The Anatomy of Story (52 page)

An all-knowing storyteller has no dramatic interest in the present. He already knows everything that happened, so he becomes a dead frame. Instead, the storyteller should have
a great weakness that will be solved by telling the story,
and thinking back and
telling the
story should be a struggle for him. This way, the storyteller is dramatic and personally interesting in the present, and the act of telling the story is itself heroic.

■ Cinema
Paradiso:
The hero, Salvatore, is wealthy and famous but also sad and in despair. He has known many women but never really loved any of them. And he hasn't visited his hometown in Sicily for thirty years. When he learns that his old friend Alfredo has died, it causes him to remember growing up in the place to which he vowed he would never return.

■ The Shawshank Redemption:
"Red" Redding, serving a life sentence for murder, has just been turned down again for parole. He is a man

without hope and believes he needs the walls of the prison to survive. One day, Andy arrives and walks the gauntlet between the lines of jeering prisoners that all new prisoners must walk. Red bets that Andy will be the first new prisoner to cry that night. Andy doesn't make a sound.

■ Heart of Darkness:
This is ultimately a detective story where the "crime"—the "horror" of what Kurtz might have done and said—is never known or solved. Part of the mystery is Marlow's true motive for telling and retelling his tale. One clue may be his final words to Kurtz's "Intended," when she asks him the last thing Kurtz said before he died. Instead of his actual words—"The horror! The horror!"—Marlow lies and says, "The last word he pronounced was— your name." Marlow is guilty of telling her a lie, telling a story that promises a simple answer and a false emotion, and this is reprehensible to him. And so he is doomed, driven, to tell his tale again and again until he gets it right, even though Kurtz's experience, and the heart of darkness itself, is unknowable.

5. Try to find a unique structure for telling the
tale instead of
simple
chronology.

The way you tell the story (through the storyteller) should be exceptional. Otherwise it's just a frame and we don't need it. A unique way of telling the story justifies a storyteller and says: this story is so unique that only a special storyteller could do it justice.

■ It's a Wonderful Life:
Two angels tell a third angel the events of a man's life that have led him to the point of committing suicide. The third angel then shows the man an alternative present: what the world would look like had he never lived.

■ The Usual Suspects:
A number of men are murdered on a docked ship. Customs agent Kujan interrogates a crippled man named Verbal who tells how it all started six weeks ago when the cops questioned five guys for a heist. The story goes back and forth between Kujan questioning Verbal and the events that Verbal describes. After he lets Verbal go, Kujan looks at the bulletin board in the interrogation room and sees all the names Verbal used in his confession. Verbal has made up all the "past" events in the present. He is both the killer and the storyteller.

6. The storyteller should try different versions of how he tells the story as he struggles to find and express the truth.

Again, the story is not some fixed thing, known from the beginning. It is a dramatic argument the writer is having with the audience. The act of telling the story and the act of an audience listening to it, and silently questioning it, should partly determine how it turns out.

The storyteller creates this give-and-take by leaving openings where he struggles with how best to tell it and lets the audience fill in the gaps. Through his struggle, he comes to understand the deeper meaning of the events, and by pulling the audience in and making them participate, he triggers the deeper meaning of their life narrative as well.

■
Heart of Darkness:
This is the antistoryteller's tale: it uses three narrators to show structurally that the "true" story is hopelessly ambiguous and can never be told. A seaman talks about a storyteller (Marlow) who is telling his shipmates a tale told to him by a man (Kurtz) whose dying words, "The horror! The horror!" are never explained. So we literally get a mystery wrapped in an enigma, an infinite regression of meaning, as obscure as "The horror" itself.

Also, Marlow has told this tale many times, as though trying to get closer to the truth by each telling, always ending in failure. He explains that he went up the river to find the truth about Kurtz, but the closer he got to him, the murkier things became.
■
Tristram Shandy:
Three hundred years ahead of its time,
Tristram

Shandy
uses this same storytelling technique in comedy. For example, the first-person narrator tells a story that goes backward as well as forward. He talks to the reader directly and admonishes the reader for not reading properly. And he complains to the reader when he has to explain something that he says should come out later.

7. Do not end the storytelling frame at the end of the story, but rather about three-quarters of the way in.

If you put the final storytelling frame at the very end of the story, the act of remembering and telling the story can have no dramatic or structural impact on the present. You need to leave some room in the story for the act of recounting the change to the storyteller himself.

■ It's a Wonderful Life:
Clarence, the angel, listens to the story of George's life until the moment when George is about to commit suicide. This recounting of past events concludes with about a third of the story to go. In the final third of the story, Clarence shows George an alternative and helps him change.

■ Cinema Paradiso:
The hero, Salvatore, finds out that his friend Alfredo has died. He thinks back to his childhood, which he spent mostly at the Cinema Paradiso, where Alfredo was the projectionist. The memory ends when Salvatore leaves his hometown as a young man to make his name in Rome. Back in the present, he returns to his hometown for the funeral and sees that the Cinema Paradiso has become a boarded-up ruin. But Alfredo has left him a gift, a reel of all the great kissing scenes the priest ordered cut when Salvatore was just a boy.

8. The act of telling the story should lead the storyteller to a self-revelation.

By thinking back, the storyteller gains a great insight about himself in the present. Again, the entire storytelling process is structurally one big self-revelation step for the storyteller. So telling the story is the way the storyteller-hero fulfills his need.

■ The Great Gatsby:
Nick says at the end, "That's my middle West.... I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters.... After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that.... So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home."

■ The Shawshank Redemption:
Red learns to have hope and live in freedom after being inspired by his friend Andy.

■ Goodfellas: As
a black comedy,
Goodfellas
uses the first-person storyteller to highlight the ironic fact that the hero
doesn't
get a self-revelation at the end, even though it is clear that he should.

9. Consider having the storyteller explore how the act of telling the story can be immoral or destructive, to himself or to others.

This makes storytelling itself a moral issue, dramatically interesting in the present.

■
Copenhagen:
Copenhagen is really a competition of storytellers: three characters give different versions of what happened when they
met
during World War II to discuss building a nuclear bomb. Each story represents a different view of morality, and each character uses his own story to attack the morality of another.

10. The act of telling the story should cause a final dramatic event.

This event is often the hero's moral decision.

Telling the story should have an effect, and the most dramatic effect is to force the storytelling hero to make a new moral decision based on his self-revelation.

■
 The Great Gatsby:
Nick decides to leave the moral decadence of New York and return to the Midwest.

■
 It's a Wonderful Life:
George decides not to commit suicide but rather to join his family and face the music.

■
Body and Soul:
The storyteller hero, after looking back, decides not to throw the fight.

■
The Shawshank Redemption:
Red decides not to give up outside of prison as his friend Brooks did. Instead he decides to live and join Andy, who is starting a new life in Mexico.

77. Don't promote the fallacy that a character's death allows the full and true story to be told.

In this common trigger for telling a story, the storyteller states that the character's death finally makes it possible to tell the truth about him. His deathbed scene and last words provide the final key for the truth to "fall into place."

This is a false technique. It is not your actual death that allows you to understand your life because you can finally see it whole. It is acting
as if
you will die that creates meaning by motivating you to make choices now. Finding meaning is an ongoing process of living.

Similarly, the storyteller may use the character's death (someone else's or his own) to give the
appearance
that now the full story can be told and understood. But meaning comes in the act of storytelling, in looking back again and again, and each time, the "true" story is different. Like Heisen-berg's uncertainty principle, the storyteller may know
a
meaning at any one time but never
the
meaning.

■
Citizen Kane:
The meaning of Kane's dying word, "Rosebud," is not

that it sums up all of Kane's life but that it can't.
■
Heart of Darkness:
Kurtz's dying words—"The horror! The horror!"— don't make the enigma of his life any clearer. They are the final mystery in a larger mystery about the heart of darkness that exists in all humans, including the storyteller Marlow, who tells the tale again and again in a vain attempt to finally get to the truth.

12. The deeper theme should be concerned with the truth and beauty of creativity, not heroic action.

By placing all actions within the storytelling frame and highlighting the importance and struggles of the storyteller recounting those actions, you make storytelling the primary action and the great accomplishment.

■
The Usual Suspects:
Verbal is a master criminal, having defeated or killed everyone who has tried to stop him. But his greatest accomplishment—indeed, the main reason he is a successful criminal—is the story he improvises that makes everyone think he is a weak, pathetic man.
■ Gilgamesh:
Gilgamesh is a great warrior. But when his friend and fellow warrior dies, he looks in vain for immortality. He is left with the immortality that comes from having his story told.
■
The Shawshank Redemption:
Andy's great gift to his friend Red (the storyteller) and the other prisoners is to show them how to live life with hope, style, and freedom, even in prison.

13. Be wary of too many storytellers.

For all its power, the storyteller has costs. The biggest one is that it places a frame between the story and the audience, and that usually drains some

emotion from the story. The more storytellers yon have, the more yon risk distancing the audience so much that they look at the story from a cold and clinical position.

Stories that excel in their use of a storyteller are
Sunset Boulevard, The Conformist, American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Re-demption, Forrest Gump, Presumed Innocent, The Magnificent Ambersons, Heart of Darkness, Tristram Shandy, Copenhagen, Madame Bovary, Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley, Cinema Paradiso, Gilgamesh, The Great Gatsby, It's a Won-derful Life,
and
Body and Soul.

GENRES