#fff Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting - Part 3 The Principles of Story Design
still constructing
I have already written the note on the Chinese translation version of this book, you can read it here: “#033 故事——材质、结构、风格和银幕剧作的原理”. The only reason why I reread the English version is my distrust of translation and my pursuit of the original meaning.
7 The Substance of Story
THE PROTAGONIST
- Generally, the protagonist is a single character.
- For two or more characters to form a Plural-Protagonist, two conditions must be met:
- All individuals in the group share the same desire.
- In the struggle to achieve this desire, they mutually suffer and benefit. If one has a success, all benefit. If one has a setback, all suffer. Within a Plural-Protagonist, motivation, action, and consequence are communal.
- A story may, on the other hand, be Multiprotagonist. Here, unlike the Plural-Protagonist, characters pursue separate and individual desires, suffering and benefiting independently.
- It’s even possible, in rare cases, to switch protagonists halfway through a story.
A PROTAGONIST is a willful character. Quality of will is as important as quantity and the true strength of the protagonist’s will may hide behind a passive characterization.
The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire. The protagonist has a need or goal, an object of desire, and knows it.
The PROTAGONIST may also have a self-contradictory unconscious desire. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly wants.
The PROTAGONIST has the capacities to pursue the Object of Desire convincingly. The character’s desires must be realistic enough in relationship to his will and capacities for the audience to believe that he could be doing what they see him doing and that he has a chance for fulfillment.
The PROTAGONIST must have at least a chance to attain his desire. An audience has no patience for a protagonist who lacks all possibility of realizing his desire.
The PROTAGONIST has the will and capacity to pursue the object of his conscious and/or unconscious desire to the end of the line, to the human limit established by setting and genre. For no matter how intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the characters and their world, a circumference of experience that’s defined by the nature of the fictional reality.
A STORY must build to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another. If people exit imagining scenes they thought they should have seen before or after the ending we give them, they will be less than happy moviegoers. We’re supposed to be better writers than they.
The PROTAGONIST must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic.
- Sympathetic means likable.
- Empathetic means “like me.”
THE AUDIENCE BOND
The audience’s emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy.When we identify with a protagonist and his desires in life, we are in fact rooting for our own desires in life.
Empathy, therefore, is absolute, while sympathy is optional.
The protagonist is a human being; the audience is full of human beings. As the filmgoer looks up on the screen, he recognizes the character’s humanity, senses that he shares it, identifies with the protagonist, and dives into the story.
THE FIRST STEP
Your character, indeed all characters, in the pursuit of any desire, at any moment in story, will always take the minimum, conservative action from his point of view.
What is necessary but minimal and conservative is relative to the point of view of each character at each precise moment.
In story, we concentrate on that moment, and only that moment, in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism. The world of the character reacts differently than expected, more powerfully than expected, or both.
THE WORLD OF A CHARACTER
A character’s world can be imagined as a series of concentric circles surrounding a core of raw identity or awareness, circles that mark the levels of conflict in a character’s life.
THE THREE LEVELS OF CONFLICT:
| Inner Conflicts | Personal Conflicts | Extra-personal Conflicts |
|---|---|---|
| Mind | Family | Individuals in society |
| Body | Lovers | Physical environment |
| Emotions | Friends | Social institutions |
THE GAP
STORY is born in that place where the subjective and objective realms touch.