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.

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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.”    

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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.

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