Plots and Stories: why everything comes from character

[Note: this is a short extract from my book, 'Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters' forthcoming in August from Continuum Books]

Everything in your world should be part of your overall mechanism of storytelling. Every location, design choice, rule (magical or mundane) and principle of your story world needs to be serving some aspect of your story. Specifically they should manifest part of the central problem or challenge of your story and its hero/ine.

Here is Terry Gilliam discussing his creative process in writing The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus 2009 (my italics):

“These kinds of worlds are me just allowing my imagination to run. I pretend I’m whoever the character is in there and I just go with it. Or I have an idea that already I’m trying to force onto the film and I make sure the character becomes something that serves the ideas that I’ve already wanted to get out of my system and get up on the screen.”

Take that wonderful adventure The Princess Bride (scr. William Goldman) 1987 with its Cliffs of Insanity, Rodents of Unusual Size and Fire Swamp all of which signify their challenge in their names. Or Labyrinth (scr. Jim Henson, Terry Jones et al) 1986 with its, well labyrinth – oh and who could forget the Bog of Eternal Stench and David Bowie in Tights, both offering a fate worse than death for its teenage heroine.

Sarah, meet your pop quiz on loyalty...

Remember, Labyrinth is about a girl who resents having to babysit for her brother in the real world and has to get her priorities straight and learn responsibility when the King of Goblins steals him away. The labyrinth of the story presents her with a series of tests of character and judgment – a process of maturation if you will – that earns her the right and gives her the inner strength and the skills to save her brother in the end. It is the world that does the work here. It is the lesson plan for Jennifer Connelly’s heroine, prepared most carefully and to character. In other words, the world is designed by the writers to test out and expose her personal flaws and weaknesses. It is not a random collection of ‘cool stuff’ crammed into a script. The former creates satisfying drama, the latter is just stuff that happens that we get to watch (see: Resident Evil 2002).

This is why we talk about story worlds rather than plot worlds.

Story worlds not plot worlds

One of the most difficult parts of the screenwriting process is to change your mindset from valorizing events (plot driven) to prioritizing motivations (story driven). This is the most important step on our film student road from generalized idea back to a workable movie concept.

By now it should be pretty clear what has to happen. Our discussion of story worlds has focused on how the world needs to work to and for character. Now we need to express that work in terms of a story concept rather than a plot concept.

Put another way we need to stop thinking about what a character does, but why she does it.

Every movie has both a story and a plot. Stories are about the internal challenges our characters face, the changes they go through and the lessons they learn or fail to learn. Stories drive the events of the plot and without a story a plot has no real meaning or emotional significance for the audience.

In filmmaking terms, therefore, plots are simply the external mechanisms we use to tell stories.

So how does this work in practice? Well, we just talked about Labyrinth which is about a girl, Sarah who needs to grow up, take responsibility and put the welfare of others first. The story of the film is about her learning to do that. It is an internal struggle for her as a person. We can’t see internal struggles (remember show don’t tell?) so we need a plot to show us the process by which she gets from where she started, selfish and immature, to where she is at the end, a good sister and a more mature individual all round. We are given final evidence of this transformation when Sarah passes on her beloved teddy bear, Lancelot, to her newly rescued baby brother. In symbolic terms, of course, the teddy bear represents the parts of her childhood she is now ready to leave behind.

In the plot Sarah meets other characters and has all kinds of labyrinthy adventures which help her get to the final plot event when she faces the naughty Goblin King and his worrying haircut.

In the story, those characters and adventures form parts of Sarah’s learning curve. They transform her from a spoilt brat to a clear thinking young woman (she finally remembers her spell) who is capable of actually defeating the lad Bowie and his worrying package.

So plot and story in Labyrinth are two parallel journeys, one traveled by the feet and the other travelled in the mind and personality of the character.

Plots get us into our seats; stories keep us watching.

Every film, even the most obviously plot driven films like 2012 (scr. Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser) 2009, has a story. As a screenwriter, however important your plot and spectacle are to the final success of your concept, if you try and pitch without a story you will get nowhere. We will cover this in detail in the next chapter, but as a taster this is how Roland Emmerich describes his approach to 2012 in a video interview posted at Movieweb.com:

“I realized that, you know, in disaster movie format you have two things. You have very big images and you have very small, intimate stories and that’s a great combination. The heroes are normal people like you and me. They don’t have to have special talents or anything. They only have to have the will to survive.”

So in 2012 there are parallel, macro and micro plot tracks, the global Noah’s Ark plan to save (the richest members of) the human race and the personal struggle of John Cusack’s character, Jackson Curtis and his family who understandably want to be among the saved rather than the drowned. Both of these tracks are run by stories which suggest you have to earn your own redemption. In the global plot, the story has Chiwetel Obamiofor – sorry Ejiofor – teaching Americans to basically suck less: “The moment we stop fighting for each other, that’s the moment we lose our humanity.” In the family plot, Jackson Curtis earns his redemption as a father and as a husband by proving he can be more than the obsessional flake who drove his wife and kids away before the start of the movie.

Both of these stories come from and play to character. Jackson Curtis is ‘flawed’ and needs ‘correcting’ just as the human race – or at least the American part of it, personified by Oliver Platt – needs a metaphorical smack on the nose with a rolled up newspaper: “Bad America, no biscuit!”

How seriously are we expected to take these stories? The answer is: not very. My old friend, the brilliant film academic Martin Stollery, put it like this as we were leaving the cinema (I paraphrase slightly): “Don’t you feel that at the heart of all his films Roland Emmerich is just taking the piss?”

Nevertheless, the stories are there so that plot can be hung upon them in a functional sort of way.

Cue California sliding into the sea…

…so that John Cusack can prove he’s a good husband and father.

It's OK honey, I've learned my lesson...