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:

Marvel Reread Club Episode 9: December 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 009 Marvel Reread Club December 1962

It’s another visit to the Marvel Reread Club! In this episode, we check out December 1962, including Fantastic Four #9, Journey Into Mystery #87 featuring Thor, Strange Tales #103 featuring the Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #38 featuring Ant-Man. Hitchhiking in costume! Fake experimentation! Hypno-Rings! Giant Fly-Paper! Check it out!

Hey Look, My Book Finally Got Announced in Publisher's Weekly!

Apparently it's coming out in April of next year, which was news to me! They make it sounds pretty good. I might read it!  We've also got a great cover which I hope to be able to show you soon

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I Don't Want to Shock You, But James and I Couldn't Keep to Schedule

Yes, we had announced that “The Secrets of Story Podcast” would now be biweekly, just like “Marvel Reread Club”, so you would get a podcast every week, but I’ve had computer drama, James is on vacation this week, and I’m on vacation next week, so, though we’ve recorded it, I’m going to push the new episode back two weeks. “Marvel Reread Club” will post as scheduled next week (though it may not have an embedded player, depending on my internet access), then the Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist will resume the next week, culminating in a a new “Secrets of Story Podcast.”

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there one character whom the audience will choose to be their hero?

As I said earlier, audiences will always choose one character to represent their point of view and their interests. This is their hero. Even in an ensemble story, or a story about various walks of life, the audience will choose one character to primarily identify with. They have to—that’s how we’re hardwired to process stories. 

You may wish to equally privilege various characters, but the audience will usually choose only one to fully identify with. In Traffic, only Benicio Del Toro’s story is really compelling, because he has the biggest challenge. The other stories are there to make various points, but once we’ve identified with Del Toro, it becomes more and more annoying to cut away from him. We know who our hero is.

So you have to acknowledge that your audience will begin your story by desperately searching for a strong character to identify with, and that they will expect the story to follow the arc of that hero’s problem from beginning to end.

It’s important to remember that your audience must identify with your hero, but they need not sympathize with the hero’s larger goal. “Antihero” stories are extremely hard to write well, but they can become beloved when done right. As we watch Breaking Bad, we fully identify with the tragic hero Walter White, and we even get pulled into rooting for his little schemes in most episodes, but we always hope that his business will ultimately fail and that he will learn the error of his ways, before it’s too late. This powerful irony fuels the show.

But wait, now let’s look at an example that breaks this rule and gets away with it: “A Game of Thrones”

One of the primarily rules in my book (In fact, I elevate it to the status of “Law”,) is that, even if you’re writing an ensemble story, you have to accept that readers will always choose one character to be their hero, and invest their hopes and dreams in that one character. And I still believe that, despite the striking counterexample of this book, which has eight roughly-equal points of view characters, many of whom have a claim to being “the” hero of the book.

Does it get away with it? Yes, it does. How? Well, I make it clear in my book that any rule can be broken, but you have to know you’re breaking it and accept that you’re going to frustrate your audience. My rules are just warnings about expectations your audience will have, some conscious, some unconscious. As a writer, you need to be aware that your audience will seek to identify the one hero of your story, and they’ll be frustrated with you if they can’t do that.

“A Game of Thrones” is the ultimate example of the oft-misunderstood phrase, “The exception proves the rule.” We are acutely aware of this rule as we read because he’s breaking it. Martin knows that we want one hero, and toys with that expectation for a long time before he finally denies it utterly.

Our identification is indeed split. Martin creates empathy for seven of his eight POV characters, (All except Sansa. Even when we’re in her head, we’re just looking down on her) and each of those is the hero of his or her own story, and potentially the hero of the whole series, but for most of this book, we do settle our hopes on one hero: Ned. He is the one trying to solve the book’s biggest mystery, and he is the glue that holds the other heroes together.

In addition to his own chapters, four of the other POV characters are his children, and one is his wife. That just leaves Tyrion and Daenerys, who complicate things. Tyrion is brother to Ned’s nemeses, and we have complicated emotions toward him. We know he’s not our hero, but we can’t help but like him, and we’re even tempted to trust him. When he goes to fight alongside his brother, we feel betrayed that this likable character is siding with evil. Even then, we root for him not to get killed, and at the end when he’s sent to King’s Landing to be the Hand of the King, we’re hoping he will mitigate Joffrey’s evil.

Daenerys is the most audacious break with audience expectations, in that her heroic storyline is almost totally separate from the others. She is the best argument that this is a book with more than one hero. But it’s essential that, at key points, Ned acts the save the lives of both Tyrion and Daenerys. Unlike the next two books, in which Daenerys’s storyline will be totally divorced from the rest of the book, a key turning point in this book is when Ned throws away his job in an attempt to save the life of this would-be queen halfway around the world. Likewise, Ned sends word to his wife at one point to release Tyrion when she has him prisoner in a deadly situation.

So we readers, as I say in my book, are indeed desperately searching around for one hero to invest our hopes in, and we find one, despite the fact that we have so many options to choose from.

Then he gets his head chopped off.

But the whole power of this moment is that it’s so shocking, and it’s so shocking because we’re sure he’s our one hero. That is the whole trick of this book. Martin knows that he’s breaking the law. He’s intentionally creating cognitive dissonance. He’s being puckish. He’s being audacious. He’s blowing our minds.

Of course, after this happens, we’re lost. We’ve never had a book chop off the head of the hero and just keep going before. So once again, we desperately search around for a hero, and don’t know where to turn. (Ironically, I think that most readers will land on Robb, even though he’s not one of the eight POV characters, and won’t be in any subsequent books either.)

Martin is toying with our genre expectations. He seems to think that fantasy readers have too simplistic a sense of moral complexity, and he’s using that to trap us. He knows that we’ll look for the one right hero, and settle on Ned, rather than, say, Jon or Daenerys, then he’ll force us to rewrite our sense of right and wrong and look for heroes in places we may not have looked for them before. That’s his whole point.

If you break a law, you will frustrate your reader. If that’s your whole goal, then go right ahead!

Okay, let’s see how the movies I’ve looked at have done with this rule:

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  Andy.
Alien	NO. Not until very late, when we finally settle on Ripley once she takes over.
An Education	YES. Jenny
The Babadook	Yes and no.  Our identification shifts, but one could argue that Amelia remains the “hero”, because we’re still rooting for her to get over it once she’s possessed, and not for Samuel to defeat her.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Bart
Blue Velvet	YES. Jeffrey.
The Bourne Identity	YES. Jason, although our loyalty to him is tested at times.
Bridesmaids	YES.
Casablanca	YES. Rick.
Chinatown	YES. Jake
Donnie Brasco	YES.  Donnie.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Mookie, for lack of a better one, but he’s relatively passive and we’re never sure if he’s a hero or an anti-hero.  It’s interesting that Mookie is sometimes the POV character and sometimes not.  Sometimes he leads us to the next character and sometimes the camera jumps away from him independently.  It’s almost as if the camera is the hero, sometimes agreeing with Mookie and cutting along with his perspective, sometimes cutting in opposition to his POV to things that impeach what he just said, or impeach what he’s about to say. (The case can also be made that Buggin’ Out is a co-hero or co-anti-hero, because he’s the one who is actually driving the plot and Mookie is just reacting.)
The Farewell	YES. Billi
The Fighter	YES. Mickey.
Frozen	YES. Anna, though it does a good job of also allowing it to be Elsa’s story in secondary way.
The Fugitive	YES. Kimble.
Get Out	YES. Chris
Groundhog Day	YES. Phil.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Hiccup.
In a Lonely Place	YES. Dix.
Iron Man	YES. Tony.
Lady Bird	YES. Lady Bird
Raising Arizona	YES. Hi.
Rushmore	YES. Max.
Selma	YES. MLK
The Shining	NO. This movie has one hero at a time but it’s a tag-team effort: first Jack, then Danny, then Jack, then Wendy, then Halloran, then Danny.
Sideways	YES. Miles.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Clarice
Star Wars	YES. Luke, though we find Han more appealing.
Sunset Boulevard	YES.  Joe