When she suddenly broke off their engagement, and then went and married her daughter’s father… Of course, we also understand what pushed her to this. Luke did. He was pushing her away, making her second place, being insensitive to her needs. I miss the old Luke, who was always there for Lorelai, no matter what. He’s always loved her, even before they were dating. And whatever problems they face, we know they’ll never be truly happy unless they find happiness together.

This might be the last season of Gilmore Girls. And what do fans like this do when their favorite show is about to be canceled? Answer: Everything they possibly can to keep it going. They don’t want GG to end at the current, seventh season. So there’s the “Great8Mandate” write-in campaign. And there are numerous online polls, which GG fans vote on in droves. There are petitions. And then there are blogs and forums, and almost every TV blog or forum out there has at least one comment on it begging for a Gilmore Girls season 8.

As I write this, there are only 4 episodes left for Luke and Lorelai to reconcile. And fans are getting very nervous. They want Luke and Lorelai to reunite. But how can they possibly do so in only a month? After all the bridges they’ve both burned? How do you get by all the anger and hurt, and find love and contentment, that fast? It just doesn’t happen. I tried to soothe their fears, reassuring them that Luke and Lorelai can indeed get back together, even get married, this season. I even described exactly what kind of thing would have to happen to make it work, and why. The only question is whether the writers go ahead and do it.

But fans are not writers. Our hero has gotten himself into a fix. And the fans think that he can’t get out, because they can’t see a way out. Of course, that’s what makes for great drama. Because when he does get out of the fix, free to save the world, we’re overjoyed. Fans don’t understand storytelling. And that’s why I pray the writers of Gilmore Girls ignore fans when it comes to the story. I pray they don’t let the fans tell them how to write a good story.

Because the fans keep saying we need to give Luke and Lorelai time to get back together. Amy Amatangelo, the TV Gal, reflects the opinion of many Gilmore Girls fans:

I am on “The Great8Mandate” bandwagon… We deserve a proper farewell. Or as TV Gal reader Rebecca put it an “unrushed conclusion.”

An “unrushed conclusion”? Okay, here’s the problem. An “unrushed” conclusion is a boring one. Like dialogue, pacing is not about what’s realistic. It’s about what’s plausible. And when fans say “unrushed,” they mean they don’t understand how Luke and Lorelai can possibly get by the China wall that currently separates them. In other words, if the fans can’t see how the conflict will be resolved. But if they could see how the conflict will be resolved then the suspense goes right out of the story. I can’t think of one top story that has an unrushed conclusion. They always have dramatic, mind-bending, tear-jerking conclusions that leave you saying, “Wow!” Unrushed conclusions suck.

Rushing the ending can make it all the more powerful. If it seems like Luke and Lorelai just can’t reconcile, doesn’t that make it all the more powerful when they do? And this is true no matter how unrealistic it is. It doesn’t matter whether the ending is believable, only whether it’s plausible. And whether or not it’s plausible depends more on the characters themselves than on real life. Once you have strongly sympathetic characters, as Gilmore Girls does, you can do almost anything you want in the story. And if the characters go along for the ride, the audience will, too.

When Steven Spielberg directed Jaws, the story goes, when he got to the end of the movie, where the shark dies– Peter Benchley had written the original novel and the screenplay. And Spielberg’s ending was different than the original ending. Benchley disagreed with Spielberg’s ending, because he said it was unbelievable. He said no one would believe that an air tank would explode like that or that it would explode a shark like that. Because none of that could possibly happen in real life. And as the Mythbusters proved, Benchley was right. The ending to Jaws could never happen in real life.

But Steven Spielberg said, he’s had the audience on the edge of their seats for 2 hours, and he’s going to give them a satisfying ending. He said the story was going to go out with a bang. And you know what? Spielberg was right. In theaters, when the ending came, audiences cheered. They not only believed the impossible; they exulted in it!

It has nothing to do with what would happen in real life. It has to do with the drama. It has to do with identifying with a hero who, being in an impossible situation, somehow overcomes, triumphant. It’s the plausible impossible. And that’s what I want to see of Luke and Lorelai.

What do you think? Is it better for a story to have a rushed ending? Are there case in which a story should have an unrushed ending?

-TimK

-TimK

In a story, starting a fight is an easy way to make the mood tense. But conflict can do more than just make a story feel tense, suspenseful. Conflict engages the audience. It makes us sympathize with the characters and root for them. And it heightens other emotions in the story.

Conflict draws us in

Frequently, when the conflict makes the story tense, it’s actually heightening some other tension in the story. For example, C.J. West’s Sin and Vengeance is a true, page-turning suspense novel. The suspense comes not just from the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist, but also what we expect the antagonist to be capable of. He terrifies us.

This happens because conflict draws us in: Conflict enables us to feel sympathy for the underdog. In a Romance, the romantic parts are about love unrequited or passion unfulfilled.

Conflict enables sympathy

Tom Sawyer is a sympathetic character. Even though he’s always doing naughty things, getting into trouble, we don’t like to see him punished. And then when he develops a crush on Becky Thatcher, our sympathy increases. And when he witnesses a murder and Injun Joe is out to get him, our sympathy increases again. Our sympathy lets us feel for him, even feel the same way he does.

I also talked about conflict in the season-six finale of Gilmore Girls in another post. The reason for the strong reaction fans have to the finale is the sympathy they have for the characters. And this sympathy would not happen were it not for the conflict. The sympathy is so strong, in fact, that fans get upset because the conflict. (Is it possible to make a story too immersive?)

Romance unfulfilled

This Gilmore Girls episode also includes romantic elements that make us want to cry. This happens when romance is unfulfilled.

Casablanca is another example of a movie that makes some people cry. It’s because Rick is in love with Ilsa, but their love can’t be, then will be, then will never be.

Casablanca actually didn’t make me cry, though The Notebook did, as I mentioned in the last spotlight. Movie critics have described The Notebook as being a sappy romance story. But such a story works, for a simple reason, romantic tension. We have conflict; it draws us in, makes us feel what the characters are feeling.

How to do it

If you want to use conflict to create or enhance the feeling a story brings:

1. Decide which feeling the story should portray.
2. Choose a conflict that would make the protagonist feel that way.
3. Make the protagonist face that conflict.

An example

Last September, I wrote a short story called “Pine.” It was actually a project I did for a writing prompt. I had to write something inspired by a certain photo of a house. But I knew I didn’t want to write about just a house. Because no matter how much I dressed it up, that would be boring. I knew I needed a conflict. So I chose a romance story revolving around a first love.

Here’s the beginning of the story:

Each morning Jace walked by her house on his way to school. Each afternoon he passed it on his way home. Sometimes, he would also pass at other times. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of the bright-faced girl with wavy blonde locks. She sat under the two conifers that towered overhead. But as far as he knew, she never noticed him.

The house itself, a grey Stick Victorian with brown trim, spoke of a happy family. Its expansive porch took a jaunt through the sweet-scented yellows and reds of the flower garden. Little gabled alcoves jutted into the world, embraced by the overall form of the structure, as if its gables were parents looking after their offspring. A squat wall of white stone stood before this all, making up in intensity what it lacked in stature, a formidable protector to all within.

But the trees were even more special, for under these Jennifer would read. Or sometimes she would just be sitting quietly or humming softly a tune Jace didn’t recognize. Jace paid her no heed, or else she might see his admiration. But out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her shapely form, and he fought to keep breathing. And in his imagination, he felt the softness of her pink cashmere sweater in his delicate hands. He felt her fingers running through his thick, dark hair. Her chocolate eyes and his ordinary brown ones got lost in each other. Perhaps his finger stroked the line of her eyebrow, following her face around softly-curved cheek and jaw, finally resting under her chin.

But Jace said nothing, made no motion out of the ordinary. He merely continued walking, as nonchalantly as possible for a big-footed, lanky teen in a grey tee and worn khakis.

You can read the whole story at my LiveJournal.

-TimK

Pamela Slim at Escape from Cubicle Nation understands what it’s like to have too much to do and too little time.

I still have not completed my ezine for April. And today is … May 1! Egads! I have babysitting 2 1/2 days a week, then the rest of my work gets done in the evenings… articles… “life management” stuff… paying bills… paperwork… my gigantic “Successful Manager’s Handbook”…

By the way, Escape from Cubicle Nation is a must-read blog. Pam Slim’s articles are interesting and fun to read.

-TimK

Review of The Notebook, directed by Nick Cassavetes, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks.

An elderly woman (Gena Rowlands) stands, looking out of the nursing home window. An elderly man (James Garner) visits her. She doesn’t know him, but he clearly considers her an old friend. He reads to her a story from a small notebook, a story about young Noah (Ryan Gosling) and his one true love Allie (Rachel McAdams). They fell madly in love one summer. But she comes from a rich family, and her mother doesn’t want her marrying below her class. Allie gets not even one of Noah’s letters. She falls in love with and gets engaged to a handsome busnessman, with her parents’ full support.

Meanwhile, with a big hole in his heart, Noah buys and rebuilds a 200-year-old house, his dream house. It had been his dream even before it was his and Allie’s dream. And now this dream is all he has of her.

Recounting this plot makes me feel a little like crying. Of course, Noah and Allie encounter each other again. And when they do, it is a tense moment indeed. Their longings and struggles are the best and worst of first love.

The man and woman in the nursing home are also not just there as an excuse to tell the story of Noah and Allie. They have their own story as well. Who are they? Why doesn’t she know him? Why does he sit and read to her? This is just for starters. That story made me cry, too, by the way. The Notebook is a story within a story, a two-barreled romance.

The film is rated PG-13 for sex. It’s also a little on the long side, a little over 2 hours. And at times, the story dragged. All outstanding conflicts seemed to be resolved. I felt like the story should be over. I wondered why I was still watching, why I cared about what was happening on the screen.

All said, I enjoyed The Notebook and fully recommend it as a heart-stabbing, romantic tear-jerker.

The Notebook
directed by Nick Cassavetes
Rated PG-13 for some sexuality
US movie release: June 25, 2004
US DVD release: February 8, 2005
Run time: 124 minutes

Note also the novel by Nicholas Sparks.

P.S. Here’s the Notebook trailer:

]]> http://bethestory.com/2006/04/27/spotlight-the-notebook-the-movie/feed http://bethestory.com/2006/04/24/setting-the-mood-with-milieu http://bethestory.com/2006/04/24/setting-the-mood-with-milieu#comments Mon, 24 Apr 2006 04:01:19 +0000 J. Timothy King http://bethestory.com/?p=121

This is the second part of a series, after Setting the Mood With Expectations.

Another mood-generating device authors use is milieu.

What is milieu

What I mean by millieu is the same thing Orson Scott Card means, when he talks about the 4 different types of stories. Briefly, Orson Scott Card talks about the millieu story, idea story, character story, and event story, depending on what story element is at the root of the story idea.

The milieu is the world surrounding the characters, not only the setting but also culture and society, governement and religion, family and traditions, everything.

Moody milieus

I’m not necessarily talking about using a milieu story to generate a mood. But I am saying that some milieus have their own mood associated with them. For example, cultural milieus frequently generate a strong feeling. The movie Moonstruck has a strong feeling about it, because it is about an Italian family in New York City. Similarly, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is set in Denmark, and Smilla grew up in Greenland. Someone recently told me the novel was the coldest story he’d ever read.

Your mileage may vary. Each of us is likely to react slightly differently to a given milieu, depending on our own histories and taste. Still, milieu is an important element. That’s why authors instinctively feel the need to build layers of complexity into their fictional universes.

In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, on the island of Santorini, in Greece, especially in the novel, Lena always the artist is overwhelmed by the visuals of the island, the colors. (You get a sense of this in the film as well.) How the sympathetic characters react to the milieu will affect how the audience reacts.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the characters live on the moon, and the society there is normal for them. When they visit Earth, you get a feeling of oppression, even though their Earth is very similar to ours. Humans tend toward neatly whitewashed evil. It’s all a matter of perspective. We get to see our society through their eyes.

By the way, calling on sympathy to manipulate the audience’s feelings is something well known to politicians.

How to do it

You can use the following steps to write mood into a story:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what elements of the milieu would invoke these feelings in the audience.
3. Write these elements into the story.

Sometimes, you don’t need to identify a specific feeling. Sometimes, you only care that it’s a strong feeling. Cultural milieus are great for this.

If you do have a specific feeling you want to encourage, consider using character sympathy to drive audience reaction:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what elements of the milieu would invoke these feelings in the character.
3. Write these elements into the story.

An example

Here’s a short piece that I intended to feel reminiscent. (By the way, this is based on my own memories of Longwood Gardens, in case you’ve been there yourself.)

A little dark-haired girl, perhaps 6 years old, ran by and almost knocked Jenna over. And Jenna smiled. A man called out after, but the girl wasn’t listening.

“Sorry,” he said to Jenna.

“That’s okay.” She smiled even more broadly. “I was a little dark-haired girl once, too.”

When she was little, Jenna’s family every summer visited this same tourist trap. But to her it was not just a tourist trap. It was a memory. As a girl, she romped down the same red-brick path. She smelled the same flowers, all red and purple and gold. The same hot sun radiated on her long, black hair. The same sweat beaded on her face, waiting for a gentle scented garden breeze to cool it. In the distance, Jenna could just make out the chimes tower signalling the hour.

She stopped a moment, letting the sun beat down on her. Then she sighed and continued on.

How do you write moody stories? How do you imbue your prose with overwhelming emotion? It’s all about manipulating the feelings of the audience. Over the next couple of weeks, I want to look at different ways to set the mood. This week, using expectations to set the mood.

Breeding fear

What I mean by expectations is that which the audience thinks could happen. It’s not necessarily what will happen, but it is what is being hinted at.

For example, in C.J. West’s thriller Sin and Vengeance, he establishes early on what one of the characters, Randy, is capable of. I was on the edge of my seat in terror of his shenanigans. And as the character further develops, I grew to fear him increasingly more. I felt helpless in the face of this character, and terrified for the protagonist, the sympathetic character, who must go up against him. This sets the tone of the whole novel.

Sin and Vengeance manipulates our emotions in order to give us a memory of a feeling. This, I think, is what “mood” really is, a memory of a feeling.

So one way to generate mood is to set expectations about what’s going to happen, or at least what could happen.

H.P. Lovecraft also did this well in his story “The Shunned House”. He builds up an image of this house as having something terrible: Anyone who lives there meets an untimely death. Lovecraft was a master of building up an horrific element and wrapping it up in the plight of the characters. In this story, we just know our characters are destined for something terrible, and we fear for them and with them.

The X-Files also did this well. We loved Mark Snow’s moody soundtrack. But music is an abstract art form. Alone it can’t set the mood. It can only enhance the mood. What set the mood was the fact that any moment, Mulder and Scully might encounter a horrifying and deadly foe. This especially bugged me when they split up to work on two different branches of a case. Even though being together never decreased the danger, I felt better not having to go into a terrifying situation alone.

Other emotions

We can also apply the same technique to other feelings. If we had a sympathetic character who was trying to accomplish something, for example, as he overcame a tiny obstacle the audience would share his feelings of accomplishment and hope.

Consider Laura Whitcomb’s excellent novel A Certain Slant of Light (about which I cannot rave enthusiastically enough). The main character is dead, a ghost, and as a ghost she can hear and see what happens in the world, but she can’t feel objects or smell or taste, and no one else can hear or see her. Then someone does see her and hear her, because he is another ghost living inside a human body. And so we have hope that our protagonist can find a fuller existence. She falls in love with this other person, and when she then finds a human body to inhabit, we experience with her all the great feelings of love and passion and fulfillment. And we also fear the day they will have to leave these bodies, even though she avoids thinking about that eventuality. And we hope they can find some existence together, either as humans or in some other afterlife. (If you don’t understand, read the novel; then you will.)

How to do it

You can use the following three steps to write mood into a story:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what expectations in a sympathetic character’s story would evoke these feelings in the character.
3. Give the character reason to expect these things.

Alternatively, you can make the audience feel for the character, because they know something the character does not or has a perspective he doesn’t have:

1. Identify the emotion you want the audience to feel.
2. Ask what future events in a sympathetic character’s story would evoke these feelings in the audience.
3. Give the audience reason to expect these things.

An example

(Note: I know I said in the podcast I’d write a couple stories to demonstrate. As it turned out, just the beginnings seemed to make the point.)

Here’s the beginning to a story that illustrates using the character’s reaction to set the mood. The feeling I want to evoke is fear. Establish a character who is afraid of something. Then make him face the thing he fears. Note that he can face it with bravery— Bravery is being afraid and doing it anyway. Still, the audience will experience the same tension they know is under the character’s tough exterior.

Logic did not matter. Ever since he was a young boy, ever since his black cat playfully reached out an grabbed him, as cats do, John had been terrified of dark passages and black cats. This was a deep-seated phobia.

Sometimes, people asked him why he became a zookeeper and why he loved the panthers. He wasn’t sure himself. Maybe it was a twist of fate. Or maybe it was his subconscious facing his fears.

Whatever the reason, just after the zoo had closed for the night, the panther had escaped, and now John was in charge…

-TimK

Do you love good writing? Do you want to learn to write? Check out fantasy author Holly Lisle’s website.

For readers

• excerpts from her novels
• complete, on-line editions of Fire In the Mist and Sympathy for the Devil
• short stories, poetry, cover art, and more

Also, in her on-line store are a couple novels you can buy in as an eBook download.

For writers

One of the things I love about Holly Lisle’s advice on writing is her concrete, practical approach. She doesn’t tell you to write a thousand pieces of crap, throw them all against the wall, and see what sticks. She gives real advice you can take to the bank now.

• How to Write FAQ
• Publishing FAQ
• Worldbuilding FAQ
• Scam-Spotting
• Book Is Not Baby
• Who WON’T Make It
• Writers’ Quiz
• How to Quit Your Day Job
• and much, much more

Also, in her on-line store, check out the Character Clinic, which is one of my favorite resources for generating character ideas and making fictional characters seem like real people. She also has other books for writers, all available as eBook downloads.

Holly Lisle founded the Forward Motion writer’s community.

Her blog and podcast

Her blog is called Pocket Full of Words.

She also has a podcast, Holly Lisle On Writing.

Who is Holly Lisle?

As a kid, her dream was to become a famous artist. After high school, she worked at a newspaper selling advertising. Then she went to sign-painting, teaching guitar, and McDonald’s, then penultimately into nursing. Ironically, this all prepared her for a career as a novelist. Read her short biography.

-TimK

This week, something a little different, a dichotomy Kate Wilhelm mentioned in her book Storyteller. It has been mentioned on at least one other podcast. It’s not so much a dichotomy as two story dimensions. As Kate Wilhelm points out, both are important. I want to explore both, and I want to take this lesson and apply it to other story forms.

Two dimensions, both important

Being a storyteller or a wordsmith, these are two different ways to approach writing a story. They’re not mutually exclusive. They’re more like two aspects to any writer’s personality.

I once worked for a larger employer than I do now. One of the things you get with a larger company is that you can sometimes attend on-site seminars for personal and professional development. I was able to take a seminar on communication techniques. Part of this seminar was a “communication styles” evaluation, with which each of us could determine which communication styles he preferred. Some of us were more abstract, some more concrete; some of us were more logical, some more emotional. I fully expected that I would learn which ones I preferred and that then I would be able understand potential conflicts between my style and that of others. That’s not what it was about, though. Because the person who learns to use all four communication styles, each when the situation calls for it, he’ll go further, faster, and be able to accomplish more.

It’s the same way with the storyteller and the wordsmith. Both of these are necessary, and if you can master both, you’ll be able to write much better than if you only master one.

Here’s what Kate Wilhelm said about the wordsmith on one side and the storyteller on the other:

I think of it as surface and depth, with the full understanding that it is much more complex than that. But it was a starting point…

A good story is one in which the surface and depth are fused into one inseparable whole. Beautiful language, unique imagery, subtle symbolism over nothing is not a good story. Neither is a story obscured by bad word choices, awkward phrases that conceal meaning rather than reveal it, inappropriate symbolism or metaphors.

The Wordsmith

“The Dark Country” by Dennis Etchison is a horror-genre short story, something you would not usually associate with literary fiction. But read this, the beginning of the story:

Martin sat by the pool, the wind drying his hair.

A fleshy, airborne spider appeared on the edge of the book which he had been reading there. From this angle it cast a long, pointed needle across the yellowing page. The sun was hot and clean; it went straight for his nose. Overweight American children practiced their volleyball on the bird-of-paradise plants. Weathered rattan furniture gathered dust beyond the peeling diving board.

Traffic passed on the road. Trucks, campers, bikes.

The pool that would not be scraped till summer. The wooden chairs that had been ordered up from the States. Banana leaves. Olive trees. A tennis court that might be done next year. A single color TV antenna above the palms. By the slanted cement patio heliotrope daisies, speckled climbing vines. The morning a net of light on the water. Boats fishing in Todos Santos Bay.

A smell like shrimps Veracruz blowing off the silvered waves.

And a strangely familiar island, like a hazy floating giant, where the humpback whales play. Yesterday in Ensenada, the car horns talking and a crab taco in his hand, he had wanted to buy a pair of huaraches and a Mexican shirt. The best tequila in the world for three-and-a-half a liter. Noche Buena beer, foil labels that always peel before you can read them. Delicados con Filtros cigarettes.

Bottles of agua mineral. Tehuacan con gas. No retornable.

He smiled as he thought of churros at the Blow Hole, the maid who even washed his dishes, the Tivoli Night Club with Reno cocktail napkins, mescal flavored with worm, eggs fresh from the nest, chorizo grease in the pan, bar girls with rhinestone-studded Aztec headbands, psychoactive liqueurs, seagulls like the tops of valentines, grilled corvina with lemon, the endless plumes of surf…

And would you get to the point already?!

The storyteller

On the other side of the spectrum, we have The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the novel by Ann Brashares. It’s a popular, compelling story, but with a mediocre rendering. Here’s a snippet from early in the story:

The first thing was the front door. It was painted the most brilliant, egg-yolk-over-easy shade of yellow. Surrounding it, the house front was painted the brightest possible blue. Who could even imagine such a blue? Lena tipped her face upward to the cloudless afternoon sky. Oh.

In Bethesda, if you painted your house those colors, they’d call you a drug addict. Your neighbors would sue you. They’d arrive with sprayers at nightfall and repaint it beige. Here was color bursting out everywhere against the whitewashed walls.

“Lena, go!” Effie whined, shoving Lena’s suitcase forward with her foot.

“Velcome, girls. Velcome home!” Grandma said, clapping her hands. Their grandfather fit the key into the lock and swung open the sun-colored door.

The combination of jet lag, sun, and these strange old people made Lena feel as if she were tripping—hypothetically, of course. She’d never actually tripped on anything, except maybe a bad shrimp from Peking Garden once.

If Lena was glazed and stupefied, Effie without sleep was just plain cranky. Lena always counted on her younger sister to do the blabbering, but Effie was too cranky even for that. So the drive from the tiny island airport had been mostly quiet. Grandma kept turning around in the front seat of their old Fiat saying, “Look at you girls! Oh, Lena, you are a beauty!”

Lena seriously wished she would stop saying that, because it was irritating, and besides, how was cranky Effie supposed to feel?

We get to know the characters. We see how Lena reacts to the scenery, which is very important once we learn that she’s an artist. We also learn about Lena’s grandmother and her thoughts, which also become important later in the story. For now, it’s enough to know Lena’s thoughts, Lena’s reaction to these things. All these things are setting up a story arc. And even though there’s a fair amount of description, it’s not boring.

However, even though there’s a fair amount of description, look at what we don’t know. We don’t know how the air smells. We don’t know how the sun or air feels. We can’t hear any of the background noises. We know nothing, in fact, except what we can glean from the sense of sight. All the other senses are missing. All of these things Lena could be experiencing, and we could be experiencing them with her and further sympathizing with her, except that they’re missing from the narrative.

The storyteller and the wordsmith, together again

But you don’t have to choose one or the other. One of the best novels I’ve read is A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb, which I spotlighted a couple Thursdays ago.

Here’s how the novel starts:

Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead. I was with my teacher, Mr. Brown. As usual, we were in our classroom, that safe and wooden-walled box—the windows opening onto the grassy field to the west, the fading flag standing in the chalk dust corner, the television mounted above the bulletin board like a sleeping eye, and Mr. Brown’s princely table keeping watch over a regiment of student desks. At that moment I Was scribbling invisible comments in the margins of a paper left in Mr. Brown’s tray, though my words were never read by the students. Sometimes Mr. Brown quoted me, all the same, while writing his own comments. Perhaps I couldn’t tickle the inside of his ear, but I could reach the mysterious curves of his mind.

Although I could not feel paper between my fingers, smell ink, or taste the tip of a pencil, I could see and hear the world with all the clarity of the Living. They, on the other hand, did not see me as a shadow or a floating vapor. To the Quick, I was empty air.

Or so I thought. As an apathetic girl read aloud from Nicholas Nickleby, as Mr. Brown began to daydream about how he had kept his wife awake the night before, as my spectral pen hovered over a misspelled word, I felt someone watching me. Not even my beloved Mr. Brown could see me with his eyes. I had been dead so long, hovering at the side of my hosts, seeing and hearing the world but never being heard by anyone and never, in all these long years, never being seen by human eyes. I held stone still while the room folded in around me like a closing hand. When I looked up, it was not in fear but in wonder. My vision telescoped so that there was only a small hole in the darkness to see through. And that’s where I found it, the face that was turned up to me.

Wow. That gives me a little shiver.

What is story?

Can we do anything with these two components besides writing short stories and novels? Yes. In any media, we can compare the story to the way the story is expressed.

Story is an abstraction. A novel, for example, is only a representation of the story told within. The story isn’t the words of the novel, either. Story is a concept, something represented by the words, behind the words. I like to say, story is where the writer meets his audience. It’s that part that connects with the audience, where the words disappear and all that’s left is immersive communication.

You must pay attention to the story, or you won’t have that channel of communication. By the same token, you must give that story an effective physical medium through which to be expressed, calling on every means at your disposal to accomplish this.

The storyteller and the cinematographer

Filmmakers, for example, tend to focus on the media of film, sometimes neglecting the story, just as writers tend to focus on the words, sometimes forgetting the story.

March of the Penguins tried very hard to bring us into the plight of the emperor penguins, but at the end of the day, it was just a bunch of penguins, and I don’t care about a bunch of penguins? They tried very hard to heighten the tension, to get me involved, by saying, “But this is not the worst they will face,” or words to that effect. Still, it was just a bunch of penguins, and I don’t care about a bunch of penguins. So a few of them died. Aw. Am I supposed to cry?

Now, if they had followed the plight of two particular penguins, Harry and Harriet, as they fall in love, have a baby penguin chick, and overcome the dangers that are claiming the lives of their friends and their friends’ families… That I would have cared about.

If you want both the storyteller and the cinematographer, check out Citizen Kane, The Godfather, or Smilla’s Sense of Snow. For the last, see my spotlight earlier this week. The plot starts to get weird near the end, but Siskel and Ebert gave the film “two thumbs up,” because even though things get preposterous, you don’t care! You’ve already been drawn into the story, into the life of this character, and even a ridiculous plot twist can’t pull you out.

The storyteller and the programmer

I remember an old adventure game called Zero Critical, by Istvan Pely. This game had an incredible story, but the game itself has bugs and weaknesses. The game was overall rated not-great, but I enjoyed it a lot.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have pure gameplay-games like Tetris, without any story. They can be fun, but they don’t inspire me.

Check out Psychonauts (and my review of it) for a game with strong gameplay integrated with a strong story.

The storyteller and the designer

Can we generalize even further? What about to story design aspects in general. The design elements in a story, if they serve the story, you won’t even notice them.

Plot devices, for example, are story design elements. But unless those plot devices are used to tell a story, they’re just plot devices. They can’t work in isolation. Still, if you use creative, original ideas, you’ll end up with a best story you can have.

-TimK

A review of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the movie.

I first encountered this underappreciated sci-fi mystery flick when Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up in 1997. Smilla’s Sense of Snow stars Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne and is based on the novel by Peter Høeg of the same name. And of course, now we can see it on DVD.

Smilla Jaspersen is a resident of Copenhagen, but she grew up in Greenland. She comes home one day to find the little boy from the apartment below hers. He is lying face-down on the sidewalk, having fallen from playing on the roof of the building. The young boy Isaiah was not just her neighbor; he was also her friend, probably her only true friend. And immediately, Smilla knows that something is terribly wrong. You see, Isaiah was scared of heights. She goes to the snow-covered roof to investigate, to see for herself. The police rebuff her, but to Smilla the evidence is clear. Isaiah was not playing on the roof. He was running from something, something so terrible that he ran right off the edge. She can tell from his tracks in the snow.

Near the end of the story, the plot gets a little crazy, and Siskel and Ebert had noted the crazy plot. But all I remembered from their review was snow and intrigue, a romantic image inspired by the cinematography. Directed by Bille August, indeed the film shines as art in its own right, even without a plot. Still, years after having watched the movie, reflecting back, all I remembered of it were the characters. Now, watching it again recently, I realized that it was the crazy plot itself that made these characters real.

Actually, the plot is not all that bad. Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a sci-fi flick wrapped up in an Hitchcockian thriller. The plot is full of twists and turns. And it all makes sense… if you accept the ending. Whether you do or not, however, Smilla accepts that ending, and that’s why, to echo Roger Ebert, “The plot is totally absurd, and I didn’t care that it was!” Actually, Smilla may or may not accept the ending. She may or may not even care. By the time the ending comes, she has invested so much of herself in her quest to find out who killed Isaiah, the screwy plot only serves to highlight her commitment to this passion.

The film makes exceptional use of strong language. Early on, Smilla says, “I’m sorry I’ve given you the impression it’s my mouth that’s rough. I try to be rough all over.” It’s rated R for strong language, some violence, and a sex scene. But none of it is superfluous. It all just serves to heighten the powerful mood.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow is not mainstream, as it sports neither the massive, glitzy, overdone special effects nor the shallowness of the ’90’s sci-fi movie. But watching it was an extremely enjoyable experience for me, one that I have repeated numerous times and will repeat in the future.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Rating: R (Restricted)
Theatrical release: 1997
DVD Release: May 21, 2002
Run Time: 121 minutes

Note also:

• Siskel and Ebert’s 1997 review
• IMDb page

]]> http://bethestory.com/2006/03/30/spotlight-smillas-sense-of-snow-the-movie/feed http://bethestory.com/2006/03/27/anatomy-of-a-story-game-2 http://bethestory.com/2006/03/27/anatomy-of-a-story-game-2#comments Mon, 27 Mar 2006 05:01:42 +0000 J. Timothy King http://bethestory.com/?p=96

This is part 2 of “Anatomy of a Story Game”.

This week, we’ll complete the basic story design and discuss some implementation issues in various media.

A story state-diagram

A state diagram is something used in software engineering to design a state machine. We’re going to use one to design an interactive story. That’s a lot of 25-cent verbiage, but the concept is simple. We’re simply going to draw out the possible plots of our story.

Story state-diagram (PDF file)

In part 1, I wrote out a flash-fiction story. As a very short story, it has only a few opportunities for interactivity, but it does have a few. I started by writing the story in sections, similarly to the way you might write summaries of the sections of a novel on index cards so that you can arrange them visually and see the story flow, so that you can plan your novel.

In this case, we’re doing something similar, based on the same idea, but with a slightly different use of the idea. I’ve written out each of the player-events in the story (or summaries of them) and arranged them into a state diagram.

This state diagram represents an abstract view of the story. It does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with entities in the virtual world or narrative. Events, for example, include only things that the player does that actually move the story forward. Other things the player may do in a game, such as traveling back and forth through the game’s virtual world, do not necessarily generate story events and may not appear on this diagram. This state diagram is only an organizational tool to help us visualize the story.

States

In the diagram, each rounded rectangle is a state. A state is as if you were watching the story on a video tape and you hit the pause button. That frozen point in the plot is the state described inside each rounded rectangle. This is the point at which the player must decide what to do next, in order to progress the plot.

In our story, since it’s being written as a hypertext “choose your own adventure” type of story, the states themselves have no physical form. They simply represent the point to which you’ve read, where you’ve put the bookmark before deciding what to do next.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, the player navigates through a virtual world, interacting with that world, manipulating objects in that world. In this kind of game, a story state may represent the state of various objects or characters in the world. For example, in a Myst-style puzzle-solving game, you might have a locked door. Before you discover the lock combination, the door is closed. That’s one state: “closed door.” After you unlock the door and open it, you’ve moved the story to a new state: “open door.”

Events

Each arrow in the diagram is a player event, something the player can do to push the plot along. Using the video-tape metaphor, this is the time during which we’re actually playing the tape, inbetween pauses, inbetween states. Events move the story from one state to the next.

In a hypertext interactive story, events correspond to passages that the user can read. These are the sections of narrative that I previously wrote. And you can see that the arrows are labelled with the headings of the narrative passages from part 1.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, events usually correspond to cut-scenes. In the locked-door example above, when we unlock the door, we might watch a cut-scene showing the door open, after which time whenever we visit the room with the door, it will remain open.

Choices

During the plot, our character Martin (and thus the player) may face choices. Depending on which path he chooses, the plot will take a different path.

For example, after he asks Jane about the missing book, and Jane feels as though he’s accusing her, he can choose to state his accusation straight-out, or he can choose to backpedal. This story is so simple, each choice represents only a small diversion. But you could make the difference much more involved.

Concurrent states

Immediately after the introduction, denoted by the arrow coming from the “start” of the diagram, the story splits into two story threads. In one thread, Martin questions the guests from his dinner party in order to clue in on who might have misplaced or stolen his book. In the other thread, he searches his apartment, in case someone just misplaced the book, maybe put it on the wrong shelf or something.

These two threads happen independently, as shown in the diagram. At any time, both plot threads will be in force, and one state from each will be active. These are called concurrent states.

Again, this is a very simply story, with only two major sections, each of which has only two concurrent states. Typically, an adventure game will have at least three sections, each with at least three concurrent states, plus a “boss” sequence at the end (which this story also has).

Choices based on state

In the second part of the story, after Martin tries to trap Jane, the story goes one of two ways, depending on whether Martin had previously found the book. Whether Martin had found the book is part of the other story thread. So one concurrent state can effect choices made from other states.

This happens more than is actually shown on the diagram. I’ve simplified the diagram to make it more manageable. For example, in the first part of the story, when Martin talks to Jane, Pat, and Dory, he might have slightly different conversations depending on whether he had searched his apartment first and failed to find the book. This will affect the narrative, but not where the arrows point. If we were to draw this on the state diagram, it would be represented by a pair of arrows, each going between the same two states, but each with a different condition on it.

If you write such a story as a book or a simple web page, the number of pages you need to write quickly balloons, because each page could have multiple versions, depending on how many concurrent states you need to take into account. (The number of possible variations is 2^n-t, where n is the number of rounded rectangles in the other story threads and t is the number of other story threads. So if you had three threads total, each with three states, each thread has 2 “other threads,” which each have 3 states, and the number of variations is 2^6-2=16 possible variations.)

Fortunately, if you can write any software at all, you can get the computer to handle the variations by generating them on-the-fly. This is what I will do with this story. I’m still finishing up the implementation, but I’ll post it later this week.

“Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead.”

If I tried really hard, I might be able to find something wrong with this story. But why would I want to work that hard? After just finishing A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb, already I want to start over again from the beginning. So seldom do I run across a story this well put together, I can’t help but gush a little. I even emailed Laura Whitcomb to tell her how much I enjoyed it.

What the story is about

Helen has been haunting the living for a hundred thirty years now. She is gentle, caring, not malevolent, simply lost. And lonely. She takes what little companionship she can from her hosts, the people she has haunted. But she still can’t touch them or talk to them. To them, she’s not even as solid as the air.

Then she meets James, another ghost left to haunt the Earth. James is in the body of teenage boy named Billy Blake. Billy’s soul had left his body. Something drove it out. Not just “something.” It’s clear what events in Billy’s life caused this.

Helen and James fall in love, but she still can’t touch him, feel him. Until they find a girl named Jenny, whose soul has also left her body. Now they must wrestle with their new lives, their feelings, and their old lives too. And what will they do when it comes time to leave these bodies?

Sympathetic characters, powerful story

At every point during the story, I sympathized with Helen and felt I was part of her world. Laura Whitcomb clearly knows how to make her characters real. And where other writers might be tempted to pull them out of character in order to push the plot forward, she makes her characters want to do what they do, and the plot comes along with them.

For example, when James tells Helen they must eventually leave the bodies they inhabit, I immediately thought, Ah, but how are you going pull that off? You can’t force Helen to leave Jenny’s body, because we sympathize with Helen, and we would feel cheated if she were merely forced against her will to give up what she loves. But Laura handles this situation like a master. First she takes away the reason Helen is in Jenny’s body, then she gives Helen a noble reason to want Jenny to take back her own body. The way this panned out made perfect sense, but I never saw it coming.

I’ve read novels in which the author builds up the conflict, builds the tension, puts the characters in impossible situations, and then doesn’t know how to get them out. So he invokes deus ex machina (or some variation), and I end up feeling cheated. But as I was reading A Certain Slant of Light, I knew my effort was to be well rewarded. And I am looking forward to Laura Whitcomb’s second novel, which she is currently writing.

Yes, A Certain Slant of Light is Laura Whitcomb’s first novel. I have a prediction: If she gets past novel number 3, she’ll be famous.

Who should not read this book

This is a medium-length novel, advertised as for teenagers. Adults have disagreed about whether it is actually suitable for teenagers, although what they mean is “suitable for their teenagers.” Use parental discretion, and be prepared to discuss.

In any case, if you can’t stand dark fiction, if you get bent out of shape by the portrayal of sex, or by ghosts or spirit possession, or if you’d get too upset that one of the antagonists is a fundamentalist Christian hypocrite— If any of these things would bug you so much that you wouldn’t be able to put them in the context of the story, you probably won’t enjoy this book no matter how good the story is.

Laura clearly called on the fundamentalist stereotype as a basis for Jenny’s family. Writers call on stereotypes all the time to give a broad basis to characters and settings. But remember that Laura is not describing fundamentalists. She’s describing Jenny. Actually, she’s describing the milieu that Helen enters when she takes Jenny’s body. I myself had to remind myself of that, since the portrayal was indeed negative. Even fundamentalists love their kids. And like other parents, they tend not to restrict and discipline their children to the point of abuse, to the point of squeezing the soul from the body. This is an exceptional case. But it fits the story.

This is true of all of these plot devices. They are never there to try to spice up the work. This story does not need to be spiced up. It pulls along whatever elements are necessary to make it work.

Conclusion

In summary, a truly great read. I have no suggestions for improvement. I suck.

A Certain Slant of Light
by Laura Whitcomb
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Graphia (September 21, 2005)
ISBN: 061858532X

]]> http://bethestory.com/2006/03/23/spotlight-a-certain-slant-of-light/feed http://bethestory.com/2006/03/16/spotlight-walk-two-moons http://bethestory.com/2006/03/16/spotlight-walk-two-moons#comments Thu, 16 Mar 2006 05:01:11 +0000 J. Timothy King http://bethestory.com/?p=90

A review of Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.

When I first read the first chapter of Walk Two Moons, the Newbery Medal award-winning juvenile novel by Sharon Creech, I didn’t quite realize what I was getting into. You can read it yourself, preview the first chapter at Amazon.com. Now after having read the whole book, reading these first few pages makes me tear up a little.

This is the second book by Sharon Creech that I’ve read recently. The first was Heartbeat, a much shorter story told in a unique style. Walk Two Moons is a more traditional, 280-page novel, but no less worthy of note.

It’s the story of Sal, a 13-year-old girl traveling with her grandparents to Lewiston, Idaho to see her mother. On the way, she tells them of all that happened after she and her father moved to Euclid, Ohio. They moved when they found out her mother was not coming home again. In Euclid, she met a girl named Pheobe, but what she didn’t realize at the time was that Pheobe’s story was hers, too.

Behind these interwoven tales are all the feelings of a young teenage girl when her mother goes away and may not come back, or will not come back.

The story is targeted at girls aged 9-12, but it may also be appropriate for young teens. I enjoyed it, too, but I have broad tastes, except when it comes to the quality of the story. And good, solid storytelling characterize this novel through its multiple, interwoven subplots and strong character development.

There’s Pheobe, Sal’s paranoid friend, whose own mother has a secret. There’s the strange red-headed woman, Margaret Cadaver, whom Sal’s father has oddly befriended. And there’s the blind Mrs. Partridge, Margaret’s elderly mother, who can tell who you are and how old you are just by touching your face. And we also learn about Sal’s close relationship with her mother and why it’s so difficult to accept that her mother isn’t coming home again, and why it’s impossible for her to talk to anyone about it.

Without revealing how the story turns out, let me just say that it left me with a feeling of melancholy satisfaction.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: HarperTrophy; Reprint edition (September 30, 1996)
ISBN: 0064405176

What are story games, and how do they differ from other games? What about adventure games and interactive fiction? What are some of the issues that arise when writing story games?

This is the first part of two episodes that explain story games and how to write them.

What is a story game?

A story game is a game in which the stoy drives the game, rather than the gameplay driving the game. In general, if you can take the story out of the game without losing the game, it’s not a story game. But if the story is so tightly integrated into the game that you’d have to change the shape of the gameplay in order to take the story out, that’s a story game.

To design a story game, tell a story, but let the player cause story events. Make the story interactive. Traditionally, this is done with an external conflict. The things that the character needs to do to resolve the external conflict, turn these into puzzles for the player to solve. This is why adventure games are commonly detective or science-fiction stories.

Adventure games usually don’t have strong character-based stories, though there’s no conceptual reason why they can’t. In future episodes, I’d like to explore variations that make for strong character-based story games.

What’s the difference between an adventure game and a story game? Some adventure gamers will tell you that the puzzles are central to an adventure game. Others will tell you the story is central. Many games appeal to both of these perspectives by offering strong puzzle-based gameplay with a tightly integrated, driving story. But by “story game,” I mean to refer to any story-driven game, whether it has puzzle elements or not, and whether or not it has other gameplay elements.

At pinheadgames.com, you can play good, short, graphical story-based Flash adventure games, on-line for free. In particular, check out The Goat in the Grey Fedora, a humorous detective story in a film-noir style.

Plot branches

… or, a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You have to give the player choices as to which plot-branch to take the story down. Otherwise, he feels led around by the nose, and this can destroy the illusion of reality. However, you really only have to make the player believe he’s choosing which way the story goes. He may just be choosing the order in which events are told, but not how they come together. Sanitarium did this pretty well.

These plot-branches can multiply exponentially, like rabbits. This can make the stories very complex. But we can manage this complexity by writing the story as multiple story threads. Each story thread proceeds independently as events affect it. However, story threads can spawn, join, and feed into other story threads. So they are independent, but related.

Think of how you might plot a novel. One common method is to write a summary of each part of each subplot on an index card, then lay out the index cards in story threads, so you can see how they go together. This is the same thing we do when designing a story game, except that we also take into account alternate storylines, where the player chooses one path or another, but not both.

Some story games have multiple alternative endings. I prefer a story with one good ending, rather than a story with multiple not-so-good endings. I first noticed this playing The Pandora Directive, which has a number of endings, depending on what you make the hero do and say. Whenever I played it, I’d Google for a walkthrough, a cheat, that would tell me at the critical stages exactly what I should do to get the ending I wanted. I did not consider this cheating, since I was not playing for the gameplay, but rather for the story.

The player is your co-author

A story games greatest strength is also its greatest liability. The player is taking part, indirectly, in the writing process.

As the author of the game, you must anticipate what the player will be thinking and what he will want to do, and you have to give him the ability to do it, or at least to try them, within the rules of the game. Otherwise, the player will feel like the environment is unrealistic, and the game will interfere with his suspension of disbelief.

Also, the player will tend to make mistakes beginning writers make. He’ll want all protagonists to be copies of himself. And he’ll go out of his way not to hurt the protagonist. Of course, writers know that you have to put your characters through hell, no matter how much you love them, in order for them to triumph over it. But the player isn’t going to want to do this, unless you give him a compelling reason or force hell on the character.

A sample story game

This is the beginning of a design to a sample story game, a mystery. I’m starting with rough story snippets, each of which corresponds to one of the index cards you might use to plot a novel. This doesn’t represent the whole story, and they aren’t all arranged in order. Also, some of these need to be tweaked, depending on which alternative the player chose earlier in the story.

Next week, I’ll enhance the design. I also hope to post a JavaScript or HTML version of the game, like an electronic “choose your own adventure” novel, just to demonstrate how this can work.

Part 2

Here is Part 2.

A review of Because of Winn-Dixie, the film directed by Wayne Wang, based on the novel by Kate DiCamillo.

This is a touching portrait of a little girl’s heart. It’s a film I rented and watched, and then felt I had to watch again. And then I felt like I needed my own copy of the DVD, and like I needed to get a copy of the novel, too.

In Because of Winn-Dixie, young AnnaSophia Robb gives a stellar performance as Opal, a 10-year-old girl, daughter of the local preacher, who just moved to a new town, because preachers move. More so even than most kids in a brand new place, Opal is lonely. Not only is she new, but she’s also ostracized because she’s the preacher’s kid.

This is the case until she meets a stray dog that somehow got into the local Winn-Dixie supermarket. In a fit of heroism, she rescues this dog from the pound by claiming he’s her dog. She names him Winn-Dixie, after the supermarket, and he becomes her only and best friend, even though there’s no way she could possibly keep him. But she convinces her father to let her keep the dog until they can find a new home for him.

But that’s not going to happen, partially because of Opal. In the meantime, we learn that Winn-Dixie has an uncanny knack for making friends. A touching transformation occurs in Opal and in everyone she touches, all because of Winn-Dixie.

Released in 2005, Because of Winn-Dixie is apparently intended for older children, but I consider it suitable for all ages, from the very young to the very old. It’s rated PG for thematic elements and brief mild language, but I detected nothing objectionable, and I had no qualms about letting my 7-year-old daughter watch the film.

Being a character-driven story, the quality of the characters are very important, and Because of Winn-Dixie does a fine job. The story features a cast of charming characters in touching and sometimes all-too-realistic conflicts. The character changes that occurred were all convincing, and there were no magical character transformations just to push the plot forward. Bravo!

There was only one weak point: the character of the local policeman. His character was distorted, apparently for cheap comedic effect, like Barney Fife but on heroin. Since this aspect of the character added nothing to the story, and since it contradicted his role as a lawman, it came off as mixing the ridiculous with the sublime.

That last phrase “mixing the ridiculous with the sublime” I got from my father, who was himself a preacher when I was 10. I may have identified more strongly with Opal because of my own experiences as a P.K., as this movie presents an incredibly realistic perspective on thorny issues that preachers and their families face, that we as parishoners don’t usually even realize exist.

Because of Winn-Dixie is available at Amazon.com.

]]> http://bethestory.com/2006/03/09/spotlight-because-of-winn-dixie/feed http://bethestory.com/2006/03/06/how-to-spin-a-yarn http://bethestory.com/2006/03/06/how-to-spin-a-yarn#comments Mon, 06 Mar 2006 05:01:14 +0000 J. Timothy King http://bethestory.com/?p=78

Conflict is what drives the story arc. It’s what keeps the audience on the edge of its seat. And it’s a fundamental aspect of story structure. If you want to see how a story arc works, just look at just about any novel or movie or story game. Let’s look at Disney’s Snow White.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Snow White’s evil stepmother the Queen is envious of Snow White’s beauty, so she makes Snow White a maid. Snow White meanwhile meets a prince who would carry her away, which makes the evil stepmother even more envious. She orders a huntsman to cut out Snow White’s heart and bring it to her in a gold box. But the huntsman instead warns Snow White to escape into the forest and tries to fool the evil queen by bringing to her in the box the heart of a pig.

Snow White, meanwhile, finds the cottage of the seven dwarves. She cooks and cleans for them in return for lodging. But the evil queen finds out through her magic mirror that Snow White is still alive and still the most beautiful in the land. So she disguises herself as an old crone and creates a magic apple that will put Snow White to sleep forever. Only love’s first kiss will be able to wake up Snow White. She tricks Snow White into eating the apple. The dwarves discover this going on and chase the evil queen off a high precipice, from which she falls to her death.

But it’s too late. Snow White has already taken a bite of the apple and is dead. So the dwarves put her in a gold coffin with a glass cover. The prince happens along, discovers Snow White, kisses her, and she wakes up. Then he puts her on his horse and they ride off and live happily ever after.

The arc

A charming fairy tale, yes, but it follows a classic story arc. Here’s how the story arc works. Start with a conflict. In trying to resolve the conflict, things get worse for the protagonist. He tries once, twice, and then finally on the third try the conflict is resolved. And then there’s an epilogue that shows the new status quo after the conflict is resolved.

• The conflict is that Snow White is in danger and wants to find her prince.
• First attempt to solve the conflict: She meets her prince. This just makes the queen more angry. As a result, the queen tries to have her killed.
• Second attempt: Snow White runs away to the dwarves and the huntsman tries to fool the queen into thinking Snow White is dead. As a result, the queen sets out on a plan to kill Snow White personally. And she succeeds, at the cost of her death, yes, but that’s of no help to Snow White.
• Third attempt: The prince kisses Snow White, which wakes her up and resolves the conflict.
• Epilogue: They lived happily ever after.

Doing it ourselves

Our character gets laid off from his job, and now he’s out of work and needs to support his family. (That’s the conflict.) He has some unemployment pay and some severance. He tries for several months to get a job. (The first attempt.) But that doesn’t work, as he can’t find a job, and now they need to cut back, to economize. His friends at his church find out about his economic situation and invoke the church’s benevolence fund. (The second attempt.) This keeps them in food and shelter, but he still doesn’t have a job, and now he feels guilty for taking charity and inadequate as a provider. One of his friends has been urging him to try a career change, which he has been resisting. But now he does try it. (The third attempt.) It works, and he ends up making enough money to pay back the money he borrowed and contribute money to the church benevolence fund and the other communities that helped him through. And maybe he’s also has gained a new perspective on charity. (The epilogue.)

Variations

I like an abbreviated epilogue, rather than an epilogue full of inane banter. Just tell me what things are like after the conflict is resolved, and end the story.

The plot points are areas of great intensity in the story. Inbetween, there can be periods of relative rest. A story is like a huge boulder. Initially at rest, you have to give it a push to get it going, but then you can coast along, spend a little time looking at the scenery, before the next big push. The times of rest are not excuses to dump expository lumps onto the reader, but they are opportunities to look at relevant asides that would be uninteresting on their own.

In a complex story, there will be layers of story arcs. Consider a serial drama, like Gilmore Girls. The first 3 seasons of Gilmore Girls represent a unified epic story arc. On top of that are stories that stretch across multiple episodes. Then on top of that are individual episodes, each of which is a story of its own. The episode-length stories provide the surface for the multi-episode stories, which are built on the multi-season stories.

To resolve the conflict, the protagonist can conquer it, or the conflict can conquer the protagonist. Be careful with having the conflict win. I personally need the protagonist to win something, even if he also loses something. Maybe he wins a new perspective on life, as he yields to the inevitable. That may be bitter-sweet, but at least it’s not frustrating, as I found, for instance, A Streetcar Named Desire.

A review of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

Andrew Wiggin prefers to be called Ender. He’s a six-year-old genius destined to save the world. He’s also a Third, that is the third child in a world in which it’s against the law to have more than two. The government made an exception with Ender, because he’s going to become the General who will win Earth’s war with an alien race called the Buggers. Why Ender is the one quickly becomes obvious. Yes, he’s only a little boy, but Ender thinks and acts like a great leader. And that’s why he leaves his family for battle school, to become a great military leader. But the challenges he faces in military school are more than even Ender expected, and yet he faces them with both dignity and cunning.

I easily understood why this novel won a Hugo and Nebula Award. Ender’s Game is a masterfully told tale. It’s a strongly plotted story with excellent character development. And really it is more about Ender than about the game, because the game changes Ender. As he progresses, he must wrestle with his own feelings about what he’s done and who he’s become. May God help him if he actually wins the war and kills all the Buggers. What will he do about his conflicted emotions then?

The first few chapters I had some trouble with. I especially had trouble understanding that the Earth is under forced population control. This premise never made sense to me in the context of the story and characters. The story did not need it, either. The idea of global population control was superfluous and confusing, but it only popped up a couple times after the first few chapters. And starting with the fourth chapter, Ender really grew on me. I rooted for him, and I admired him. As he faced each new challenge, I literally could not put the book down. And when I read the last page, I felt like I had really been in that other world and had really known those characters. I believe the word I used was “Wow!”

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages, Tor Science Fiction; Reprint edition (July 15, 1994)
ISBN: 0812550706

]]> http://bethestory.com/2006/03/02/spotlight-enders-game/feed http://bethestory.com/2006/02/27/favorite-classic-story-games http://bethestory.com/2006/02/27/favorite-classic-story-games#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2006 05:01:29 +0000 J. Timothy King http://bethestory.com/?p=76

What do I mean by “story game”? After all, most games now have stories. What differentiates a story game from all the others? By “story game” I mean a game whose story drives the game. In most games, the gameplay is the central element, and the story is there to add flavor. But in story games, the story is the central element, and the gameplay is built around the story. As a result, the story is so tightly integrated with the gameplay that you cannot remove the story and still have a game left.

A brief history of story games

The story in games came from the Adventure genre. The earliest adventure games were text games, what we now call Interactive Fiction. The prototypical adventure was ADVENT, written on a PDP-10 by Will Crowther in the 70’s. Actually the game was called “Adventure,” but the operating system only allowed filenames to have 6 characters, so “ADVENT.” ADVENT is basically a puzzle game in which you must explore a great underground cave in order to find treasure.

This was also the idea behind Zork, the Great Underground Empire, the first adventure game published by Infocom, the pioneer adventure game publisher, now owned by Activision. The object of Zork was to explore the Great Underground Empire, solve the puzzles, and discover the hidden treasures. But Infocom also published many story-rich text adventures as well as did other publishers of that era. These were the progenitors of today’s Interactive Fiction.

Sierra On-Line, cofounded by Roberta Williams, now owned by Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing, was the first to add images to adventure games, creating the first graphical adventure games, starting with Mystery House, a black-and-white mystery adventure. In a Victorian mansion, guests start being murdered, one by one, and you must discover who the murderer is before he gets you. Roberta Williams is best known for the King’s Quest series of games, just one of the “Quest” series, which are soon to be re-released. (Stay tuned to bethestory.com.) Jane Jensen joined Sierra in 1991 and became famous for the Gabriel Knight series there.

Meanwhile, at LucasArts, some of the most beloved story games were being created in the Monkey Island series and the games by Tim Schafer. After Grim Fandango, perhaps the best loved adventure game of all time, Tim and others from the team started their own studio, Double Fine Productions, and developed Psychonauts, a platform-adventure game and another story-gaming hit.

Now, numerous independent developers are trying their hands at story games, usually based on the classic adventure formulae. We’ll have to see what sticks. But I have a feeling that innovation in making the story more immersive is where the most notable progress will show up.

How are story and gameplay integrated?

I’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming episode. Briefly, an interactive story is conceptually just like any other story. That is, there’s conflict, tension, and resolution, arranged in a story arc. As in any complex story, multiple story threads interweave, branching and joining and interrelating. Story events cause the plot to progress along each story thread, just as in any story.

Here’s where the interactivity comes in. The player can cause story events to occur. Traditionally, external conflicts are presented to the player as puzzles to solve. This is why adventure games are traditionally puzzle-based games with external conflicts in the story. It’s a tried and true formula. In a future podcast, I’ll demonstrate the formula and propose some cool variations on it. But for now, let’s look at a couple of my favorite classic story games.

Full Throttle

by Tim Schafer
1994 LucasArts Entertainment Company
Starring the voices of Roy Conrad, Mark Hamill, Kath Soucie

Full Throttle is one of the games Tim Schafer produced at LucasArts. It came between Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. Full Throttle takes place in the future, in the desert, and on motorcycles. Our hero, Ben (Roy Conrad), no-nonsense leader of the Pole Cats, sets out to prevent an ambush of his gang, but instead ends up smeared all over the pavement and framed for murder by the evil Ripberger (Mark Hamill, Star Wars). Along the way, he finds an ally in Maureen (Kath Soucie, Rugrats), a mechanic with an awesome secret.

I like this game even more than I do Grim Fandango, because I identified strongly with Ben, not as much with Manny.

Let’s look briefly at the storyline as it begins. After refusing his gang’s services to escort Malcolm Corley to the Corley Motors shareholder’s meeting, Ben finds himself knocked out cold and stuffed in a dumpster. And he doesn’t have the keys to his bike. The first puzzles involve finding his keys and learning that his gang is in for an ambush. Instead, he finds himself in a huge, uh, accident. Fortunately, a reporter happens along, and takes him to Maureen, or Mo for short, who fixes his bike and him, too.

But she needs a little help getting it finished. The front forks were completely destroyed, so Ben needs to find new ones. Someone stole Mo’s welding torch, so Ben needs to find it. And the bike needs some gasoline before it’ll run. So that’s 3 more goals, and 3 more sets of puzzles. The forks he can get from the junk yard, but first he needs to get in, and he needs to do something about that Pit Bull. The torch is probably the easiest item to find, as it’s pretty obvious who stole it and where it is. The gasoline he might be able to get from the gasoline tower, if he can get by the security system.

The puzzles in Full Throttle are all pretty easy. The game also has some arcade-like sequences, which has ticked off adventure gamers. But the arcade sequences are actually puzzles. For example, on the mine road, you have to fight certain foes. If you approach this as a test of mouse-manipuation acuity, you’ll be frustrated. If you treat it as a puzzle, figuring out which weapon will work against each foe, you’ll find it easy.

The biggest complaint adventure gamers have about Full Throttle is that it’s shorter than most games. You can play through the whole thing in only a few hours. But the story has so engrossed me, I include it among my most favorite story games.

The Pandora Directive

by Chris Jones and Aaron Connor
1996 Access Software Incorporated
Starring Barry Corbin, Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Roberts
Directed by Adrian Carr

The Pandora Directive was the fourth in the Tex Murphy series, and the second 3D, FMV game featuring Tex Murphy. The Pandora Directive takes place in San Fransisco in 2043, a generation after World War III left the world a radioactive wasteland. Private Investigator Tex Murphy (Chris Jones) is hired by one Gordon Fitzpatrick (Kevin McCarthy) to find his lost colleague and friend Thomas Malloy (John Agar). But the search puts him onto the trail of a dangerous secret involving space aliens and government cover-ups. He must fend off the formidable government agent Jackson Cross (Barry Corbin, One Tree Hill) as well as Malloy’s sexy niece Regan Madsen (Tanya Roberts, That 70’s Show), both of whom are after this same secret.

One of the innovative gameplay features of The Pandora Directive is that the story turns out differently depending on how you play the game. This was intended to make the game more replayable, because you can play it through differently every time. But I sought out a suitable walkthrough, so I could always play the variation in which the hero wins and gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after. In other words, I’d rather play the same good story over and over again than to play several different less-good ones.

The Pandora Directive, as some of the other Tex Murphy games, also has an Entertainment Mode (for story lovers) and an alternate Gamer Mode (with more puzzles). And it has an integrated in-game hint system, which can help you the puzzles. The Tex Murphy games do have a some contrived puzzles, put in there just to provide gameplay challenges. But the compelling storyline makes up for this defect.

The Goat in the Grey Fedora
An on-line story game by Mark Darin, starring Jason Ellis, published by Pinhead Games.

Many of us expect little from adventure games. But the story game is not dead, no siree. In fact, it’s coming back to life. Just as bloggers and podcasters and videobloggers are ushering in a new era of media, on-line game publishers are ushering in a new era of story gaming.

If we expect little from adventure games, we expect even less from free games. But we should not settle. And the second episode in the Nick Bounty series by Pinhead Games neither asks us to settle nor disappoints.

Nick Bounty is a detective, not a Private I, though. He’s currently still a Public M class detective, because to become a Private I, you got to get a license, fill out all this paper work, blah blah blah. Still, he’s a murder and missing-persons detective. Have you ever heard of CSI?

Desperate for a job—And what game detective isn’t?—he stumbles into deadly conflict after a voluptuous brunette hires him to find a missing ceramic goat. Her name is Kathrine Ledbetter, but everyone calls her “Kitty.” Her uncle recently died, or was killed, but because she isn’t immediate family, no one will let her near her uncle’s things, including the ceramic goat. It isn’t valuable, but is sentimental, apparently, and Kitty wants Mr. Bounty to track it down for her. Oh well. It’s a job, right? So Nick Bounty agrees to look for the ceramic goat and soon discovers that he’s not the only one looking for it.

This is the story of The Goat in the Grey Fedora, an on-line story game by Mark Darin, starring Jason Ellis, published by Pinhead Games. The story is a typical plot-based detective story, told in a humorous film-noir style. The gameplay is classic puzzle-based adventure play, with an interface similar to that of Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island. Some of the puzzles have a quirky sense of logic, but once I got used to the quirky sense of humour, I had no trouble with the puzzles. On top of that, I was laughing my ass off.

If I had gotten stuck, I could have used Pinhead Games’s excellent on-line hint system. Just click on the “Hints” link on the web page. When you need a hint, read down the list of subject areas. When you find the one that applies to the puzzle that’s blocking you, roll over the hints to reveal them, one by one. Each hint progressively gives you more information, rather than just revealing the answer.

The game also has a cool soundtrack, which reminded me a little of the Tex Murphy series, and great voice acting. Its 3D graphics are rendered in a plastic cartoon style. All in all, it’s what I’d expect from a professionally produced game, which this is, and what I’ve always hoped but never previously gotten from a free download.

The Goat in the Grey Fedora is a Shockwave Flash game, which can be played on-line or downloaded for free from Pinhead Games’s web site. There are Windows and Macintosh versions available, and the Windows download worked on Linux under Wine.

It took me about an hour to play through the whole story, so it’s a short game but still enough for an evening’s entertainment. However, if after playing The Goat in the Grey Fedora you find yourself hungry for more, check out Brain Hotel, also from Pinhead Games, which is based on Ron “Aalgar” Watt’s Tales of the Odd comic strip. In Brain Hotel, Ed Arnold, a demoralized delivery man, delivers a package to a guest of the Brain Hotel on the eve of the annual supervillian convention. Being that the recipient was a supervillian, of course, Ed stumbles onto a deadly plot that could mean the lives o