George Bernard Shaw once wrote that plot was the creation, manoeuvering and destruction of relationships between characters. Plot is derived from character and it’s sole purpose is to drive the story so the character can attempt to achieve their goal. Every scene in your script must either reveal something about the character and advance the story. Flat scenes become boring and lose your audeince. Here are some plot devices that can pique your plot:

• DANGER – I cannot stress this one enough. It can be moral danger such as deciding to cheat on your spouse, or physical danger such as being trapped in a burning house. Raise the stakes and make your character earn their goal and pay for their mistakes. Give them insecurities, flaws, problems and issues we can all relate to. Make them fall into a ditch that they must crawl out of. A common plot device in action films is to either have multiple things go wrong at once or sequentially. The victim tries to escape, but they can’t find the keys to the car so they break in. Then there’s a flat battery so the can’t hot wire it to start. Then there’s no cell phone coverage… What’s needed may not arrive in time or not arrive at all. Oftentimes, dramatists use a Deus Ex Machina (literally God from the machine) whereby some life saving event occurs just in the nick of time before all is lost. Make sure this isn’t a lucky co-incidence or your audience will never forgive you.

• TIME BOMB - Give your characters a ticking time clock where something seriously bad will happen if they don’t achieve a goal. Maybe there isn’t enough time to defuse the bomb? Perhaps the main character doesn’t know how to defuse the bomb. Maybe the main character isn’t even aware of the bomb. Does the audience know? Giving either the audience or the main character such a superior position adds intrigue and interest. Alternatively, the main character can simply run out of options to achieve their goal rather than out of time.

• CONFESSION – After deep humiliation make your character confess to a secret, shortcoming, wound or a deep seeded fear or shame. Maybe they realise the error of their ways and take responsibility for their actions. Consider your audience. Being born out of wedlock is generally not considered a shameful act in the Western world. Forcing a pregnant unwed couple to marry may be acceptable is some cultures, but not in others. Play with morality in your plot. The beauty of it is that it’s never clearly right or wrong like a maths problem. Is it wrong to kill someone? What if they killed your family? What if it is in self defense?

• BETRAYAL – The hero’s buddy changes sides or is revealed as a traitor. What if the main character doesn’t realise this, or does so when it’s too late? What if the traitor leads them into a trap?

• DILEMMA – The hero is forced to make a choice between two equally bad alternatives. Consider the family with premature Siamese twins who must decide which one survives and which one doesn’t. What if the main character consciously decides not to act because they are faced with issues of duty for the higher good? Or even love?

• OBSTACLES – External influences such as bad weather or natural disasters forcing them to stop. Car or other vital piece of machinery breaks down and a replacement part is not immediately forthcoming. What if their progress is stalled due to injury, illness or other physical condition such as pregnancy or diabetes? What if someone in their team is killed or kidnapped? Running out of bullets, money, food, air all add to the excitement of danger.

• DISCOVERY – The element of surprise and shock always jolts your audience. Examples of this include a cover been blown of an undercover cop, the presence of an intruder being noticed, an escalating lie has been revealed. A discovery must pivot your story into a new direction, not simply act as a minor irritant. Remember the scene in “Mad Men” where Betty discovers Don’s true identity by opening a locked drawer? She didn’t sigh and carry on, she left him. Discoveries can also be wild goose chases. Following the wrong lead, the wrong map or the wrong advice.

• LOVE – Due to it’s universality, love will always add to a plot. What if a past lover returns? Consider Jodie Foster in “Sommersby”, when she tells her returned “husband” that he’s not the man she married because she didn’t love him like she loves the impostor. Add a love triangle; one bride versus two grooms. Add gender swaps, such as “Tootsie” who had enamored a man who thinks she’s a woman. Also consider the third wheel. The buddy who suddenly becomes the bride’s love interest when he reveals his true self. Love is also used to tame a savage, misanthropic heart.

• TRAITS – Give your character some endearing traits so the audience can partially overlook their negative ones. Give them courage, give them love. give them scruples so they are fighting for a good cause where the collateral damages justifies the cause, make them perform a good deed, make them desirable such as handsome, physical and funny. Make them spiritual, generous and wise. Ensure it all emerges from a place of truth and authenticity. Audiences retract from phonies. Give them fears, traumas which block their growth, masks which prevent other characters from seeing their real self.

• LIKES – Make your characters like children, animals and art. Give them great taste in cars, partners, houses, music, fashion, food and overall lifestyle. Audiences tend to admire what they aspire to be or what they perceive to be desirable.

So go forth and beef up those plotlines.

Humans have been telling stories to each other since time immemorial. They serve a deep psychological and sociological need. Let us examine a few key concepts:

WHAT IS A STORY?

Quite simply, it is a journey of inter-connected events with a beginning, middle and an end providing

• dramatic fulfillment
• education
• knowledge
• entertainment
• emotional stimulation and,
• a satisfying conclusion (we love closure)

Stories began as visual medium when our forebearers painted images on cave walls. or drew with sticks in the sand. They were accompanied by words or grunts. As complex language developed, stories were increasingly verbalized, and later on written. Stories today can be exclusively composed of images, written words or speech, but often times are a combination. Cinema is primarily a visual medium, with a lesser proportion of words (dialogue). Television is more dialogue based than cinema in general.

A story must have a purpose. For instance, the Australian Aboriginal woman at a rock formation called “The Devil’s Marbles” in the Northern Territory told stories to keep youngsters away from these rocks to avoid danger. A story can be as dry as a depiction of actual events or “life-like” events. Even fantasy fairy tales emulate “life-like” events through suspension of disbelief. Whatever dungeons and dragons we use, the events in a story must feel authentic .

Stories also need a theme (exploration of the human condition). What topics or concepts is your story exploring? Racism? The power of the human spirit during disaster? Love always triumphs over evil? Revenge? And the list goes on. This has been discussed in an earlier blog in the 36 dramatic situations by Georges Polti.  Be careful that you are only exploring one central theme and perhaps one or two minor ones. Otherwise your story loses focus which must be found.

In order to make a story compelling, there must be a protagonist (hero), a goal, a dilemma, conflict, an antagonist (nemesis) and a moral (leading to growth) to create a complete experience. And more importantly, an audience. Stories help us communicate with each other, and add meaning and enrichment to our lives. They bring people together through sharing and help us evolve and grow stronger.

Dramatica defines story as a grand argument dealing with a problem or an inequity. Huh? Basically, it raises the issue of a hero with a conflict as they are yanked from their natural world through a critical or inciting incident, and how they go about solving it.

During a recent seminar by Jen Grisanti (a Hollywood writers’ consultant and wonderful person too), she spoke of the importance of finding your story. What is the writer specifically trying to say? Why are they taking up her with a series of events? Is your story too episodic? What do you want your audience to get from watching your film? What message are you trying to convey to your audience?

The movie “Tootsie” spent close to a decade in development until the writer Larry Gelbart finally decided that ‘Tootsie” was a story about a man who had to become a woman in order to better understand them and himself. It wasn’t so much a story of desperation, the lengths people go to to make it as an actor, or about a guy liking to dress up. Consider “What Women Want” with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt which was essentially the same story with body rather than clothes swapping.

Jen Grisanti sees stories as media for building communities. Pretty powerful stuff. A good story must have clarity and must be relevant to the times. How does the story make you feel? These are primal concepts, but difficult to nail down. It must also possess deeper symbolism to have a greater impact on us. She sees the important aspects of raising the emotional stakes in a story as being

• anticipation
• expectation
• participation
• surprise and,
• a delayed payoff

WHAT IS A PLOT?

A plot is simply the way a story is executed, or a cause and effect series of events. A road map. It is the mechanics of your story; how the sequence of events are put together. Many writers confuse the two and think writing event after event constitutes a story, especially in action films. Is your plot linear, non-linear or avariant? Classic examples of unconventional plotting include “Memento”, “Reservoir Dogs” and “Run Lola Run”. Plot also relates to structure, the most common being the Aristotelian three act structure. Is there a clear concept or story idea, which is more specific than a theme? Good versus evil isn’t a story concept.  Is there a well defined central/main character with a clear motivation, goal, a dilemma and obstacles. One way to enhance your plotting is to consider what is the worse case scenario if your main character doesn’t achieve their goal. The ultimate failure to achieve a goal is death.

Subplots are secondary or tertiary storylines. Some readers have complained that, because a writer hasn’t really found their story, some subplots are actually more intriguing than the main plot. It happens in unpolished scripts. Even to me! Another problem I recently grappled with is my choice of main character to drive the plot. In the end I switched the boy to a girl (literally not surgically) and everything fell into  place.

FINDING YOUR VOICE

These are the less tangible qualities that define you as a writer. Jen Grisanti claims that many newer writers lack a distinct voice which distinguishes them from other writers.

This is a difficult process of self exploration. It means that we need to delve deeper into our psyches than ever before. She made us define a critical or life changing incident where the rug was pulled from under our feet and we are forced to deal with a new reality. Sound familiar? In doing so, we help shape our characters which are products of our creativity and therefore ourselves. Imagine placing your profile on a social website. Think of how you would describe your personality? What are your likes and dislikes? What do you value most in your relationships with other people? Certain patterns will emerge which define you as an individual. Are you easy going? Wound up tight? Chatty? Pensive? Conventional? Alternative? Think about how a producer might discuss what qualities you possess as a writer. If a project is greenlit and a producer is looking for a writer and they say “This project is perfect for xxxx (insert your name)”, it’s because of your voice.

Part of finding your voice involves common themes in the stories we like to tell. Are we animal lovers? Philanthropists? Comedians? Feminists? Optimists? Cynical? Interested in human suffering? Are your characters strong, successful people? Are you strong and successful or do you aspire to be? Are characters underdogs? What is their disposition? Happy? Smarmy? Cheerful? Quirks?

Finding your story and finding your voice is rather like wanting a quick definition of the meaning of life. The only way to find it is to keep searching. And the search lies in the writing. So what are you waiting for?

Gilbert Harrison - distracted by bird

A man who was rich/dumb/ignorant enough to purchase a car for $1 million proceeded to relieve it of its operating capabilities by crashing it into a Texas salt marsh two weeks later.

If being dumb enough to crash your car into a lake, he’s blaming it on the fact that a bird distracted him…and that, because of the bird, he dropped his cell phone and was leaning over to pick it up. During that process, he may have taken his eyes off the road, and drove the car into a salt marsh (don’t worry; it wasn’t deep, as shown by the picture above).

While the man does look like a beached walrus riding a sea-horse while sitting on his car waiting to be rescued, I beg the question: how did the pelican startle the man enough to cause him to not only drop his cell phone, but crash his car into a man-made lake in the middle of southern Texas?

Let’s check out the culprits.

1)      The Bird – This beautiful pelican was soaring through the crisp, America blue Texas sky, patrolling the salt marshes for fish that, most likely, were not there because of the excess salt in the water (Dead Sea anyone)? Upon seeing this beautiful creature, the man was so entranced by it, that he dropped his cell phone and, like a fly to a bug zapper, just drove his car towards the bird flying high into the air and nose diving for fish that, most likely, were not in a salt marsh.

2)     The cell phone – The cell phone, because of its constant usage – or maybe because of its own entrancement of the bird – began to heat up by over usage (or pure lust for the pelican beak), burning the man’s hand, causing him to drop the phone. In an attempt to cool it, he ripped his hand through the dash-board to get to the cold Freon running through his A/C. Sadly, in doing so, he broke the drive shaft, rendering the car unsteerable, and proceeded to coast into the salt marsh

3)     The man (most likely scenario) – The fat man, while on the cell phone with a McDonald’s franchise (as he wanted to buy it) and greaseball burger in his other hand, steering with his knees, blasting Denis Leary, was taunting a hungry pelican by holding the burger out the window. The pelican saw the bait and swooped in for it, actually putting the man’s hand in its beak, but the man was able to drop his cell phone and reach out the window to punch the bird in the throat to free his hand. Realizing that free fast food was being lost on the phone, he reached below his dashboard, – taking his eyes off of the road – and slightly turned towards the marsh. Returning to the sitting position, he realized he left his burger in full view of the damned bird, who was now playing chicken with his car. In fear of the bird damaging his million dollar car, he swerved to try to avoid God’s creature, crashing his money pit into a salt marsh.

 While what actually happened may never come to light, one question might never be know: How did a guy THAT fat fit into a car THAT small?

 The world may never know, but I bet he knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of s Tootsie Pop.

Jnah Lehrer

On Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between “linguistic determinism” and “extreme nativism.” The linguistic determinists argue that language is a prison for thought. The words we know define our knowledge of the world. Because Eskimos have more nouns for snow, they are able to perceive distinctions in snow that English speakers cannot. While Pinker deftly discredits extreme versions of this hypothesis, he admits that “boring versions” of linguistic determinism are probably accurate. It shouldn’t be too surprising that our choice of words can frame events, or that our vocabulary reflects the kinds of things we encounter in our daily life. (Why do Eskimos have so many words for snow? Because they are always surrounded by snow.) The language we learn as children might not determine our thoughts, but it certainly influences them.

Extreme nativism, on the other hand, argues that all of our mental concepts — the 50,000 or so words in the typical vocabulary — are innate. We are born knowing about carburetors and doorknobs and iPods. This bizarre theory, most closely identified with the philosopher Jerry Fodor, begins with the assumption that the meaning of words cannot be dissected into more basic parts. A doorknob is a doorknob is a doorknob. It only takes Pinker a few pages to prove the obvious, which is that each word is not an indivisible unit. The mind isn’t a blank slate, but it isn’t an overstuffed filing cabinet either.

So what is Pinker’s solution? He advocates the middle ground of “conceptual semantics,” in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. (As Pinker admits, he owes a big debt to Kant.) The tenses of verbs, for example, are shaped by our innate sense of time. Nouns are constrained by our intuitive notions about matter, so that we naturally parcel things into two different categories, objects and substances (pebbles versus applesauce, for example, or, as Pinker puts it, “hunks and goo”). Each material category comes with a slightly different set of grammatical rules. By looking at language from the perspective of our thoughts, Pinker demonstrates that many seemingly arbitrary aspects of speech, like that hunk and goo distinction, aren’t arbitrary at all: They are byproducts of our evolved mental machinery.

Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. He uses the f-word to explore the topic of transitive and intransitive verbs. He clarifies indirect speech by examining a scene from Tootsie, and Lenny Bruce makes so many appearances that he should be granted a posthumous linguistic degree. But profanity from Lenny Bruce can’t always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing ‘isms. Sometimes, the payoff can be disappointing. After a long chapter on curse words — this book deserves an “explicit content” warning — Pinker ends with the banal conclusion that swearing is “connected with negative emotion.” I don’t need conceptual semantics to tell me that.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Lehrer is editor at large for See magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and more recently, How We Decide. He is a graduate of Columbia University, a Rhodes Scholar, and author of several articles for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

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If you wish to read the entire review, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR2007122100139.html.