Stories we love are about the reoccurring cosmic battle between order and chaos. They are about how (1) we fall off the serpentine border between the two extremes, how (2) we quarantine ourselves in one or the other, and then (3) how we get back our balance and live on the edge between them.
Thus, stories that engage us are about:
A Conflict of Values
Obstacles that Escalate Tension
Storytellers should be aware that the internal conflict of values (i.e. borders & quarantines) between characters is made external through the physical conflict seen and heard on screen. What the story is really about is the internal conflict of what external borders to erect or tear down, and what quarantines to enforce or break out of.
Likewise, COVID-19, while essentially invisible, creates visible effects upon our body's normal biology. And that effective conflict extends to our homes, our communities, and our countries.
WHAT WAS SUBTEXT IS NOW ON THE NOSE
Remember when Trump was demanding walls, borders, and travel bans? Many citizens objected. They believed America was a country of immigrants and great diversity. (For the sake of illustration, I'm sidestepping the "legal" vs. "illegal" equivocation). America had values that didn't discriminate. There was a way we should do things, and we needed to stay true to the practices that made us a great nation. etc. etc. At the same time there were political battles about socialism, the organizational principle of subsidiarity, and government handouts. Notice that both sides in that conflict of values had barriers going both ways. Both sides wanted to quarantine the others.
Then, suddenly, COVID-19 changed everything, on both sides. What Trump tried unilaterally (walls, and travel bans) now governors and mayors are demanding. What Trump fought against (socialism and government handouts) now he champions. (Why write fiction when real life is more dramatic?)
In those real-life stories there are internal and external conflicts, and there are character arcs and situation outcomes that resulted. Both sides were involved in a fight for (or against) borders and for (or against) quarantines.
A DISTANT BUT RELATABLE ILLUSTRATION
In Once Up a Time in Hollywood, washed-up actor Rick Dalton feels quarantined. He's always playing the heavy who gets killed in Act 3. His career is fading. One day he realizes he's living next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. But there's a wall and a big iron gate that keeps him out. Then tragedy strikes (through the kindness of producer, Tarantino's, revisionist history) and Rick finds the wall/iron gate opening for him (music cue) as if by magic, and he's released from his "quarantine."
In Knives Out, the Thrombey family is quarantined in deceased Harlan Thrombey's mansion until Benoit Blanc can knock down enough walls and barriers to find the murderer. Meanwhile Marta Cabrera, Harlan's personal assistant and nurse, is psychologically quarantined thinking she killed the novelist as she hides behind a "porous wall" of deceit (and vomit).
In Elizabeth (the Shekhar Kapur directed Cate Blanchett's vehicles), the Queen is continually quarantined by her throne and responsibilities, as multiple figures of court and France attempt to tear down her walls or the walls around England.
In Midway, U.S. military characters battle the walls erected by Japan's Imperial Navy in the Pacific by self-quarantining their lives in doomed dive bombers and ships to build a wall around their country and keep the Imperial Army out of America.
In a sense, EVERYTHING is about walls, barriers and quarantines.
DAO's YING/YANG
The Dao Ying/Yang symbol illustrates several things about the conflict in stories and arcs of characters. Ironically, the ancient symbol visually represents one of the 2001: A Space Odyssey themes from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra—that of eternal reoccurrence. To the Daoist it is a symbol of the oneness of the cosmos. In a simple way the Ying/Yang symbolizes the eternally rotating day and night, and how the earth (and our lives) forever rotates between light and dark, good and evil. That is true not just physically, but psychologically.
Therefore, a good story, as explained by The Moral Premise principle, is a conflict between the light (a particular virtue, or strength) and the dark (a particular vice, or weakness). And if you're watching a successful television series, which is eternally caught in Act 2, the conflict between that vice and virtue continues every week for years. The Ying/Yang rotates as the light chases the dark's tail, and the dark chases the light's tail, all the while the dark has some goodness to it (the white dot), and the light contains some imperfection (the black dot). This is life. This is the cosmos. There is constantly this internal and external conflict that keeps life interesting.
But there's something significant about walls and quarantine in this symbol of the cosmos. Jordan Peterson suggests that our best life is lived in the border between the light and the dark or to use his terms: between "perfect order" and "abysmal chaos." To be quarantined inside perfect order (the white) there would be no innovation or human progress. Why? Because innovation and progress demand we take risks and step into the unknown, the chaos. And by experimenting with things unknown in the world of chaos we discover ways to enhance the order in our lives. Likewise, if we were to keep our lives absolutely pure, we risk getting a disease for which we have no antibodies....and we die. In that case our bodies have not built up knowledge of how to deal with chaos, which is dangerous. Vaccines introduce small amounts of the disease in our healthy bodies and teach our ordered lives to develop anti-bodies.
Stories are like that. In Act 1 our protagonist lives in the ordered-balanced-lighted world. Everything is supposedly fine. But something alien enters his life and throws it into chaos. To solve the chaos and rebalance this life, he has to enter the world of chaos, the unknown, the dark, Act 2, the Special World. While in Act 2 he learns about the problem firsthand. In Act 2 he returns to his village with the elixir in hand to solve the problem for the rest of humanity. In this way, our protagonist lives on the border between order and chaos. He straddles the wall. An effective protagonist is not quarantined on either side—although in the early pages of Act 1 he may be quarantined—and by entering Act 2 he breaks out and crosses the threshold. Recall the Moment of Grace in LIAR! LIAR! when cashless Fletcher Reede stands on the fence line between the car pound and his ex-wife, Audrey, who holds the check book, and he suddenly realizes (music cue), "I'm a bad father. I'm a bad father." And Audrey says, "You're not a bad father when you stop 'quarantining' yourself with your lies and show up." (Okay so she didn't say that exactly.) But you get the point.
So, go quarantine yourself away and write that story. That's what I should be doing, but I'm writing this instead. I'm not sure which is the quarantine...writing or finding an excuse not to write.
Blessings,
stan
A Life out of Balance
The Dragon and Its Gold
The Decent and Indecent
An Elephant in the Room
The Threshold into Act Two
Obstacles that Escalate Tension
A Protagonist's Impossible Dream
Our Greatest Desire and Greatest Fear.
As storytellers our current state of quarantine over fears of COVID-19 is wonderfully illustrative of the crux of all good storytelling—the Moral Premise, where characters are motivated by vice and virtue to tear down (or build up) borders or establish (or break down) quarantines.
Storytellers should be aware that the internal conflict of values (i.e. borders & quarantines) between characters is made external through the physical conflict seen and heard on screen. What the story is really about is the internal conflict of what external borders to erect or tear down, and what quarantines to enforce or break out of.
Likewise, COVID-19, while essentially invisible, creates visible effects upon our body's normal biology. And that effective conflict extends to our homes, our communities, and our countries.
WHAT WAS SUBTEXT IS NOW ON THE NOSE
Remember when Trump was demanding walls, borders, and travel bans? Many citizens objected. They believed America was a country of immigrants and great diversity. (For the sake of illustration, I'm sidestepping the "legal" vs. "illegal" equivocation). America had values that didn't discriminate. There was a way we should do things, and we needed to stay true to the practices that made us a great nation. etc. etc. At the same time there were political battles about socialism, the organizational principle of subsidiarity, and government handouts. Notice that both sides in that conflict of values had barriers going both ways. Both sides wanted to quarantine the others.
Then, suddenly, COVID-19 changed everything, on both sides. What Trump tried unilaterally (walls, and travel bans) now governors and mayors are demanding. What Trump fought against (socialism and government handouts) now he champions. (Why write fiction when real life is more dramatic?)
In those real-life stories there are internal and external conflicts, and there are character arcs and situation outcomes that resulted. Both sides were involved in a fight for (or against) borders and for (or against) quarantines.
A DISTANT BUT RELATABLE ILLUSTRATION
Some years ago, just after the Sundance Film Festival, I was with a few other writers and story gurus as the guest of an actor-producer at one of those large vacation rentals in the mountains above Park City, Utah. We spent days breaking a story down on colorful four-by-six index cards taped to a glass door wall around which we sat trying to figure out how to tell the story in subtext. We were stumped about how we should show the story and not just tell it. We had worked all day and it was now 10:30 at night with no apparent solution. We gave up and went to our respective rooms for the night. The next morning, our host (the actor-producer) came down to breakfast beaming ear-to-ear. He had figured out a solution. Referring to the protagonist, our host said, "He gives a speech!" And then he proceeded to act out the speech, which explained explicitly (presumably to the audience) what subtext couldn't. Of course! It was perfect! It worked! We had crossed a threshold, a barrier, we were no longer "quarantined" in our little subtext rooms. What we had fought against, we were suddenly for.ALL STORIES ARE THIS WAY...even stories about creating stories.
In Once Up a Time in Hollywood, washed-up actor Rick Dalton feels quarantined. He's always playing the heavy who gets killed in Act 3. His career is fading. One day he realizes he's living next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. But there's a wall and a big iron gate that keeps him out. Then tragedy strikes (through the kindness of producer, Tarantino's, revisionist history) and Rick finds the wall/iron gate opening for him (music cue) as if by magic, and he's released from his "quarantine."
In Knives Out, the Thrombey family is quarantined in deceased Harlan Thrombey's mansion until Benoit Blanc can knock down enough walls and barriers to find the murderer. Meanwhile Marta Cabrera, Harlan's personal assistant and nurse, is psychologically quarantined thinking she killed the novelist as she hides behind a "porous wall" of deceit (and vomit).
In Elizabeth (the Shekhar Kapur directed Cate Blanchett's vehicles), the Queen is continually quarantined by her throne and responsibilities, as multiple figures of court and France attempt to tear down her walls or the walls around England.
In Midway, U.S. military characters battle the walls erected by Japan's Imperial Navy in the Pacific by self-quarantining their lives in doomed dive bombers and ships to build a wall around their country and keep the Imperial Army out of America.
In a sense, EVERYTHING is about walls, barriers and quarantines.
The Dao Ying/Yang symbol illustrates several things about the conflict in stories and arcs of characters. Ironically, the ancient symbol visually represents one of the 2001: A Space Odyssey themes from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra—that of eternal reoccurrence. To the Daoist it is a symbol of the oneness of the cosmos. In a simple way the Ying/Yang symbolizes the eternally rotating day and night, and how the earth (and our lives) forever rotates between light and dark, good and evil. That is true not just physically, but psychologically.
Therefore, a good story, as explained by The Moral Premise principle, is a conflict between the light (a particular virtue, or strength) and the dark (a particular vice, or weakness). And if you're watching a successful television series, which is eternally caught in Act 2, the conflict between that vice and virtue continues every week for years. The Ying/Yang rotates as the light chases the dark's tail, and the dark chases the light's tail, all the while the dark has some goodness to it (the white dot), and the light contains some imperfection (the black dot). This is life. This is the cosmos. There is constantly this internal and external conflict that keeps life interesting.
But there's something significant about walls and quarantine in this symbol of the cosmos. Jordan Peterson suggests that our best life is lived in the border between the light and the dark or to use his terms: between "perfect order" and "abysmal chaos." To be quarantined inside perfect order (the white) there would be no innovation or human progress. Why? Because innovation and progress demand we take risks and step into the unknown, the chaos. And by experimenting with things unknown in the world of chaos we discover ways to enhance the order in our lives. Likewise, if we were to keep our lives absolutely pure, we risk getting a disease for which we have no antibodies....and we die. In that case our bodies have not built up knowledge of how to deal with chaos, which is dangerous. Vaccines introduce small amounts of the disease in our healthy bodies and teach our ordered lives to develop anti-bodies.
Stories are like that. In Act 1 our protagonist lives in the ordered-balanced-lighted world. Everything is supposedly fine. But something alien enters his life and throws it into chaos. To solve the chaos and rebalance this life, he has to enter the world of chaos, the unknown, the dark, Act 2, the Special World. While in Act 2 he learns about the problem firsthand. In Act 2 he returns to his village with the elixir in hand to solve the problem for the rest of humanity. In this way, our protagonist lives on the border between order and chaos. He straddles the wall. An effective protagonist is not quarantined on either side—although in the early pages of Act 1 he may be quarantined—and by entering Act 2 he breaks out and crosses the threshold. Recall the Moment of Grace in LIAR! LIAR! when cashless Fletcher Reede stands on the fence line between the car pound and his ex-wife, Audrey, who holds the check book, and he suddenly realizes (music cue), "I'm a bad father. I'm a bad father." And Audrey says, "You're not a bad father when you stop 'quarantining' yourself with your lies and show up." (Okay so she didn't say that exactly.) But you get the point.
So, go quarantine yourself away and write that story. That's what I should be doing, but I'm writing this instead. I'm not sure which is the quarantine...writing or finding an excuse not to write.
Blessings,
stan
