writing-prompts-for-friends
GIF by veronica-you-look-like-hell McKee spends the next chapter talking about various problems that plague writers and how we can overcome them. The first one he discusses is how to hold the audience's interest. If I buy a movie ticket, even if the movie is garbage, I'm going to stay and watch the whole thing because I'm stingy and I'm not going to waste my money. At the most, I lose a couple hours of my time to The Touristor some other major letdown. But a novel could take up tens of hours of my time potentially. If I am not engaged by it, I will close it, put it down, and never pick it up again. Therefore, writers have to work very hard to make sure that their characters and plot engage their audience and make them want to keep turning those pages. How can we do that? McKee explains that the only way to fully engage the audience is to appeal to both sides of human nature: intellect and emotion. The Curiosity aspect is pretty straightforward, I think. Keep them guessing and wondering and they'll want to stick around and find out how things end. But Concern is a much deeper concept. Looking at the above definition of Concern, it sounds like the audience is seeking good.But then why are films about bad people like THE GODFATHER so popular? Why do we love anti-heros? Why do I want to marry Loki? McKee provides a couple excellent anecdotes to explain this: I found McKee's insight very fascinating. By making these bad people likable through comparison to the people around them and their environments, we trick the audience into sympathizing and empathizing with some of the vilest people imaginable, if we can do it right. McKee is not referring to genres here. These are the story/audience relationships that vary according to how we hold the audience's interest. In Mystery, the audience knows less than the characters. In Suspense the audience and characters know the same information. In Dramatic Irony the audience knows more than the characters. You can keep your audience's attention by playing both to their curiosities and their emotions. Get them invested in the characters, on their sides, seeing from their eyes. But meanwhile, keep them guessing. Give them just enough so they're not lost, but not so much that they know what's going to happen on the next page.Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. As the protagonist is put at increasingly greater risk, the audience wonders, “What’s going to happen next? And after that?” And above all, “How will it turn out?” The answer to this will not arrive until the last act Climax, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put. Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through for no other reason than to get the answer to that nagging question. We may make the audience cry or laugh, but above all, as Charles Reade noted, we make it wait.
Concern, on the other hand, is the emotional need for the positive values of life: justice, strength, survival, love, truth, courage. Human nature is instinctively repelled by what it perceives as negative, while drawn powerfully toward positive.
As a story opens, the audience, consciously or instinctively, inspects the value-charged landscape of world and characters, trying to separate good from evil, right from wrong, things of value from things of no value. It seeks the Center of Good. Once finding this core, emotions flow to it.
"The reason we search for the Center of Good is that each of us believes that we are good or right and want to identify with the positive. Deep inside we know we’re flawed, perhaps seriously so, even criminal, but somehow we feel that despite that, our heart is in the right place. The worst of people believe themselves good. Hitler thought he was the savior of Europe.
I once joined a gym in Manhattan not knowing it was a mafia hangout and met an amusing, likable guy whose nickname was Mr. Coney Island, a title he’d won as a bodybuilder in his teens. Now, however, he was a “button man.” To “button up” means to shut up. A button man “puts the button on” or shuts people up… forever. One day in the steam room he sat down and said, “Hey, Bob, tell me something. Are you one of the ‘good’ people?” In other words, did I belong to the mob?
Mafia logic runs like this: “People want prostitution, narcotics, and illicit gamblings. When they’re in trouble, they want to bribe police and judges. They want to taste the fruits of crime, but they’re lying hypocrites and won’t admit it. We provide these services but we’re not hypocrites. We deal in realities. We are the ‘good’ people.” Mr. Coney Island was a conscienceless assassin, but inside he was convinced he was good.
No matter who’s in the audience, each seeks the Center of Good, the positive focus for empathy and emotional interest.
At the very least the Center of Good must be located in the protagonist. Others may share it, for we can empathize with any number of characters, but we must empathize with the protagonist. On the other hand, the Center of Good doesn’t imply “niceness.” “Good” is defined as much by what it’s not as by what it is. From the audience’s point of view, “good” is a judgement made in relationship to or against a background of negativity, a universe that’s thought or felt to be “not good.”
THE GODFATHER: Not only is the Corleone family corrupt, but so too are the other mafia families, even the police and judges. Everyone in this film is a criminal or related to one. But the Corleones have one positive quality—loyalty. In other mob clans gangsters stab one another in the back. That makes them the bad bad guys. The loyalty of the Godfather’s family makes them the good bad guys. When we spot this positive quality, our emotions move toward it and we find ourselves in empathy with gangsters.
How far can we take the Center of Good? With what kind of monsters will an audience empathize?
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: The writer of novel and screenplay place Clarice (Jodie Foster) at the positive focal point, but also shape a second Center of Good around Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and draw empathy to both. First, they assign Dr. Lecter admirable and desirable qualities: massive intelligence, a sharp wit and sense of irony, gentlemanly charm, and most importantly, calmness. How, we wondered, could someone who lives in such a hellish world remain so poised and polite?
Next, to counterpoint these qualities the writers surround Lecter with a brutish, cynical society. His prison psychiatrist is a sadist and publicity hound. His guards are dimwits. Even the FBI, which wants Lecter’s help on a baffling case, lies to him, trying to manipulate him with false promises of an open-air prison on a Carolina island. Soon we’re rationalizing: “So he eats people. There are worse things. Offhand I can’t think what, but…” We fall into empathy, musing, “If I were a cannibalistic psychopath, I’d want to be just like Lecter.”
Maintaining Interest withMystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony
Mystery means gaining interest through curiosity alone. We create but then conceal expositional facts, particularly facts in the Backstory. We arouse the audience’s curiosity about these past events, tease it with hints of the truth, then deliberately keep it in the dark by misleading it with “red herrings,” so that it believes or suspects false facts while we hide the real facts.
This technique of compelling interest by devising a guessing game of red herrings and suspects, of confusion and curiosity, pleases the audience of one and only one genre, the Murder Mystery, which has two subgenres, the Closed Mystery and the Open Mystery.
The Closed Mystery is the Agatha Christie form in which a murder is committed unseen in the Backstory. The primary convention of the “Who done it?” is multiple suspects. The writer must develop at least three possible killers to constantly mislead the audience to suspect the wrong person, the red herring, while withholding the identity of the real killer to climax.
The Open Mystery is the Columbo for in which the audience sees the murder committed and therefore knows who did it. The story becomes a “How will he catch him?” as the writer substitutes multiple clues for multiple suspects. The murder must be an elaborate and seemingly perfect crime, a complex scheme involving a number of steps and technical elements. But the audience knows by convention that one of these elements is a fatal flaw of logic. When the detective arrives on the scene he instinctively knows who did it, sifts through the many clues searching for the telltale flaw, discovers it, and confronts the arrogant perfect-crime-committer, who then spontaneously confesses.
In the Mystery form the killer and detective know the facts long before Climax but keep it to themselves. The audience runs from behind trying to figure out what the key characters already know. Of course, if we could win the race, we’d feel like losers. We try hard to guess the who or how, but we want the writer’s master detective to be just that.
These two pure designs may be mixed or satirized. CHINATOWN starts Closed but then turns Open at the Act Two Climax. THE USUAL SUSPECTS parodies the Closed Mystery. It starts as a “Who done it?” but becomes a “Nobody done it” ...whatever “it” may be.
Suspense combines both Curiosity and Concern. Ninety percent of all films, comedy and drama, compel interest in this mode. In Suspense, however, curiosity is not about fact but outcome. The outcome of a Murder Mystery is always certain. Although we don’t know who or how, the detective will catch the killer and the story will end “up.” But the Suspense story could end “up” or “down” or in irony.
Characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge. As the characters discover expositional fact, the audience discovers it. But what no one knows is “How will this turn out?” In this relationship we feel empathy and identify wit the protagonist, whereas in pure Mystery our involvement is limited to sympathy. Master detectives are charming and likable, but we never identify with them because they’re too perfect and never in real jeopardy. Murder Mysteriesare like board games, cool entertainments for the mind.
Dramatic Irony creates interest primarily through concern alone, eliminating curiosity about fact and consequence. Such stories often open with the ending, deliberately giving away the outcome. When the audience is given the godlike superiority of knowing events before they happen, its emotional experience switches. What in Suspense would be anxiety about outcome and fear for the protagonist’s well-being, in Dramatic Irony becomes dread of the moment the character discovers what we already know and compassion for someone we see heading for disaster.
SUNSET BOULEVARD: In the first sequence the body of Joe Gillis (William Holden) floats facedown in Norma Desmond’s (Gloria Swanson) swimming pool. The camera goes to the bottom of the pool, looks up at the corpse, and in voice-over Gillis muses that we’re probably wondering how he ended up dead in a swimming pool, so he’ll tell us. The film becomes a feature-length flashback, dramatizing a screenwriter’s struggle for success. We’re moved to compassion and dread as we watch this poor man heading toward a fate we already know. We realize that all of Gillis’s efforts to escape the clutches of a wealthy harridan and write an honest screenplay will come to nothing and he’ll end up a corpse in her swimming pool.
Placing the audience in the position of Dramatic Irony does not eliminate all curiosity. The result of showing the audience what will happen is to cause them to ask, “How and why did these characters do what I already know they did? Dramatic Irony encourages the audience to look more deeply into the motivations and causal forces at work in the characters’ lives. This is why we often enjoy a fine film more, or at least differently, on second viewing. We not only flex the often underused emotions of compassion and dread, but freed from curiosity about facts and outcome, we now concentrate on inner lives, unconscious energies, and the subtle workings of society.
However, the majority of genres do not lend themselves to either pure Mystery or pure Dramatic Irony. Instead, within the Suspense relationship writers enrich the telling by mixing the other two. In an overall Suspense design, some sequences may employ Mystery to increase curiosity about certain facts, others may switch to Dramatic Irony to touch the audience’s heart.
A certain amount of audience curiosity is essential. Without it, Narrative Drive grinds to a halt. The craft gives you the power to conceal fact or outcome in order to keep the audience looking ahead and asking questions. It gives you the power to mystify the audience, if that’s appropriate. But you must not abuse this power. If so, the audience, in frustration, will tune out. Instead, reward the filmgoer for his concentration with honest, insightful answers to his questions. No dirty tricks, no Cheap Surprise, no False Mystery.
False Mystery is a counterfeit curiosity caused by the artificial concealment of fact. Exposition that could and should have been given to the audience is withheld in hope of holding interest over long, undramatized passages.
In Summary
Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print
#writing prompts for friends#writing advice#writing tips#writing resources#creative writing#writer#writing#write#writers block#writing inspiration#writing inspo#creative writing theory#robert mckee#writing fantasy#writing fiction#writing fanfiction#writeblr#writing prompts for friends notes on story#writing prompt#writing exercise#writing ideas#writebr#music
