The Importance of Surprise, Revelation, Sacrifice, & Beauty in Successful Stories

Recently I posted something from Chris Vogler on the importance of "wishing" in successful stories. Here is something just as important, on surprise, revelation, sacrifice, and beauty.

 I've enjoyed Jordan Peterson's perspective on the important of narratives in culture. Now, he interviews one of the best storytellers of our time, Randall Wallace.  Some highlights are quoted below.

Jordan Peter's recent podcast with Randall Wallace has some profound moments in terms of narrative and storytelling. It's long (2 hr 22 min).  Randall Wallace is not only an A-List screenwriter, but also a producer, director, and novelist. It is always challenging to listen to dialogue between two effective, responsible, achievers... who are smarter than the rest of us.  Excerpts follow.

SURPRISES and REVELATIONS

[29:40] WALLACE: There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently. It's, "keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable." I find that in a great story, or in any great piece of art that surprise is the central currency of its power. There's an element, if you will, of revelation. I think it was Paul Tillich (Carl Bart), I'm not, sure who said: "Religion is man's way to God and is always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man and it's always perfect." Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story when you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming what just happened. That's what makes them awake that's what stabs them broad awake.

In Braveheart so many people said to me it was when the woman that William Wallace loves, when her throat is cut that's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie. Even to the very end of Braveheart there would have been many people in Hollywood, and were, who thought well that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him. We can't end an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled. But that was where it had to end for me. But how we get there and what it says surprised me and surprised the audience too, and in that I would think is how it becomes resonant.

I was doing a charity screening of Braveheart a few years ago. For the first time in oh, two decades, to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened not on television but projected in a theater and doing it for a charity in Austin, Texas. At the end of the movie, I walked up onto the stage to do a Q and A. The first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row, 19 years old. So, she wasn't born when Braveheart had come out. I was surprised that she stood up first and she said: "Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question I just want to tell you something. My fiancée died six months ago and before he died, he told me he wanted me to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he loved me."  And I did I… I had to stop. I… I couldn't go on for several minutes it shocked me it moved me it surprised me . 

PETERSON: You said that you write love stories. and I guess she put her finger on that really profoundly.

WALLACE: There's the idea that that men want to be courageous. They want to be willing to

sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for. And women want a man like that and they, the women, want to be participants in that story, in that same journey for themselves. To me it's narrative that can give you that more than any abstract explanation.

[33:49] PETERSON:  There's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising. If you can predict it, technically speaking, it doesn't contain any information and so information always comes in the form of surprise… we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us. So, then you said revelation comes in the form of surprise and I would say that's virtually the case by definition isn't it? Imagine you're viewing a narrative through a particular lens. 

You're in a cognitive perceptual structure, a frame of reference that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them, and to make predictions. And if something unexpected happens that means that you've just learned that [your previous] frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstance. So, what that really does mean is that something transcendent, at least from the perspective of [your] current frame of reference, has in fact occurred. That's a mini miracle in some sense, right? Because a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following… so a surprising revelation is a mini miracle… 

I would also say the narrative does something else. It doesn't just surprise you it also gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprise now makes sense. If it doesn't then you're left unsatisfied by the movie…  I've seen that often in particularly in movies… the writer will throw a whole variety of things up in the air and it's really compelling. Then about three quarters of the way through the movie you think it'll be really something if all of that gets tied together [by the end.] Then it doesn't, right? It falls flat. It doesn't end in a manner that does justice to what's been set up. 

That's a classic narrative structure. There's a stable state to begin with, and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily, and then the establishment of a new state. A good story definitely does that for us.

Around the 53 min mark Wallace tells the story of writing Braveheart and taking an early draft to Jack Bernstein (who wrote Ace Ventura). Wallace says Jack and him are polar opposites. After reading it Jack told Randall, "this is the best thing of yours I've ever read."  The story surprised Jack (and Randall). It had that revelatory quality of love in it. William Wallace did what he did, because of love. So, there's a connection between love and revelation—the revelation of how much one loves. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF SACRIFICE

Then there is this about the importance of sacrifice around the 46 min mark. Peterson is talking about the stories in the Old Testament, but it has profound meaning for fictional characters in our movies.

[46:00] PETERSON: One of the great human discoveries was that of sacrifice. It was the discovery that you could modify the present so the future was different... You can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present, something of extreme value, and obtain something of even more value in the future yeah... It's a cataclysmic discovery.

While you can give up something that you own, you can give up something that

you love. You can die for something, or you can sacrifice your entire life to it. The last of those is the ultimate sacrifice — to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal. ... That is what everyone admires and that's what we all look for in stories that's what compels us... It's the basis of romantic attraction... associated with generosity...and share the fruits of your sacrifice. There's cosmic significance to the idea of sacrifice.

WALLACE: I agree with that completely... that's what is at play when you're making the sacrifice. There's this other element of faith in it... instead of it just being a negotiation, central to the sacrifice... is a transforming commitment, that the person [sacrificing] is being transformed.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY

[59:41] PETERSON: There isn't anything that's more valuable than beauty, and I mean that from the cold-hearted conservative capitalist perspective. It's stunning how valuable beauty is. The most valuable artifacts in the world are paintings I know, except ... factories that make computer chips. Single artifact paintings are worth 150 million dollars at the at the upper end, along with ancient manuscripts that are works of timeless art. It looks like an investment in beauty is one that pays off as long as the thing remains in existence. I don't know how much everything in Europe that's beautiful cost but it was plenty, and it's paid back in spades and is only going to become increasingly more valuable as the past becomes more and more scarce, which is happening very very rapidly. I mean, these countries have more tourists than people, and it's all a consequence of art and beauty.

WALLACE: In Rome there are something like 150 cathedrals. If you went to three or four a day, in a month you couldn't visit them all. And and everyone you walk into takes you to a different place, which is exactly as they they were intended to do. 

[74:58] PETERSON: People have no idea [about the importance of beauty]. That's why I wrote chapter eight [Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.] They have no idea how much they're starving for beauty. It's a hunger that goes far beyond, well let's not say that -- it doesn't have to go beyond material hunger -- but no matter how well fed you are, without some relationship to beauty, there's too much suffering in the world for it to be viable. Beauty, along with truth, is the antidote to suffering. It's not optional. It's crucial and you can tell that by its economic value. For those who are hard-headed you can't point to anything with more economic value. Period.

Miracles Don't Just Happen, and Neither Do Story Hooks.

Story hooks are very much like miracles. But unlike miracles, your audience won't take the hook on faith. You have to explain it.

I have been working on a non-fiction book that has a couple of chapters that deal with the intersection of miracles and natural law. It occurred to me that miracles are very much like story hooks.

What's a Miracle?

A miracle can be defined as any unique physical phenomenon that defies natural explanation and which appears to have some benefit to a person or group of persons. That definition is an attempt to separate incidents of fate, or natural catastrophes that harm humanity (e.g. tsunami, tornadoes, or ...falling branches—like the one that totaled my wife's car yesterday in our driveway) from a similarly fascinating natural event that saves a person's life or prevents catastrophe. While a tornado may level a house we would not call it a miracle. But the baby that is carried by that same tornado to a field 2 miles away and set down without serious injury—

The view out my office. NOT a miracle, unless it can be fixed.

—that's a miracle!

And of those two events (the house leveling tornado or the tornado as baby transporter) which is the story hook?  The baby for sure.

My examination of miracles for this book I'm the editor of (in which I find myself at times rewriting the material), has revealed that there are many ways miracles can be naturally explained, although such explanations are nearly as miraculous and as fanciful as the event itself. The explanations involve unseen hierarchy of the nature's laws, the hierarchy of species, coincident of event timing, and the intersection of spacial and time dimensions beyond those which we normally perceive (3 of space and the point-dimension of time).

Miracles (and perhaps story hooks, too) seem to have two common components:

1. There is an instigation or incident from an outside trigger, and
2. After the outside trigger natural physical laws take over. 

In other words, the idea that a miracle violates or breaks natural laws is probably a false concept. It appears that the unusual event is the trigger, after which Natural Law dominates. (Ah! Now, I'm sure some of you would argue with that. Well, hold on, there's more but I can only type one finger at a time.)

Do Miracles and Hooks Break with Nature?

Now, as I just stated, people of religious faith will challenge me on ideological grounds that miracles do not violate or break a natural law. They will claim that unless there are miracles that defy nature they aren't miracles, and if there are no such nature-defying events then religious faith is dead...and since we can't have that, miracles must defy, violate, or break with nature.  (So much for the circular reasoning of ideology. I prefer evidence, else one could believe in anything....really.)

I'm not going to try to defend religious faith here (although I have it, and I do believe in miracles), but let's examine some ideas and see the story potential in each. My point is that miracles are a good way to conceptualize story hooks...and likewise your hooks should be/could be/must be miraculous...with an explanation of a sort. 

Are These Miracles? Could they be Hooks?

A dandelion growing in the middle of the desert? We'd call that a miracle, but it's an event that can be explained. The miracle here is that a dandelion seed got into the desert mud. After that inciting incident, natural law took over...when the conditions were right we have a blooming dandelion.

We call the development of a human being in a mother's womb and its delivery, The Miracle of Birth, although biologists claim that it can all be explained...at least at some level. Frankly, science can explain very little about how it happens nor can they create a baby from scratch. That makes it a miracle....an everyday miracle, hey get that thumb out of your mouth, you want buck teeth? Why look at that thumb and those teeth...wanna explain either of those?

Aunt Millie being healed of some strange lung disease is one thing...we're not really sure if there was a misdiagnosis, or if some "miracle" drug actually worked, if if an angel visited her in the middle of the night. 

But how do we explain Splash, Jesus walking on water or healing the eyes of the blind, or Moses leading the Children of Israel through the Red Seat on dry land? The skeptic's easy explanation of the Bible miracles is that they're as real as Splash—they didn't actually happen. The person of faith, on the other-hand, is much like the avid story connoisseur...they believe, for there's something of value in the story and the belief. And a good hook or miracle can reveal truth in the story myth that follows.  (Where "myth" is the story vehicle, regardless of it's truth. J.R.R. Tolkien once told C.S. Lewis that the Jesus myth was a true myth worthy of belief. The Chronicles of Narnia were the result.) [Did you ever wonder why those British authors only used initials for their given names?]

Daryl Hannah in a mermaid suit, Morgan Freeman walking on water, or Jesus spitting on a man's eyes are all good hooks, aren't they? How can they be possible? We wonder, we're intrigued, we allow mystery and suspense to pile in...and we become engaged in the story...because of the miracle. We're hooked.  Most people of faith don't want an explanation of miracles (from the ancient past or present day.) But story mavens need something, and I think people of faith need something too, otherwise belief in anything, true or not, would be probable. 

In stories then, when we're presented with the hook, we want to know something about it, like where did it come from, or how does it work? It can't be the writer's convenience and just appear. We can't expect readers or audiences to buy into the ideology just because we said it is so. Even if we can't explain it perfectly, audiences expect us to give it some basis in logic, even if the logic is faulty.  

For example, in WHAT WOMEN WANT, Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) has a bathroom accident with a hair dryer and a bathtub, that "allows" him to hear the thoughts of women he's near. At first this is just what playboy Nick would want. But then it turns into a curse. Nonetheless, the hook, or miracle is explained...at least enough so we can suspend disbelief. And of course it makes no sense, whatsoever. If anything like what happened to Nick happened to a real person, they'd be electrocuted dead. End of movie. 

So, it occurred to me, that some of the philosophical, logical, and scientific understandings of where real miracles come from would help us as storytellers come up with believable hooks. 

5 Rules for Miracles and Story Hooks

1. Miracles and hooks are at first unexplained phenomenal events, seeming impossibilities in the physical realm. But in reality, miracles and hooks do not actually violate Natural Law. C.S. Lewis writes in his book Miracles:

If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and in months later a child is born.

2. Miracles and hooks are not the same as events of fate or catastrophes which occur due to natural law of occurrences, but without moral purpose. Miracles and hooks are specific to a person or group of people with a moral purpose. That is, a miracle or a hook involves some intelligent, benevolent "person," or "force" that triggers the event.

"Everything in a successful story relates to the character arc described by the moral premise statement, including the hook, which describes the peculiar and person problem of our protagonist....Peter." (personal interview with Stan Williams) ...hey, I needed a quote...can't I quote myself even if I just made it up?

3. After the event is triggered, Natural Law takes over and all other things in the person's life or story transpire without additional miracles or hooks. Natural law is never violated, although the natural laws involved may be unknown.

Scientific discoveries reveal natural laws heretofore unknown which caused events that previously could only be described as unexplained phenomenal, or something God does in secret.  But even if we have some explanation for how the event occurred,  the phenomena's moral purpose defines it as a miracle.

4. The "person" or "force" behind the miracle or hook may be a representative of a higher order species that intervenes in the life of the lower species. 

A miracle to a nutritive plant could be triggered by a brute sentient animal. A miracle to a brut sentient animal maybe triggered by a rational person.  A miracle or hook to a rational person would be triggered by a supernatural entity. In each case, the higher species reaches down into the environment of the lower species to trigger an event. For both agents, in both species, no natural law is broken, although the lower species may not understand the natural law which the higher species invokes. 

For example, a young girl folds her laundry and puts 12 pairs of socks in her drawer. The next morning there are only 9, her three favorite pair of red socks are missing. She wonders if she counted wrong. But then a few days later a miracle occurs and the three missing pairs show up again, in the drawer, perfectly in place. She takes one pair out to put it on, and low and behold she discovers a second miracle, the holes in the heels of the socks have been mended. How did this happen? Well, you guessed it, a higher order species paid her a visit...her mother.

5.  "Persons," and "forces" can trigger miracles by operating in extra dimensions of time and space beyond the 3 dimensions of space and 1 point of time humanity normally experiences. Science fiction is always playing with time and other dimensions. If we're to consider some of the theories surrounding Quantum String Theory we have as  many as 10 dimensions to play with, and all we need is a 4th for Jesus to walk through walls, or for Bruce Nolan (Jim Carey) to hear the prayers that God hears and to walk on water.

Conclusion

So, the next time you're trying to think up a hook, think instead of a miracle. That impossibility that through your craft you make reasonable.