January 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

Take the Downton Abbey Quiz

 WHICH DOWNTON ABBEY CHARACTER ARE YOU?

Take the new Downton Abbey Quiz and find out whether you’re upstairs or downstairs!

At the end of a long, tiring day, you prefer to

A. Retire to your room to talk over your love life with your maid while applying generous amounts of hand cream

B. Call for Branson to bring round the car while looking forward to getting into your nightgown and reading Trollope in bed

C. Enjoy a last, meditative snifter alone

D. Concoct further spoils and stratagems with your partner in crime

E. Make sure everything is ready for breakfast in the morning

If you found yourself unexpectedly all alone in the Abbey you would

A. Take the opportunity to clean the second-best silver

B. Short-sheet all the beds in the family bedrooms

C. Poke around the little drawers in Lord Grantham’s writing desk

D. Go around and visit some of the poorer tenants before coming home to rearrange your snuff boxes

E. Stare out a window and think how boring your life is

Your secret life’s wish is

A. To see your biggest rival tried, sentenced, and hung by the neck until dead

B. To be named a marquis

C. Indoor refrigeration

D. To have your spouse discovered to have been only “mostly” dead

E. To return by time-machine to the sanity of the Victorian Era

Your favorite play, film, or television serial is

A. Upstairs, Downstairs

B. Macbeth

C. Pride and Prejudice

D. Miss Marple

E. Debrett’s Peerage (does that count?)

Your idea of the perfect day is

A. Scoring at least five verbal zingers before dusk

B. The satisfaction of having served your employer to the utmost of your capabilities

C. Finding out that the man (woman) that your sister (brother) is in love with is really in love with you

D. Taking it out on someone for no reason whatsoever

E. A hunt or shoot, followed by tea outdoors, followed by a nap, followed by a fine dinner, bed

*          *          *

So, which Downton Abbey character are you?

Actually, it doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is the fact that we like to take these kinds of quizzes in the first place. Why do we like to do so? Why do we like to identify with fictional characters, imagining ourselves living their lives? 

Why, in other words, do comic book and fantasy fans go to the annual ComicCon convention in San Diego dressed as their favorite characters from Lord of the Rings or Marvel?

Why, indeed, do children play dress-up and other games in which they lose themselves in fictional worlds?

What is the point of all this play?

This is one of the questions I am considering in my new book, The Happiness Plot, otherwise titled, The Odd Predicament of Being a Teller of Tales in an Age Which Has Lost Its Story, coming soon.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the question I raise. 

 

The image above reproduced courtesy of PBS Masterpiece.

 

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot, The Philosophy of Stories Tagged: ,
November 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

How to Stop Preaching in Your Fiction

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

How to Stop Preaching in Your Fiction

18.

“The artist whose chief goal is not to make everything more beautiful but to enlist his audience in a cause—no matter what that cause may be—is rarely if ever prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He replaces the true complexity of the world with the false simplicity of the ideologue. He alters reality not to make everything more beautiful, but to stack the deck.”

–Terry Teachout, remarks upon accepting his recent Bradley Prize

Setting up a story as what McKee calls a “dramatized dialectical debate” allows the reader or audience to experience the real texture of the moral argument at the heart of the story. Stories can work without such debate: e.g. superhero myths or thrillers where it’s Good Guys versus Baddies, or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the bad guy of which is mute for 1,000 pages. Such stories work either because of the excitement generated by the prowess of the hero and the external obstacles he or she faces, or because interesting moral argument is generated elsewhere than in the central plot (in Frodo and Sam’s struggle with trusting Gollum, or in Gollum’s struggle with his alter-ego, Smeagol, as opposed to Frodo and Sam’s often tedious efforts to evade Sauron).

But stories with dramatized dialectical debates in their central plot typically have a deeper moral richness and thereby generate greater audience fascination and longer endurance. Moreover, as McKee notes, the dialectic involved in such a story helps the author avoid the temptations of didacticism. What McKee argues about screenwriting applies to all the narrative arts:

When the premise of a story “is an idea you feel you must prove to the world, and you design your story as an undeniable certification of that idea, you set yourself on the road to didacticism. In your zeal to persuade, you will stifle the voice of the other side. Misusing and abusing art to preach, your screenplay will become a thesis film, a thinly disguised sermon as you strive in a single stroke to convert the world. Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.”

So the best way for the writer to avoiding moralizing, therefore, is to create a story in which two or more points of view conflict–each of which is compelling. “As a story develops,” continues McKee, “you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly.”

This doesn’t mean that one point of view won’t “win out” in the story’s climax. But it does mean that this moral truth, if it is one, will only manifest itself and reveal its force through a spirited combat with points of view that oppose it, but which also seem to have some truth to them. This is the case, at least, in the most humanly complex kinds of story.

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , ,
November 22, 2014 1 Comment

Storytelling as Dialectical Argument

 

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

Storytelling as Dialectical Argument

17.

But the Controlling Idea is only the conclusion to a story’s argument; it is not the argument itself. Just as the philosopher must supply a set of premises or claims in support of his conclusion, so too the storyteller must supply premises or claims in support of his Controlling Idea.

Yet not even this will be sufficient for the story’s Controlling Idea to be persuasive. For stories, in order to be compelling, must be dramatic, which is to say they must involve conflict viewpoints. The storyteller, therefore, must not only argue for the story protagonist’s Controlling Idea; he must also argue for the Controlling Ideas of those characters who contend with the protagonist.

Philosophers call this type of argument, which takes up various reputable ideas concerning a given topic, dialectical argument. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle pursues an inquiry into the nature of happiness by considering the leading or most reputable opinions about it. In his day as in ours, many people think happiness consists in pleasure, others in wealth or public recognition. Still others think happiness is to be found in philosophical contemplation. Aristotle sifts through these reputable opinions about happiness, weighing them against our commonly held intuitions about what happiness must be, in order to mine the partial truth in these opinions. In illuminating their partial truths, Aristotle gets a clearer idea of what genuine happiness consists in.

A good story works in the same way. A good story sets various characters and their viewpoints (their reputable opinions) in conflict with one another in order to work out a truth. In Sophocles’ Antigone, both Creon and Antigone think they know what justice and the gods demand, but their viewpoints conflict with one another. Sophocles’ play is the working through of these conflicting opinions in order to get at the genuine truth.

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , ,
November 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

A Story is Not Reducible to Its Controlling Idea

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

A Story is Not Reducible to Its Controlling Idea

16.

Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar, would have for its Controlling Idea something such as: “Earth’s inhabitants are saved (positive value) when the hero, I.e., Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper, risks his life to enter the black hole in order to gather data on the “singularity” (cause).

In Jane Austen’s Emma, Emma finds marriage and felicity with Mr. Knightly (positive value) when she humbly recognizes and corrects her prodigious habit of self-deception (cause).

In Sophocles’ Antigone, death and destruction fall upon Creon’s house (negative value) after Creon unwisely sentences Antigone to death for according her dead brother, Polynices, the appropriate burial rites (cause).

The point of any story can thus be encapsulated in the Value + Cause of a Controlling Idea. But we must be careful. We mustn’t allow the Controlling Idea to turn into anything but a rough summary of the story’s theme, enough to give direction to the writer’s efforts but not a substitute for the story itself. It is well to keep in mind Flannery O’Connor’s wise words: “People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick out the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.”

A story, in other words, embodies the theme or Controlling Idea of a story to such an extent that to separate Controlling Idea from story, to reduce a story to its Controlling Idea, is to undermine the audience’s experience of the truth of the story. The examples of Controlling Ideas given above are not supposed to compel any audience apart from their embodiment in narrative. As noted earlier, a story is not a mere vehicle for a philosophy. The Controlling Idea or philosophy exists in the story like the impress of a signet ring in wax.

“You tell a story,” says O’Connor, “because a statement would be inadequate.”    

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
November 18, 2014 Leave a Comment

Robert McKee and the Controlling Idea

 

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

Robert McKee and the Controlling Idea

15.

The argument of the story is its plot. But just how does a plot argue?

McKee is quite good on this point. Storytelling, he tells us, is the creative demonstration of truth, the conversion of idea into action. But how does the “demonstration” work? “A story’s event structure,” explains McKee, “is the means by which you [the writer] first express, then prove your idea…without explanation.”

So it’s the “event structure,” the plot, that does the arguing. But somehow it does so without a lot of explaining on the part of the author. Master storytellers, says McKee, never explain. As David Mamet once put the same thought, the whole trick is never to write exposition (i.e., explanation of the events).

Now, setting aside the fact that some pretty good storytellers are also some pretty fulsome explainers (e.g. Dickens, Henry James, and, in a much quirkier way, Muriel Spark), we need to know what it is about the plot of a story that, all by itself, without the author holding its hand, is capable of arguing for the truth.

Let’s begin with McKee’s concept of the Controlling Idea. McKee prefers the term Controlling Idea to that of “theme” because “like theme, it names a story’s root or central idea, but it also implies function: The Controlling Idea shapes the writer’s creative choices.”

A Controlling Idea, McKee explains, can be reduced to the following equation:

VALUE + CAUSE

The Controlling Idea “identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state. The sentence composed from these two elements, Value plus Cause, expresses the core meaning of the story.”

In her posthumous collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor remarks about her famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” that the free act, the moment of grace, that makes the story work is “the Grandmother’s recognition that the serial killer known as the Misfit is one of her own children.” Here we have a Controlling Idea, or part of one. At the story’s climax a positive value or charge comes into being: the Grandmother experiences a moment of grace in recognizing the brutal killer confronting her as one of her own babies. What brings this positive value into being? What is its cause? Ironically, it is the very brutality and theological confusion of the Misfit. O’Connor was fascinated by the way in which violence and the grotesque distortion of human dignity can often be the means by which the spiritually complacent are returned to reality and prepared to accept their moment of grace.

*The image above of Robert McKee is reproduced courtesy of Aleksandr Andreiko via Wikimedia Commons under the following license.

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , ,
November 15, 2014 Leave a Comment

Exclusive Content for Subscribers

Last night my wife and I went to see Christopher Nolan’s new film, Interstellar. Our discussion afterwards about the problems in Interstellar‘s plot inspired me to create an exclusive podcast for subscribers to The Comic Muse Email Newsletter.

In the podcast, I use Interstellar to zip you through the basics of storytelling structure. Just 15 minutes and you’ll have completed your mission to a new storytelling galaxy.

Don’t get left on the ground! Enjoy the podcast by signing up right here for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s FREE!

I'm Ready for the Turning Point

Also, please keep in mind that throughout November I am presenting a series of posts at danielmcinerny.com which will itself comprise a very brief introduction to storytelling structure, a series I’m calling THE HAPPINESS PLOT. It’s perfect for fiction writers of all kinds as well as writers of narrative non-fiction, not to mention those doing work in brand storytelling.

I hope you’ll stop by and that you’ll sign up for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter and enjoy the exclusive content.

Filed Under: The Comic Muse Podcast, The Craft of Fiction, The Craft of Screenwriting, The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , , ,
November 13, 2014 Leave a Comment

Storytelling as the Creative Demonstration of Truth

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

 

Story as the Creative Demonstration of Truth

14.

I’ve been talking about stories as “promoting” either “thick” or “thin” conceptions of justice or love or whatever. This is an assumption well worth challenging. Do stories tell us truths about life? Is there any relation between stories and philosophy?

C.S. Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism, appears to say “no.” In speaking about the differences between tragedy, comedy, and farce he writes: “None of the three kinds [of drama] is making a statement about life in general. They are all constructions: things made out of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it.”

Lewis qualifies his point. Any story “will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge, and experience the author has; and even more by something which I can only vaguely describe as the flavor or “feel” that actual life has for him.” However, to regard the story “as primarily a vehicle for that philosophy” is for Lewis an “outrage” to the thing the author has made for us.

What Lewis is keen on stressing here, rightly, is that stories, novels, plays–narrative art in general–should not be taken as mere vehicles for the dissemination of an author’s philosophy. A play, for example, is not just a delivery system for abstract comments about life—more diverting than reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to be sure, but essentially no different from Kant in being a philosophical proclamation. No story can simply be reduced to a statement of whatever wisdom the author may possess. “Don’t be indecisive” (I jest) is not a substitute for Hamlet.

A play, in other words, is not a philosophical statement plus some literary qualities that we may dispense with if we choose.

And yet, Lewis fails to do justice to the way in which stories do tell us truths. Robert McKee, in his wonderful book Story, formulates this idea quite nicely: “Storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action.”

A story is not a work of philosophy, but there is at least a perceived wisdom embodied in the decisions the author has his characters make. The “argument” of the story is its plot, which in its climax aspires to conclude something about the way life ought to be lived. But this truth, if it is one, will only be convincing to an audience who attends to the literary qualities of the piece.

* The image above is reproduced courtesy of James MacMillan at Wikimedia Commons under the following license.

So a story is not a mere vehicle for a philosophy, but a philosophy is embedded in every story like the seal of a signet ring is embedded in wax.

 

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , , ,
November 11, 2014 Leave a Comment

Mysteries, Thrillers, and Justice

 

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

Mysteries, Thrillers, and Justice

13.

The conventions of the detective story and the thriller demand that, in the former, a criminal be found and brought to justice, and, in the latter, that someone being pursued by some force of evil ultimately find rescue. The justice that is promoted in such stories can, like the idea of “romance” in romance novels, be either thick or thin. Many a classic or “cozy” mystery, for example, focuses on the analytic prowess of the detective as he or she pursues a villain whose villainy is “thin” in the sense of being straightforwardly comprehensible. There’s nothing terribly complicated in the idea of a murderer who plants a knife in the back of Lord Boring in order to claim an inheritance. Everyone (more or less) agrees that murder is wrong.

Yet there are also mystery writers who through their mazy plots strive to promote “thicker” conceptions of justice. Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, for example, as well as David Hare’s Worricker series on PBS’s Masterpiece Contemporary, endeavor to promote a sense of justice that Mankell and Hare see as out of step with the reigning world order. Mankell and Hare are “left-wing” in their political sympathies. A writer such as Evelyn Waugh, however, in his Sword of Honor trilogy about World War II, attacks modernity from a very different perspective, i.e., a religious and Catholic one. But what is interesting is that Waugh shares with Mankell and Hare a desire to critique the modern world in the name of a justice that in some sense is undervalued. Writers of this stripe don’t just want to underscore the evil of, say, murder; they want to shine a white hot light on the bloated underbelly of society itself.

The point here is not that, to be excellent, a story must  trade on a “thicker” conception of the human good. Rather, it’s to say that in his attempt to distinguish character wants from the character’s natural needs, the writer must decide at what level of specificity he wants to address those natural needs. Does he want to promote an aspect of the human good on which everyone agrees (“Murder is wrong”), or does he want to promote a thicker aspect of that good that is more controversial (“Western Civilization becomes more chaotic and brutal the more it distances itself from its Christian roots”).

* The image above is reproduced courtesy of the BBC.

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
November 10, 2014 Leave a Comment

Romance Through Thick and Thin

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!

Ready to uncover the plot? 

The Game is Afoot!

To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

Romance Through Thick and Thin

12.

What does Elizabeth Bennet want?

Love.

Wrong answer.

Or, at least, a badly incomplete answer.

The superficial romance novelist, smitten by what Austen biographer Claire Tomalin calls the “dream denouement” of Pride and Prejudice, sits down at the laptop and bangs out 90,000 words of Girl Meets Boy, Girl Loses Boy, Girl Gets Boy Back Again. The focus is erotic, if not, these days, downright pornographic. Such a book will always find an audience, and that is because romantic love is one of the deepest of our heart’s desires. Romantic love, countless novels, movies, and pop songs testify, is practically synonymous with human happiness.

Yet none of this is why Pride and Prejudice is a great novel.

Jane Austen did not simply write a love story. She wrote a story of both Elizabeth Bennet’s and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s moral transformations which made possible their marital union. From the beginning Elizabeth wants romantic love, but what she has to learn is not only that a husband truly worth loving must also be a virtuous man, but also, and more importantly, that we can become blinded by “first impressions” (Austen’s original title for the novel) and proudly prejudge the virtuous or vicious qualities of others. And by “virtue” Austen meant something much more than “cute” or “nice” or “funny” or even “decent.” She meant qualities of character founded upon habits of mind and passion formed by a particular vision, an Aristotelian vision as scholars have pointed out, of the truth of the human person.

Austen’s has what we might call “thick” conceptions of what love and moral goodness are. Your average romance writer, by contrast, is content with the “thin” gruel of eroticism.   

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November 9, 2014 Leave a Comment

Storytelling At the Height of Our Heart’s Desire

 

Storytelling At the Height of Our Heart’s Desire

11.

Stories of impersonal or “physical” conflict can rivet our attention because they show the object of our most basic natural impulse, life, in dire jeopardy. Walter Mitty has to contend with the enormous, albeit comical, physical challenges of trekking across the world in order to find Sean O’Connell.

But Walter Mitty is not just about impersonal conflict. It is doubtful that there are many stories of a hero or heroine’s battle with impersonal forces which solely concern this level of conflict. Walter Mitty’s central conflict is not with the ardors of the Himalayas, but with his desire for love and a sense of his own genuine greatness. His real conflicts are personal and inter-personal.

In Gravity, Dr. Ryan Stone wants to return safely to earth. But she also needs to rediscover the purpose of her life, lost after the death of her little girl. Part of what makes Gravity so successful as a story is that Stone’s efforts to reach the primary goal, staying alive, break open her deeper need for meaning. Her desire to remain alive is obviously a natural one, but her desire for meaning is discovered to be a deeper desire of her nature.

The higher storytelling reaches into the inclinations of our shared human nature–I’m consciously switching my metaphor here from “depth” to “height”— the more that story’s capacity to resonate with us.

The thrill of watching our hero survive a car chase is one level of entertainment. That of watching our hero ascend into the highest reaches of his heart’s desire, as Dante does in the Divine Comedy, is quite another.     

Filed Under: The Happiness Plot Tagged: , , , , , ,
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