The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is at least one actual human being opposed to what the hero is doing?

Occasionally friends ask me to consult on reality TV series they’re pitching. One was about adventure travelers who go to unsafe countries, one was about Live Action Role Players, and another was about a struggling hip-hop label. Every time, I had the same advice: Someone onscreen has to be opposed to what your subjects are doing. I implored them to shoot interviews with people who disapproved of this activity. 

In each of the above cases, this advice met with resistance: “But I want to present what these people do in a positive light! I don’t want to bring negativity into it.” My argument was (and still is) that the only way to portray an activity as a positive thing is to prove your subjects are willing to overcome opposition to do it. If you just show people doing their thing and having a great time, there’s no story. If you show them doing it despite opposition, then the audience can appreciate the meaning of what they do.

“Well, okay, sure, all stories need conflict,” you might say, “but my fictional characters are more compelling than those would-be reality show stars. If I create a great fictional character who’s internally conflicted, can’t that create meaning on its own, without bringing any external conflict into it?”

It is possible to write a meaningful story in which the primary conflict is internal, not external, but it’s much harder. The only form of writing that is naturally suited to showing internal conflict is the first-person novel, but even movies can pull it off if they work really hard.

For instance, The Secret Life of Dentists, based on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley, successfully dramatizes the internal conflict of a passive protagonist. Campbell Scott plays a conflicted dentist who can’t bring himself to confront his wife about her infidelity. So how does the movie dramatize this internal struggle, this lack of action? It uses every trick in the book—voice-over, dream sequences, wish-fulfillment fantasies—but ultimately, all of these fall short, so Scott must argue with an imaginary character (Denis Leary) who represents his suppressed rage. So this movie becomes the exception that proves the rule: One way or another, conflict must be dramatized.

Even if you are writing a first-person novel, internalized stories without external conflict are hard to write well. Drama refers to interaction between characters, not conflict within a character, and drama is at the heart of great writing. Conflicted characters are great because they’re volatile, but that volatility only erupts when that conflicted character meets her match and is thereby challenged. When we pick on ourselves, we rarely do so in a surprising way. When other people pick on us, that’s when things get real.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	NO. Not really, and that’s fine.  He’s his own antagonist.  (Almost every woman he meets is actually willing to have sex with him: Mann, his boss, the bookstore girl, Keener, the prostitute)  Kat Denning is a bit of an antagonist, but even she joins team Andy quickly.
Alien	YES, Ash.  (Well, sort of human)
An Education	YES. Her family at first, then her teachers once her family has been co-opted.
The Babadook	YES. first the sister then Samuel.  Also the child services people.
Blazing Saddles	YES. “That’s Hedly!”
Blue Velvet	YES. many, but especially Frank.
The Bourne Identity	YES. Chris Cooper.
Bridesmaids	YES. Helen.
Casablanca	YES. pretty much everyone, especially Major Strasser.
Chinatown	YES. Noah Cross, the cops, etc.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  everybody he meets.
Do the Right Thing	YES. The hero is doing very little, but yes, Pino opposes him.
The Farewell	YES. Everyone in the film is opposed to Billi’s wish to tell her grandma.
The Fighter	YES. his new girlfriend won’t let him screw himself over any more.
Frozen	YES. Hans.  The movie would have been much weaker if not-really-bad Elsa was the only antagonist.
The Fugitive	YES. Gerard.
Get Out	YES. Just about everybody
Groundhog Day	Hmm… It depends on his goal. Yes, when he wants a date from Rita, otherwise not really, just himself.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. His father specifically and whole village generally, and then the final dragon.
In a Lonely Place	YES. everyone, to varying degrees.
Iron Man	YES. First the warlord, then Stane. Sometimes Pepper as well.
Lady Bird	YES. Her mom is opposed to a lot of what she’s doing.
Raising Arizona	YES. Lots of them.
Rushmore	YES. Dr. Guggenheim, and everybody else at one time or another.
Selma	YES. Lots and lots.
The Shining	NO. Not at the beginning, but yes once they’re opposed to each other.
Sideways	YES. Jack is opposed to Miles’ idea of not meeting someone, then opposed to Miles’ need to confess, Maya and Steph are opposed to his lying.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Chilton, plus Lecter, plus Bill
Star Wars	YES. Darth Vader
Sunset Boulevard	YES. Various, as his goals change.  First the repo men, then Max, then Betty, then Norma.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the story present a unique central relationship?

Unique characters are overrated. Does your main character feel familiar? Good! Audiences want characters to feel familiar so they can identify with them. Besides, it’s almost impossible to come up with a unique character. There have been too many stories, and we’ve seen them all before. 

But there’s an easier way to tell a unique story. You’re going to have much better luck if you take two familiar characters and give them a believable but never-seen-before relationship. The high school outcast is a familiar archetype, but let’s put that character into a unique never-seen-in-a-story-before relationship:

• My Bodyguard is about a high school outcast who pays a scary bully to protect him from the other kids. 
• Rushmore is about a high school outcast who strikes up a friendship with one of his private school’s funders who feels equally alienated. 
• Election is about a high school outcast who infuriates her teacher so much that he tries to sabotage her student government election. 

If those stories had been about watching these outcasts try to get a date with the popular kid, then they would have fallen into overly familiar territory. It’s the unique relationship, not the unique character, that makes the story great.

I’ve known a lot of strange people, but none so strange that I can’t think of a preexisting character just like them. On the other hand, I’ve had a dozen oddball relationships in my life that I’ve never seen replicated: unlikely friendships, overdivulging bosses, bizarre dates, etc.

Don’t force one dysfunctional character to generate conflict single-handedly. Allow two seemingly functional characters to set each other off in an unexpectedly dysfunctional way. Such things have happened to you, and if it’s happened to you, then it’s happened to others in the audience. They’ll happily smile in identification when they see it portrayed.

It’s fascinating to go back and rewatch the first few episodes of 30 Rock. All of the elements of greatness are there from the beginning, but the show doesn’t work yet, because the writers haven’t found their focus. Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon is annoyed by her boss, Jack (Alec Baldwin), and by her own employees, generating a lot of conflict, but the conflict is flat. All of the individual characters are funny, but they all have relationships we’ve seen before.

Then, suddenly, in episode six, everything snaps into place, and the show recenters itself on a new, never-before-seen-on-television relationship. In that episode, Liz reluctantly accepts an ongoing offer of mentorship from Jack, despite the fact that she’s a loosey-goosey, left-wing girl-about-town and he’s a type A, right-wing, ultrasexist alpha male. This odd but mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationship quickly becomes the heart of the show, generating dozens of unique stories and conflicts we haven’t seen before. The result is seven great seasons of television.

Think about times in your life when an acquaintance suddenly became your nemesis or a love affair took a strange left turn. If this was a fascinating relationship that we haven’t seen portrayed before, then you’ll find fresh emotions to tap into.

Can you find relationships from your life that are as incongruous as those seen in Paper Moon (a conman teams up with an eleven-year-old girl) or Midnight Run (a hard-assed bounty hunter has to escort a timid accountant)? If not, you can always invent one. Simply take two very different types of characters and force them to rely on each other in a unique way.

Rulebook Casefile: Milking the Unique Relationship in The Apartment

In The Apartment, C.C. Baxter and Miss Kubelik are both familiar types: the shnook and the strung-along other woman. But their relationship is utterly unique: She is having an affair with Baxter’s boss in his own apartment. The entire story is fueled by the uniqueness of this relationship. At first neither is aware of their unique relationship. Rather than reveal the true nature of their relationship all at once, Wilder and Diamond parcel out this reveal very gradually over the course of the movie, milking this unique relationship for all it’s worth.

What if neither Baxter nor the audience had been aware of the situation until Baxter came home one day to find Kubelik and Sheldrake, in flagrante, covering themselves up in embarrassment? That would have delivered the maximum amount of shock, but so many emotions would have come flooding out at once (for the audience, for Baxter, for Kubelick, and for Sheldrake) that the moment would have been overwhelming. Instead, screenwriters Wilder and Diamond proceed slowly and deliberately:

• First, when we in the audience see Kubelik at the Chinese restaurant, we feel the shock of realizing that Baxter’s crush has been sleeping with another man in his own apartment, No one onscreen is experiencing this revelation at the same time we are, so we get this moment to ourselves. Now that we know more than any of the characters do, we can fully appreciate the irony of this situation... 
• Later, Baxter recognizes Kubelik’s broken mirror at the Christmas party, and realizing that she is his boss’s mistress. Because she does not know what the mirror means to him, he gets this painful moment all to himself. 
• Later, when Baxter finds her “asleep” in his bed, his anger flares up. Because he does not yet know she has taken too many sleeping pills, he gets to have this much-needed cathartic release, before he has to suddenly shift back to feeling sympathy for her as he tries to save her. 
• Later, the doctor slowly wakes Kubelik up. With Baxter out of the room, she gets a moment to experience the shame of her failed suicide attempt. After that passes, she sees Baxter there and experiences an entirely different sort of shame as the final revelation finally falls into place: she realizes that she been carrying on her affair in the apartment of the man who really loves her. 

What is the result of stringing out this series of revelations so deliberately? Let’s try another “what if?”: What Baxter had discovered Kubelik trying to hang herself instead of taking pills? His anger and his instinct to save her would have kicked in at the same time and gotten mixed up with each other, plus we’d also be dealing with her shame at being discovered and her shock at realizing that this was Baxter’s apartment. The mirror and the pills allow each of these four sets of feelings to hit separately, one after another.

The unique relationship between this shnook and this other woman is slowly revealed over the course of the movie, and Wilder and Diamond milk this painful situation for all it’s worth.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, several.
Alien	YES, bickering working-class space crew.
An Education	NO. Not really…maybe with Jenny and the other moll.
The Babadook	YES. a mother and son who each think the other is a monster.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Very much so: a black old west sheriff and an alchoholic white gunslinger.
Blue Velvet	YES. an amateur investigator in a sadomasochistic relationship with his target.
The Bourne Identity	YES. the spy and the bohemian.
Bridesmaids	YES. Rivals for the title of maid of honor.
Casablanca	YES. an expatriate bar-owner and his corrupt police chief friend.
Chinatown	YES. A detective and the woman who he was fooled into thinking he was representing.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  A ruthless undercover cop and the sad-sack mobster he targets.
Do the Right Thing	YES. a pizza delivery man and his boss.
The Farewell	YES. a girl and her grandmother when the girl is hiding from the grandmother that she’s dying.
The Fighter	YES. a boxer and his crackhead brother.
Frozen	YES. A princess and an ice merchant must team up to stop another princess.
The Fugitive	YES. Very much so: a fugitive and his Marshall.
Get Out	YES. Very much so.  We’ve never seen a pairing like Chris and Rose before, once we find out what’s really going on.
Groundhog Day	YES. A weatherman and his producer.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. A boy and his dragon.
In a Lonely Place	YES. a romance between a man and the stranger that alibis him.
Iron Man	YES. An arms dealing billionaire and his military liaison
Lady Bird	YES. None of the relationships are tremendously unique, but they’re all original enough not to be cliché. We’ve seen relationships of the sort we see here with the mom, the dad, Julie, Jenna, Danny, and Kyle, but not with these well-observed unique details.
Raising Arizona	YES. The couple are an ex-con and ex-cop.
Rushmore	YES. a student and his school’s funder.
Selma	YES. Very much so: An activist and a president.
The Shining	Somewhat: we’ve seen a wife and son afraid of the dad before.  The Halloran/Danny relationship is unique.
Sideways	YES. A divorced middle-age man and his middle-aged best friend who is getting married for the first time.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. FBI and serial killer working together.
Star Wars	YES. (Unless you’ve seen Hidden Fortress) The farmboy, the mercenary, the princess, the hermit and the princess.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the story follow the progress of the hero’s problem, not the hero’s daily life?

And so we’re back!  Sorry I took a break with these for a while.  I realized I wasn’t including enough old pieces, so I had to spend some time identifying old posts to add to these.  You’ll see the results below, with two old pieces added to this excerpt from the book:

What is the worst possible way for any story to begin? “BRINGGGGG! Angie’s eyes open and she looks over at her alarm clock. …” Don’t do this. Your story is not about your hero’s life. Your story is not about your hero’s day. Your story is about your hero’s problem. Do not follow your hero around like a puppy, waiting for something to begin. Begin the moment the problem begins—no sooner and no later.

If you’re writing a lot of scenes in which the hero wakes up in the morning or goes to bed at night, you’re doing it wrong, because those scenes have nothing to do with the hero’s problem. In the overstuffed fantasy novel Eragon, there are no fewer than nineteen scenes of the hero waking up in the morning!

Likewise, the way to get from scene to scene is not to ask, “What does the hero do next?” but rather, “What is the next step in the progression of this problem?” That next step might happen immediately after this scene, or the next day, or years later. Your audience will happily make that leap forward with you, because they are invested in this one problem, not the progress of your hero’s daily life.

Let your story start at the moment the problem becomes acute, and then end at the moment the problem is solved (or succumbed to, or peaceably accepted). If you simply follow the development of that problem, then everything before it begins, everything after it’s resolved, a lot of extraneous events along the way will simply fall away, and you’ll find your story.

Rulebook Casefile: I loved how quickly Dallas Buyer’s Club movie moved. As soon as you begin to suspect what might happen next, we suddenly leap ahead a few weeks and land knee-deep into the middle of that plot turn. We never see McConaughey make the decision to do the next thing: “Wait just a second, I just had a big idea, what if we…” We just see that he has made a big decision, and he’s already facing the next big complication. We’re constantly playing catch-up…which is exactly what we want.   

Rulebook Casefile: The Progress of the Problem in the Opening of The Babadook

The Babadook exemplifies three rules:

• A story follows the progress of the problem, not the progress of the character 
• Cut ten pages out by starting scenes late and ending them early 
• Never let your characters apologize 

By the time the story begins, Sam’s behavior has already gotten pretty bad, and things are quickly getting worse. The first ten minutes feature breathtaking storytelling in every sense of the word: We begin with ten 30-second scenes of Sam’s escalating violence and monster-obsession, then at the 5-minute mark he’s kicked out of school. After ten more 30-second scenes, he pulls the “Mr. Babadook” book off the shelf exactly at 10-minute mark, and the real terror begins.

How on earth does writer/director Jennifer Kent get such a richly-characterized movie to move so fast? How can you say anything with a 30-second scene, and how can you keep up that pace for 20 quick scenes in a row?

The lack of apologies has a lot to do with it. Presumably, after each of Sam’s problematic incidents he apologizes abjectly to his mom or she to others, but the movie has no time for that. It’s tricky, because those scenes are tempting to write: after all, that’s big drama …but it’s empty drama. The audience doesn’t want to watch characters talk about something that’s already happened, they vastly prefer to watch characters discuss things that might happen, or that are happening. What’s done is done.

Here’s what Kent has to say:

• “Deciding the structure of it, I was always trying to make it more and more constrictive. It’s a matter of rhythm. For me, films have more in common with music than with novels or literature. The flow of this movie was determined by its musicality. We didn’t stop in the edit until it felt that way. We clipped out a lot from the first half until we got there, about 10 minutes, I’d say.” 

Getting out of scenes also creates a nice effect near the end, cleverly manipulating our genre expectations. The scene:

Once we know that Amelia is over the bend, their kindly old neighbor knocks on the door to make sure they’re okay. We see wild-eyed Amelia trying to send her away. We then cut to Sam discovering their dead dog on the kitchen floor, only to have him turn around to find his murderous mother standing over him, explaining that the neighbor won’t be bothering them anymore.

So did Amelia kill her neighbor? Well, no, but we don’t find that out until the epilogue when the neighbor is babysitting Sam again. Not only is this a great example of the power of cutting away to keep tension high, it helps with the problem we discussed last time: In the end, Amelia kills no humans. This violates our genre expectations, but it’s necessary in order to have a semi-happy ending, so one solution is to cut away from that scene early, implying just for a while that maybe she has killed someone, which makes the rest of her rampage that much scarier.

It’s a brilliant cut: If we figure out that she’s not going to kill anyone, then the movie loses tension, but if we know for certain that she has killed someone, then we lose all hope of a happy ending, which also decreases tension (our tense hopes that this might still turn out okay). By cutting away, both sources of tension are kept alive.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Well, his whole life is a problem, but yes.  There’s not a lot of waking up and falling asleep.
Alien	YES.
An Education	YES.
The Babadook	YES. The first half-hour is a beautiful model of lightspeed filmmaking, following the progress of the problem over a long period of time in a rapid-fire way. (Kent says they cut ten minutes out of this section.)
Blazing Saddles	YES. Very much so. In fact, Bart disappears off the screen for fifteen minutes as the problem develops, then reappears, already up to speed.
Blue Velvet	YES. Two hours of deleted scenes attest to how slimmed down the story is (only stills survive, but those stills can be seen on the DVD).
The Bourne Identity	YES.
Bridesmaids	YES. though this one problem eventually spirals out to encompass most of her life.
Casablanca	NO. Not strictly.  It’s not very linear.  The camera wanders through some tangentially related minor storylines on its way back to Rick.
Chinatown	YES.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  we barely even see where he lives as Donnie.
Do the Right Thing	Yes and no.  We think for the most of the movie that this is just a day-in-the-life story, but we realize at the end that almost everything we’ve seen has contributed to the riot.
The Farewell	YES. we see little of her life outside this problem.
The Fighter	YES. It begins when he realizes that his family is the problem, and ends when they reconcile with his girlfriend.  They could have gone further to show Micky’s most famous fights, but they don’t, because that’s outside the scope of the problem.
Frozen	YES.
The Fugitive	YES. Very much so.  The first ten minutes do an amazing job of zipping through the set-up.
Get Out	YES.
Groundhog Day	YES. We get started quickly, then slow down to show two whole days, then move through hundreds of day quickly once he begins making incremental progress.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. there are lots of montages that show Hiccup’s incremental progress at solving the problem without worrying about what Hiccup does all day.
In a Lonely Place	YES. We zip through a lot of time.
Iron Man	YES. We zip through a lot of story quickly.
Lady Bird	YES. Basically.  It begins at the moment her relationship with her mom becomes untenable, and ends with the relationship’s peacable resolution.
Raising Arizona	YES. For instance, when it starts to cut away to Smalls, it uses the excuse of a dream in which Hi conjures up Smalls as a projection of his guilt, allowing this second storyline to become an extension of the one problem.
Rushmore	YES. The months projected on curtains keep things moving swiftly along.
Selma	YES. there’s lots of jumping ahead.
The Shining	YES. it follows the progress of the problem as it passes from hero to hero.
Sideways	YES. It breezes through seven days of story, which is more than most movies
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. We zip through a lot of time, have little “downtime”
Star Wars	YES.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.

Marvel Reread Club Episode 11: February 1963

Steve and Matt Bird · 011 Marvel Reread Club February 1963

It’s February 1963 in the Marvel Reread Club, with Fantastic Four #11, Journey Into Mystery #89 featuring Thor, Strange Tales #106 featuring Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #40 featuring Ant-Man! Lincoln’s Mother! Super-Ventriloquism! Flame Saws! Fake Appendicitis! We bid a sad farewell to Jack Kirby on three more of his comics, but he’ll be back soon with other books, we promise!

It's Really Not Our Fault

Sometimes the guest has to delay, so James and I miss another podcast deadline.  That happens, too.  

Marvel Reread Club Episode 10: January 1963

Steve and Matt Bird · 010 Marvel Reread Club January 1963

Welcome back to Marvel Reread Club! Today we look at Fantastic Four #10, The Incredible Hulk #5, Journey Into Mystery #88 starring Thor, Strange Tales #104 starring The Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #39 starring Ant-Man. Stan and Jack betray the FF! The Hulk in an Abominable Snowman costume! Cars turn into ice cream! Paste-Pot Pete! Termite armies!

I don’t usually post interior pages, but I couldn’t resist showing you Pete’s glorious outfit:

Episode 31: Irony

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 31: Irony

Welcome back to the Secrets of Story Podcast! James and I have both had epic vacations, so we’re rested and ready and raring to go. For this episode, we got into a long, unproductive, and very contentious discussion about whether comedy ages well, but I snipped all that out, so you get 69 minutes of sweetness and light as we discuss Irony in Casablanca, Blazing Saddles and Mulan!

Here’s the video I did about Irony in Mulan, so you can see some of these in action: