The Anatomy of Story (30 page)

Creating a world of slavery to express or accentuate your hero's weakness is also useful in drama and melodrama.

Sunset Boulevard

(by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder & D. M. Marshman, Jr., 1950)
In
Sunset Boulevard,
the hero's weakness is a predilection for money and the finer things in life. Sure enough, he finds himself hiding out in a rundown mansion with an aging movie star who has money to burn, as long as he fulfills her wishes. Like vampires, the movie star and her mansion feed on the hero, and they are rejuvenated as the hero falls into an opulent slavery.

A Streetcar Named Desire

(by Tennessee Williams, 1947) A Streetcar Named Desire
is a perfect example of how the world of slavery at the beginning of the story expresses the hero's great weakness. Blanche is a fragile, self-deceptive woman who wants to hide in a dream world of romance and pretty things. But instead, she is thrust into a hot, cramped apartment with her sister and brutish brother-in-law. Rather than give her the illusion of romance, this hellhole, with its apelike king, Stanley, relentlessly presses in on her until she breaks.

Casablanca

(play
Everybody Comes to Rick's
by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison,

screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, 1942) Casablanca
is a love story with an opening world of slavery that constantly jabs at Rick's weakness. His fabulous bar, the Cafe Americain, reminds him at every turn of the love he lost in romantic Paris. The club is also all about making money, which Rick can do only if he pays off a traitorous French police captain. Every magnificent corner of his bar shows Rick how far he has fallen into a self-centered cynicism while the world cries out for leaders.

Fantasy is another story form that places special emphasis on this technique of matching the world of slavery to the hero's weakness. A good fantasy always starts the hero in some version of a mundane world and sets up his psychological or moral weakness there. This weakness is the reason the hero cannot see the true potential of where he lives and of who he can be, and it is what propels him to visit the fantasy world.

Field of Dreams

(novel
Shoeless Joe
by W. P. Kinsella, screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson,

1989)

In
Field of Dreams,
the hero, Ray, lives on a farm in Iowa near a town that wants to ban books. He builds a baseball diamond on his property even though the other farmers think he's crazy and his brother-in-law wants the farm for its practical and monetary value. Ray's need is to do something he's passionate about and make amends with his deceased father. Building a baseball diamond—which brings back the dead baseball star Shoeless Joe Jackson—creates a Utopian world where Ray lives and allows him to have one last communion with his father.

Mary Poppins

(books by P. L. Travers, screenplay by Bill Walsh and Don Da Gradi, 1964)
In
Mary Poppins,
the household is a restrictive place, governed by a rule-bound father whose god is the clock. The apparent main character, Mary Poppins, is what I call a traveling angel, "practically perfect in every way," so she has no weaknesses. In fact, she is the agent for showing others their true potential and the negative potential of their enslaving world. The children are rebellious in a self-destructive way and have no sense of the wondrous world of enchantment that lies outside their door in London and also within their own minds.

The father, who is the main opponent, has an even greater weakness than his children. He sees the world as a business, and though he doesn't enter the fantasy worlds, he does benefit from his children's visits to them and from the magical nanny. At the end, the father's world of business has become a place where he can fly a kite with his kids.

Other traveling-angel comedies that show a similar connection between the hero and an enslaving world are
Crocodile Dundee; The Music Man; Amelie; Chocolat; Good Morning, Vietnam;
and
Meatballs.

How the Story World and the Hero Develop Together

Notice that each of the major story elements so far—premise, designing principle, seven steps, characters, and moral argument—matches and connects with all the other elements to create a deeply textured but organic unit, with everything working together. This is the orchestration so essential to great storytelling.

In the beginning of the story, all the elements weave together and express the same thing. The hero (probably) lives in a world of slavery that highlights, amplifies, or exacerbates his great weakness. He then goes up against the opponent best able to exploit that weakness. In Chapter 8 on plot, you'll see how another element at the beginning, the "ghost," expresses the hero's weakness as well.

The connection between hero and world extends from the hero's slavery throughout his character arc. In most stories, because the hero and the world are expressions of each other, the world and the hero develop together. Or if the hero doesn't change, as in much of Chekhov, the world doesn't change either.

Let's look at some of the classic ways the hero and the world change, contrast, or don't change over the course of a story.

Hero: Slavery to Greater Slavery to Freedom World: Slavery to Greater Slavery to Freedom

The hero begins the story in a world of slavery. He struggles to reach his goal and experiences decline as the world closes in. But then, through self-revelation, he fulfills his need and becomes free in a world that is better off because of what he has done.

This pattern is found in
Star Wars
episodes 4-6,
The Lord of the Rings, The Verdict, The Lion King, The Shawshank Redemption, It's a Wonderful Life,
and
David Copperfield.

Hero: Slavery to Greater Slavery or Death World: Slavery to Greater Slavery or Death

In these stories, the main character begins enslaved by his own weakness and by a world pressing in. Because of the cancer in the hero's soul, the world that depends on him is rotten as well. In seeking a goal, the hero learns a negative self-revelation that destroys both him and the world that relies on him. Or he is crushed by an enslaving world he cannot understand.

Examples are
Oedipus the King, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Conversation, The Conformist, Sunset Boulevard, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard,
and
Heart of Darkness.

Hero: Slavery to Greater Slavery or Death World: Slavery to Great Slavery to Freedom

In this approach, used in some tragedies, you break the connection between hero and world at the end of the story. The hero has a self-revelation, but it comes too late to set him free. He does make a sacrifice before he dies or falls, which sets the world free after he is gone.

We see this sequence in
Hamlet, The Seven Samurai
, and
A Tale of Two Cities.

Hero: Slavery to Temporary Freedom to Greater Slavery or Death World: Slavery to Temporary Freedom to Greater Slavery or Death

This technique has the hero enter a subworld of freedom at some point during the middle of the story. This is the world in which the character
should
live if he realizes his true self. Failing to do so and moving on, or discovering the rightness of this world too late, eventually destroys the hero.

This pattern occurs in
The Wild Bunch, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
and
Dances with Wolves.

Hero: Freedom to Slavery or Death World: Freedom to Slavery or Death

These stories begin in a
Utopian
world
in
which the hero is happy but vulnerable to attack or
change.
A
new
character, changing social forces, or a character flaw causes the hero and his world to decline and
eventually
fall.

This sequence is found in
King Lear, How Green Was My Valley,
and such King Arthur stories as
Le Morte dArthur
and
Excalibur.

Hero: Freedom to Slavery to Freedom World: Freedom to Slavery to Freedom

The hero again starts off in a world of freedom. An attack comes from outside or within the family. The hero and the world decline, but he overcomes the problem and creates a stronger
Utopia.

This approach is used in
Meet Me in St. Louis, Amarcord,
and to a lesser degree in
Cinema Paradiso.

Hero: Apparent Freedom to Greater Slavery to Freedom World: Apparent Freedom to Greater Slavery to Freedom

At the beginning of the story, the world appears to be a
Utopia
but is actually a place of extreme hierarchy and corruption. The characters fight ruthlessly to win, often with many dying in the process. Eventually, the hero fights through the corruption to create a more just society, or he is simply one of the last ones standing.

Examples include
L..A. Confidential, Jurassic Park, The Magnificent Amber sons
, and
Blue Velvet.

A brilliant variation on this sequence is found in
Goodfellas,
which combines the gangster and black comedy forms. The story moves from the apparent freedom of the mob community to greater slavery of the hero and death for all of his friends.

TIME IN THE STORY WORLD

Now that the story world is connected to the hero, we have to look at the different ways the story world itself can develop. Time is the fourth major element—along with natural settings, man-made spaces, and tools—that you use to construct your story world.

Before we look at the many ways that time is expressed through the world—or more exactly, how the story world is expressed through time—we need to get beyond two fallacies that many storytellers have about time.

Fallacies of
Past
and
Future

What we might call the fallacy of the past is common in historical fiction. The idea is that the writer of historical fiction is depicting a different world, based on its own set of values and moral codes. Therefore, we should not judge those people by our standards.

The fallacy of the past comes from the misguided notion that a writer of historical fiction is first and foremost writing history. As a storyteller, you are always writing fiction. You use the past as a pair of glasses through which the audience can see itself more clearly today. Therefore, withholding judgment about people in the past is absurd; we show them
in order
to judge ourselves by comparison.

You make this comparison in two ways. Negatively, you show values dominant in the past that still hurt people today. We see this with the Puritan values in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
and Arthur Miller's
The Crucible.
Positively, you show values from the past that are still good and should be brought back. For example,
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
glorifies such values as duty, honor, and loyalty found on a military outpost in 1870s America.

What wo might call the fallacy of the future is common in science fiction stories. Many writers think science fiction is about predicting what will happen in the future, what the world will actually be like. We saw this thinking at the end of 1983 when everyone was debating whether and in what ways George Orwell had been right about 1984.

The fallacy here is that stories set in the future are about the future. They're not. You set a story in the future to give the audience another pair of glasses, to abstract the present in order to understand it better. One key difference between science fiction and historical fiction is that stories set in the future highlight not so much values as the forces and choices that face us today and the consequences if we fail to choose wisely.

True time in a story is "natural" time. It has to do with the way the world develops and in turn furthers the development of the story. Some of the top techniques of natural time are seasons, holidays, the single day, and the time endpoint.

Seasons

The first technique of natural story time is the cycle of the seasons and the rituals that come with them. In this technique, you place the story, or a moment of the story, within a particular season. Each season, like each natural setting, conveys certain meanings to the audience about the hero or the world.