5
THE FULL STORY
The previous chapter took a wide-angle view of story’s eight stages, so you can dissect stories into their major components. To learn fast, locate the eight stages in stories you love and watch as the deep pattern of universal story form emerges.
This chapter prepares you to craft stories of your own by taking close-ups of these stages and their various aspects. Like a composer of music, a storyteller must learn to play multifaceted instruments that ultimately harmonize and crescendo.
STAGE ONE: THE TARGET AUDIENCE
PRIME PRINCIPLE: A MEANINGFUL EMOTIONAL EFFECT
Writers of fiction for page, stage, and screen have little difficulty imagining their story’s buying public. Over a career, fine storytellers develop a keen sense of their ideal target reader/audience, along with a feel for their work’s target emotional effect. Comedy writers labor for laughs; romance writers strive for tears; action writers aim for excitement; authors of psychologically complex tellings hope for correspondingly complex emotional effects. At the end of the day, the professional writer judges his quality of work not by its effect on him, but by the degree to which the effect he hoped for affects his readers or audience.
For the creators of marketing stories, however, defining the target audience is far more demanding. The next chapter will examine the multidimensional research in Stage One of the purpose-told story.
STAGE TWO: SUBJECT MATTER
PRIME PRINCIPLE: BALANCE
Powerful stories will not grow in arid ground. A setting must be prepared. So once the reader/audience is in sight, storytellers build their tales from the bottom up, starting at the foundations of their story’s world, preparing for the telling step by step.
Subject matter for a story contains three major components: a physical and social setting, a protagonist, and a core value. Life offers the storyteller an infinite variety of each.
In fact, more often than not, the spark of originality that ignites an exceptional story flashes through a creative’s imagination not while she daydreams, but as she sweats out the grunt work of founding her story-world and planting its setups.
World-building, therefore, is storytelling’s critical second step. Strong choices made here greatly increase the possibility for success; weak choices mudslide downhill, burying the stages that follow. The weakest choices of all favor the general over the specific.
Writers hoping for a best seller want their stories to influence the largest number of readers or audience members possible, so they generalize, opting for a one-size-fits-all, rather than one-of-a-kind, world. This unfortunate step actually shrinks, rather than expands, their future audience or readership.
The mind works best when it moves from the specific to the universal—not the other way around. Consider, for example, the phrase a piece of furniture. As you read it, a vague image blurs your imagination and halts your thoughts because your mind has no inclination to go backward to the particular. But if I say, “A wingback Duchess chair upholstered in blood-red leather,” a clear image glows in your mind. Instinctively, your imagination moves forward from this particular to the general, slotting the chair into the mental category “furniture.” This applies to all aspects of a story’s world, physical and social.
Therefore, the principle: The more specific the setting, the more universal the story’s appeal.
With an eye to his end purpose, the storyteller must identify every element of the setup, then research each in depth to generate original choices, and finally integrate these aspects with precision. As a result, he creates a unique story-world for a telling of top-notch quality.
TIME
A story’s setting encloses two dimensions of time—location and duration.
1. Location in Time
The vast majority of stories happen in the here and now of their contemporary society. Others take place in a historical setting or hypothetical future, and a few in the timeless world of fantasy.
Story duration refers to how much time the telling spans in the lives of its characters versus how much time it takes to tell. Telling time ranges from brief seconds on YouTube to the hundred hours, more or less, of a multiseason long-form television series. With a few exceptions, the life spanned within the telling covers far more time than the telling.
SPACE
Two dimensions structure a story’s space: (1) Physical—the horizontal landscape and every object on it. (2) Social—the vertical hierarchy of a society’s pyramid of power and the possibility for movement up or down.
1. Physical Location
Many stories, especially on stage or in sitcoms, play out in a single, enclosed space: a living room, for example, as family members, maps spread on the floor, argue over where to go on vacation. On the other hand, most stories told for the screen or page jump from place to place: a driveway as a family packs for a trip, their picnic on a beach, their dinner in the waterfront restaurant, and so on.
2. Social Location
Every physical setting contains a social setting as well, a cast of characters defined by demographic factors such as age, gender, income, employment, and ethnicity. What’s more, this cast lives in a culture defined first and foremost by its values—its ideality versus its reality, what its citizens believe they should do versus what in fact they do.
THE CORE VALUE
The physical and social dimensions brace a story in time and place, but a setting does not become three-dimensional until the teller adds substance in the form of values.
As mentioned in chapter 3, in everyday conversation, when someone says an individual or institution has “values,” he means positive qualities such as truthfulness, love, generosity, hard work, loyalty, and the like. But for the story-maker, the values he invests in his telling come not as singularities but binaries of positive/negative charge: truth/lie, love/hate, generosity/selfishness, hard work/laziness, loyalty/betrayal, life/death, courage/cowardice, hope/despair, meaningfulness/meaninglessness, maturity/immaturity, justice/injustice, and on the list goes, naming all those qualities of human experience that can shift charge dynamically from positive to negative and back again.
A telling may incorporate any number, variety, and combination of values, but it anchors its content in one irreplaceable binary—the story’s core value. This value determines a story’s fundamental meaning and emotion.
Suppose a story’s core value is love/hate. How and why a person moves from love to hate or from hate to love gives the events meaning. As the story moves back and forth between negative and positive charges, emotions flow, not only in the characters but in the audience as well.
But if a storyteller were to extract love/hate from her characters’ lives and substitute morality/immorality, this switch in core value would evolve her work from a love story to a redemption plot with all-new meanings and all-new emotions.
If a crime story were to shift its core value from justice/injustice to life/death, it would stop being a crime story and pivot to an action tale—once again, new emotions, new meanings. If a family story were to deemphasize the value of unity/breakup and instead emphasize maturity/immaturity in one of its children, the plot would radically change genre from domestic drama to a coming-of-age story. The core value that pulses at the heart of a story determines its specific meaning and unique emotional impact.
THE PROTAGONIST
Cast design is best imagined as a solar system of planets, satellites, and comets (supporting characters) in orbit around their sun (the story’s core character, aka protagonist or hero), burning at the center. A single character usually plays this star role, but it could be a duo (such as in Thelma and Louise), a team (Inglourious Basterds), an institution (the CDC in Contagion), even all of humanity considered as one massive group struggling to survive (War of the Worlds).
When two or more characters fill this role, they act as one: All members of the group want the same thing and suffer or benefit mutually as they pursue it. Whatever happens to one, positive or negative, affects them all.
A core character must be empathetic; she or he may or may not be sympathetic. The difference between these two is this: Sympathetic means “likable”—an amiable, companionate person the target audience might want as friend, family, or neighbor. Empathetic means “like me”—an innate trait shared by both the core character and the target audience.
Sympathy is optional, empathy essential, for this reason: Audience involvement hinges on an act of personal identification. No matter how charming, attractive, and sympathetic a character may seem, an audience will not connect on good looks alone. Rather, the psychological bond of empathy only develops when an audience subconsciously identifies with a positive human quality emanating from within the character. This quality becomes the story’s center of good.
THE CENTER OF GOOD
The moment a story appears in front of audience members or readers, they instantly and instinctively inspect its value-charged landscape, seeking an emotional door into the story, a place to stick their empathy. They sort the positives from the negatives, the goods from the bads, the rights from the wrongs, the things of value from the things of no value. Everyone searches for a center of good because, in his heart of hearts, everyone instinctively sees himself as good.
We all know we’re flawed, perhaps in need of moral fine-tuning, but when we weigh the positive versus negative charges within, we feel that on balance we’re overall good, or at least right. The worst of people believe they’re justified in what they think and do. Just ask them. Therefore, all people, regardless of their humanity or lack of it, seek a positive glow somewhere in a story’s world, a mooring for their empathy.
Ideally, the storyteller places this center of good within the protagonist so that a positive human quality emanates from within the core character and captures the audience’s personal involvement. This empathy magnet also anchors the mirror story, which we will explain in chapter 6.
Please note: The principle of the center of good is not a call for sentimentality and Pollyanna cheerfulness. Just as too-sweet candy hurts your teeth, a too-sugary world hurts your sense of truth.1
LIFE BEGINS IN BALANCE
Before a story begins, its physical setting, social setting, core value, and core character rest in a state of balance. The protagonist has her daily ups and downs. Who doesn’t? Nonetheless, she holds reasonable sovereignty over her existence. Until… something happens.
STAGE THREE: THE INCITING INCIDENT
PRIME PRINCIPLE: IMBALANCE
Definition: The inciting incident launches a story by upsetting the equilibrium of the protagonist’s life and throwing the story’s core value either positively or negatively, but decisively, out of kilter. This turning point initiates the events that follow and propels the protagonist into action.
The inciting incident could be a massive social event or a quiet inner event—a change in national leadership or a change of mind. It could happen by accident (the protagonist wins the lottery) or by decision (he quits his job to open a new business). It could cause a positive turn (the core character is offered a big promotion) or a negative turn (he goes bankrupt). It could, as it often does, move first to the positive (the core character falls in love with a great guy) and then to the negative (only to discover he’s married).
From the inciting incident on, a story’s core value dynamically changes its charge over the course of the telling. In storytelling, therefore, dynamic means more than “active” or “forceful.” It means constant change and progress caused by an alternation between the positive and negative charges of values inherent in the story’s events.
From the audience’s point of view, the inciting incident causes four effects: First, it captures attention. As we pointed out earlier, the mind keys on change, and the inciting incident’s sudden pivot of the protagonist’s life sharply focuses the audience’s interest.
Second, it raises the major dramatic question, “How will this turn out?” This MDQ is very adhesive mental glue. When you think back, how many perfectly lousy stories have you sat through for no other reason than to get the answer to the nagging question: “How does this piece of dreck turn out?”
Third, when curiosity over the MDQ merges with empathy for the protagonist, a story generates the compelling magnetism known as suspense. Suspense doubles involvement. This blend of subjective identification with objective wonder magnifies a story’s power tenfold.
Fourth, the instant an audience sees the protagonist’s life tilt out of balance, an image forms in their imaginations, an image of a scene they know they must see before the story can end. After a lifetime of story-going, the audience knows that once an inciting incident hits, negative forces will continually block the protagonist’s actions until at crisis she finally comes face-to-face, as it were, with her story’s most focused antagonistic power.
This critical confrontation is sometimes called the “obligatory scene,” because having caused audience members to imagine it, the storyteller is obligated to show it to them. It would be rude not to.
STAGE FOUR: THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
PRIME PRINCIPLE: AN UNFULFILLED NEED
If an event were to throw your life out of balance, what would you want? What would any human being want? Sovereignty over existence. By throwing life out of balance, the inciting incident arouses the natural human desire to regain control and restore balance.
In the wake of this starting event, the protagonist senses a sudden, radical, possibly dangerous tilt in the ground he stands on, and so conceives of an object of desire, that which he feels he must have in order to put his life back on an even keel. This could be something physical like a hike in pay, a product innovation, or the right person to love; something situational like a job promotion, a divorce, or revenge for an injustice; or something ideational like a deeper insight into himself, a higher goal in his career, or a faith to live by. From story to story, no two objects of desire are quite the same; ideally, each is unique and specific to its tale.
Nonetheless, all stories dramatize the essential human struggle to move life from chaos to order, from imbalance to equilibrium.
We measure the worth of the object of desire in terms of risk: the greater the risk, the greater the object’s worth. What would you risk your time for? What would you risk your life for? What would you risk your soul for? The most compelling objects of desire come with the highest price tags, and the greater the object’s worth, the greater the involvement. Contrariwise, watching a character pursue something of no real value is the definition of boredom.
A story shapes a character’s moment-by-moment struggle, but the complexity of life winds through a labyrinth of wishes and needs. Ultimately, storytelling becomes the art of merging and organizing many streams of want into a flow of events that aims at a single object of desire.
The specific desire that focuses a character’s struggle to rebalance life is greatly determined by the culture he lives in. Cultural ideals determine the foreground desires that guide a character (what he should want) and the background desires that limit his choices (what he must not want).
Each of us continuously senses the relationship between ourselves and every person we encounter in life—our safety in traffic, which table the maître d’ gives us, our place in the hierarchy of co-workers, to name only three public examples. We are acutely aware of our private rapport with friends, family, and lovers. We’re also attuned to our innermost self, our relative state of physical, mental, emotional, and moral well-being. What’s more, we’re aware of our place in the flow of time; of our experiences in the past, the knife-edge of the present, and what we hope for in the future. This complex of interwoven relationships creates foreground and background desires—the shoulds and must-nots of life.
These desires not only cement the status quo of a character’s life but also temper his behavior. Background desires form the web of restraints that follow every character into every scene. These fixed desires for stability limit the character’s actions, restraining what he may or may not say or do to get what he wants.
The protagonist’s object of desire, however, must not be confused with his motivations. Desire answers what questions: What does the character consciously want? What does he subconsciously long for? Motivation answers why questions. Why does a character want what he wants? Why does he want his particular object of desire?
The roots of human motivation reach deep into childhood and, for that reason, are often irrational. How much and to what depth the storyteller researches the whys of the characters’ motivations is up to him or her. Some obsess on it; others ignore it.
Biographers of historical figures—Charles Darwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso—devote chapter upon chapter detailing the upbringing of each, trying to document the precise childhood experiences that motivated these personages to do the great things they did.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, never mentions motivation. He gives us no idea why guilt torments the ambitious Macbeth, why jealousy consumes the regal Othello, or why the foolish King Lear trusts his daughters to look after him in his old age. These tragic souls just do the fascinating things they do while we hold our breath.
PRIME PRINCIPLE: TACTICAL CHOICE
Desire demands deeds. To rebalance life, the core character must act. As he does, the actions he takes and the reactions he gets move him either closer to or farther from his object of desire. This positive/negative dynamic propels his story to climax. For a storyteller to create unique, intriguing actions, she must turn an observant eye to human behavior and the principles that govern it. Consider, for example, these two:
Principle 1. Idiosyncratic Tactics
Every human being acts from one moment to the next on his personal sense of probability, on what he feels will probably happen when he does what he intends to do next. Each person’s feel for contingency flows from the sum total of his days, awake and sleeping. Life-as-lived gives him a unique vision of how the physical, social, personal, and inner dimensions of his world work, or should work. Therefore, from one instant to the next, whether consciously thought through or instinctively spontaneous, guided by his sense of feasibility, he takes actions designed to cause enabling, positive reactions from people and things around him.
From his quiver of personal tactics, he draws strategic behaviors, all in an effort to move toward his desire of the moment and long-term hopes. And because, like everyone else, he is one of a kind, his sense of what will probably happen when he takes an action will also be one of a kind; therefore, his choice of tactic (exact words, gestures, facial expressions, and so on) will, in turn, be one of a kind.
In other words, all actions reflect a singular point of view. Because everyone possesses a singular combination of genes and experience, the number of real-world points of view equals the exact number of people alive at any moment. It’s this infinitude of idiosyncratic tactics that inspires storytellers to imagine unique characters, the sort found in the best-told stories, with behaviors like no one else’s, behaviors that fascinate.
Principle 2. Risk Avoidance
Evolution programmed the genes of every living thing to conserve life down to the last calorie of energy, take no uncalled-for risks, and yet pursue all necessary desires. Therefore, human nature, as a part of Mother Nature, always takes the conservative, minimal, and yet sufficient action in an effort to get what it wants.
Why would a person do otherwise? Why would she expend any energy or take any risk if she can get what she wants the easier, more secure way? She won’t. Nature won’t allow it.
Therefore, this guiding principle: A character will never do less than she has to, nor will she ever do more than she needs to; instead, she will take the minimal, conservative, yet sufficient action that she believes will move her closer to a balanced life. Bear in mind, however, that Goldilocks’s choices of less, more, and just right vary enormously from person to person.
More often than not, from day to day, moment to moment, we correctly choose which actions to take. Ninety-nine percent of our actions cause the responses we more or less expect. We hail a cab; it stops. We Google a question; Wikipedia answers it. We call a friend; he’s glad to hear from us. We take action; what we expect to happen happens; we get on with our day. That’s life, but never, ever story.
To create a meaningful emotional experience for his audience, the storyteller evicts all empty moments, all trivialities and banalities, and embraces those events, and only those events, that bring value-charged change.
To create value-charged change, the storyteller pits the core character’s sense of probability against reality’s forces of necessity. Probability is what we imagine will happen before we take an action; necessity is what in fact happens when we do. The value at stake in the core character’s life changes poles when the core character’s first action (rooted in his subjective sense of probability) clashes with the story-world’s first reaction (rooted in reality’s objective necessity).
STAGE SIX: THE FIRST REACTION
PRIME PRINCIPLE: THE VIOLATION OF EXPECTATION
Many factors and forces underlie the first reaction, so we’ll work through them one by one.
THE VIOLATION OF EXPECTATION
When a character’s world suddenly reacts differently and/or more powerfully than he imagined, this violation of expectation delivers a jolt of surprise, followed by a rush of insight. The clash between what he thinks will happen and the result he actually gets jolts him and splits open his reality. The character stares, as it were, into the gap between his subjective anticipation and its objective result. Then with a rush of insight, he suddenly glimpses how his world actually works; how its unforeseen forces of antagonism now block his path.
The phrase forces of antagonism does not necessarily name a villain, per se. Villains inhabit certain genres, and in his proper place an archvillain, such as the Terminator, can be a wonderful antagonist. Rather, forces of antagonism simply refers to the various negative obstacles that arise out of any conflict, corporeal or situational.
When an unanticipated, even contradictory, obstacle violates a protagonist’s expectations, it moves him farther from his object of desire than he was before he acted. He now realizes that he cannot get what he wants the easy way. The force(s) of antagonism may come from any one or any combination of reality’s four tiers: physical, social, personal, and inner. Each of these tiers may conceal a host of obstacles.
1. Physical Obstacles: The titanic forces of time, space, and every object in the natural and human-made universe: not enough time to get something done; too far to go to get something; nature’s tumults from tornadoes to viruses; dark and dangerous city streets; the damn car that won’t start.
To these realistic forces, fantasy genres add supernatural and magical forces of amazing variety and unlimited imaginings.
2. Social Obstacles: The powerful forces of institutions and the individuals within them.
These include all levels of government and their international, national, or local legal systems; corporations; religious organizations; schools; hospitals; the military; and even charities.
Every institution everywhere shapes itself into a pyramid of power: The people at the top have great power; the people at the bottom have little or none; the people in between have some. How do you gain it? Lose it? Go up and down the pyramid? A host of causes influences movement through these social ranks—education, personality, willpower, and, all too often, luck.
3. Personal Obstacles: The forces of pleasure and pain that arise from the intimate and often problematic relationships among family, friends, and lovers.
These range from lovemaking to divorce, from gift giving to squabbles over money.
4. Inner Obstacles: Contradictory forces within a character’s body, emotions, and mind with its warring conscious and subconscious desires.
How to cope when your memory betrays you, your body breaks down, or emotions overwhelm common sense? Anxiety, for example, may swing a character’s inner barometer of success back and forth between high pressure and low pressure, even though outwardly nothing in his career actually changes.
TURNING POINTS
To turn a scene means to change its value charge; the phrase turning point names the precise moment when an unforeseen force of antagonism violates expectations and pivots the value at stake from positive to negative or negative to positive. Turning points trigger change in only one of two ways—either by a direct action followed by the reaction it sparks, or by a revelation of a secret or previously unknown fact and the response it unleashes.
Ideally, every scene, in one direction or the other, veers around a turning point. Those that do not are nonevents—activity without change. Too many nonevents in a row and a story collapses into tedium. On the other hand, persistent, progressive change holds us like a tool maker’s vise.
Turning points simultaneously merge the rational and emotional sides of life. To understand this twin effect, we need to examine the two sides separately.
The Rational Effects of TURNING POINTS
A violation of expectation is, in essence, an effect with an unknown cause. As a result, turning points pop questions into the mind such as “Why have things taken this unforeseen turn? Why didn’t the character see this coming? Why didn’t I? What caused this startling twist?”
A turning point punches a hole in reality. Curiosity compels the audience members to fill the hole with knowledge, so their thoughts rush back through previous scenes and images, looking for an unseen cause, trying to solve the mystery of “Why?” The answer has been planted beneath the story’s setups. The moment the audience glimpses this hidden truth, it erupts with an “Oh, yeah, now I get it!” insight that both delights and enlightens.
For example: In Moneyball, when General Manager Billy Beane presents his new sabermetrics project to his chief scout and team manager, he expects that his employees will be as excited by its potential as he is. Turning point: The two men hate it on sight, refuse to implement it, and fight against it tooth and claw. Our eyebrows go up in surprise and we wonder why. Then with a rush of insight, we suddenly realize that the game of baseball is, after all, a nineteenth-century invention. Men who have worked and played in its traditions all their lives are not going to turn twenty-first-century without a fight.
Having hit this negative floor, the story moves off in a new direction as Billy’s tactics pull them, kicking and screaming, into the modern age, driving the film to a positive climax. Along the way, Moneyball rewards its audience for paying attention by giving them insights into baseball history, modern baseball’s methods, and the inner truths of its characters.
As Aristotle observed, the deepest audience pleasure is learning without being taught. When a tale dramatizes its meaning skillfully, the audience feels no mental strain and yet comes away with a fuller understanding of the workings of the world and the human heart.
The Emotional Effects of TURNING POINTS
Emotions begin as reactions to stimuli. When sights and sounds, tastes and touches strike the senses, the mind instantly analyzes their meanings, sorting the positive from the negative: helpful versus hurtful, familiar versus strange, beautiful versus ugly, for me versus against me, and the like.
The mind’s ranking process keys on the potential for change. So long as life’s conditions run in neutral, the mind pays no attention and goes about its many tasks. But when things change, awareness snaps to alert as our animal instincts warn us that change threatens survival.
Once the mind determines whether the change leans toward the positive or the negative, certain glands open and pour a cocktail of substances into the bloodstream. These infusions of chemicals we experience as emotions. As mentioned in chapter 2, at the most basic level we feel just two, pleasure and pain, but with degrees, variations, and complexities of each. This is why two people may have two very different responses to the same stimulus. This is also why one person may interpret a stimulus in two divergent ways and experience so-called mixed emotions.
Emotion, therefore, is the side effect of change. When the mind senses change from negative to positive, it releases pleasure-giving chemicals; if the mind registers a movement from positive to negative, it unleashes a painful flow.
When applied to storytelling, this phenomenon inspires the dynamic design of turning points. Consider, for example, this work by Unilever’s Dove brand.
THE DOVE “REAL BEAUTY” CAMPAIGN
Ad Age named “Real Beauty” one of the top five ad campaigns of the century. It began when market researchers at Ogilvy & Mather found that only 2 percent of women saw themselves as beautiful, while 98 percent found fault, many to an unrealistic extreme. So Unilever launched the campaign in 2004 with a mission to persuade women of their natural beauty.
In 2013, Hugo Veiga created a video titled Dove Real Beauty Sketches.2 The story follows a group of women who volunteer for an odd experiment: They agree to have their portrait done by a sketch artist who cannot see them. Instead they will simply tell him what they look like. This act of courage immediately draws empathy from the audience.
When the artist finishes their portraits, he does a second set of drawings, this time taken from first impressions of these women as reported by people who met them that day. Set side by side, the sketches based on the strangers’ observations are clearly more attractive and true-to-life than the women’s hypercritical self-depictions. When each woman is then shown her two portraits, the difference moves her to tears.
THE DYNAMICS OF EMOTION
The above graphic tracks the emotional dynamics in the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video. Its turning points swivel between the opposing poles of its core value, from self-criticism to self-appreciation.
The story goes like this: Each woman, having consented to the blind sketch experiment, describes herself in rather unflattering terms (inciting incident). These acts of self-criticism upset the balance of their lives, turning their emotional state from neutral to negative.
But then the dynamic swings up to the positive when the women view complimentary sketches of themselves inspired by the impressions they made on strangers. They smile with pleasure (first action). This turning point moves the story from self-criticism (negative) to appreciation by others (positive).
But as each woman’s eyes move back and forth between the two contrasting portraits, she reacts against the positive opinions of others and falls into doubt (crisis). Can she trust a stranger? Who should she believe? Herself or other people? This turning point takes the women from appreciation by others (positive) to doubt of others (doubly negative) and draws a corresponding negative emotion from the audience.
Then each woman’s wish to believe struggles against her inner obstacle of self-doubt (second action) until her better nature finally wins out and convinces her to see herself as others see her (second reaction). The story climaxes on the doubly positive charge of self-appreciation. During this decisive transition, the audience shares in the women’s triumph over self-criticism and feels, with them, a positive emotion.
All well-told stories express how and why life changes, and, as we noted above, the side effect of change is emotion. These feelings, however, only come to life during a transition. As a story shifts from positive to negative, the audience feels a dark emotion; as it transitions from negative to positive, a light emotion fills them. Once change completes itself, however, emotion quickly dissipates, ready to move in a new direction. To grip and hold emotional involvement, a story’s values must transition dynamically from change to change to change. For without change, events, no matter how cheerful and energetic, dissolve into an emotionless, boring recitation of “. . . and then and then and then…”
STAGE SEVEN: THE CRISIS CHOICE
PRIME PRINCIPLE: INSIGHT
The protagonist pursues her object of desire action by action, turning point by turning point, until a moment arrives near the end of the telling when the most sharply focused conflicting forces in her life now block her path. This is the obligatory scene the audience has been waiting for. At this crisis point, she has exhausted all possible tactics, save one. This powerful moment calls for a major decision. Faced with an array of possible actions, she must choose one last tactic in a final effort to put life back in balance.
THE NATURE OF CHOICE
Decisions come in two kinds: clear choices versus dilemmas—the easy versus the hard.
The clear choice poses a positive versus a negative option, and is, therefore, easy because, in essence, it makes the choice for you. Clear choices obey nature’s grand imperative: Always choose the positive.
Every living thing, flora and fauna, instinctively heeds the two laws governing the conservation of energy and life: (1) Never do anything you don’t have to do if you can get what you want the easier way. (2) Never take any risk you don’t have to take if you can get what you want the safer way. Putting these two together, the law of nature becomes: When faced with a positive-versus-negative choice, always choose the positive over the negative, the right over the wrong, the good over the evil.
In practice, however, people rarely make choices for purely rational reasons. The laws of nature are subject to point of view and the subjective, often irrational biases that come with it.
For that reason, once we understand that every person chooses the positive and only the positive as he subjectively sees it, and at the same time witness the tsunamis of evil that sweep through our world, we have to step back in awe of the human mind. The brain is a rationalizing wonder, a machine built to protect its own survival by turning negatives into positives.
Dilemmas also come in two kinds, and both are hard because they pose a choice between either two positives or two negatives, known respectively as irreconcilable goods and the lesser of two evils.
In the first dilemma, the protagonist must choose between two goods; she wants both but circumstances force her to choose only one. In the second dilemma, she must choose between two bads; she wants neither but circumstances force her to choose one. The hard choice of dilemma causes anxiety before the choice and risk during it. Whichever way the protagonist chooses, she stands to lose something of value in order to gain something of value: A price must be paid.3
In an author’s fiction-told work, the crisis decision puts the protagonist under stress-filled pressure as she faces one of these two dilemmas. But as we’ll see in the next chapter, in the marketer’s purpose-told story, the protagonist’s climactic choice must be pressure-and stress-free.
STAGE EIGHT: THE CLIMACTIC REACTION
PRIME PRINCIPLE: CLOSURE
Her strategy works. At climax, the protagonist’s final choice of action causes the reaction she hoped for. She gets what she wants and needs as her world delivers her object of desire and restores her life to an even more perfect balance than when the story began. The story achieves closure—all questions answered, all emotion satisfied.
THE PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESSION
If a story’s events multiply beyond the single turning point outlined above, and into a full-length (the one to two-plus hours of a film or play) or even long-form (the five-hundred-page novel or multiseason television series) story, then the principle of progression shapes the telling.
In these cases, turning points flow in a series that repeatedly and progressively moves the protagonist either farther from (negative) or closer to (positive) her object of desire, as the telling builds toward its climax and the final satisfaction of the protagonist’s need. Over the dynamic of full-length and long-form stories, forces from the various levels of antagonism amplify in power and focus, deepening and widening the telling. As complications intensify, the PROTAGONIST reacts by digging deeper into her willpower as well as her mental, emotional, and physical capacities in an ever-escalating effort to restore life’s balance.
The scenes not only move dynamically across the positive/negative charges of the story’s values, but also arc along a progression of conflict-filled risk. The protagonist stands to lose more and more in her quest for her object of desire. As the character’s struggles progress, the forces of antagonism build, calling on greater and greater capacities from within her, generating greater and greater risk and jeopardy, demanding greater and greater willpower to make more and more demanding decisions. And so on down the line to the end of the line, the ultimate climax.
As a model of this grand structure, consider the eighty-six-episode, internationally renowned AMC series, Breaking Bad:
In the story’s first hour, the protagonist, Walter White (a guy who never smoked), discovers he has terminal lung cancer. With time running out to provide for his family, he uses superior technical know-how to create a start-up company that makes a boutique product better than the competition. Not an easy task in the face of unreliable partners and ruthless competitors.
Walter is constantly beset by raw-material shortages, on one hand, and supply-chain blockages, on the other. Plus, that bane of all entrepreneurs: government regulation. In Walter’s case, the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
Like most self-made men, Walter must contend with people who feel threatened by his brilliance and cannot grasp his vision.
As he builds his business empire, he suffers major setbacks on the personal level as well. He copes with his wife’s infidelity, all the while outmaneuvering his DEA agent brother-in-law. Greater and greater risks test his willpower; more and more satisfying rewards drive him on. By the series climax, Walter provides handsomely for his family, saves his partner’s life, and destroys his most powerful enemy.
The next chapter adapts story’s eight stages to the purpose-told story. Future chapters will harness story’s pulling power to speed marketing’s multiple missions.