Category: Casablanca

The answer to that question, according to Hitchcock, is your paycheck. He was talking about actors, but there’s a bit of truth in there for writers, too.

So, a while back a friend of mine asked me to look at a script he’d been working on. It was pretty darn solid, overall, but right in the beginning I noticed something that struck me as a bit odd. Our hero’s renovating a large home and has been told one area of the estate is off limits. Don’t go through that door. Well, as tends to happen in movies… guess what?

It was how it happened that got my attention, though, and not in a good way. Just a few pages later said character is slamming his shoulder against the door three or four times until it pops open and he can explore a bit. Which was odd, because up until now this guy had seemed like a straight-shooting model citizen. Now suddenly he’s breaking and entering just to satisfy a mild sense of curiosity.

Here’s another example (not from my friend’s script). Let’s say Bob is hanging out with a female friend, they decide to go out, and she heads off to her room to get changed. It says one thing about Bob if, when he heads to the bathroom, he happens to catch a glimpse of his friend naked through the door and has a momentary “Wow.” It says another thing if, as soon as she walks off, he casually finds the angle that lets him stare into her room. It’s a third thing altogether if he pulls out his cell phone to use the camera and take pictures. On the surface, the same thing is happening–Bob is seeing his friend with no clothes–but these are three very different scenes because of his intentions in each one (innocent, lecherous, and kinda creepy).

Y’see, Timmy, motivation is one of the keys to storytelling, because it’s one of the keys to great characters. It’s why everything happens, and why someone’s doing something affects how they do it. People can be motivated by greed, survival, anger, hatred, fear, duty, love, lust, zealotry– any number of things. Everything a character does has to come from some type of motivation. Everything. Unmotivated characters will just sit on the couch for 300 or so pages, and nobody’s interested in that. We all know people like that in real life. Why read about it? More to the point of this week’s little rant, it’s the writer’s job to make sure motivations make sense and are consistent for both the characters and their world. When they aren’t, that starts chipping away at suspension of disbelief.

Now, hands down, the biggest and most common problem is when the writer confuses their motivation with the character’s. The big battle can’t happen if Wakko doesn’t do this, so he does this. I need Yakko to say something so we can get to chapter seven, so Yakko says it. Granted, this is how all writing happens, but if you’ve already established that Wakko would have a strong aversion to doing that and Yakko would never say this, the reader’s going to wonder where these choices are coming from. Just because the writer has ultimate power over the characters does not automatically mean anything that gets written is “right” for the characters. Even when you’re behind the wheel, you have to drive certain ways in certain places. If you doubt this, try shifting into reverse next time you’re on the freeway.

Probably the most common place for this kind of motivational mistake is dialogue. The writer comes up with a funny or cool line and needs a character to say it. Any character. Someone has to say this cool line! Suddenly Father Mike is cracking sex jokes and Sister Hannah is cursing like a sailor. Still great lines, but would these people really use them? The need for explanation can also lead to unmotivated dialogue and make monosyllabic characters start lecturing like college professors. This is a two-fold problem, because not only does it weaken the suspension of disbelief, as mentioned above, it also breaks the flow of the story.

Motivation also becomes a problem when the writer is trying to hit certain benchmarks or requirements with their work. Gurus exhort people to hit this point by page nine, have this action by chapter ten, or make sure this happens X number of times before Y. Fledgling writers follow these rules as a rigid gospel, make their stories and characters twist unnaturally to meet them, and often the result is just a bunch of false drama. In Hollywood, where they refer to elaborate stunt or effects sequences as set pieces, it’s not unusual for producers to hand the screenwriter a laundry list of set pieces to fit into their script– or to write the script around. Robert Towne’s script for Mission Impossible II is, alas, an example of just such a thing. Throughout it, stuff just happens. No reason for it, it just happens because the director, producers, and star wanted it in the script. Don’t even get me started on Wanted.

In all fairness, some times those requirements are self-imposed. Like that cool line of dialogue I mentioned above, the writer comes up with something they just can’t let go of. Maybe it’s a certain action sequence, a clever homage, or some odd wish-fulfillment being expressed on the page. Regardless, it usually ends up with some unmotivated decisions, violence, or romantic encounters.

Another common mistake, on the flipside, is to give the motivations for every single thing that happens, including characters or actions that… well, that just aren’t all that important. Odds are I don’t need to know that the woman at the bus stop ran away from home at age thirteen or that the long-haired waiter doubles as a male stripper to pay for med school. As I’ve mentioned before, if it doesn’t have a direct effect on the story being told, don’t waste time with it. It may feel luxurious and literary, but more likely it’s clumsy and confusing.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these characters and actions shouldn’t have a motivation. Everything in your story needs a motivation, but the reader doesn’t need to know it all. They just need to see the consistent results of it. At no point in Casablanca is it ever brought up or discussed why Rick suddenly decides to be generous to the young couple trying to win money for an exit visa. People comment that he did it and it’s very out of character, but why he did it is never mentioned. Does it need to be? No, of course not. Anyone paying attention to the film can explain why Rick has this sudden turn of heart.

Now, there is another school of though in writing that unmotivated action is the best. Life is random after all. Much as we don’t like to think about it, people often suffer setbacks that have no deliberate machinations behind them. They get dealthly ill. They’re involved in fatal car accidents. In the real world, stories don’t always get happy endings and neither do people. Things get left unresolved and mysteries go unexplained. So doing this in your work can only make your writing more realistic and believable, yes?

No.

I’m calling shenanigans on this one, and on every professor, critic, indie filmmaker, and self-proclaimed guru who pushes this viewpoint. If you take this approach in your writing it isn’t artistic– its lazy. Things like that happen in the real world, but we’re talking about fiction. Nothing on the page is coming from the randomness of the universe, it’s all coming directly out of the writer’s mind. It’s a created world, and as the writer it’s your job to resolve the issues you’ve created. To have readers invest their time and emotions in a character which the writer then kills off just for the heck of it is cheap. When doing so leaves conflicts unresolved, it’s a cop-out. It’s the kind of pretentious excuse made by people who don’t actually want to put any real effort into their work.

Nobody here wants to be that kind of writer, right?

Good.

Next week, before we get further into the sparkly holiday season, I want to talk about some stuff that really sucks. No, seriously.

Until then, hopefully this has motivated you to go write.

My sincerest apologies for being late with the ranty blog. Again. It’s not that I don’t care about the baker’s dozen of you who read this collection of nonsense. It’s just that I care more about keeping a roof over my head. It’s nothing personal. Plus, I had a very old friend visit from the east coast, and I care more about her, too.

So, anyway… if you know the second part of that title (many thanks to Paula Abdul), you’re already way ahead of the pack…

I left off in mid-rant having talked about linear structure. Your characters and your action need to have a logical order to them–even if they’re not presented to your audience in that order. Which brings us to the second thing I wanted to talk about, and that’s dramatic structure. While linear structure is experienced within your story (but still perceived by the reader) dramatic structure is experienced by the reader (yet your characters are still aware of many of its elements).

All stories need some level of drama. Drama comes from conflict, and that comes from challenges the characters have to face. They can be action challenges, emotional, intellectual, almost anything. Having to blow up the Death Star before it destroys the Rebel base is dramatic. So is having to face the love of your life who abandoned you in Paris. And so is having to deduce why someone would hire a red-headed man just to copy the encyclopedia.

Now, one challenge all by itself is not a story. If all I have to do is beat the monster and I win, that’s not much of a story, is it? It’s just a step. Readers and audiences don’t want to see someone do X and win. That’s boring, no matter if we’re talking about action, emotion, or pure cleverness. They want to see the hero do A, B,C, X, Y, Z, and win by the skin of his or her teeth. So a good story has a series of challenges for the hero to face, and this is where dramatic structure comes in.

For this next bit, it’d help if you pictured a wave diagram. Just one of those nice up and down ones, perhaps with the zero-level line drawn across the horizon.

(this graphic, by the way, sent today’s ranty blog almost two hundred thousand dollars over budget. Just saying…)

A good story is like a series of waves, each one representing different challenges your characters encounter. The troughs are setbacks they suffer between, or perhaps because of, each success. For example, Indy finds the Ark of the Covenant, but then he gets sealed alive in the Well of Souls with a few thousand Egyptian asps. If your characters never suffer any setbacks (and you’d be amazed how many stories and scripts I’ve seen with this problem) you don’t have waves, you have a line. Likewise, if your story is nothing but an ongoing string of defeats and failures (which tends to go with “artistic” writing), that’s just another line, too. And let’s face it, lines are flat and boring. It’s the same thing as having nothing but “cool” dialogue. It’s just monotonous.

Which brings us to the second part of good dramatic structure. As the story progresses, the waves should be getting taller, every one a little more than the last. The troughs between them should get deeper and deeper. The height of the waves is a good measure of the tension level the characters are facing. The troughs is the level of failure or setback they’re encountering. If you have a kayak or a surfboard, the journey’s pretty smooth near the shore as you’re starting out. You can coast over those little waves without even noticing them. As you get further out, though, closer to where you want to be, the waves get bigger and there can be some serious drops between them. Then you’re at the point where staying down too long means that next wave will just crush you…

To go back to our very expensive graph, there’s a reason for this ever-increasing structure. If the story’s waves are always five up and five down, they cancel each other out and we’re back at that very dull, monotonous line. The all winning/ all losing lines are boring, yes, but you really don’t want that line to be at zero. Each victory should lift the hero (and the reader) a little higher, just as each setback should send them reeling a little harder.

Let’s take a minute to look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once we get past that wonderful opening sequence and into the main story, the first few challenges are almost imperceptible. Indy tries to keep his students’ attention, worries about why government agents want to talk to him, and is excited to hear they’ve enlisted him to search for the Ark. He saves Marion from the Nazis only to have her die in an exploding truck. He learns the secret of the medallion and the location of the Ark, but Sallah’s grabbed before he can escape the Map Room. He finds the Ark, but the Nazi leave him buried alive in the Well of Souls. There’s always a “but” in there, all the way up to Indy infiltrating the secret Nazi island and getting Belloq in the sights of an RPG, but Belloq calls his bluff and Indy is finally captured by the Nazis. After all these increasing ups and downs, the big, terrifying up the film ends on is God himself coming down to stomp the bad guys.

Try to beat that.

Now, a few things to watch for as you consider waves, the expensive graph, and your own story.

One is you shouldn’t have two waves which are the same height. If this challenge is equal to that challenge, one of them either doesn’t need to be there or needs to be lessened/increased a bit. Again, when things are the same, it’s monotonous.

Two is these should be valid challenges and they really should be bigger. Don’t fabricate a wave just so your character has a challenge and then try to convince the readers its a vital, integral part of the story. A ninja attack is cool. A ninja who attacks out of the blue just to create an action sequence is not. You don’t want to be the literary equivalent of the surfer who insists the waves in Lake Michigan are just as big as the ones at Venice Beach.

Three is something I touched on above. Dramatic structure is separate from linear structure, because it’s more what the audience is experiencing. Your story can be structured like this…

Ghijkl abcdef mnopqrs wxyz tuv

…but the dramatic challenges still need to go from smallest to biggest. The waves always have to increase with the narrative, not with the actual order of the story. In this example, abcdef should be a bigger wave than ghijkl, even though abcdef happened to the characters first. If it doesn’t increase drama to have it at this point in the narrative, why is it here? This is one of the biggest problems non-linear stories have–there’s no dramatic reason for them to be out of order. I saw one film that was a non-linear mish-mash, but it accomplished nothing except to confuse the audience.

This is leading into something else, and I’ve prattled on a bit too long as it is. So why don’t I stop again and next week I’ll try to finish up with a convoluted definition of narrative. And maybe some more pictures.

Until then, go write.

We’re all familiar with that title reference, yes? Even if you never played as a kid (or a semi-drunken college student), you’ve probably seen or heard about it. Clue is the classic mystery game, where you have to determine the murder weapon, the scene of the crime, and (of course) the killer.

A game of Clue isn’t much of a mystery, however. It’s more of a puzzle you just need to solve though the process of elimination. We never find out why the good professor felt the need to cave in Mr. Boddy’s skull. Was it an act of revenge, long-overdue justice, or just a heated argument that boiled over into violence? Similarly, Plum never offers any sort of defense or alibi. He just ends up being the only person who can’t account for his location at the time of the murder, so we cart him off to life behind bars.

Motives and alibis are what really separate a mystery from a puzzle. They’re the human element that makes things either a little more complicated or a lot more difficult, depending on your point of view.

The motive is why someone does what they do– the personal reasons behind the action. Why does the Monster (sometimes called Adam) kill Victor Frankenstein’s bride-to-be? Why does Lando betray Han? Why does Romeo kill Tybalt?

If you really think about it, though, most characterization comes down to motives. Knowing why someone’s doing something—anything, not just criminal acts– tells you a bit about them. We learn a lot about the good Doctor Jones simply because of his desire to go looking for the Ark of the Covenant, but also because he mocks the ideas behind the fabled treasure. You can ask these sort of questions about most great characters. Why is it so important to Atticus Finch that Tom Robinson receive a fair trial? Why is young Edmond Dantes so determined to escape from prison? Why does Dot keep hitting Yakko with that hammer when he’s not looking?

You can even look at motives in a negative light to help define characters. Not why characters do something, but why didn’t they do something else? Sometimes people make difficult, troublesome decisions that are going to cause problems, and that can tell your audience something about them as well. Why won’t Nick Andros abandon Tom Cullen (M-O-O-N spells Tom) so he can travel faster to Denver? Why doesn’t Louis turn Rick over to the Nazis for shooting Major Strasse? Why won’t Prince Hal acknowledge his friendship with Falstaff?

Motives don’t need to be big, elaborate things, mind you. “Bob doesn’t want to get beaten up,” is a perfectly acceptable motive. So is “Beatrice wants to sleep with Larry” or “Pinky is hungry.” Not everyone has to be hiding a dark secret, keeping themselves out of the electric chair, or protecting the Holy Grail.

The real failure comes when characters do things not for their motives but for the writer’s. If you ever look at a character action and the reasoning behind it is “because X needs to do Y,” that’s false motivation. The writer is looking forward in the story rather than back at character development. And character development is where all your motivation is going to come from.

Now, in mystery stories, the alibi often walks right alongside the motive. Simply put, the alibi is the reason you couldn’t’ve done the crime, even if you had a reason to. It’s contradictory evidence. We know Miss Scarlet was in the greenhouse and Colonel Mustard can’t lift anything over his head since the war, so they’re off the hook for Boddy’s murder. We may find out later Scarlet was in the bedroom with Mrs. White and Mustard’s medical records were faked, but that just makes the mystery a little juicer.

In fact, alibis make most stories a little more tasty, because keeping something hidden makes other characters (and the audience) think twice. It’s when you want to deceive your audience and keep a little something from them to improve the story. Most romances wouldn’t be as interesting if at least one of the two parties involved wasn’t completely denying an attraction. Stu Redman must die in that ravine, because none of his friends ever see him again. And there’s no way those robots can do anything wrong, because the Three Laws will keep them on the straight-and-narrow path every time, right?

Note that in many of these examples, the writer isn’t even lying to the audience. If the reader chooses to interpret things a certain way (a wrong way), that’s hardly our fault is it? Well, okay, it is, but we’re doing it for a good reason. The key thing is, none of these alibis are cheats. There’s a good reason none of Stu’s friends ever see him again. The robots really are following the Three Laws (as best as their little positronic brains can, anyway). And, come on, who’s really going to admit they’re attracted to a guy like Chuck, right?

So, even if crime doesn’t pay, you can still get something useful out of it. If your characters always have honest motives, they’ll be real. If they always have compelling alibis, they’ll be interesting.

Next week, since it’s been brought it up once or thrice, we’re going to talk about the rules. To be more specific, we’re going to talk about being the exception to the rule, because that’s what most folks are more interested in.

Until then, get yourself motivated and go write.