

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:44:00 +0000

There are many advantages to writing a book over other forms. Whilst screenwriters are generally squeezed into fairly narrow structural boundaries by their media, novelists have no limits. You can go anywhere, meet anyone and do anything you like!

However, novelists have one main problem over and above the more visual media. Generally speaking, their work is much longer. To fill a 100,000 word novel requires something like 4 times the material of a 100 minute film. There is also the double-edged sword that writing a book can be a lot more experimental. Constraints can be a very good thing in forcing a writer to be imaginative in coming up with creative ways of getting around limitations.

Novelists often come to me with a novel of between 10,000 and 50,000 words and they want to know how to turn this into something much longer WITHOUT getting out the dreaded padding.

The answer is to take the existing characters and find new forms of conflict to twine into their story. Let`s use Back to the Future for reference. It is fundamentally about a kid who is accidentally sent back in time. His key conflict is with the laws of physics and time travel. He has to find appropriate power in 1955 to match the nuclear reaction that propelled him there from the future in the first place. There are four types of conflict. Let`s see how each of these types can be used to add dimensions to the main plotline:

1) Relationship Conflict. There is almost no story on earth that doesn`t include relationship conflicts. In Back to the Future, Marty is in conflict with his future mother, Lorraine (who falls in love with him); with his future father (who will not do what Marty requires of him so he can exist in the future); and with the bully, Biff, who wants Lorraine all to himself and bullies the weak and unassertive George. In your story, there is always space for another character providing a new set of conflicts for your protagonist.

2) Internal Conflict. These are conflicts a character has with himself and his own fears and insecurities. Marty`s father, George, is in conflict with himself; racked with self-doubt and uncertainty. The outcome of the main plotline is directly linked to George`s ability to resolve his internal conflict.

3) Institutional Conflict. These are conflicts against the rule-base of an organization; so the introduction of a policeman, doctor, teacher, bookmaker or anyone whose institutional rules will go against the desires and aims of the protagonist will always add a dimension. In the main story progression of Back to the Future, the school rules, as represented by the fearsome Mr Strickland in both 1955 and 1985, provide a surprising level of impact.

4) External Conflict. You will note that all the above forms of conflict are – to a greater or lesser extent – open to being influenced by the character. External conflicts are story events over which the character has little or no control, so acts of God, machine malfunction, the random actions of incidental characters, illness, plane cancellations and so on. There are many minor interjections of this nature in Back to the Future, such as the fact that Marty got accidentally sent back in time in the first place.

The key to successfully adding dimension to a story with additional conflict is to ensure that the new conflicts are directly tied in to the events that define your story and have an impact on the protagonist`s journey or character growth.

For lots more on conflict and antagonism, and the essential ingredient to make conflict effective (Triangulation) see The Story Book, or contact me directly and I will send you a freeeeee chapter on the topic.

Cheers!

David

The Top Ten Tips for Stories that Grip!

noreply@blogger.com (David Baboulene) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:18:00 +0000

In my work I have been fortunate to have conversations with famous people who have made their money from stories, including:

Bob Gale (scriptwriter of Back to the Future);
Lee Child (16 million Jack Reacher Novels sold);
John Sullivan (TV comedy writer of Only Fools and Horses; Just Good friends; Citizen Smith…);
Mark Williams (Actor in The Harry Potter films; Shakespeare in Love; 101 Dalmations...);
Willy Russell (Theatre supremo and writer of Educating Rita; Blood Brothers; Shirley Valentine…)

to name but a few. So, from the insights from these fine gentlemen, from my own experiences getting published and writing The Story Book, my work as a story consultant, from working on films and from undertaking my PhD in Story Theory, here are my top ten tips for writers.

1) If you want to be a writer, read a thousand books.

2) Write every day. Make it a priority, build it into your schedule and discipline yourself to it. Yes, being a writer is glamorous to talk about and a romantic place for dreamers, but the ones who make it work very hard, are professional and productive.

3) Don't try to learn 'how to write'. No course or method or rule book or guru can tell you how to write. There's only one person who can tell your story your way, and that's you. Those who make it have self-confidence in writing what THEY think is great. Yes, learn about STORY - where story power comes from, how they work, why they exist, how they resonate, what factors are present in all great stories - then use that understanding to take responsibility and write your story YOUR way.

4) Yes, understand story structure, but structure is NOT a starting point for story development, so don't let it drive you. Let your creative brilliance run wild and free and write from the heart in creating your story; then later, use your understanding of structure in problem-solving and optimizing your story.

5) Most of all, understand SUBTEXT. And understand the creative behaviours that embed subtext. Subtext is the substance of story. If you have no subtext you have no story. The more subtext there is, the higher a story is rated by the audience. Fact.

6) Stories are about character behaviours. Don't think about 'plot' and 'character' as separate things. What a character does when he takes action will define his true character, and what a character does when he takes action will also provide the action. Character behaviours meld plot and character into a single entity (story). Get this right, and your story-telling will be tight, cohesive and greater than the sum of its parts.

7) All the greatest stories show us a character learning and changing and growing through the experiences of the story events (or failing to learn and grow, but the lessons are still evident to us as readers/viewer). Try to ensure that at least one character is offered the opportunity to climb the ladder of life. You will find that this is actually your real story, and this is what resonates with your readers and elevates your story.

8) True character comes only from putting your players under pressure to make difficult decisions. For a mountaineer to climb a mountain might be a huge challenge, but he'd be delighted to do it, so the conflict is not meaningful and therefore the story is not meaningful. For a mountaineer to climb a mountain to save a stranded friend... risking his own life to do so whilst his children are begging him not to go and his wife says she’ll leave if he does... that is a story. Sit your characters on the horns of a dilemma wrapped in a choice of evils and sandwiched between rocks and hard places and your readers will be gripped...

9) It's really important to learn to handle rejection (there WILL be rejection...) otherwise you will never send anything off. I know many, many writers who develop their stories... then develop and develop some more... because they are so scared of the Judgment Day that comes the moment they admit it’s finished. There's no easy way. You have to grasp the nettle and get on with it or give up now. Put your ego to one side (the vast majority of rejections are nothing to do with your ability or the literary merit of your story); dig deep, be strong, and put it out there. When I asked John Sullivan for his advice for aspiring writers he gave me this series of steps that should define a writer’s life:

A) Write the best stuff you can.

B) Send it off.

C) Go to A.

It ain't rocket science! But you do need to be brave, or else you won't get anywhere. As soon as your material is good enough, you WILL be recognised... and you WILL get a deal! And I promise you - once you’ve had 10 rejections, the 11th doesn’t hurt so bad!

10) If you would like more detailed information on any of the above, get in touch with me and I will send you a free chapter from The Story Book on any topic you like, or blog on the subject if it is of general interest.

Very best of luck with your work. Oh, before I go, I think there might be just one more tip we could all benefit from...

11) Get off the internet and go do some writing!

David